nothing to do but laugh

Brent has always done this thing when he sees a really good dunk on SportsCenter--he laughs. It's like a giddy, I-don't-know-what-else-to-do-with-myself laugh. It's always the same. He sees the dunk, starts the quirky laughing bit, and says something like, "That's just stupid."

["Stupid" in this sentence means: so ridiculously great and above what most people are capable of doing there is no other word I can think of right now to describe it. ]

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I always just kind of shake my head at him and he says, "What?! Did you see that?!" And I acknowledge that it was awesome. I love basketball, but I'm not moved to giddy laughter so this response was always a little strange to me.

Monday we were driving back home from a little trip, and my aunt had let me borrow the book Seabiscuit because I had mentioned I was wanting to read it. [Which is amazing in and of itself because I could care less about horses, but the author, Hillenbrand, wowed me with her ability when I read Unbroken]. So we were driving home and I was a few chapters in and Brent said to just go ahead and read out loud.

That's when it happened. I finished a chapter and turned the page to begin the next. I read, "Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air."

And I laughed.
I stopped reading and I laughed.

Brent immediately understood the emotion I was experiencing. It's not that it's the best sentence I've ever read in a book, but it just caught me off guard. It wasn't the opening line of the book, which every good author knows to revise and revise to perfection. It was just the first sentence in an inconspicuous chapter. But it was so good, and I just had to laugh at its near perfection in my adoration for the author's craft.

Brent smiled sidelong at me. "Stupid, isn't it?"