Funny Things are Everywhere
By Gail Grenier Sweet ©2004
My friend Sharon and I are talking on the phone. She tells me about her son the Marine.
“Jesse called me from boot camp. He only had a few minutes to talk. He said they were about to be transferred to Camp Pendleton and they all had to get a bunch of shots. The worst shot was this big frozen one he got in the butt. He said it felt like a big wad of peanut butter. Right after the shots, they had to go on a long run. He had to run with a big wad of peanut butter in his butt.
“I thought about mentioning childbirth at that point, but thought better of it. I thought, ‘Jesse, your head was no picnic,’ but I kept quiet. Now that I think about it, I had Jesse by cesarean. Rainey was the one with the big head that I felt, oh yeah.”
***
My neighbor Judy and I stand on her back deck. She’s just given me a plate of untouched cut vegetables and dip from her Christmas party. I’ve thanked her and we talk for a bit. Suddenly I see us as if from above and I realize that as we talk, we keep grasping at the air and saying “OH!” We do this because we’ve just remembered thoughts that got away moments before. As the thoughts float back to us, we extend our hands as if to catch them on the run. This is pathetic, I think, two post-menopausal women reaching for the escaping thoughts. Can you picture a room full of us, grasping the air and saying OH?
***
I take my daughter, nephews and niece to see “Peter Pan.” We’re jabbering about the movie on the ride home. Anna and Mark and I are going on about how it was a great movie but we kind of missed the songs from some of the other versions of “Peter Pan.” Just then Daniel pipes in, loudly, as if from another planet, “There were no songs in this one. That was good.”
***
When my kids were little, we used to read a Dr. Seuss book called “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.” There was a line in that book that kept repeating: “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”
That’s what I think about living every day on this Earth. Funny things are everywhere. Noticing the funny things is how I get through the bleaker days. Will somebody please tap me on the shoulder if I ever stop noticing?
The End