That was supposd to be a More Inside. Craaaaaaap.

My dad likes to talk to strangers about something his first wife said recently to him while mom is standing there staring at him. She'll let him go on for a while until she has to explain that she is in fact his first wife. This tickles him no end.

He also gets great enjoyment out of telling people that he and mom were married in May and I was born in October. She is forced to mention that they were married in May 1959 and I was born in October 1960.

Plus, he has taken to wearing overalls to church.

Also, he adores asking a waitress for a cup of hot water so he can add ketchup and crackers to it. This is almost always done in the presence of grandchildren who are appropriately horrified.

He is for sale. No reasonable offer refused.

Every child needs a dad like yours puddinghead. This world is too sterile.

My dad is a physics professor. The stories you've heard about them having wild hair and no sense of fashion are all true.

All his life, the three of us kids made fun of him for his bright toucan shirts and his too-short pants. Finally, he believed that he'd learned his lesson.

One day, he's at this physics conference. He looks down at the feet of the guy sitting next to him. The guy's socks don't match.

"What an idiot," my father thinks. "I'd never do something so stupid."

Then he looks down at his own feet, and realizes that he's wearing two different Birkenstocks.

This is one I heard a long time ago, and it may be apocryphal, but I like it, so here you go.

I remember meeting a guy who told me his dad was a surgeon of some sort, very straightlaced pillar of the community and all that. He allowed himself one public indulgence: every year when the new phone book showed up on the doorstep, he went out, looked himself up and started running around yelling "I'm in print! I'm in print!" a la The Jerk. I have no idea if it's true, but like the story of the honeymooning couple, the camera and the toothbrush, it's so good it should be.

The traditional greeting in my family is "boolah". No one remembers why, but we wish each other holiday boolahs and birthday boolahs and once in a while one of us will email the other and say, "I am prepared to offer you 100,000 boolahs" and the other will reply, "that will not be sufficient" or, "and unto you".

The most favorite is to approach my mother from her deaf left side and mouth and gesture that there has been some kind of horrible accident. It gets her every time. Or, as you walk by, whisper, "deaf people suck". Heh. Forty years and we're still pulling the same shit on her.

I'm gonna testify about my grandma Ruby.

Ruby is 95 and looks at least two decades younger. She lives alone. She drives. She does crosswords and watches Jeopardy to stay sharp. She cooks lunch for my father and they eat it together while watching Days of Our Lives. This has been going on at least 30 years.

Ruby uses language creatively. Poophammer! is my favorite of her curses. She's always written skits and plays for her church and clubs. Here is one she wrote for her church's 100th year anniversary (she's been attending faithfully for most of them). She portrays Angel 009. It's a big howdy-doody!

She's buried a husband -- watched her siblings and childhood friends fade away, many painfully -- and she remains sunny, brave, and cheerful. She fills me with a love and awe I can hardly describe. I want to be sitting in her yard with her, eating her fried chicken and potatoes, watching the sun on her face. I want to be home, and being with her is home.

I grew up in the Bay Area, and my family used to drive by this military depot where they stored tanks at least once a week. Ever since I was a little kid, my brother and I would shout out "Tanks, mommy, Tanks" every time we passed the depot, and my mom would always reply, "you're welcome, muddgirl, you're welcome." Then, the Gulf War V1.0 rolled around, and pretty soon all the tanks were painted Iraqi Sand color, and more and more disappeared every day. Eventually, I had to say to my mom, "No tanks, mommy, no tanks", to which she replied, "Well fuck you, too."

muddgirl, I haven't laughed like that in ages!

Good Lord, melissa may, did you just say Poophammer?

At the dinner table, if one of us told a good story about our day, my Dad would smack the table and announce, "By God, that's outstanding. I think I'll stand outside!" and he'd leave the house.

The women in my family play cards and we're incredibly competitive about it. And we swear. A lot.

A guy I was dating came to play cards with me, my mother, my aunt, and my sister. When he passed my aunt a particularly bad card, she turned to him and said bitterly "You little pig fucker!"

He never played cards with us again.

My pops like to lean over me to whoever gets the window seat on the airplane and shout "There's a man on the wing of this plane."

He once almost gave a nun a heart attack.


He also in his younger days indulged a passion for driving around, smoking reefer and shooting a flare gun out the window. Good times.

Divine_Wino, that was SO funny! I hope I'm in the window seat sometime.

P.S. mudpuppie, my mom laughed her butt off at your story.

yeah muddgirl, my mum loved that story - while interrobangs story had me rolling. Hehe, two different kinds of shoes. heheee.

My mother has been amusing herself with this joke for 20 years, when she's not driving she'll offer ever helpful tips to the driver (my father or brother) like "make a right here", "slow down", "watch out for that sharp curve." until the driver eventually snaps -"Hey, is it you or me who is driving?" to which she'll have to reply "Oh my god don't you even know that!?"
it works better in Swedish: -"Är det du eller jag som kör?" -"Vet du inte ens det?"