Flying Food and No Fear

Laughter. It has been so prominent in my life, sometimes I don’t even realize it because I, like many others, am being too focused on the bad. I could tell so many stories, and I’m not even kidding you when I say so many stories, I mean so many stories of the times that I’ve sat around my aunt’s kitchen table laughing with them. My favorite story about laughter was this one time a few years back. I believe my cousin and I were, you know, finishing up our last year of Middle School and we were on edge and all this and that. We just didn’t want to be high schoolers yet, so my uncle, in an attempt to make us happy, said that we are going to have a family cook-off. So we got our whole family under one roof. My cousin’s family, my family, my grandmother, all of us and we paired up into teams. I and my Mimi (my mom’s, mom) were on a team together and we made what we remember were these little artichokes, spinach, and cream cheese pastry bites and everyone loved them. It wasn’t just me and my Mimi, of course. It was us as a team, my sister and my mom, my aunt and my other sister, my uncle and my cousin, and my dad and my brother as a team. Just all the pairings we could put together and we all made something different. As I said, me and my Mimi made appetizers. My brother and dad I believe made desserts and so on and so forth. We were all just in the kitchen. Let me tell you that the kitchen is not made for all of us: seven from my family, four from my aunt’s family, plus my Mimi. So… There were a lot of people in that kitchen and all of us trying to use the oven at the same time, was a disaster.

When I remember this specific event. All I can remember is the laughter. I can’t help but laugh when I’m with them. I mean, me and my Mimi were baking. I’m trying to whip up the artichoke, spinach, and cream cheese dip, and then she dips her finger in and smears it on my nose. It was such a small action that caused an outbreak. Everyone else in the kitchen at this point now had food smeared on them. Laughing. Laughter everywhere. Laughter so contagious I couldn’t avoid it if I tried. At that point, when food was flying and my family, all twelve people, tried to dodge the flying food, my cousin and I found each other’s eyes, through the bars of wooden kitchen table chairs. We were no longer worried about highschool. We knew (at least I know I did) that if I needed someone to cheer me up when highschool got tough, I’d have these people to come home to.

What I’m trying to get across by telling you this story of laughter is that laughter doesn’t have to be something necessarily funny like a knock-knock joke, you know? Laughter can be a lot of things and can be anywhere. But we were around that kitchen table. I wasn’t thinking, oh, this is hilarious. I was thinking, I love these people. I love them so much that the amount of serotonin they make me feel is unbelievable. Do you remember how I said, I’m always focusing on the bad things? About how I have such a big family that it’s hard to fit us all under one roof? I’m flooded with work all the time, whether it be: in school, out of school, or in my home. But sometimes you need to just stop. Stop all your thoughts. Stop thinking about the bad for one minute and think about how to laugh. Laughter is possible everywhere you go. I think as humans? We need laughter.

“42c – Tiny Messy Kitchen” by TheBrownMike is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.