I find laughter everywhere I go but I don’t expect to see reference to it on the walls behind the check-in desk at hotels. But there it was chiseled into the granite wall of a new, luxury hotel built in a most unlikely place, a bald prairie devoid of trees and landscaping in Illinois. It read “Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, dreams are forever.” I thought that was profound and wondered who said it (more about that later). I asked the clerk. She replied, “I don’t know who said it but it’s there because locals said the owners were nuts for building this hotel on this spot and they just laughed it off and had that carved in stone.”
“Do the owners laugh a lot?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, especially when I ask for a raise,” she replied. Then she let out a respectable chuckle herself but I could tell she enjoyed her job.
“Do you want a room overlooking the pool?” she asked. “It’s the middle of winter,” I replied, “How about a room overlooking the hot tub.”
“Just a moment sir, our Security Officer may have something for you in the stock room, what size is your neck and wrists for the stocks?” I started to ask her if she wanted to arm wrestle but decided to quit while we were both still laughing. Besides she had a skull and crossbones tattoo on her biceps. I had decided against a tattoo of that sort years ago because my biceps only had enough room for one eye socket and a bone.
Laughter has curative powers they say. I saw a blurb on Facebook recently that indicated that being overweight should not concern us nearly as much as it does. As I recall the saying was “If you are 200 pounds overweight you are less likely to be kidnapped. Relax. Eat Cake.” Look on the positive side of adipose-ology.
My friend Mark has a quirky sense of humor. For instance, he loves malaprops, the mistaken use of a word, like “He loves to dance the flamingo (instead of flamenco).” He learned this form of humor from his father who also had a warped funny bone. When the father retired friends threw a big party for him and had a Friar’s Roast, mainly because they were too cheap to hire real entertainers and roasted Spam for the main course. However the best line of the night came from Mark’s brother who said, “All night people have been asking me if I have developed the same sense of humor shared by my father and brother, and you should see the look of relief that comes over their face when I tell then NO.”
My point of this column is that I think the author of that line, “Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, dreams are forever,” got it right. It sounds kind of Mickey Mouse and it is. The author was Walt Disney. www.docblakely.com
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Humorist Doc Blakely is a professional speaker/writer/musician/rancher from Wharton, Texas. He has been Pokin’ Fun at himself and life for 40 years.
