One reason my parents have lived as long as they have in relatively good health is my mother's wonderful sense of humor.
Take for example, the case of the missing pudding pack.
One day, Mom was doing a load of wash, when something went awry.
Ever since they moved into a rancher in a 55-and-older community in Montgomeryville, Mom and Dad have been cramped for space. They used to have a three-story twin home in Norristown where I grew up, and they had a house in the Poconos until a few years ago.
Anyway, there are always things other than clothes and laundry detergent on top of the dryer. Diet sodas, canned goods, and various and sundry other items she can't find a place for in the kitchen cabinets reside there temporarily.
On this occasion, as Mom stuffed a load of colors into the washer, a Jell-O pudding pack got swept in with the clothes.
The pudding packs survived the wash cycle, but when Mom put the clothes in the dryer, she and Dad got their first clue something was amiss.
"It smelled like I was baking a cake," Mom said, unable to stifle her laughter.
All that tumbling around in the hot dryer proved too much for the pudding packs and they began releasing their chocolatey goodness, coating the damp clothes like some ill-conceived fabric softener.
It took a few minutes for Mom to figure out what had happened.
Dad stood behind her, wondering aloud if she wasn't having an episode of some sort.
"Why did you put pudding in the dryer?" Dad asked incredulously.
"I didn't do it on purpose, you dope," Mom responded, equally nonplussed.
Back in Norristown, the laundry room was in the basement. God only knows how many similar incidents occurred when the laundry was something Mom did away from prying male eyes in between her full-time job as a key punch operator at Bell Telephone and making dinner.
Mom preferred it that way and, truth be told, Dad and I also liked it when the laundry was squarely Mom's province. Now, with everything on one floor, foreign objects in the laundry are more easily detected by otherwise oblivious males.
To her credit, Mom rarely treated us like laundry morons except the time she accidentally splashed bleach on my favorite golf shirt.
When I complained about the white blotches on the shirt, Mom showed her true colors.
"Here," she said. "Let me rinse that out."
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