Sue, again and again

This woman does many things well. She is magic with children, and she can paint a house or a delicate watercolor portrait. She will knock together a loaf of bread or a fence, she works out in the gym three times a week, and her garden flourishes. Her children and grandchildren adore her and love to hang around if they can catch her at home. If she’s your friend, she’s a friend for life and will be the first to arrive if you’re having a crisis and need support. She can fix the plumbing, the roof, the toaster, or the hem of a pair of trousers, and she’ll quote a few lines by Rilke, Yeats, or Edward Lear to illustrate a point. Of all her many abilities, what she does best is laugh. 

She laughs at life’s absurdities, at our attempts to be dignified, at the ways we puff ourselves up with importance and strive for perfection, as if we thought the world could not revolve without us. She laughs at our capacities for delusion, at what we think we remember, at what we are certain is coming next, at our excellent intentions and our tender aspirations, at what lovable fools we are, trying hard to be thoroughly good human beings every day.

She lets me laugh with her. And so we laugh more than we do anything else. We laugh when we see ourselves in a mirror. How can we look so old and feel so young? When did our hair grow thin, our waists thicken? We laugh at all the parts of us that fall apart or fail, at how surprised we are by unexpected malfunctions. We laugh at how things that happened thirty years ago are so vivid, and things that happened last week are such a blur. How do words we have known since childhood elude us, simple words like billboard, cardboard, rafter? And after a lifetime of showing up for work at 7 a.m., how is it that we now have to dash headlong in a panic to get to a 10 o’clock appointment? We laugh, and laugh, and laugh together.