“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” -WH Auden, 1907

A few years ago one December, as I prepared to leave for a business trip, my husband John (aka Kurt Vonnegut’s Mr. Brilliant) went into the basement to install insulation beneath the kitchen floor in our 100-year-old chilly house.

Searching the dryer for my missing sock (always the missing sock, never the missing ascot, a phenomenon that for years I’ve blamed on plate tectonics, but I digress), I heard from downstairs an animal noise, a groan, a cry of sudden shock at the pain, of mortality and surprise, of anguish and hurt. I thought John had stapled his hand to the beam or was impaled on a rake or something bloody and bone-chilling and nauseating like that—good imaginations for regrettable gore run in my family; after a brief moment in which I took stock of my personal constitution and tolerance for blood and guts, I ran downstairs, afraid of what I would find.

I found him unable to move or speak, his face white, his arm at an odd angle like an ice skater who can’t finish his triple lutz. I couldn’t see the problem and he couldn’t speak to tell me. There was no blood, but worse: something I’ve never seen—he was paralyzed by pain. [The back story: given the many late night trips to the hospital emergency room with Daddy’s heart attacks, I’ve long responded to every hurt, sniffle, strained muscle, cough of John’s with one question, the one that matters: “Are you having a heart attack?” He has long known that this is the measure of seriousness for me, the barometer of any emergency situation, the answer to which determines the speed of my response, as if anything less than a heart attack doesn’t merit my moving my head or quickening my pace. I’m only half kidding.]

A man who has been known to perform minor surgery on himself and hardly believes in aspirin, John isn’t prone to wimpiness in regard to physical pain, so I knew it was bad. When he agreed to go to the emergency room, I knew it was real bad. I knew the affirmative answer to my ubiquitous question was finally here, after all those years of dreading it. This was that awful moment. I bundled Emma up (Tess was gestating nicely at the moment, six months away from emerging) and off we went to begin a process the conclusion of which we could not know at the time.

Things move slowly in hospitals unless you go in with the symptoms he had. Whisked away for tests, he was then held overnight in the cardiac intensive care unit. I brought Emma home, blithely telling her that Dad would hate the hospital food and would be home soon, but without that surety in my own mind. We were new in town, a month here. There were no friends to call.

And as I stepped on the first step of the four going to our front porch, it hit me like a punch to the gut, a sudden knowing that chilled me through, a Porch Step Epiphany, if you will: if only John’s clothes came home from that hospital, but not him, the laughter would go missing.

Mr. Brilliant makes me laugh like nothing or no one has ever made me laugh. And when Emma grows up and writes her memoirs (I hope I fare well, but there was that one incident with the pretzels), what will shine through in the portrayal of her daddy are the lengths to which he is willing to go to make her laugh. And I mean really laugh. Laugh to tears, laugh to stomach ache, to pleading for it to stop. Now Tess is growing up in the same tradition of slight insanity and belly laughs, learning so young how to create laughter in others. The term “peals of laughter” was invented for the young; they know their voice, they try it out. As adults, we minimize, hold in, reduce.

These girls will long remember every birthday or whiff of a holiday beginning with a thick forest of brightly colored streamers and balloons and hearts cut out of construction paper that sometimes takes him hours to create and perfect, that beautiful wooden lemonade stand on wheels that he made for Emma in the garage out of scraps of lumber, the giant telescope he rehabilitated because Emma so loves the stars, the trips to the Duck Park with Tess and the long, complicated and yet soothingly predictable stories he tells her at bedtime, the cakes with Civil War battles recreated by small plastic soldiers, the chess sets pitting physicists against mathematicians, the home movies of being attacked by doughnuts and ding-dongs.

By appearing to fall asleep and snore, we used to kid him about educating us with his long and involved (see: boring) histories of the universe. The subtle hint didn’t stop him. He still regales us with those historical treatises, but now does so loudly in the manic voice of Steve Irwin, the Australian Crocodile Hunter, “CRIKEY! THROW ANOTHER SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE! THE BLOODY HUNS ATTACKED! THE CHINESE INVENTED PAPER, GUNPOWDER AND UMBRELLAS! NO WORRIES! FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM TOOK 375 YEARS TO SOLVE! HITLER PAINTED STILL LIFES! THAT MOVIE ISN’T HISTORICALLY CORRECT—THEY WOULDN’T HAVE HAD BUTTONS LIKE THAT IN 1864!”

This hilarity is a sister to the fact that he really is brilliant; John is the man enlisted by everyone who knows him to be their “lifeline” on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” He is as at home teaching Emma about building a bird house from sticks and mud as he is talking to world renowned scientists about quarks. Who won the Nobel Prize in 1949? Who lost the World Series in 1964? What is the origin of the Pleiades? Who is Dirac and what is he famous for and what was his wife’s name and his favorite color? What is the secret ingredient in Spam? Mr. Brilliant remembers everything he’s ever read, so he knows, damn it, he knows. Poor man has lost any chance of finding a Trivial Pursuit partner—why bother? The only categories I have any slight hope of beating him at are those covered by People magazine.

Once in elementary school, Emma refused to do her homework after school. “Emma,” I said, “we need to get this done before dinner. I’ll help you.” “I prefer not,” she intoned quietly. “Honey, you really need to finish up, and then we can play trains.” “I want to wait,” she answered. “Let’s get it done before Daddy gets home and surprise him!” I offered. Finally, in desperation, she told me the absolute truth: “I have to wait until Daddy gets home so he can help me,” she pleaded. “But honey, why? I can help you now.”

“Because Daddy knows everything.”

Well, there you have it in a nutshell. I’ll just sit over here quietly. Chopped liver.

It takes the threatened or actual loss of something to bring it into sharp relief sometimes, most times, always. I wish it weren’t so, but it seems to be that way, not only in love but in life. Living with a snorer? You’ll miss it when they’re gone. Does she leave body powder on the floor near the vanity when she uses her big poofy poof; you’ll long for that fairy dust when it stops falling. It will be the smallest things that bring loss into quick relief: the smell of Fahrenheit cologne, a jar of Skippy, a matchbook from the Roger Smith Hotel, Spongebob Squarepants, a small silver book with a scruple in it, a black and white cookie like the ones from New York, a homemade sandbox, a box of leaves once Fedexed to me in London because I was missing autumn at home.

The end of the hospital story is a wonderful one, the best possible: no heart attack, home, alive, well, and having a birthday today, a Big One, a half a century one.

Yes, John was born fifty years ago today in a hole in Germany. That is, he was born in an underground army hospital. He’s loved dirt ever since, collecting it wherever he goes, comparing the colors, tracking its feel. It seems only fitting, then, that one of his 50^th birthday presents is something called The Dirt Project (surprise!). After a call was put out into the universe, dirt has arrived from nearly every U.S.  state and 10 foreign countries, from Alaska to New Zealand to Israel, from good friends and from people I’ve never met. It just keeps coming and the colors are amazing.

So this is all to say a wee Happy birthday, dear Johnny. Here’s to many, many more years of craziness, long stories about the history of science that make our teeth hurt, impersonations of Homer Simpson and of Ted Knight from the Mary Tyler Moore show, watching Patricia Routledge as Mrs. Bucket in “Keeping up Appearances,” wearing lit candles taped to your head, and big, big laughs, the kind where your stomach hurts afterwards, the kind where tears come and for all the right reasons.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Laugh more without worrying how you look. Tape a lit candle to your head, pretend you’re being attacked by doughnuts or Barbie dolls and make a film of it, create dozens of tall, odd snow characters all over the hood of your car and see how long they’ll last when you’re driving 35 miles an hour, look at the stars with your kids at night, teach them how the world works in a fake Australian accent, and above all: tell them stories and laugh at their jokes and catch them when they’re falling.

And while you’re at it, acknowledge now what you would miss if it were gone from your life. Then embrace it, cultivate it, be grateful for it, tell it, tell them so.