I’m actively making plans to finish the “What I’m Looking For” series, and I realized that there are a couple of posts still up on Dead Charming that need to be over here so I can refer back to them at the appropriate time. Also, I promised my mother that I’d post this one somewhere she could go and find it, so this repost serves double duty.
This is the first piece of non-fiction I ever seriously tried to write, and honestly without this I would have never started blogging. It is, in its essence, the first blog post I ever wrote. Much of the premise behind My Bad Pants is derived from my thought process when I wrote this and how I felt about it after I stood up and read it at a funeral.
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May Twenty-Fourth, 2006. The phone rang just before six o’clock in the morning. I am NOT an early riser, and six a.m. is just too damn early to be conscious. I can hear my Aunt Marge on the line, but I’m not exactly sure if I’m awake or just having a really weird dream.
“Nicky, I wanted to ask you if you’d do something to represent your mom’s side of the family at Grandma’s funeral. The oldest child of each of her children have all agreed except you.”
“Um, of course. What do you want me to do?”
“Just talk about your memories of Grandma. We wanted each side of her family to get a chance to speak. Jace and Lisa agreed to do it last night.”
“Yeah, I’d be glad to.”
“Good. Try to keep it light hearted. Funny memories, things like that. We’ll already be crying so much, it would be better if we had happy things to think about.”
…and with that, I was signed up to give a light-comedy reading at a funeral for my beloved Gramma in front of hundreds of people. Had I been awake, I might have thought harder about it. But then again, I probably wouldn’t have. I DID have to ask my wife several hours later if I had really agreed to that or if I’d just dreamed up the whole thing.
What follows is thing I ever wrote that I was proud of writing…
