I don’t know why, but this happy memory washed over me this morning.
Family Christmas party, years ago, everybody still alive and healthy, the whole bunch of us crammed into Grandpa’s living room–to this day I don’t know how we fit. And just for the heck of it, we played some Mad Libs.
If you’ve never played this crazy game, well, it’s easy. You have a short story full of blanks, and the only thing the players know is vague clues to help them choose a word to go into the blank–like “noun,” “adjective,” “exclamation,” etc. All they do is supply a word for each blank.
And so you wind up with sentences like “Mikey hiccuped all the way to the moron‘s office and then asked to shame the bloated but still prehensile senator.”
The story I read to my family at the party was about bird-watching, but by the rules of Mad Libs, they didn’t know that. I asked for nouns and adjectives and other details, and they provided them.
That’s how we wound up with a “ruling junta” in Baltimore pursuing a “yellow-bellied crotch sucker.” And other equally silly formulae.
And oh, did everybody laugh! I thought my mother was going to plotz. We laughed till tears ran down our cheeks.
I wish I could invite some of you over for Mad Libs. I could guarantee a good time!
What a great time you and your family will have in Heaven playing Mad Libs. I hope we all can be invited. I envision Heaven as a place of abundant laughter.