A shameless and transparent excuse to post a picture of my girls.

One of the most consoling thoughts I have clung to in these weeks since Mama died is the knowledge that the woman could laugh and laugh well. Her laugh was rarely quiet.  It was a giant, robust guffaw.   I'm not sure how common it is, but Mama had (and passed on to me) the capacity to have absolute seizures of laughter.  When a laughter seizure happens, it feels like someone has launched a program in the brain, an infinite loop out of which it is difficult to break.  In shell script form it would look like this:

while true
  do
    laugh
 done
 

The loop goes on and on and on until the brain manages to throw out an escape sequence, usually after 15 or so minutes, sometimes longer.

Mama's most famous seizure of laughter occurred in the early 1950s at the Alabama Theatre.  My father had taken her there to see a movie.  They were in high school and this was one of their earliest dates. Prior to the movie, a newsreel played.  It began with a story of the world's smallest bicycle.  A man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tiny, folded bicycle.  He unfolded the handlebars and pedals, squatted onto the bike and began pedalling furiously.  Despite the frantic motion of his legs, he merely inched forward.  Mama seized.

 I haven't been able to locate the original newsreel, but I did find this one: Man Rides Mini Bike into Office Newsreel and Stock Footage, which conveys the flavor of the thing.  (It also risks sending me into a seizure. Gawd, this is funny!)

Laughing through this would be thoroughly inappropriate.  But Mama was caught in the loop.  Eventually, an usher came and asked my parents to leave.  And so for the rest of her life she could brag that she had been tossed from the Alabama Theatre for laughing too hard.

Over the years Mama and I shared a number of laughing seizures, most of which ended with lots of shouting of "Stop! Stop!" and sprints to the bathroom.  One I clearly remember happened in the late 70s when Mama was on her Eudora Welty  binge.  When Mama got into an author she just devoured everything they wrote in a frenzy of reading. (I inherited that trait, too.)  Mama was reading "Why I Live at the P.O."  to me and was giving a pretty good performance.  I got tickled, she got tickled, undies got wet.  Now that's a consoling memory.

I think my oldest daughter Eleanor has inherited the laughter looping mechanism, though it is a bit too early to tell.  I do know that she and her sister Hazel already have terrific senses of humor and this is powerfully consoling, too. 

 I think Eleanor will be a great laugher in the long run.  Hazel has her father's dry ways and can keep a straight face like no member of my family ever could.  Here they are goofing off recently with holiday cake molds in Target.  Mama would have loved this photo.