Would you wear that shoe?

Ma never shied away from a confrontation if she thought you were trying to cheat her.

In November of 2002 Ma pre-arranged her burial stuff which included a casket made of egg cartons, a cemetery plot and a grave marker. Her social worker from the County went with Ma on this. She was another one you better not mess with.

Ma died at 11;30 am on December 6, 2008. She was buried at Saint Mary's Cemetery a couple days later. No wake and I paid the 200 bucks for the graveside service. I wanted to be there. It was cold and I told the spiritual advisor from the hospice (Father Pat, wink, wink) to show up with a stocking cap on or one would be issued.

But...Ma's grave marker still hasn't had the year of death engraved on it and being the procrastinating bastard that I am it took me over two years to investigate.

I stopped by the funeral home in April of this year and the nice girl at the desk pulled their file and then wrote down my name and number and told me she would investigate.

Last week I stopped by the funeral home again to see if the gal was making any headway and she wasn't there but there were two guys who looked like morticians which they were. Same story, write my shit down and tell me they were on the case.

Last Saturday we received a letter from the cemetery saying they would assist us on the matter for the low low price of $150.

I dug through the funeral paperwork yet again to find that Ma had purchased the headstone through the cemetery.

Enter the dragon. At Mrs request I relinquish the matter to her. I'm just not as diplomatic with slapdicks as I used to be.

Mrs calls the cemetery and the woman eventually says in a quite snippy tone: 'Well if you have the paperwork'.

The engraving will be done or I'll just take care of the headstone myself with some glue and macaroni shells. You really need to spray paint the macaroni shells gold before you put "2008" on the headstone.