Freestyle Friday (We Laughed So Hard)

Fridays are for winding down. Saying goodbye to the work week. Looking forward to the weekend and time away from the cares of the world. So why not try to put a smile on your face?

Monday through Thursday this blog will be written in a serious manner. On Friday’s I will go freestyle. I will write a light-hearted blog about whatever comes to mind.

So, let’s talk about laughter. Real laughter. Beginning in a work setting.

Writing is work but it’s nothing compared to hard physical labor. And if you grew up on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland you know what hard physical labor is.

There is nothing like working in a tobacco field. The labor is from sunup to sundown with only a short break for lunch. I’m not going to get into the details. You can look it up. The only thing that made it bearable were the stories that the men told out in that field and how they ragged on one another.

What stories were true, I don’t know. I just know that they made us laugh every time we heard them. They could have been from yesterday, last week, last year or twenty years ago. Those men knew how to tell them. Half of the time they couldn’t do it with a straight face. Sometimes the kick that they got out of telling the story was funnier than the story itself.

And everyone was fair game when it came to being ragged on. If you weren’t doing something right or working too slowly you were going to get the needle. If something had happened to you that they thought was funny they were going to joke about it. If your team lost a game, you would hear about that. Everything was fair game. If you didn’t have a nickname they were going to give you one.

The reasons why they were able to do this was that they could laugh at themselves. And oh, how they laughed.

I saw these grown men literally scatter in all directions laughing so hard at something said or done. Hands would go in the air. Heads were thrown back. Knees slapped. They would laugh so hard that for a moment nothing would come out. Then all of them would talk or make some kind of sound at the same time.

And this made work a little easier and fun.

It was okay to take work seriously, but when a moment to have a good laugh came, they took it. And the harder the laugh the better.

When my friends and I get together we tell stories just like our fathers and those men.

And we laugh just as hard and scatter just as much as they did.

I’m laughing right now thinking about them.