My Sister's Sense of Humor

Humor is a relative thing. In my case the relatives were my mother and my sister. Their humor was based on a highly developed sense of the ridiculous added to deadpan honesty. Both were paragons of self-mockery. I don’t know when my mother learned to be a comedienne. She’s rarely smiling in her early photos. But I think my sister began her standup career at her first formal dance. It was our Amah Mary who came up with a solution to the problem of what my sister could wear, since buying a new dress was out of the question. By they way, we never called Mary “Amah.” We called her Mary. She lived with us as combination babysitter and housekeeper so our mother could help our father sell shoes or chickens. I discovered the word Amah watching foreign films and decided to use it in my journals so as to not confuse her with our mother, who was also Mary. Amah Mary altered one of her own dresses, a gown she’d been keeping since her younger years when she had expectations of having an actual social life. My sister was probably fourteen and the dance was an open to all, not a “need date,” sort of affair. She was so excited to go out in her first evening gown! She felt like a queen, that is until she entered the auditorium and heard a collective gasp. As soon as she glanced at the other girls, she knew she’d made a critical mistake. They were all dressed in pastel shades, whereas she was in funereal black. If you know anything about late 1940s fashion rules, you know that girls never wore black. I think Bette Davis made that mistake in one of her movies. If it had been me, I would have turned tail and run for the exit, never to return, but not my sister. Rather than admit humiliation, she rose to the occasion with a “Ha-Ha! Fooled you!” sort of remark, which drew the other girls to her, laughing, and saying, “Oh, Bette, you’re such a joker. You’re the only one who would show up wearing black! You’re so funny.” She laughed with them and insisted on having a grand time anyway. She told me this story to teach me that sometimes the best way to get out of an embarrassing situation is to use humor, even if it’s at your own expense. If you do it right, you get over your self consciousness and end up having more fun than anyone else. The key is to get to the punch line before anyone else has a chance to think of it. As a result of this training, I am now the first one in the crowd to raise my hand and say, “Hello. My name is Carol and I’m on antidepressants.” After my sister married, she and her husband moved to the other end of the state where the coastal redwoods live. In order to drive there, you had to motor for endless hours along two-lane highways that never stopped twisting and turning. The best way to survive the trek and avoid throwing up was to fall asleep, unless you were the one driving. Hogging this road were huge lumber trucks piled with enormous pyramids of newly-cut logs. The only thing keeping the logs from rolling off and crushing you to death were a few straps here and there. Lumber trucks couldn’t travel as rapidly as my brother-in-law wished. Actually, nothing could. At his Celebration of Life, I met many of his former friends who told stories of refusing to get into any vehicle he was driving. He had a knack for turning strong men’s hair gray with fear and their bowels to jelly with his race car shortcuts. His tricks included passing cars while going uphill on the steepest of San Francisco’s streets and speeding past lumber trucks on blind curves. I know this is true, because I’ve been in his car, screaming with the other passengers, while he pulled his various Dirty Harry stunts. We’d been driving for hours, my brother-in-law at the wheel, my sister at his side, and my mother, father, and yours truly wedged into the back seat. My parents had nodded off but I was awake, wanting to know about it if my brother-in-law’s driving was going to kill us all. He was passing yet another lumber truck when I saw my sister assessing the situation. Knowing her, I braced myself. She waited until we were parallel with the flatbed and all we could see from the passenger side was a wall of logs. Then she screamed, “Crash!” My mother and father woke with a jerk, saw the mountain of logs ready to bury them, and yelled in fright. My brother-in-law, clued into her antics, stayed on the road instead of veering off the mountainside. Meanwhile, my sister and I enjoyed a good belly laugh. That’s another thing my sister taught me: there’s nothing like a little terror to break up hours of monotony. In due time, after years of community development and service, she turned out to be a big shot. There are annual awards named after her. A building bears her name. Yet she never stopped poking fun at herself or ceased enjoying the embarrassment it caused. For example, she loved to gamble at the local Indian casinos. I went with her once when she’d finished chemotherapy. The people at the bar were thrilled to see her again. One of them said, “I love your new hairstyle, Bette. Its so pretty!” She replied, deadpan, “It’s a wig. I have to wear it because I have cancer and I’m bald.” How’s a person supposed to reply to something like that? The answer she would have have liked best would have been, “Nice toupee.” During a prior casino outing, she was reluctantly admitted to a high-stakes, deadly-serious, all-male, private-room poker game. She had such great fun being a silly old lady until the other players realized she was cleaning them out. She grinned through the rest of the game and came home a much wealthier woman. They never invited her to play again. Perhaps our most telling moment was shortly before she passed. I had settled her on her favorite couch, bracing her knees and head with pillows to relieve the discomfort of an aching back. Once I saw she was momentarily pain-free, I picked up her water glass to refill it, when she said, “Wait. I want to tell you something.” I stopped, expecting a request of some sort. She went on, “I want you to know that if our roles were reversed, that is if you were here on the couch where I am and I was the one standing where your are…” I waited. “I want you to know that I would not be as nice to you as you are being to me.” I looked at her, thoughtfully considering what she’d said and then replied, “I believe you.” This struck us both as being riotously funny. We laughed until our sides hurt. Well, hers already hurt, but she laughed hard anyway. Tragedy plus time equals comedy, they say. My sister never waited that long.