here.

1. laugh when people tell a joke. otherwise you might make them feel bad.

2. laugh when you look into a mirror. otherwise you might feel bad.

3. laugh when you make a mistake. if you don’t, you’re liable to forget how ultimately unimportant the whole thing really is, whatever it is.

4. laugh with small children… they laugh at mashed bananas on their faces, mud in their hair, a dog nuzzling their ears, the sight of their bottoms as bare as silk. it renews your perspective. clearly nothing is as bad as it could be.

5. laugh at situations that are out of your control. when the best man comes to the altar without the wedding ring, laugh. when the dog jumps through the window screen at the dinner guests on your doorstep, sit down and laugh a while.

6. when you find yourself in public in mismatched shoes, laugh — as loudly as you can. why collapse in mortal agony? there’s nothing you can do to change things right now. besides, it is funny. ask me; i’ve done it.

7. laugh at anything pompous. at anything that needs to puff its way through life in robes and titles… will rogers laughed at all the public institutions of life. for instance, “you can’t say civilization isn’t advancing,” he wrote. “in every war they kill you in a new way.”

8. finally, laugh when all your carefully laid plans get changed; when the plane is late and the restaurant is closed and the last day’s screening of the movie of the year was yesterday. you’re free now to do something else, to be spontaneous… to take a piece of life and treat it with outrageous abandon.

house on a quiet street,
a home for the brave
a glorious kingdom
with the sun on your face
rising from a long night
as dark as the grave
on a thin chain of
next moments, and
something like faith
on a morning to order
a breakfast to make
a bed draped in sunshine
a body that waits
for the touch of your fingers
the end of the day
the beat of your heart,
the beat of your heart 

there is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright,
and there the moon-bird rests from his flight
to cool in the peppermint wind.

let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.

yes, we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know
the place where the sidewalk ends.

all the same, though i hadn’t said so, she was indeed precious to me. the truth is, we were in love almost from the first, falling into love if not fallen on that first night : and i must try to tell how it was. we were hesitant to admit our love even to ourselves at first : it was too soon ; one must be cool ; one must be wary. the question was: could it be believed? it was like a letter announcing one’s inheritance of a fortune from an unknown great uncle. some things take a good deal of believing. there was in both of us a kind of hesitant, incredulous wonder. could this really be happening - this marvel? and yet in january one of us found something on falling in love that, with the appropriate pronouns, was just the way it was for  both of us. a bit sentimental, perhaps, but then lovers are. it is quoted from memory, perhaps inaccurately, with thanks to the unknown author:

to hold her in my arms against the twilight and be her comrade for ever - this was all i wanted so long as my life should last…and this, i told myself with a kind of wonder, this was what love was : this consecration, this curious uplifting, this sudden inexplicable joy, and this intolerable pain.