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?