the world and everything in it...

in this troubled and untidy world I find that I am seeking meaning at every turn and one of my essential reference points is old friends long unseen. It would give me the greatest joy to sit on a windy wet Amsterdam afternoon in Cafe Hoopmans watching the cute young waiters and waiting for Si to appear and enjoy them with me. We would have a few beers and laugh at life for a while. And if life laughed back we would in turn laugh even louder and order another beer. After a while the people at the next table would start laughing as well and then the waiters and soon even the mad guy looking for cigarette ends in the gutter would share a laugh with a schoolmistress going past on her bicycle. She would pass the laugh along to a cop who would laugh with all the people standing in the queue at the little Theatre and they would start laughing as well. After a while the laugh would leave Amsterdam on the N1 heading south where it would make its next landfall in Limburg, then Brussels, Paris, London and New York then Fukushima. It would be a week before I next met Si at Cafe Hoopmans and by that time the laugh would have traveled round the world returning to Si (and me) on the face of a laughing Swedish boy who just came out of a coffee shop. He gives the laugh right back to Si whose eye he has by this time caught and conquered and Si passes it on to a polish waiter who in turn starts it on it way round the world again... I have a dream...that if all the boys in the world laughed at the same time the world would transform in an instant into heaven.