From a phone call with my Mother over the weekend

My mother is the funniest person I've ever known. She can make anyone laugh and regularly does. It's often a special, self-deprecating kind of humor. For example, she was warning me about a statin drug that she had been taking but stopped because it could impair memory. She asked me if I was taking a statin drug. I said, Yes, and she wanted to know what one. When I said I couldn't remember, she burst out laughing and said, "See, you better stop taking that stuff!" Last weekend, we were talking about the places she had gone to school in West Virginia. That place is the mythic ancestral home for me, and I want to know as much about it as possible. We had backtracked to Welch from Baltimore, which is where she had gone to look for work as soon as she was done with high school. And also, I think, because her boyfriend from school had joined the service and had been sent there for training. "You know what I really wanted to do?" she asked. She knew that I knew she had always wanted to be a singer, but this was something else. "I wanted to be a comedian. I could always make people laugh. Especially in school. I was always the youngest in the class, and I didn't have anything, but I could make them laugh. It was how I got accepted." John, Tuesday, May 8, 2012