Humor, With Interest
Sivakami, my thirteen-year-old daughter, and Medium’s Terry Mansfield
The wilting plants in pots
Last week was sunnier than we expected. All the plants in pots that the gardener had so laboriously carried up to the terrace (eighteen steps) were wilting.
A clothes-drying trip takes too long
I went upstairs to hang out the clothes for drying and frowned at the new rose plants I had purchased a week or so previously. They were definitely in need of some hydration!
Bucket-and-mug to the rescue when a hose pipe is missing
My terrace trip took me much longer than it would take to just hang out the clothes, because I had to manually fill up the bucket in which I had carried the clothes up in, and water around twenty pots to resuscitate the plants in them. Two of them, tiny plants in tiny pots, appeared as dead as dead could be, but I didn’t shrink from watering them generously anyhow.
Sivakami remembered when I’d laughed at a Medium story about watering plants
When I came downstairs, my daughter, Sivakami, who is all of thirteen, asked me what had taken me so long. When I told her I had been watering the plants — with a bucket and a mug, we haven’t yet bought a hosepipe for the terrace — she laughed and asked if I was sure that I had been watering real plants and not artificial ones like Kayoko’s husband had.
My daughter remembered Kayoko’s Japan trip
The wonder is that Kayoko’s husband, Terry Mansfield, isn’t someone my daughter knows or has heard of. Around six months ago, I had laughed myself silly reading a story of Terry Mansfield’s in which he waters all his wife’s real and artificial houseplants when she is on a month-long trip to Japan. Kayoko’s real plants die while the artificial ones unsurprisingly survive. I had found this incident so funny that I had related it to my daughter. She forgot Terry’s name but remembered Kayoko’s because “it stuck in her memory,” she said.
Children remember stories that make Mummy laugh.
Even the children of the people from who you elicit a laugh are positively influenced by your funny writing, Medium writers!
Keep at it, rub those palms together and crank out the funny writing.
And while at it, please don’t water any artificial plants.
Use this link to join Medium at $5 a month. 50% of your membership supports my writing. You can read thousands of stories by Medium writers that will engage, inspire and enlighten you.
Maybe you’ll want to write too, and then you will get a link of your own: once you get a hundred followers you too can join the Medium Partner Program and start accumulating the cents and the sense.
