Rich: Finding a reason to laugh, even at a funeral

You know how it happens. You go to the funeral home to pay respects and run into people you haven't seen in ages. Many years have passed, but yet y'all begin telling stories -- always the funny ones -- and, there in the midst of grief, you begin to laugh.

When Debbie's grandmother, age 93, passed away, I walked into the state room of the funeral home to see three friends I had not seen since my cheeks were dewy with youth. It started out as all these conversations do, a bit awkward, us trying to find the common ground in lives now different in scope and experience. Gradually, though, we got there and one said, laughing between words, "Hey, do you remember when?"

And that began it all for us.

There were many "remember when's," all wrapped in giggles and smiles, for no one ever seems to recall the dreary times or the moments that were, at best, mundane. Slowly, 25 years melted away.

"I was just thinking of y'all the other day," I said, starting to laugh at the memory I was about to recollect.

My friend, Poet, had been visiting and we had been to dinner. Poet, as I always write, is a gentleman of the highest order so when we started to leave a restaurant, I stepped back and waited for him to open the door. He obliged, of course. As he pulled the handle, my mind flashed back to that evening when those three friends -- two men and a woman -- and I had been to dinner. The guys decided they would play a trick on me. It was a rustic restaurant and they knew the doorknob had a tendency to come off.

So, they rigged it and gleefully plotted for the moment that it would come off in my hand and they would laugh uproariously.

Sharon folded her arms and shook her head. "You're wasting your t