Laugh and the world laughs with you, fall from a tree though and you fall alone

As I was tucking Declan into bed a few weeks back he looked up at me with an unusual flash of sadness on his face.

"I am not a nice person, I don't like my brain," he muttered in an unexpectedly serious tone.

"What do you mean you don't like your brain?" I replied with my usual confusion.

"Jennifer got hurt today and I couldn't stop laughing. I didn't mean to laugh at her, but I just couldn't stop," said Declan.

It was fairly clear that my big-hearted, soon-to-be second grader, struggled with controlling his laughter at the time and was now racked with guilt.

Laughter is something I believe we simply don't get enough of, so I struggle with muffling it in any scenario. I attempted to help him process the remorse and explained the situation sounded similar to when Uncle Casey stubbed his toe on the living room couch, something Declan and I were both quite fond of laughing at.

"Casey knew we weren't laughing because he got hurt, but Jennifer didn't know that," I said, uncertain if my example even made sense to me, let alone the youngster.

I advised Declan to approach the girl and let her know how bad he felt for laughing and explain that he never meant it to come across as a celebration of her injury. I'm not sure he fully understood my recommendation but he seemed to gain some comfort when I suggested he try to learn from the experience and at some point, when the shoe is on the other foot and someone laughs at him, realize it may not necessarily indicate ill-will on their part.

I began to think of the myriad of times during my childhood I had found myself doubling over in laughter at the expense of one of my friends.

At the top of that list has to be the time I found myself encouraging my then "best friend" to climb higher and higher up a giant pine tree, located in the park across from our home in Missoula, Montana. Eventually Eric, who at the time was already the size of a full-grown man even though it was only our eighth grade year, climbed so high up the tree that the branches began to get thinner and thinner. When he stalled, considering he may have gone as high as he should, I offered additional encouragement for him to continue.

"Keep going, you're almost at the top, you can do it!" I yelled, from the safety of the ground below.

Eric made it up one or two more branches before the branch he stood on broke under his weight and he found himself hanging from a higher branch with both hands, flailing his feet about in an effort to find another branch to stand on.

After a few moments of unsuccessfully attempting to gain his footing the branch Eric hung from snapped and he fell a couple of feet, before desperately grabbing onto another branch with both hands. That branch snapped a few moments later and what followed was a scene that no Hollywood special effects crew could ever duplicate.

I watched from the ground below as Eric's body was bounced like a pinball back and forth, from branch after branch, all the way down the tree. I don't believe it to be an exaggeration when I say he bounced off of roughly 30 branches on the way down. The scene reminded me of one of those wooden slant mazes that you incline in an effort to bounce a steel marble back and forth until it reaches the bottom.

As Eric's fall reached just past the midway point of his earlier climb he came to an opening in the branches on one side of the tree and a moment of silence ensued as he free-fell for several feet, significantly increasing his velocity. His body then slammed belly first into one of the thicker branches near the base of the tree. I could hear the impact knock the wind out of Eric just before it slung him backwards and threw his body parallel to the ground below, positioning him so that he could fall the remaining 10 feet face up and back flop into a thunderous cloud of dirt in front of me.

Eric immediately began rolling around on the ground moaning from the pain, as I dumbfoundedly inquired as to whether he was OK.

Within moments, we were both laughing uncontrollably. To this day it was the funniest thing I have ever witnessed and, thankfully, no serious injury resulted.

Later Eric said he was relieved he had given me his eyeglasses prior to climbing up the tree, saying his mother would have killed him if he broke another pair. I remember wondering at the time whether he would have climbed as high up the tree as he did, had he been able to actually see anything past the bridge of his nose. I kept that curiosity to myself though, after all, Eric was quite a bit bigger than me at the time and I felt more than a little responsible for egging him on.

As I walked out of Declan's room and shut off the light, I couldn't help but think to myself, "if all he ever does is laugh, he will turn out just fine."