Sharing a Laugh...

Real Life is not winning a Power ball Ticket. But I bought one anyway. There’s a hefty number of shrinks who will tell us all that “it’s gambling”, “it’s the thrill of it”, etc. that keeps us buying those little orange tickets. I would agree with most of that over-analyzing, but I don’t feel guilty for falling prey to the hype of winning a billion dollars.

My Mom and I sat in a Chinese restaurant last week and made a pack to buy two tickets using our the numbers from our recently opened fortune cookies. We would split the billion in half. We shook on it. Sounds relatively innocuous for a lunch time topic, but what ensued after that was far from our normal days together.

We laughed. And laughed again. And again – coming up with all the things we were going to do with our winnings. My Mom and I used to laugh all the time over silly things, but as we have both aged, it doesn’t seem to happen that we act like high school freshman, giggling and belly-laughing at our own humor. Ours was an irreverent humor that we shared, laced with sarcasm and cynicism, often totally ridiculous and usually not PC.

If I listed all the things she said, you would probably yawn…it was clearly one of those moments where “ya had to be there” to laugh now. As we were driving over the bridge to Marysville, she dead panned “I know, I’ll buy Marysville”.  If you grew up in Marysville, a town surrounded by a levy system that is stagnating because of  it’s non-growth and old school politics, you’d get how funny that was.  At another point in the car, she told me that even if we one $4 dollars, she wanted her half…because she needed some stamps. I was dying! I told her for a million bucks I would manage her money for her, which sent her off into a coughing fit. And I reminded her that when she croaked, I would still get more money that she did, as I would inherit my "daughter's" share of her estate.

It wasn’t so much the notion that we had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, it’s that it was a “good” day.  Mom is soon to be 91 and she said that day that she’s starting to “feel” old. We have our shopping days together every two weeks, and usually talk about innocuous things. I bring her up to speed with the going-on with the kids and their families, etc. 

She’s from a different era than I, lived in the country the better part of her whole life. We have the typical mother-daughter issues that I have spent years trying to overcome. I pretty much avoid the tricky topics (I leave those to Dave who adores his occasional porch-side political chats with her). I guess I hadn’t realized that we hadn’t laughed a lot together in years like we used to...until we laughed together over Power Ball. The price of the ticket was worth it.

It was a good day. Even if we didn’t win.