If I were a joke, I wouldn't be an elegant, dinner conversation remark that causes sophisticated people to smile smugly in acknowledgement of the witty banter. I would be the kind of in-your-face punch line that makes five year olds giggle in church during the pastoral prayer.
Today I walked in to town via my normal jaywalking route past street lights. There is a Starbucks being built, to go with the quiet restaurants and business offices that line this little shopping center. Lost in my thoughts, and growing rather warm in the sun, I thought at first the noise I heard was accidental. Then I heard it again: a breathy, feeble, distant kind of whistle. It is a man. It is a man building a place where pretentious upper class people will get their daily dose of caffeine and have business meetings with prospective interns, and where poor college students will splurge during finals weeks in order to study off campus for a few hours/days. This man, busy in his important work, was taking a break to acknowledge my existence, however briefly, in his world. And he was doing it poorly. Perhaps his lips were dry, or he didn't know how to whistle very well, or he was trying too hard. Whatever the case, the noise was almost unnoticeable.
I walked on. Ignoring the compliment, I realized all too late the opportunities I had missed. I could have thanked the young man for the compliment but explained how his notice of my physical attractiveness actually does my overall personhood no favors. I could have looked confused before asking in a surprised, bemused way if he was trying to whistle. I could have waved and given him the number of the local Jimmy John's. I could have shown him how to whistle.
I was given the cue for a joke, and I never picked it up. How often does that happen in my life, and I never notice?
Today I crouched low over a bridge covered by excrement in order to take pictures of ducks that wanted Saltines. I got drooled on while sunbathing by an enormous dog who still has weight to gain before adulthood. I cried over a dying horse in a children's book, and briefly considered whom from my college years I would invite to my wedding, were there such a thing. I bought bananas, grapes, peanut butter, and Saltines from Harris Teeter and traipsed them across a parking lot, four lanes of traffic, and a small college campus. I got impatient waiting for my bananas to freeze and made a peanut butter banana split smoothie without peanut butter on accident. I cleaned the blender twice because peanut butter is important.
On a daily basis, I sleep with a fuzzy green Seuss bird that I named Leroy. I write "I like my men like I like my __" jokes in a little notebook. I break out in songs that I don't know the words to, and end up mumbling or humming most of the way. Sometimes I give up entirely on words and sing songs in solfege. I take every possible opportunity to make a pun, and sometimes laugh at puns that people make accidentally.
My whole being is unintentionally comical, and in the typical fashion of a comic straight man, I am unaware of it. I wrote a status today about the whistling man, because I thought it was funny, then half an hour later deleted it because I was suddenly concerned that it sounded like I was bragging about someone whistling at me. Gross. I found a bowl of watermelon rinds that I hid from my roommate, because I wanted to feed them to the chickens instead of letting her throw them away. I threw them away, because they've been hidden for three days and I gave up.
Here is where I fail too often, in refusing to accept awkward situations as Divine gifts. All too often God sets me up perfectly for a great joke and I just leave His cue in the grass, where it sits until it gets stale and I can't use it anymore. In this stand-up comedy relationship with God, I am the straight man who is laughed at because of her very unwillingness to get the joke. The fact that God wastes so many hilarious situations on me is clear evidence of His love for me. My cup overflows.
Delightful.
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