As promised here is an account of the second time I made my mother laugh that stands out in memory. I’m sure there were many other times but she usually laughed with me rather than at me.

When I was about eight or nine we lived on a farm in Manitoba about 5 miles south of Gladstone. My brother and sister and I went to school in a one room school house in the community of Silver Stream.

Toys were few and far between in those days. We had no computers, gameboys, PS4’s or even television at that time so we had to be quite innovative actually learned to use our imagination. I know that’s a foreign concept to most kids nowadays. If they don’t have something electronic to take their attention they’re lost.

A large tractor tire lying on the ground could be our fort, our truck or our pirate ship or whatever we needed it to be. We would stick a board in one side of the tire and hang it over the other side so we could walk the plank. Imagination was a very useful thing to have.

I remember one day my brother Allan and I found a couple of empty burlap grain sacks and were taking turns coming up with ways to use them for our amusement. Eventually we ended up with the sacks over our heads, walking around like the creatures from the green lagoon or something. We could see through the loose weave of the burlap a little bit so most of the time we weren’t in danger of accident.

Then we got the bright idea that we could climb atop a couple of the larger gate posts in the corral and sit on them with the bags over our heads. This was all very amusing for awhile but about this time my mother came from the house carrying pails to get the chores started. She hollered at me to come and give her a hand.

Well, being the obedient son that I was, I started to slide off the fence post to comply. In the process the neck of the sack caught on the top of the post behind me and I tumbled headfirst into the sack and hung there helpless and yelling for help.

It seemed like forever before mother got control of her laughter enough to help me down off the post. I’m only glad there was no camera available at the time. Nowadays of course it would probably end up on America’s Funniest Videos.