What’s So Funny?

My mother was ahead of her time in several ways, and one of them was that when I was a small child, she was a professional working woman and single parent. She had a vocation, an office at the newspaper, lots of sophisticated friends, and because she was the woman's page editor, she dressed in chic ensembles every working day. This was a very good model for me as a future woman, but the grand benefit for me as a child was that I stayed with my grandparents during the day, and went to their local elementary school. My grandmother was the ideal homemaker; she was not all that interested in housework, doing what had to be done and getting it out of the way so that she could get to her real life, which was making things. She made clothes and curtains and meatloaf and cookies and peanut brittle and iced tea with mint and embroidered screens and knitted sweaters and crocheted placemats and angelfood cakes and slippers and pot roast and fried chicken and conversation. My grandfather did not have this facility; he had been and remained a legendary athlete, but he was said to not understand the uses of a hammer or a screwdriver, so my grandmother fixed things, also. What my grandfather made was fun, and he made it all the time.

I have no idea what our family looked like from the outside, possibly there was a good deal of mournful headshaking, since single parents were few and far between in those days, but if you had asked me, I would have simply said that our family was fun, and it was. One of my earliest memories is of my uncle and my grandfather throwing me (probably aged 2 or so) back and forth across the living room. A slightly later one is of my grandfather sitting on the floor with me and my older cousins, teaching us to play poker. My grandfather also liked to sit my grandmother at the piano and have her play while we sang songs like Red River Valley and Streets of Laredo. My mother and her sisters and brother told such funny stories about their own childhoods that we cousins loved to find the box of old pictures and get everyone going. First Ruth would tell her version, and then Fran would tell hers, and then Jane would insist that the proper interpretation was slightly different, and my grandmother would throw her hands into the air and point out that they were all mistaken, it had really happened this way. All the stories were funny, even the sad ones. They were so funny that it was a long time before I realized that the events being related had been frightening or upsetting at the time they occurred. This was what I learned: Whatever happened to you, you could and probably would, live through it, shape it slightly, and laugh at it later.

When I was grown and scouting about for a mate, the one characteristic that he had to have was a sense of humor. He had to make me laugh, and he also had to laugh at my jokes and remarks. I can't say that I was discerning enough to have any other standard, but for the sake of our children, I think that if you have to have one required trait, this has turned out to be a good one. It took me years and years to perceive that my parents and grandparents might objectively be called less than successful, or even dysfunctional. There was drinking, there was fighting, there were arguments about trifles that lasted for years. Diagnoses of depression came along, and there were career disappointments, too, along the lines of that famous missed opportunity (if only grandfather had refrained from losing his temper when his future-billionaire-boss beat him at tennis one Saturday morning and he stomped off the court. This too, was fashioned into an amusing tale). But goodness me, how bad can it have been? We laughed and laughed.

At a reading I gave the other day, the man sitting next to my daughter in the audience asked her if she found having me as a mother was intimidating. She said: Actually, its just enjoyable. She meant, as I mean when I look back on my objectively dysfunctional but full of laughter childhood, that a ready sense of humor goes a very long way to making unhappy events both understandable and ephemeral.