Laugh Lines

I was talking to my daughter Rebecca a while back and relating to her an incident that Pete and I had found hysterically funny. After we had finished laughing together she said to me, "Mom, my favorite sound in the whole world is the sound of you and Dad laughing."

I thought of that frequently over the next few days. For most of our lives both Pete and I have not laughed enough. We are pretty intense people; sometimes, I'd have to admit, we are almost pathologically intense. Add to that a decade of life in Germany, a culture that isn't exactly known for it's lightheartedness and sense of humor, and well, you can see why our laugh lines were developmentally delayed. This kind of focus, though, has it's downside - that of losing some of the peripheral vision that brings balance to life.

The last decade has brought a lot of progress, though. Now I'd say we do laugh a lot. Oftentimes we find ourselves laughing over something before we ever get out of bed in the morning. One of the things age teaches you is that you have less control over things than you thought you did. Your well-intentioned intensity is pretty much useless in a lot of situations. And there's a ream of truth to the admonition to "don't worry, be happy". I'm proud to say that Pete has some of the happiest and most beautiful wrinkles around his eyes - those that come from smiling a LOT.

So from the funny video on Ocean Spray's website to the hilarious email a friend forwarded to me to the turkey-wrestling woman on the TV commercial we're finding our laughs all over the place these days. We're making up for lost time...