GOOD MORNING FACEBOOK JUNKIES!

“When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, we were so poor we couldn't even afford to pay attention! Makes you want to send me money, huh?”

This is what goes on in the early mornings on Facebook to lighten myself up and start the day with a chuckle. I’m a real chuckler, and have been doing it for years. You know when you get old as I am: nothing is really sacred, nothing so important that you can’t poke fun at it.

I first realized that God was a kidder Himself, while looking at pictures of myself, and it is where I got the inspiration to grow a beard! Creeping up to the mirror every morning was a bit troublesome, and so the beard saved my knees from any potential damage.

TLW (The Little Woman) has for years remained steadfast in her attempts to be serious. She is not a laugher, but rather an observer of her mistake of having to live with me. No matter what I try, she will not crack a smile. She feels that if she did, it would only encourage me, making it hard for her to keep the household sane.

Mom had a great sense of humor, having five children she needed something to keep her spirits up, while Dad was a great kidder. He once drew a picture of my Mom’s mother, sitting on a kitchen chair asleep. Under the chair was a pot he drew. To Grandma’s credit, she laughed.

Most of my sisters have a sense of humor, and when we get together we let each other have it. If you don’t have sense of humor and can laugh at yourself, you could not survive in my family.

I enjoy making people laugh because it is better than the alternatives, crying or somberness. If I wanted to be somber all the time, I would visit a funeral parlor, but don’t bet on my not trying to get you to laugh. I have had fun at funeral parlors, just ask my sisters about one we attended in Franklin Square on year, as I gave them a tour of the basement and what we found!

Church was a particularly fun place for me, both as a worshipper and as an altar boy. There was a very hoity-toity lady who would come to church every Sunday with her husband. He was a lawyer, and looked boring, and she was a short, heavy-set woman in her 60’s, with a well coiffed hairdo and a mink stole with long drooping earrings and who carried herself like she was the queen mum. One Sunday we miscalculated the seating, as Mom mistakenly took a pew where this woman sat that bore her name on the end of the pew on a nameplate. There we were, Mom, her four daughters and myself. I was a teenager at the time as we waited for the service to start. Who arrives but her ladyship, the queen mum, sees us sitting in her pew (It really wasn’t her pew) and she gives us a dirty look. How dear us sit in her pew, after all, that should remain empty all day Sunday unless she showed up.

It just so happens as she is sitting among the unwashed she places herself in front of me in the pew ahead of us. But someone else comes along to attend services! A spider suddenly appears along the backrest of her pew in front of me. My sisters are watching, and so I take the spider, a daddy long legs and carefully place it in the old girls hair, where it buries itself deep inside her sprayed do, to the hysterical amusement of the four girls! Mom, being a pious woman, who should have known better, was not paying attention, (I think she was distracted with praying) suddenly looks at me and gives me the second dirty look of the morning in that church!

All through the Mass, the spider made an appearance in and out of the nest of silver hair, and the girls would try as they might, stifle their laughter, as I would guide the spider back into the deep recesses of Lady Clairol miracle maker.

After the Mass, Dad, who never went to church: picked us up and we all got into the car. Mom asks what was going on in church, and my sisters relate the whole incident, laughing as they do. What saved me was Dad, who started to laugh uncontrollably, making Mom laugh too.