"...huge...tracts of land."

I listened to an interview with Marlo Thomas on NPR recently talking about her new book, "Growing Up With Laughter." Heck, I didn't even know Marlo was still alive, let alone having written SIX books. I guess she also conducts interviews with comedians. Isn't that funny, the things one grows up with can still have hidden surprises when one no longer pays attention. I remember the "That Girl" TV show. I remember her dad, Danny Thomas. I remember my dad enjoying the laughter from the show "That Girl," and from Marlo and her dad Danny.

Even though life wasn't exactly ideal growing up with my parents, my dad had a great sense of humor. He had all sorts of jokes he had collected on paper. He loved funny books. He laughed out loud while reading the comics in the news papers. He loved humor. He loved a good laugh.

When I first saw "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," I was about 12-years-old and I didn't think it was very funny. I walked out of the theater kind of dumbfounded and thinking the film made no sense. When I got older and understood the humor, loving humor as much as I do. I have watched the movie dozens of times and laugh harder each time. There is a scene from the movie which I'll use to preface the following narrative:

Price Herbert, played by Terry Jones, is having a conversation with his father, played by Michael Palin, about his forth coming nuptials. Alex ("Herbert")...Herbert doesn't want to get married. He wants to sing (que music). ("Stop that! Stop that! You're not going to do a song while I'm here!") Where was I...oh, yeah...Herbert doesn't want to get married, but Father does his best to convince him that he damned well better, even stating that the young woman has "huge...(shaking hands in front of his chest in the male sign language that a woman has rather large knockers) tracts of land."

My father used to tell me stories about how funny his brother Douglas was. Things like: stopping at a local gas station in Reedsport, Oregon, and asking the quickest way to New York, or when getting asked directions saying something like "you can't get there from here." My father, having joined the military, told me how, after three years away from home, he was amazed to come home and find that his younger brother, Douglas, had grown something like a foot taller.

Somewhere around this time, my father informed me, it was discovered that my uncle Doug (whom my middle name comes from) got leukemia. My father told me how my uncle Doug would be strong and healthy one day, then be so thin and weak he couldn't even lift himself out of bed.

My grandfather, it was said, had a rather large amount of timberland. How much, I don't know. I had rarely heard about this from anyone other than my dad. I wonder how strongly he was connected with it. Why, prior to my cousin Doug getting ill, he didn't sell the land and use up the money. Did he feel a connection with the land like Shusli does to hers?

The story goes that my grandfather sold all or most of his land to try to save my uncle Douglas. The story also goes that he hired one of the foremost doctors in the field of leukemia to try to save my uncle. I'm told my grandfather flew this doctor over from Germany, and even this doctor was unable to save my uncle, who finally succumbed to the disease.

My father would sit, usually in a drunken state, at our dining room table some 30 years later, and tell me this story and often cry at the loss.

A handful of years back, my sister was told by a woman she met at my mothers family picnic that my grandfather still had some land left. She gave my sister an address to write her at. My sister never did, so I wrote the woman and never heard a thing back.

If my grandfather hadn't sold off all of his land, it was only because my uncle Doug passed away before he could.

Some 10 years ago, Reverend Goat Carson wrote a song called "Redskins," on his CD called "Simmerin'." People were always asking him about the name Redskins, so he decided to write a song about it. The story is so terrible that he had to balance it with his mother's favorite song, "You are my Sunshine."

I guess I wrote this story in the same manner. My uncles passing so many years ago. My grandfather selling off his land. My father telling me the story in a state of drunkenness and crying. All mixed up with laughing and humor because the laughter and humor helped us survive. All of my family loved a good laugh.