Shooting the breeze - Aug. 20

I laugh at the most inappropriate times. I cry when I’m happy. When God was giving me emotions, he got me backwards.

Last week, I took my first ambulance ride. Got a stomach bug and got dehydrated. Apparently in 150 degree heat you don’t even have to go outside to get dehydrated. When they got me on the stretcher and wheeled me to the ambulance, I giggled.

Should’ve been terrified. Should’ve been crying, but no. It was like a really small and inefficient roller coaster. I was on a little cart with no control over its movements – it went up and down and my stomach butterflied…it counts.

I can’t seem to be serious when it matters. I make jokes at funerals. I crack wise with folks in the hospital. I cry at weddings. Babies send me over the edge. The good thing about all this is I constantly entertain myself.

So it was that at my mother’s funeral I simply couldn’t contain my glee. Seriously, folks. She knew who she raised. She would not have been surprised. When we walked in to sit down at her memorial service all the guests were already seated and waiting.

I leaned over to my cousin and whispered Kesha lyrics to her, “The party don’t start till I walk in…”

Months later, when my dad and I were up to it, we sprinkled her ashes on the graves of my sister and grandparents – just as she wished. I told her before she died that I wanted to put some of her in a pill bottle and carry her with me (shout out to Fanny Hively because she gave me that idea nearly 15 years ago), but my mama said she’d haunt me if I did that. Mama didn’t play, so I resisted the urge.

So I’m sprinkling her ashes – which is a weird term for what you do with ashes because it isn’t like in the movies – it’s dense and silty and not at all like sand. It’s not pouring out like it’s supposed to and getting caught in the wind and flying gracefully away from us carried on the breeze… Yeah, it’s not doing any of that. It’s dumping out at weird intervals and getting all over me. Thank God I wasn’t wearing shorts and flip-flops.

We’re heading back to the car and my boots are covered, y’all, COVERED in gray ash. I looked at my dad, “I’ve got mom all over my boots…”

“Better than having her all over your butt,” he wise-cracked. Ba-dum-tsss.

And there you have it, folks. That’s how I was raised. That’s my family. Always inappropriate, always funny, always the least politically-correct bunch of folks in the room. As Mrs. Clairee Belcher said in “Steel Magnolias,” “If you don’t have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.”