Tag: funny stories

Come On Now!

Yesterday, at physical therapy, I met Anna, a hilarious octogenarian of Greek descent. I overheard her talking to her physical therapist, a man in his late thirties, who shares Anderson Cooper’s same sweet, embarrassed, shy laugh which he was doing all morning because Anna was a hoot.

In a heavily accented voice, this was the first conversation that I heard her having with her physical therapist:

“So, I told my friend about my doctor. And she went to him. Now my friend is a very attractive 80-year-old. She’s had a few facelifts, but you know, she’s eighty. And my doctor is very good looking, but he is 51. My friend says to me, “Anna, is your doctor married?” I said, “What are you, one of those cougars? That would be like having sex with someone who could be your son. Come on now!”

She interspersed “Come on now!” a lot in her conversation. And her physical therapist did his Anderson Cooper-like nervous, yet appreciative laugh, throughout all of her exercises and her stories.

She continued, “Now when my husband turned 90, we stopped having sex. That door was shut. Come on now!”

I couldn’t help myself, I started laughing out loud and I don’t have a shy Anderson Cooper-ish quiet, embarrassed giggle. I laugh out loud and proud. So at that moment, Anna peered over at me, her eyes piercing holes through her large, artistic, black glasses, right through me and she said,

“You, my friend, are an eavesdropper!!! Come on now!” (Now, my regular readers know that I cop to being an eavesdropper all of the time on this blog, but this is the first time that I actually got called out on it, by someone whom I was eavesdropping on. Nevertheless, I got the sense that Anna sort of liked my eavesdropping. She liked an audience. She seemed kind of “show-bizzy”.)

I said, “It’s true! But I only eavesdrop on interesting people.” Her physical therapist just looked at me with wide eyes, and continued his nervous giggle.

Anna liked that answer. She continued talking to her physical therapist, maybe even slightly more loud and animated, this time about her depressed friend Linda, who always calls Anna, apparently, in order to get cheered up.

“Oh, Linda, what are ya down about now? Linda, you gotta smile. Life isn’t so bad. Come on now!”

I was disappointed when Anna’s physical therapist told her that they were moving to a different station all the way across the room. Before she headed over there, she marched over to the table, where I was lying on my stomach doing leg lifts. This is when my loud laughs perhaps turned more into a nervous giggle. Anna grasped my hands and she said, “Young lady, (I loved her for that description!), always remember, laughter is the best medicine. Keep laughing! Come on now!”

Come on now, readers! Laugh a little today. Life isn’t so bad!! A sweet and salty old bird with a feisty attitude and a zest for life reminded me that laughter is the best medicine in all of the world. And she looked (and clearly felt) terrific! Take a double dose of laughter today. You won’t regret it.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Candy Corn and Soup

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I sent this meme recently to some of my family and friends. My middle son and I found it to be hilarious. My middle son said that eating candy corn is like eating candle wax. I’d honestly eat the candle wax first. Most of the responses to the meme that I got back were along the lines of, “Ha! Yes! Nobody likes candy corn.”

Well, it turns out that my daughter and a few of my friends DO like candy corn . . . quite a bit. They took offense. It seems to me that candy corn falls into the “you either LOVE it or HATE it” category. There is no in-between. You either love or hate broccoli, brussels sprouts, cilantro, sardines, mushrooms and . . . . candy corn.

On a food note, while moping in my bed yesterday, I received a phone call from a sweet young lady from Nordstrom Department Store. She wanted to know when I was going to pick up my package.

“What package?” I asked.

“It’s soup, under your son’s name,” she replied sweetly and patiently.

“Soup?!?” I exclaimed. Right away my mind was going into, “Why in the hell did my son order soup from Nordstrom?!? That’s got to be some expensive soup. I didn’t even know that Nordstrom sold soup, but then again I haven’t been to the mall in forever.”

“It’s a SUIT, ma’am,” she said, giggling.

My son and my husband had recently purchased my son a suit for his medical school interviews. The customer service person and I got a good laugh out of our exchange. It feels good to laugh. Laughter is good medicine.

From the “No Horse Pucky” Archives

Fortune for the day – “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”- Albert Einstein

The time has come for another “No Horse Pucky” story. I haven’t recounted one of these types of stories, on the blog, in a long, long time. This story is from long ago. I wasn’t even married when it happened. I was engaged to be married, though.

It all happened in an ugly, green minivan. That particular minivan ruined minivans for me, for the rest of my life, despite a minivan’s convenient nature, which would have come in quite in handy, for a mother of a large brood like mine. You see, I was 23 years old and the ugly minivan, was an all expense paid company car. I had inherited the minivan from the previous textbook sales representative, a middle-aged family man, whose position I had taken over, after he left to go to a different company. I had sold my Barbie car (as my Dad liked to call it), a bright red, zippy Miata convertible, and I was now sporting around town in an unsightly, lumbering hunter green minivan. Blech!

Anyway, one evening on the commute home, being stuck at a long traffic light, I got distracted. I got distracted by my new, shiny, lovely engagement ring. I am, admittedly, a highly distractible driver. (My sister once said that I drive like it is an afterthought to everything else that I am doing.) I decided to take my engagement ring off, to admire it from all different angles, while waiting at the stoplight. While I was gazing adoringly at my new bauble, the light changed, and the rightfully irritated driver behind me, blew his horn loudly and long-ly. It startled me and I jumped, which made my engagement ring fall out of my hands, slide down the steering wheel column, down into a crack where the steering wheel connects into the dashboard.

At the next traffic light, I decided to use a pen to try to pry the crack open a little bit, so that I could slide my ring back up into my hands, to put it back onto its rightful finger. I pried the crack open so wide that the force of gravity swiftly swooped in, to teach me a lesson and the ring fell down into the crack, now disappearing from my sight. I started panicking, imagining that perhaps the ring had fallen out on to the road, as if the minivan was a bottomless car, the type driven by Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble. (the van was pretty bad but not THAT bad) In my hysterical state, I cut off three lanes of traffic to take a sharp right turn into the nearest service station that happened to be right there, like a lighthouse, a great beacon of hope, in the desert of my despair.

“Help me! Help me, please. My engagement ring fell behind my steering column!” I shouted out to the man in the back corner of the garage. The man, covered in grease, eyed me up and down, suspiciously and motioned for me to pull the minivan into a stall of his garage. He dismissed my silly fears of the ring falling onto the highway and told me to go calm myself down, in his small, dumpy waiting room.

About a half hour later, the man sauntered into the waiting room, holding my engagement ring. He informed me that he had to remove the steering wheel, to retrieve my poor ring, which had been like a small, innocent, pretty animal, waiting patiently, yet desperately, at the bottom of a dark, smelly well.

“Ma’am”, he addressed me with a stern scowl on his grease-marked face. “Let this be a lesson to you. This is why we DON’T take these things off.”

No horse pucky.

Horse Pucky

Do you have a few stories that have happened in your life that are so hard to believe that if someone else told you that it happened to them you would say that it was “horse pucky”?  I imagine that we all do.  Here is one of mine:

Many years ago, I had a little white, soft, fluffy pet chinchilla.  She had a pen in a little area off of our garage where she liked to sleep, eat and take her dust baths.  One day, as I got my youngest son and his baby sister into the car to take my son to preschool, I noticed that the door to my little chin’s pen was open. We were in a rush so, I decided that I would look for her when I got home from taking my son to school.

I drove the 6.4 miles to my son’s preschool. (I just googled the distance, so I am not exaggerating) I got my son and my daughter who was in her cumbersome baby carrier out of the car and I guided my son into his classroom.  Now I am not sure if this was one of the days my son chose to take a “Flat Stanley” approach to the idea of going to school where eventually I would have to drag him into the school, with him refusing to cooperate and remaining “stiff as a board.”  It may have been a day that he happily skipped into school; I really don’t remember.  But anyway, I got him safely situated into his classroom with his bag and his lunch and then I got my daughter back safely situated into the backseat of the car, all ready for the 6.4 mile drive back home.

A couple miles from our home, I decided to stop at the drive-through window of our bank.  As I pulled into the parking lot and waited my turn, I noticed a little white spot that seemed to have leaped out from my wheel well.  It was scurrying around the parking lot.  It took me a minute, but it soon dawned on me that that little white ball of fur was my pet chinchilla.  I ran into the parking lot, and miraculously, as scared as she must have been, she allowed me to pick her up and cuddle her.  Now her fur definitely looked more “dalmatian” at that point due to the black grease spots that were now adorning her, but she wasn’t hurt and she lived for many years after that incident.

True story.  No horse pucky.