Category Archives: Kids – I really do love them

Butter Gall

13 Replies

Butter Gall

I like to try new things and this week was no exception.

Okay, I really don’t like to try new things and this week was no exception.

My grandson and daughter-in-law invited my husband and I to go bowling.  Now, I’m no slouch at this game.  In fact, I recently beat my brother, Mike.  Did you get that, Mike?  I beat my older brother MIKE (that’s his name) at bowling.

We get our shoes and hurry to the lane.  My 9-year-old grandson is excited to get started and he throws his ball down the alley.

I’m up next.  I pause and align my feet with the appropriate arrows.  I move my ball into the optimal position and step forward.  Here’s where I tried something new.  Instead of just throwing the ball down the lane, I decide to try bowling my entire body.  I release the ball just one second late which causes me to step over the foul line where I instantly become Wile E. Coyote peddling my feet on the highly-buffed hardwood as if I’d just run off the edge of a cliff.

Observers tell me they thought for one moment I was going to save myself, but that was not the case.  SPLAT–I crash down on my tailbone and then fall back, hitting my head on the polished hardwood.  As I slowly glide, spreadeagled down the lane toward the pins, I think I hear my father’s loving voice from my childhood.  “Oh…honey…you know you’re not coordinated enough to play a sport.”

I make it to my hands and knees and crawl back to my seat.  I shake my head in attempt to bring the scoreboard into focus.  I think I see a 1 next to my name so, trying to pull some dignity out of the situation, I say, “Well, at least I didn’t throw a butter gall.”  I look around at the six people staring back at me, blink my eyes until they return to the original three people and say “Ha, ha.  Butter Gall?  I meant to say Butter Gall.  Wait, that’s not right.”  I struggle to figure out what order the letters should go in.

Just as my daughter-in-law suggests an emergency room visit I come up with the right words.  “Gutter Ball!” I shout.  “At least I didn’t throw a gutter ball!”

Unfortunately, I can’t say that for much of rest of the game, ending with a pitiful score somewhere under 50.

The good news is – there’s nothing funnier to a nine-year-old boy than watching an adult slip and fall.  Right now, my grandson thinks I’m hilarious.

Pass the Grave…er, I Mean Gravy, Please?

6 Replies

I’ve just walked in our house, home from a visit with our daughter in Philadelphia.  I had great hopes that in a six-day period something Crazie enough would come up to post on my blog. The opportunities were limitless.  Upon arrival, Ash showed me the list of items we would be cooking for Thanksgiving.  The checklist was huge, including such items as smoked turkey, sausage & sage stuffing and macaroni & cheese.  She’d even decided to make homemade cinnamon rolls.  You know, the kind where you let the dough rise and everything!

It made me shiver with delight to think of all the things that could go wrong, thereby giving me the ability to post The Best Blog Ever for Thanksgiving.  Instead, it was like a Hallmark movie.  The dough rose, the turkey was moist and all twelve items were done simultaneously.  The smoke alarm didn’t even go off for pete’s sake.  On top of that, even though the dinner guests involved both sides of in-laws we all, frustratingly enough, got along like perfect ladies and gentlemen.  Really, Ash?  Help a writer out, would you?

I see the way people look at me when I recount a Crazie Town holiday, like it’s, well, Crazie.  But, to be honest, I thought everyone had the same kind of Crazie family, they just didn’t share it with the world.

The last time I was at a Crazie Town Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my Aunt Betty Lou to pass the gravy and she accused me of throwing away her father’s grave marker.  I was speechless.  I mean, I do have a reputation for tossing things out.  In fact, I once found a box at my father’s house and written in black magic marker on the side was “Do Not Teresa This Box!”  But a grave marker?  Even I wouldn’t Teresa that…well, probably not.

The misplaced grave marker was just the final blow in my poor grandpa’s death.  He’d never once stepped foot inside a Catholic church but his children decided that’s where they’d hold his funeral.  As is the tradition in Catholic services, with great pomp and circumstance the casket is rolled down the center aisle while the family slowly marches behind.  Unfortunately, ten steps into the march the front wheel on Grandpa’s casket cart went all wonky and started squeaking.  So for every step forward we made, the casket wheel responded.  Step…erka!  Step…erka!  The priest never hesitated and we continued our noisy step-erka way to the front of the church.

After the service we drove out to the cemetery.  While the priest gave his final prayers a buzz of conversation went on behind us.  The crowd had noticed that the funeral home dug the grave on the wrong side of the plot, so instead of lying next to his wife, they were lying head to head, with Grandpa’s feet sticking out into the walking path.

My Aunt Betty Lou, whose brain is…well…a bit pickled, upon hearing the word gravy, thought of grave, which lead her to remember that her father’s had no headstone.  Because Grandpa was a veteran, they’d sent the family a beautiful bronze plaque to be secured to a piece of granite for the headstone.  Unfortunately my father and his two sisters could never agree on what kind of headstone that should be, so Grandpa had been lying in an unmarked (although correctly re-aligned) grave for fifteen years.   Evidently, since there hadn’t been any arguing at the Thanksgiving table for a few minutes, Aunt Betty Lou decided to accuse me  of the crime.

As I spend more and more time with my husband’s drama-free family, I wonder, just how Crazie is Crazie Town?