Laughter Is The Best Medicine

That was then, this is now.  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. However, the grass is only greener because it’s had the proper nourishment and the right mixture of ingredients to make it grow.

I can remember back years ago, at my previous job, I was talking to one of the engineering techs. A youngster. Everybody under thirty years old is was a youngster to me back then. I can remember when everybody over thirty was ancient.  I am sure to him, I sounded ancient that day. Actually, what he said was, he thought I sounded like my husband.

Just prior to our conversation that day, he had taken a three-day road trip with my husband to some job sites as a learning/training experience. I am sure he got a three-day-earful of a South Carolinian, Kornbread euphemisms. He probably heard words spoken in such a way he has never heard, in all of his then, twenty-something years of life.

However, that day, I was trying to extend a little training myself. I was trying to explain how to talk to a customer in such a way, that they always thought the idea was theirs in the first place.  My “student” wasn't quite getting it, so I started over, taking another tact, using “plainer” words.

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. I was about to ask him what was wrong when he began to beg me to stop, to just stop talking. And then he asked me, if I knew that I had begun to sound just like my husband?!

I laughed hysterically. Mostly because that was THE most ridiculous thing I had ever heard, and he looked so dang serious about it. He just kept staring at me. Like I had somehow sat there and morphed myself into my country-speaking husband.

They say, after so many years, you will BE your mate. You will think for each other. You will think before they think, and you will already know that they’re thinking/feeling. 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. And I'm pretty sure, there will never 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’ll be alright. For he is the missing piece to this jagged, jumbled up puzzle I call my life. He takes such good care of me; I wish I had 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.