My weird Mom story can beat your weird Mom story
It’s the family joke that my mother starts conversations in the middle of a paragraph. Queen of the non sequitur, it’s not just a remark that catches you off-guard, but the whole of the resulting paragraph and subsequent conversation.
After 52 years, I’m kind of used to it, but I was completely unprepared for the phone call earlier this week.
“Oh, hi Mom!”
“Hi. Listen, your father and I are going to the cemetery to look at graves. Would you like one too?”
My jaw moved, but words weren’t really coming out. “Um…”
Last I heard, they were thinking cremation. Maybe Dad’s new titanium knee changed the plans.
“It’s just that we were thinking you—”
—weren’t likely to get hitched-up this late in the game, I finished in my head. Alternates quickly flashed through, wouldn’t want to leave the expense to your nieces and nephew, was one of the kindest.
“Erm…”
“We’re not going to get them today,” she said. “We just wanted know if we should be shopping for two or three.”
“Well… Uh… I guess…” Things were looking up. First, single syllables, now multiple words.
Well, why not? I really like the freeze-dried composting technique the Scandinavians are pioneering. Becoming fertilizer seems to close the circle nicely. But the likelihood of that coming to New York State by the time my foot connects with the bucket is slim.
Cremation? I’m devoting this later part of my life to reducing my carbon footprint. It would be a mockery of that to be converted directly into CO2.
“Okay,” I heard myself say, then, my pragmatic side began to recover. “Uh, wait, How much does a grave cost? I’m a little short right now.”
On Tuesday I left the house with $1,750 in my pocket, and came home with my usual six-months supply of stuff from Sam’s Club (for $201) and, oh, a pair of 24” wide-screen high-definition monitors for my PC along with a new video card to drive them (for $1,050).
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll deal with that later. Besides, we’re just shopping.”
Uh huh.
Later that same day…
“Well I know I said we were just shopping—”
Oh no. Here it comes…
“—but we found the nicest plots right at Riverside, in a new section they just opened. They’re in the second row back from the road—”
That cemetery traffic can be so irritating…
“—and only a few yards from your grandparents.”
Location, location, location. And hey! It’s right off the bike path.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Sounds nice,” I replied. “How much do I owe you?”
“Nine seventy-five,” she said.
Taken aback, “As in $975, a few bucks short of a grand?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. That’s pretty cheap.”
So now I’m the proud owner, although not yet a resident, of a plot in Rochester’s Riverside Cemetery.
Telling the story at work, a co-worker asked, “But are you sure you want to spend eternity with your parents?”
“We only go 50,000 years or so between glaciers, so it wouldn’t be that long,” I replied. “It’s already been 20,000 years since the last ice age. What’s 30,000 years?”
