Laughing, Over Sharing and Passing the Baton

 

Six days under my belt this week and three of them were spent in Nirvana and two more days spent basking in its afterglow starting out on Monday when we Gathering Girls got together for bunch. We laughed so loud and often that I thought we’d get kicked out of the Guy-Land Cafeteria. In a study done at Stanford University Medical School they established that the average adult laughs seventeen times a day and I’m not over stating the truth when I say that we Gathering Girls got our quota of laughter in over our eggs, bacon and pancake specials. I read another article recently in Psychology Today that said, “Both sexes laugh a lot but females laugh more---126 percent more than their male counterparts.” I don’t know how they go about measuring a thing like that but I can say I’ve never seen a table full of guys having as much fun as we do.

Wednesday a guy I’ve known for nearly a half century and I met for lunch at a tavern in my adopted home town. I don’t drink except for hard cider. They don’t serve it but they have the best white fish bar none in between here and the east coast. When the waitress first came to the table I told her, “Separate checks. We just met on internet and this is our first date.” (I was a silly mood.) Her face lit up the way only a young person’s face can do when they love their grandparents and they think we old people are “cute” when we come in pairs. But I had to confess, “I’m just kidding. We’ve known each other for decades.” She laughed but I wasn’t finished. “We’re not a couple, so we still want separate checks. My husband and my friend here went to high school together and I’m babbling. I don’t have to tell you my life story to order the fish.” “I’ve got the time to listen,” she said, a huge grin on her face. But I said I was too hungry to tell her about my years as a CIA agent. By then we were all laughing including a couple of eavesdroppers sitting at the bar behind us. I couldn’t blame the eavesdroppers. It was a bar after all and when the situation is right, I don’t mind being the designated eavesdropper. It’s a wonderful pastime for bloggers.

Gary and I have been having lunch together twice a year---spring and fall---since my husband died and we talk on the phone maybe once a month. We’re each other’s bitch-to-person when something ghastly happens in the Trump administration. And don’t make the mistake of reading anything romantic into our relationship. I’d rather eat dog poop and he probably feels the same way. We both know too much about the skeletons we keep in our closets. Okay, I’ll admit it. He kissed me once, shortly after my husband and I started dating all those years ago, but he apologized profusely afterward and there hasn’t been anything remotely out of line since. He and I are all that’s left of our old gang who live close enough to get together---him divorced and me the long suffering widow who likes separate checks.

Friday I went out for lunch again but I didn’t win the war over who pays for lunch. I rarely get to pay for my own meal or buy my niece’s when we go out together. I usually drive out to her rural area where she knows everyone and their brothers so she conspires against me with the waitresses or waiters. And with those she doesn’t know she speaks in that confident teacher’s voice of her that makes the wait staff listen. When I protested, “You bought my lunch the last time!” she said, “You brought me gifts today.” I did but they weren’t gifts that cost me money.

I brought her a wicker suitcase that my grandfather used in 1895 to carry all his worldly possessions when he immigrated to America and an oil lamp that came from my dad’s boyhood home in Illinois. She’s been lusting after that suitcase a long time and I decided she should have it now rather than when I die because I know she’ll pass the suitcase's history down to our newest crop of babies in the family. I'm thinking if these little ones grow up associating that suitcase with their grandmother or great-aunt's stories the more likely someone in that generation will want that wicker wonder someday. Her mission, I told her, is to figure out who should get it next when the time comes---who cares the most about genealogy and family trees. After lunch, we went over to the family cottage where we found the perfect place to show it off. She owns the cottage, now, but it was the background for a huge chunk of my best memories growing up. 

According to vocabulary.com ‘nirvana’ is a place “of perfect peace and happiness, like heaven.” All the laughter, teasing and sharing I did this week brought me perfect peace and happiness. It was like taking a vacation in Nirvana and I wish I didn’t have to come back. ©

My grandfather's suitcase that came through Ellis Island in 1895