Delight

When I watch the old family comedies from the years just before the Lonely Revolution, one thing that strikes me is how often the comedy arises from two simultaneous conditions: the first, that the sexes frustrate each other; the second, that the sexes take real DELIGHT in each other. I'm not talking about anything too racy, there. I'm talking about how much fun it should be, in a healthy culture, for older boys and girls to be around each other, and men and women. I saw a lot of this DELIGHT in my big family (39 first cousins, 28 aunts and uncles, more than half of them living in my home town). It wasn't that they all had great marriages — they didn't. But they had fun being men and being women — or being boys and being girls, teasing each other, flirting innocently — and what better practice does a kid get than by teasing and joking with a cousin of the opposite sex? I have a strong memory of my Uncle Beau, shimmying almost to the floor to get under the Limbo Stick, while the girls …