The Day That I Heard A Kid Doing The Woody Woodpecker Laugh On The Street
I've been trying to pin down my favorite laughs lately. I know that one of them is my friend Rachael's. Rachael, I don't know if you read this, but if you do, you should know that not only did I love your laugh from the first time I heard it, but that I've also adopted a variation of it. It has a quality about it of sort of bursting forth from deep inside and surprising the laugher. I think it's a laugh that is particularly charming in generally quiet people, like Rachael.

Actually, I think I'm onto something there with the contrast thing. Because I also really like how my dad laughs. It's funny - he's as masculine as a guy can be who doesn't play sports or fix things or do any of the kinds of things that you would infer that all men do if you, say, try to buy a Hallmark card for Father's Day. But he has this very high-pitched, ridiculous, slightly maniacal-sounding laugh. Like a little kid.

So maybe the best laughs happen when you can't help but be yourself - caught a little off-guard, letting something escape that maybe you didn't mean to. Particularly amazing laughers make eye contact with you when they laugh, I think. I'm always kind of proud whenever I make someone laugh, but that makes it even better.

Behind again. Previous days were:

The Day That I First Teared Up At The Office
It wasn't an all-out cry, though that will come soon, I'm sure. What brought it on was reading letters from people who lost relatives on September 11. They were thanking us (StoryCorps - where I work) for the opportunity to talk about their dead loved ones and record something about their lives. And the letters were supposed to be fairly official - they were written at our request to an organization that provides some of our funding. So they were letters of recommendation, essentially. And some of them weren't too personal, they were very much arms-length-letters. One of them started out that way. It was the only hand-written one and it was from parents whose son died. They had lots of good things to say about how telling their son's story helped them to heal and that kind of thing. And then near the end, it read something like, "It's ironic that our son left from our home, where he grew up, and not his own home on the morning that he died." The sentence didn't really fit with anything before or after it and felt like it was a thought that had just occurred to her - I'm pretty sure the mother was writing it - and she had to say it right then. It was the letter of someone who is still disoriented, still confused, still in the middle of everything five years later. One of my uncles killed himself when he was a little older than me. My family never talks about it, but my grandma referred to it once. She said something like, "After it happened, there was nothing that could hurt me anymore. There was a part of me that has been closed since then." I do not know how we survive these things.

The Day That I Watched Two Three-Year-Olds Make Friend On The Subway
I have been having lots of kid encounters lately. I will describe them in more detail when I've gotten a slightly longer list.