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[bold_n_brazen]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I may have made a mistake using the Ghost In A Jar as my opening gamblit on lawtalkers. I get the feeling I peaked with that post and have gone downhill from there.

My Dad passed away this spring. Mom had tried to purchase burial plots in the Perryville cemetary, but was unsuccessful because the cemetary's treasurer had passed away and nobody else was quite sure how the whole plot-selling thing worked. The day before the funeral, she went to the cemetary with its President. The cemetary dated back to the 1850s, with records kept in pencil, and their efforts further complicated by a change in standard grave width that occurred some time ago (learn something new every day), but they were eventually able to pick out a suitable site.

The morning of the funeral, the gravediggers went to dig the site selected and found it previously occupied. They filled it up and tried another space, but to the same result. They rinsed, lathered, and repeated, and still found graves that, while unmarked, were very much still in use. For a town with only a Baptist church, a Methodist church, and a combination gas station/grocery store/bait shop/feed store & beauty supply, Perryville seemed to have an awful lot of dead people.

The gravediggers ran out of time, and Dad's graveside service was held with his actual graveside yet to be determined, with the Peasant Mexicans patiently smoking cigarettes in their work truck, waiting to get back to work. They had the decency, however, to park the backhoe behine a clump of trees, so perhaps they were actually Aristocratic Mexicans. We were assured an hour or two after the service that the they were able to locate a site both suitable AND unoccupied (as far as we know) before the hot Texas sun stewed my father's remains.

About a month later, at the Perryville Homecoming Festival (I'm not quite sure what this is), Mom was named to the cemetary board. Perhaps based on her recent experiences, and recognizing the need to update their recordkeeping along with their knowledge that my Mom is one of the few people in the area that know Excel, she was elected treasurer by the board.

Mom emailed me shortly after the election, asking for fundraising suggestions, and I responded by sending the the Ghost In A Jar story. I have avoided speaking to her since then. I feel I may have similarly peaked as a son.

At my grandfather's funeral, my aunt went ballistic because she claimed that they had dug the hole on the wrong side of my grandmother. She insisted that he be to my grandmother's left, rather than her right, because that's what side he slept next to her in bed. She so totally lost it that backhoes were brought in to dig a new hole while the mourners stood by and waited. My cousin and I plopped ourselves down under a tree in our black suits and watched, commenting from time to time how fucking surreal it was to actually watch your grandfather's grave being dug.

I could not make this shit up.