Yesterday I read at Margaret's Memorial. I was not going to read and then I thought well, I wrote it, Margaret would have liked to hear it, so I got up, the next to the last person to speak and read my page and a half on my experiences with Margaret and a few of the times we had shared. People started to laugh as I got into the second paragraph about Margaret and the bread dough and they kept on laughing. It made me feel really good because I love to make people laugh (sometimes I don't even mean to.) I think it started when I was in eighth grade and my father was in the hospital with a heart attack.

In those days they kept you in the hospital for six weeks, flat in the bed, no pillow, nothing. My father had always been a very active man and this, plus the doctor saying he would never ski again, had depressed him deeply and I saw a side of my father that I had never seen before. The hospital was one block from the high school, so everyday I would stop in to visit him on my way home from school. One day I told him what had happened that day. "Bill Eggling made himself faint today in school, " I started. My father looked at me blankly. Why did he do that? he asked, and I said, "Well, Mrs. Collins, our history teacher was late in coming to class, and he just told everybody he was going to make himself faint. He went up to the front of the class and held his breath. First he turned kind of red, then white, then he tumbled over just as Mrs. Collins came into the room. Now the man in the next bed, put down his newspaper and looked at me, like what happened next? "Well', I continued, Mrs. Collins screamed "What's going on?" and someone said Bill wanted to show us how he could faint. Bill already was starting to sit up and Mrs. Collins ordered him to the nurse, assigning another boy to go with him. "What did Mrs. Collins do then?" my father asked and I said she shook her head and said, "And they shot good men like Lincoln." Well, my father smiled at that. The man in the next bed said he knew a guy in the service that could make himself faint...he thought it would get him out of the army, but they didn't care. And he started to tell us his stories of the war. After that everyday I would look for something funny or interesting to tell my father. And there was always plenty of material a lot of it involving the strange Bill. One day he went too far and lit lighter fluid on his desk, so we didn't see him for quite a while after that. Anyway, there were a variety of teenage boys doing weird things to report back to the hospital room, trying to get at least a smile.

Years later I was taking an English class at Bard with Professor Wilson, a well known and respected teacher at Bard for many years. We were the night class, mostly adults, but had a full schedule. We read Moby Dick plus had writing assignments every week. One time he came into class, smiled at us, and said, "Last week after this class, I went home, made a fire in the fireplace, poured myself a glass of scotch and started to go through your papers. I got laughing so hard that Mrs. Wilson (his wife was the Registrar at Bard) came downstairs to ask what was I laughing about and I told her Mrs. Fritz." That's when I knew he was talking about my paper and I blushed red as a beet but was also as proud as I could be. I made Professor Wilson laugh.

It was not easy to get Margaret to laugh. She smiled a lot, but held her laughs mostly in reserve. I remember one time at the Black Swan I was telling her about a Larry David show where he had a particular type of hair caught in his throat, and she got laughing so hard. Margaret was beautiful when she smiled, but when she laughed it was like plugging in the Christmas tree and all the lights and decorations lit up like magic. That was her laugh and I hope I made her laugh yesterday too.