Published: August 15, 2008 08:20 pm      

Giggling: an old family tradition

Deeply embedded in vacation, Maude is reprinting this old column from 2001. She’ll be back next time, raring to go, sort of.

Giddy with giggles, Sophie falls against the family tent at Rocky Gap State Park, almost collapsing it. She’s 5 1/2 years old, and, lying on the ruins, exhausted, she gasps for breath.

Then she giggles some more.

She can’t help it.

She has been giggling for the past 10 minutes and even Sophie probably couldn’t tell you what she is giggling about. The last time it was a joke she was trying to tell, except that every time she got to the punch line, she was giggling too hard to get it out. This time it had something to do with the hammock she and her friend have been playing Barbie dolls in.

The world will never know what started this particular outburst, but that’s okay. There will be another one in a few minutes. Or maybe it will be the same one. Sometimes she and her friend will giggle about something for hours, starting all over every time they think of it.

It’s a 5-to-7 year old thing. No, that’s not quite true. I have to admit, it’s a human thing. At least, for some humans.

Like me.

Just to tip you off, one of my older brother’s two pet names for me was “Giggle” which probably tells you something. (The other one was Medusa, which may tell you more about my brother than about me, although, yes, I did have pigtails.)

So Sophie, who is my granddaughter, gets it naturally.

I thought I had conquered it years ago, but just last week I got hit by the giggles again. I was talking on the phone with Eloise Early about something that happened at my 50th college reunion the week before. Don’t beg; I have absolutely no intention of telling you in this column what it was. Even if you send in a request with a plain brown self-addressed stamped envelope, I will still not tell you what it was, so forget it. But the point is that, suddenly, in the course of the conversation, each of us at either end of the telephone line were, so to speak, flat on our backs laughing — OK, giggling — so hard we could hardly get our breath.

It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it can still hit me at any time.

On several memorable occasions it almost did me in.

The thing about giggling is that it is a cooperative experience. Nobody ever almost died of giggling alone. You have to have someone in on it with you. And I always seem to have a friend or two around at the right, or wrong, moment.

Like the time I almost collapsed of the giggles at the communion rail in front of the entire church at Sunday service. This was in the 1960s, and I was young and silly, and had a young and silly, and very wonderful, friend who sang in the church choir with me. My husband, who happened to be the pastor of the church (that didn’t help), sometimes called us the Gold Dust twins, which will mean nothing to my younger reader. Betsy and I broadcast on the same frequency, and often ended up helpless with laughter, but usually in socially acceptable venues.

This time, however, we had quietly filed up to the front railing for communion, and knelt down soberly and piously as was called for. However, the ushers whose job it was to fasten the little gate hadn’t locked it securely, and as I leaned against it, the gate gave way.

I all but fell flat like David before the altar.

I caught myself just in time, but the damage was done. Betsy, who was next to me, was as helpless with unexploded laughter as I was, and I’m afraid the true solemnity of the occasion was ruined for the two of us, especially because we each realized that one sound or motion by the other would destroy us forever.

That’s the worst part of public giggling, trying not to let out a gurgle or a gulp for fear of getting a chain reaction started.

Another time our three children and I went to a home-grown production of The Messiah in a Pittsburgh church and had to sit in the front row because we were late. I don’t mean to be nasty, but the fact is that the tenor soloist was awful. He sounded like a cat in a fight. There was simply no way you could listen to his excruciating efforts without roaring with laughter, but you had to try. I still can’t figure out how the rest of the congregation sat there so quietly, with no apparent suffering.

Maybe they were all his relatives. (In which case you’d rather cry.)

I thought I was doing pretty well, actually, until I felt the pew shake. That did it. That always does it. (The worst giggling crises always happen in church.) Just as you get control of yourself, you feel the person next to you start to quiver. If the solo had gone on one more note, we would all have been publicly disgraced.

The other time I got the giggles was physically the worst, because I was eight months pregnant at the time. My friend Anne (you guessed it — another young minister’s wife) had invited me to a church program where, she said, the performer was said to be an excellent musician. She didn’t remember whether the woman sang or played an instrument, but someone had assured her that she was outstanding, and Anne knew it would be right up my alley.

The worst part of it was that for some reason (these things happen to ministers’ wives) we were told to go up and sit together on the platform. So we did, sitting there obediently like good ministers’ wives, with our hands folded, and expectant looks on our faces. (Especially mine.) The performer came out, leaned on the grand piano, opened her mouth and, without a word of introduction — started to whistle.

It turned out she did bird whistles.

Anne’s information was correct.

The woman was excellent.

Anne and I however were in total misery. Every time one of us calmed down, we could hear the other one snuffle or snort or hear her chair creak. All the problems associated with late pregnancy tried to happen to me right up there on stage, and there was no escape. It was the worst experience of its kind I have ever gone through.

So, yes, Sophie gets it naturally.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.