Laughter IS The Best Medicine

That was then. This is now. That was never ending failure. This is glorious success. That one was my experience of losing face. This one is my absolute saving grace. I once was lost. But now I'm found.

I suppose this is how everyone feels when they've come from a failed relationship into a relationship that has flourished beyond their wildest imagination. Sometimes you just can't see the forest for the trees. Sometimes the grass IS greener on the other side. Because it has the proper nourishment. The right mixture of ingredients. To make it grow.

Today at work, I was talking to one of the engineering techs. A youngster. Everybody under thirty years old is a youngster to me now. I can remember when everybody over thirty was ancient.  I am sure I sounded ancient today. He thought I sounded like my husband. Which was a little scary. For both of us.

He took a three day road trip last week with my husband. To some job sites. As a learning/training experience. I am sure he got a three day earful of South Carolina, old man, Kornbread euphemisms. He probably heard use of several words he has never heard used that way in all of his twenty something years of life.

Today, I was trying to extend a little training myself. I was trying to explain how to talk to the customer in such a way, that he thought the idea was his, and he agreed with it when you were done. He wasn't quite getting it. So I started over. Took another tact. Almost instantly, I saw his eyes begin to glaze over, he lifted his hand in front of his face as if to ward off something coming his way. Something that was scaring him. Mentally. I was about to ask him what was wrong when he began to beg me to stop. Stop talking. And wanted to know, did I know, I had begun to sound just like my husband?! I began to laugh hysterically.

I laughed. Mostly because that was THE most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. And I laughed, because he was so dang serious. He just kept staring at me. Like I had somehow sat there and morphed myself into Mims.

No, I never would have thought that I would begin to speak like Mims. I have spent half of our 13 years of knowing each other, trying to get my children to STOP talking like him. I still prefer to think that it was me using common sense in my conversation, opposed to the actual use of words that startled that young man. Either way, it was an awakening for me as well.

They say, after so many years, you will BE your mate. You will think for each other. You will think before they think, what you know they will think. And all of that is alright. I've been reading his mind for a long time now.  However, I don't care anything about succumbing to his South Carolina dialect.

I was deemed to be Kornmuffin long before Kornbread Jr had a girlfriend who was tagged with that name. And I don't mind it so much. I don't care anything about having it plastered across the back window of my truck, but I don't mind being called that in passing. And I'm pretty sure, there will not be a time, anytime soon, that you will see me with a wad a chaw in my jaw.

But if in my later years, I began to slide into his slow, sure way of talking, that will be alright. For he is the missing piece to this jagged, jumbled up puzzle I call my life. My glorious, full of laughter, no shortage of raw humor, he takes such good care of me, life. I should have found his funny, beautiful face years ago. They say laughter adds years to your life. Just think how much longer I could have lived, had I found him first.

copyright © 2011 Michelle Mount Mims