When did I stop laughing?
It turns out that youth is not the only thing wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw famously once wrote: “Youth is the most precious thing in life. It is too bad it has to be wasted on young folk.”
The older I get, the more I agree with the basic sentiment.
But youth isn’t the only valuable resource afforded to the wrong people at the wrong time.
Take sex, for example. During my promiscuous teenage years, I knew nothing. I was surrounded by young ladies in the very prime of their beauty, and I was a fumbling buffoon. How different things could have been. To paraphrase Luther Vandross: “If I knew back then, what I know now. If I’d understood the what, when, why and how”. Believe me, I would have been a very popular young guy.
I feel the same about laughter.
There were times when I was younger when I found myself literally helpless with laughter. On more than one occasion, I laughed so hard that my knees gave way, and I continued to laugh from the ground.
When I was younger, I laughed so hard that tears would stream down my face. Sometimes, I laughed so hard that I lost the ability to make sound — I would stand open-mouthed; the rapid rise and fall of my shoulders the only indication that I was laughing…
