HE WHO LAUGHS LAST NOT counting a three-day laugh fest in Montreal when I realized for the first time in my life I was actually alone, or a couple of drug trips in Banff near the end of the last century - I have decided to keep this century pure - I have only laughed TWICE flat-out, silly, in the 50-plus years since leaving highschool. The first time was when, after spending over half an hour setting up my tent just below the Lieutenant Governors mansion in Fredericton, and making sure my tethered dogs witnessed every phase of its construction, the two ugly brutes - two of the most beautiful dogs on Earth - took not even ten seconds to totally destroy it. In the moonlight, it looked like I was being attacked by two young grizzlies chasing butterflies. And when the idiots finally discovered, all on their own, the very entrance I had been demonstrating to them for only like 10 years, give or take, and crawled up my body and furiously kept licking the tears off my face, since they - and NO ONE in living memory - had ever heard me making sounds like that before... Belly laughs so hard that your belly actually ached. And the next time, and probably last time, at the World Pond Hockey tournament last year in Plaster Rock, in, for some reason, JOE McPHAILs car, when, with a friend, I got THAT kind of drunk for the first time since graduation... I always thought there would be more laughs than that, but I am very very grateful.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:12:52 +0000