Inside jokes for the family = a feel good dopamine.
I've needed some feel-good dopamine lately.
My go-to in such times is a cuppa and a cozy mystery. Light reading, not Eliot's Middlemarch, Dostoevsky's, Crime and Punishment or Wilkie Collin's, The Woman in White, though these are some of my old faves.
The enervating quality of humid days of "Dog-ust" has me drawn to a "lighter" sweet tea (iced) & a book whose title brings back a family memory. It also helps that a murder has taken place in an English hamlet graveyard. Miss Davenport, (a family name proudly selected for two of my grand boys) the protagonist is shocked at her own "mercenary bent." To this day my children have a variety of frugal, cheap adjectives for me in the area of finance. I would much prefer economical or prudent.....I'm certainly glad "mercenary bent" is not one of them.
So....what's the funny?
This book was chosen just for the title. *
Our shared funny occurred in the balcony of Highland Heights Presbyterian Church in the early eighties. Hubby and I and our 2 boys were sitting in the balcony. Their baby sister was in the nursery. In the sermon message Rev. Thad Grimstead used the idiom, "cut the mustard" and our 4 year old lost it!
His ticklebone had been engaged and was out of control. We all knew why!
Being a nursing baby, his sister's poops looked similar to runny mustard. Anytime a brother acknowledged, usually by holding their nose, that she needed changing it was announced loud and clear.
"Molly cut the mustard." To say that laughter ensued in our balcony pew is putting it mildly. Even the pastor raised his eyebrows and looked in our direction.
A private family joke. A shared funny. To this day it makes me smile whether I hear the term or read it in a "light" book......a time for laughter which I need. (Ecclesiastes 3:4)
*Garden bouquet of flowers from sweet Jerrie was a real spirit lifter as well.
