30 Days of Thankful: Laughter, Listening, and Lucas

My brother Lucas is amazing. He is both strong and vulnerable. Able to talk about anything when he wants. He hears everything. And he’ll reply to it. Even if it’s under his breath at the supper table and your listening to his comments and you can’t laugh because he’s making fun of the honored guest, your grandfather.

Once when we were much younger, oh like I was in my early teens and Lucas was maybe 11, we discovered that our grandparents car had a backseat that you could lay down from inside the car. This discovery happened while we were driving with them, and an idea was hatched. Somehow it was transmuted from brain to brain, or maybe Lucas whispered in my ear, the memory is a little vague, but I sat forward in the car in between my grandparents front seats almost, to block their view, and distract them. I jabbered on for a good few minutes while Lucas climbed into the trunk and Megan rearranged his jacket as though he was sleeping in the backseat.

My poor grandfather, I’m a bit surprised now that he didn’t have a heart attack when he opened the trunk and up popped Lucas among the groceries. But my grandfather also loved a good joke, and it’s hard to stay mad at Lucas when he’s grinning up at you, or down at you as the case is now that he’s not 11 and stands about 6 foot tall, so my grandfather broke into laughter as did my grandmother after exclaiming, “Oh, goodness.”

I’m thankful for Lucas because he inevitably brings laughter into my life. And while he may joke around and sometimes make fun of people, he has a way of doing it so that the person who is being punk’d ends up joining in the laughter too. I think it is because Lucas is always listening, to what people say, to what they don’t say, he hears it all. And then he says the one thing that makes it all make sense, and funny at the same time.