Using humor can alleviate a challenging situation

Mental Matters
By Dr. Jennifer Goble

My week started off semi-normal. My husband and I attended a business conference in Memphis, Tenn., and enjoyed gumbo, ribs, and the Blues.

We stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where, for 80 years, five Mallard ducks have come down the elevator at 11 a.m., played in the lobby fountain until 5 p.m., and waddled down the red carpet, back onto the elevator to spend the night in their rooftop penthouse.

We visited the Civil Rights Museum and saw where Martin Luther King was shot.

Quite a sobering experience to revisit how people with white skin treated people with black skin. Oppression, not unfamiliar from the evolution of American women.

At the end of our trip, we took a taxi to the airport. All was routine until they grounded the plane for hydraulic problems.

Passengers were unloaded off the plane, and all 250 people waited in line for one man to reschedule flights.

We hailed another 30-minute ride back into the city for the night. We were lucky to get a room, as the city was full of other people who liked gumbo, ribs, and the Blues.

Our new flight was out at 7:15 the following morning. Our alarm was mistakenly set for p.m., not a.m. Oops! We missed our plane.

While waiting at the airport, again, we sat at Starbucks for four hours.

During the less than delightful interim, a full cup of coffee was knocked off the table, and splattered onto computer bags and the area of three tables.

A man sat near us, and even though we were both obviously engrossed in our computers, he talked non-stop.

He spoke about ocean fabric, and putting a Disney World above the Great Lakes. He thought airports could have several acres of bird atriums to entertain travelers. Oh, my!

I went to the restroom, and neither the soap nor paper towel dispensers worked. I became leery of flying – everything seemed one-step off. The day was not in sync with the universe.

We made our flight, arrived home, and all is well. Whew!

In retrospect, the trip was like Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.”

It made me laugh.

Can you find humor in your upside-down days?

Until the next time: Live while you live!

(Jennifer Goble, Ph.D., LPC, is the author of My Cli-ents…My Teachers, and the blogger and encourager of Rural Women Stories: www.ruralwomenstories.com.)

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