The Witching Hour

Lying here waiting to go back to sleep, thinking about what makes us laugh at work in the middle of the night, may as well post. Thinking about 4-H. Head, hands, heart, and I can never remember the fourth H. Possibly hilarity.

Mom developed a mini-social club at our house in Albion, WA for a couple of years via a 4-H club. There was a horse club across town; we did nothing so exalted. I grew tomatoes by digging a little moat around each plant, which I flooded to irrigate the young plants, and drowned earwigs while I was at it. I sewed simple projects and baked bread to enter in the Whitman County Fair outside Colfax. Mom set me up with fresh eggs from one of the neighbors so I could do a demonstration of fresh versus store [i.e. older] eggs in our meetings.

Mostly we played round games, such as Musical Chairs, until it threatened to break up the chairs and was banned. Mostly this morning I was thinking about a teenage girl named Alice Watson and how she used to laugh; face buried in her lap and trembling for thirty to sixty seconds, followed by a loud intake of air, and more trembling.

The "witching hour" at work is from about two to four AM, what we used to call the Squirrelly Hour elsewhere, and things that might be mildly amusing for a brief second in the afternoon become wildly hilarious at three in the morning.

The other night they were talking about those Las Vegas wedding chapels which over 40 to 60 years have been transformed from a squalid retreat for desperately eloping youth into something quite common-place, respectable, and even elegant. Someone mentioned that they now have a drive-through service, to which I responded that you might as well pick up a hot dog while you were there. This led to some double-entendre and a cry of, "Supersize me."

Last night one of the nurses was talking about a blind family member who enjoyed golfing. "He can see the ball to hit it." I said I didn't care if he could see the ball--could he see the people around him? Turns out there was a seeing-eye person on the links to let the blind golfer know where the ball had gone after he hit it. "Who needs that? Just listen for the screams."

I was immobilized by wheezing teenage laughter for probably ten minutes, until it was time to run off and do another neuro check.