Stitch earned his nickname as a boy because he had a knack
for making people laugh. Later, after a divorce, he went bankrupt, and those who
knew him expected that he would lose his zest for life. But he hasn’t, and
still jokes about everything.
His current favorite theme is marriage and money. At a party
thrown by his friends in honor of his father, Stitch says: “There are two kinds
of people, those who marry for money and those who divorce for money! … Oh!
That still makes only one kind of people!”
“I’ll marry you for money,” Kate says, “who’s got a buck?”
Kate is just back from Australia. When she introduces
herself, everyone thinks her name is ‘Kite.’
Andy is Stitch’s neighbor. He asks him: “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“How do you do it? Laugh everything away.”
“Oh! That!”
Stitch remains silent a moment. It’s not that he is prone to
introspection, or that he wants to find a profoundly funny response. It’s just
that the expression Andy used ‘laugh everything away’ is the exact expression
his father used sarcastically when he was a kid and his father wanted him to be
serious. Stitch never really laughed that out. He pretended, when he was a kid.
He poked his dad about it. He would say: “Dad, why do you have to take
everything so seriously?” But there’s no more pretending. Not anymore, because
his Dad just passed away. He called Stitch to his deathbed last week. The first
thing he told him was: “Son, I knew you would never amount to anything. Divorced
and bankrupt, you’re a disgrace to the family. I fault myself for it. I should
have never let you get away with laughing everything away like you did.”
“As I recall, Dad, you pounded on me almost daily with your
comments about needing to be more serious. What else could you have done?”
“I could have sent you to a boarding school. I could have
sent you to the army. Living is a serious business … if you want to succeed at
anything. But, obviously, you don’t.”
There was a fierce look on his face.
“You know why I made jokes of everything, Dad?” Stitch asked
him rhetorically. “It’s because I never saw you laugh. When I was a kid, my
greatest wish was to see you laugh. Why don’t you ever laugh, Dad?”
