Thursday, February 23, 2006

Ribaldry with the Rabbi

I think I frighten the rabbi.

As you can probably tell from previous posts, we are a bit of a gallows humor kind of family, mostly due to the influence of the man whose photo is featured below. My dad joked about things that were just not supposed to be funny at times when you were just not supposed to be laughing, and somehow he made us laugh regardless.

Enter the rabbi stage left. I was talking with him yesterday about our memorial service plans (it's actually a Celebration of the Life of... because my dad would be mad if we had a memorial service).

I was talking to the rabbi about what we'd do/say/etc, and he said that we could either have one or two people offer brief eulogies or we could just invite people to come up and share their memories of my dad. I immediately said, "Oh my goodness, no. We'll do a eulogy. My dad absolutely hated Open Mic Nights."

Silence on the other end of the phone......

We then started talking about the length of the ceremony, and we agreed that it would be 45 minutes max "because my family wants this to be something in keeping with who my dad was, and any longer than 45 minutes and he himself would be getting out of his seat, looking for a cup of coffee and a cookie in the kitchen, and would generally just have been trying to escape no matter how much he loved the person being memorialized. He'll be there, so we want to officially mark his passing before he himself gets antsy."

Silence on the other end of the phone......

Ooops. He knows my dad but doesn't know me from Adam, and I just made two separate snarky funnies the day after my father's passing and in reference to his Celebration.

I have officially freaked out the rabbi.

My dad would be proud.

1 comment:

Integrated Systems said...

Nice to hear it's not just my own family. Black humor is a great Irish Catholic tradition, as well.