Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of her.  All my experiences with adults up until that point led me to believe that being an adult was serious business.  “Act your age” had been one of many directives that followed me around, so naturally I assumed that the older you got, the more serious you were destined to become.

Before her, becoming older seemed a little like being doomed.  I thought maybe we were all allotted a certain number of hearty laughs at birth and that most people used theirs up somewhere before their eleventh birthday.  In school I had learned that your bones stopped growing once you became an adult and I imagined that once you stopped getting taller, an invisible lid clamped shut on the part of you that allowed for wild abandon, loud, shrieking laughter, and silly craziness.  Maybe “act your age” was the adult way of preparing us kids for that. It scared me. I was ten and I liked my silly craziness.  I didn’t want to be doomed to feeling lukewarm, smiling politely through life.

But then there was that moment in the car with Mrs. Kornbluth that gave me hope.  Mrs. Kornbluth wasn’t like the rest of the mothers in the neighborhood—adults who stifled their laughs by covering their mouths with the tips of their fingers to prevent anything more than a demure sound from escaping their lips. Mrs. Kornbluth was different. She was the kind of adult who threw her head back and laughed with her whole body.  I was fascinated by her.

It was a warm day in the beginning of the summer. I don’t know where the four of us girls were going, but Mrs. Kornbluth was our ride.  We talked silly talk amongst ourselves in the back seat and she joined in, as if she were one of us.

Then she did the “wild thing.”  She depressed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor then let it up just as suddenly—not once, but several times.  She looked into the rear view mirror and laughed at the sight of us lurching back, then forward.  From the outside, the car must have looked like a mechanical monster with a mind all its own, heaving in spasms down our quiet neighborhood street.  To the giggly girls inside, it was like being on our own personal fun-house ride on wheels.

It’s probably important to mention that we were not in any danger. Our neighborhood street was deserted, and the experience lasted less than a minute.  It seemed so harmless and so much fun to me that I had to share it.

“Mom, Mom!” I shouted through the back screen door.  “Guess what!”  As the words tumbled out, I knew immediately that sharing this with my mother was a big mistake.  All I had to do was look at her face.  Her lips did not smile and worry lines creased her forehead.  I could accept that—my mom was always worried about our safety–but there was something more: a dark cloud of disapproval settled on her face, a look that told me I would never be allowed to ride in Mrs. Kornbluth’s car again.

The unabashed delight on Mrs. Kornbluth’s face as she watched us four girls lurching and giggling in the backseat of her car has stayed with me for more than fifty years.  It was a defining moment—a catalyst for questioning myself about the kind of adult I wanted to become. Certainly there are times that call for being serious and occasions that call for the decorum of a lady-like laugh.  But there are also those times when I get silly and throw my head back laughing with my whole being, letting loose a raucous, open-mouthed, wild-abandon laugh.

At those times, I secretly thank Mrs. Kornbluth.