There are those who say I come from an odd, perhaps bizarre family. I don’t. We are as normal as the next. We all work; we have mates and children; we don’t have prison records.

We just do odd or bizarre thing from time to time. Went a nephew’s wedding. Brides family on one side, groom’s family on the other. Don’t know why. Then, the friends are split up evenly. Thing is, we noticed that everyone but us was seated on the other side. Made us a little paranoid. No one needs us that way.

The groom’s father always wore work clothes. Didn’t own a pair of slacks much less a suit. Yet, there he was sitting there in a suit. It looked like crap on him. First because he wasn’t a suit man. Secondly, the suit wasn’t any good.

I tapped him on the shoulder and told him he looked good in the suit. He asked what that was supposed to mean. Talk about paranoid. The I tapped my sister on the shoulder.

“Uh, nice suit he’s got on. One thing. Next time he gets a suit, send it to a cleaner. It’ll take the smell of formyldyhyde out”.

We kids didn’t have the greatest relationship with our father. Didn’t have one at all. He was there and we were there. That’s about it. When he died the priest said he’d be doing the eulogy and, no, he didn’t have any questions. Pretty strange.

At the funeral mass he started the eulogy. After a minute or so, my brother leaned over and told me we were at the wrong funeral.

“Don’t know who this guy is but he isn’t the old man”.

Then the priest wound down with a statement telling us when our time comes that our father will greet us joyously at the gates of heaven. Our eldest sister shot me and my brother a look. Later she told us what she was thinking.

“Why, when he said that nonsense, I thought you two were going to do a rebuttal”.