The mother stayed at home taking care of the boy. As they had only one car, her lifeline was the telephone that went through the town exchange. She busied herself cleaning the old farmstead while the toddler looked through the cupboards full of things left by previous generations.

One morning, dressed because of the heat in an old strapless party dress, the young woman was scrubbing the kitchen sink when she heard a sound. Not the lowing of longhorn cattle in the nearby field nor the dry wind across the plains, but something different, muffled and odd.

Realizing she had not seen her son for a while, she began to search. The noise was coming from a small back bedroom. It sounded like a cat caught in a tuba. She ran into the room. There was her son sitting on the floor with his head stuck firmly in a pretty pink flower-decorated  china chamber pot.

She tried to pull the pot off his head. The child screamed. His ears were caught inside the rim of the bowl. Trapped with no car, no nearby neighbors, no one to help, she ran to the phone and asked the operator to connect her with a doctor. When she explained the problem, he said,

“Well, we know he’s breathing from the racket he’s making. Have you tried salad oil?” Dutifully the mother rubbed oil on her fingers and tried to push it up around his ears, but he only hollered louder when she pulled on the pot and now they were both dripping in Wesson.

“You’d better bring him in,” the doctor said and hung up. How was she going to get him to the doctor’s office? She got the telephone operator back on the line. “There’s a bus runs every couple of hours and stops at the crossroads about a quarter mile up from you,” she said. “You can just make the next one. It goes right into town”

The young woman dressed the toddler in the first thing she grabbed that didn’t have to go on over his head, a red flannel robe. By now the boy was eerily quiet, so from time to time she pinched his arm to make him yelp and let her know he was still breathing.

Passing truckers honked their horns as the two walked down the road, and drivers in nice cars shook their heads as if commenting on her poor parenting skills. They reached the crossroads just as the bus pulled up. On such a hot day all the windows of the old school bus were open.

Passengers hung from the windows watching her progress with the small china-clad companion, who was now emitting not only howls of protest but a steady steam of gooey saliva from underneath the edge of he bowl.

The two mounted the bus and the mother opened her change purse to get out their fare. At exactly that moment the driver threw the bus into gear and it lurched forward. The toddler’s oily hand slipped from his mother’s and he started to careen down the aisle, anxious passengers reaching out in vain attempts to stop his blind progress. The mother reached out too, grasped the handle of the chamber pot and it lifted off his head.

Speaking softly, she turned to the driver. “Let us off, please,” she said.

“You didn’t pay your fare yet,” the driver said, braking and opening the door.

“We didn’t go anywhere,” she said. And with all the dignity she could muster, she lifted the toddler to the ground and started back toward home, holding with one hand a red-eared, whimpering little boy and with the other the handle of the pretty pink-flowered chamber pot.

I hope by now you are laughing. If you are, you’ve just had a workout. You’ve exercised your diaphragm and abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg and back muscles. Your laughter “massaged” your abdominal muscles and can benefit digestion and absorption function.

You’ve also given you brain a boost, because laugher stimulates both sides of the brain and eases psychological stress. You’ve elevated your mood and just plain made yourself feel good.

Researchers at the University of Maryland believe laughter may also help reduce the risk of heart disease. It can help lower blood pressure, decrease stress hormones, and increase infection-fighting antibodies.

Socially, humor helps us dissolve anger, defuse situations, connect with others and permits us to look at troubling situations from a different and often helpful perspective.

So watch a comedy movie, read a funny book, seek out funny people. I love to listen to Car Talk on Saturday morning radio because while I am laughing, I’m learning invaluable tips about car maintenance.

To quote a Helpguide article entitled Humor, Laughter and Health, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”  So the next time you hear laughing, move toward it. “Hey,” you can say, “what’s so funny?”