Belly Laughing

There is a rare joy in life that is usually shared over the dinner table with friends and wine. Red, if you partake in my house. Tonight I experienced this sweet sensation... a good belly laugh.

A friend of ours was over to dinner tonight, and this particular friend can always be counted on to either draw tears of laughter or snores of boredom. The result depends entirely upon whether he chooses to lecture us with history and religion detail or bless us with one of the many and odd stories from his daily life. You can guess which he chose tonight. His story went something like this...

"There is a gas station near my house where I frequently go to buy beer on the way home from work. Josephine, she's Mexican, works there and we exchange a few words every now and then. This evening I chanced to ask her how she was doing and she responded that she was pretty tired. 'My roommate tells me I sleep too much, but I work hard and I come home late. I usually get home around one am, drink a cup of coffee, and walk the dog. Then I go to bed.'"

At this point my friend raises his eyebrow and leans forward slightly, to intimate to us his skepticism as to the logic of this regular schedule. Clearly he wonders if, were she to be enlightened to the fact of caffeine in her chosen nightly beverage, she would sleep better and be more rested for work the next day. And of course there's the walking of the dog, a young woman in the middle of the night. I can see her, one elbow casually resting on the cash register while she animates her story with the other hand and speaks more to the door than to my friend, explaining the drudgery of her regimented existence. He continues,

"She tells me she's figured out the secret to a healthy lifestyle, which she indulges me with, "You have to do two things. Have fun at home and go to work. I used to party and stuff, but I'm too old for that now."

"I tell her certainly she can't be that old, she looks to be quite young. She replies with a question, which is a death trap for me, "How old do you think I am," and I tell her, "Thirty five."

"Oh, honey, you are too kind. I'm forty seven. But my grandmama lived to be one hundred and ten. She had a cigar every day, not cigarettes," as her eyebrows raise, "but cigars. And she drank wine," here he places one fist on the table as if serving himself a drink, "and beer," he serves himself another. "She had seven husbands, but none of them had no money, so we know she didn't kill 'em. The day she died she asked me to make her some breakfast, and when I came back she was dead, with a smile on her face and a cigar in her mouth. She had a good life."

So, the moral is, smoke heavily and drink abundantly. And marry poor husbands. And belly laugh.