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65 Years of Community Building

Through Healing Laughter

By Vytas StoskusPublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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65 Years of Community Building
Photo by Chris Mac on Unsplash

When my straight-laced sister would visit after having run off & married her fiancé’s best friend & set up housekeeping with him & his family in neighboring Canada across the Great Lake Erie, her visits home were joyous occasions. Our apartment having only 2 bedrooms meant I’d end up on the couch while she, along with her husband & kids, would reoccupy her old bedroom, complete with all her old furniture, which included a double bed.

Why a double bed for an individual young woman? Because the plan had been for her to marry the guy downstairs, with whose parents our parents had jointly bought the 2-family dwelling in an inner-city working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. The bed was to be their wedding bed. This was known in those ancient times as “planning ahead.”

Things worked out differently, however. On trips to Canada for ethnic events & friends’ weddings, my sister met & spun the head off a guy from Hamilton, Ontario who happened to be her fiancé’s old buddy from the Displaced Persons Camps (refugee camps) in post-World War 2 Germany.

On one of these happy reunions with us, she arrived with 2 kids, a girl just a little over a year old & a baby boy of just a few months. The kids slept on the top mattress which was laid out on the floor next to the bed itself while their parents slept on the bottom foundation mattress, the box springs, which remained on the bedframe located slightly higher. The room was just wide enough to accommodate the 2 side-by-side without an inch to spare.

Al Jr., needing a nap as infants often do, had been parked on the slightly higher mattress on the bedframe, but a bit too close to the edge. Sure enough, he rolled off. When the crying began, everyone rushed into the bedroom, but there was no Al Jr., just the sound of his wailing from underneath the bed. Like a pinball, he had ricocheted off the edge of the mattress on the floor, which had conveniently cushioned his fall but had also sent him rolling onto the wooden floor under the bedframe supporting the other mattress.

To extricate him became the challenge. There he was trying his utmost to imitate an ambulance siren to accent the urgency of his situation, but he was being of no help whatsoever, & no one could get to him because of the lack of space. He had rolled so far that an arm stretched under the bedframe past the edge of the mattress on the floor could not reach him.

Moving the mattress on the floor was nearly impossible because of the surrounding furniture, luggage, & clothing, so the rescue operation continued through the small crack between the mattress on the floor & the bedframe.

His father’s efforts were not only hindered by the lack of operating space but also by the gales of laughter bursting from everyone at the ridiculousness of the situation, which kept the rescuer from being able to function effectively for he too was in spasms of laughter at his inability to save the day.

After a traumatic minute or 2 for Al Jr., & aching sides from laughter for everyone else, the baby was rescued & calmed. He’d not been injured, just startled awake upon finding himself falling, bouncing around, & rolling on the hardwood floor under the bed where his howls for help seemed unheeded for an eternity while his rescuers nearly died of laughter at his slight misfortune.

It’s amazing how just a couple minute slab of life gained us all, including Al, Jr. himself when he was old enough to understand, such an indelibly vivid memory to last us the 65 years since it occurred.

The incident has left me with 2 thoughts: 1) How the funniest & most memorable occasions can be the simple mishaps of daily life, & 2) It’s amazing how laughter is so healing & even community building, not just during the event but for decades thereafter. Memories combined with laughter are powerful & healing forces that bind people lovingly together.

© Vytas Stoskus, 2022 [email protected]

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About the Creator

Vytas Stoskus

Social psychologist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator; organizational, cross-cultural, creativity, unschooling catalyst; authored 3 books. Heretic . . . . can’t differentiate between my work, play, & concern for justice. www.stoskus.net

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