Friday, Jul. 15, 2005 - 11:14 p.m.

R's favorite joke-groan

A few words about R, before I tell her joke. She is my oldest sister-in-law, and 22 years older than I am. She is the one who would not walk down the sidewalk with her family, but went several yards ahead. She is also the one who I saw surriptitiously (sp)wipe the ledge over the door into my living room once. She also the one who first came to visit us when I was a new bride. The floor in our little trailer looked horrible, and I was upset because I didn't know what to do (we had been married about 2 months). 800 asked me why I didn't mop it, that would make it look OK. That's when the light went on. Mop? We didn't even have one yet!

In spite of R's foibles, she loves You with all her heart and wants all of us to do so, too. In fact, she is one of the few people who tried to lead me to you when every one in 800's family was so horrified at the little pagan he had wed. I can remember her yet, holding out a Bible with a $5 bill to me, telling me all I had to do was take this free gift, and that was just like salvation was. I love R, and those little foibles are part of the reason. But this joke is one of the biggest reasons I love her. RR, her second husband and the brother of her first husband who died, is a great joke teller and always has a few to relate, but this one is R's and it is fun to watch him squirm with embarrassment when she begins:

It seems there was this man who got a very bad cold. He got worse and worse, it turned inot bronchitis, then pneumonia, and he died. As they took him to the cemetery, the hearse had to go up a very steep hill, and the rear door popped open, allowing the wooden box to slide out, and down the hill, where it slid in through the door of a pharmacy, right up to the counter, and banged to a halt. The man popped up in the wooden box, and asked the druggist, "Do you have anything to stop this casket?"

Now R will break into wild laughter and her hearers will look at her blankly which sends all of us others into hysterics, because the real punchline is, "Do you have anything to stop this coffin?" R is always puzzled as to why some of us can hardly breathe from laughter. And when we try to explain to her, she looks at us and wonders what's the difference.

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