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It practically gallops!

Good Words About Good Deeds

“Would you like to say a few words about Grandma?” The request came in an email from my uncle. I’ve attended dozens of funerals in my life but this was the first time I was asked to eulogize the deceased. What would I say? My daughter said all I had to do was read my recent blog posts about Grandma.

I wrote back asking my uncle if the invitation was to speak at the wake, the funeral or the reception. He responded that I should be prepared to speak at both the funeral home on Wednesday night and at the church on Thursday afternoon. I wrote up some talking points but didn’t have time to print them before leaving Knoxville. When we got to our hotel on Wednesday afternoon, I pasted the notes into a web page on one of my domains. I typed the URL into my Amazon Kindle and viola! I had notes to bring to the funeral home. However, I chose to memorize the main bullet points so I could speak without looking at the Kindle unless I drew a blank.

I started by saying that Grandma was a gamer. She loved playing “tiles,” doing word search puzzles and playing Bingo. When we said goodbye to her for the last time, she was just about to start a Bingo game. I told all the other ladies that they were about to lose to my grandma. Grandma also loved to scratch lottery tickets. At this point, I pulled five scratchers from my pocket and handed them to various people in the room. I talked about a time my family visited Grandma in Florida. We bought a lottery ticket in each state along the way: Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.

With the winnings, and for Grandma there were always winnings, we would be sent to the convenience store to buy more scratchers. I told the crowd about the time Grandma had me buy a Lotto ticket with the numbers from “Lost” and how she would give me a quarter to put in a slot machine before I went to Las Vegas on business. I won $1.25 for her.

Grandma would submit her grandchildren’s names to various contests. My cousin Terry Hatton won the most memorable of the raffles  Grandma entered. He got a miniature car that looked like a Model T with a lawn mower engine in the back. Two kids could fit in the seat. We all got to drive it around Noyac. I closed my remarks by saying that Grandma had now won the greatest sweepstakes prize of them all: eternal life in heaven with our Lord.

For the funeral Mass on Thursday, I was also responsible for one of the readings. I chose the New Testament passage, which was the same reading I did at Terry Hatton’s funeral in 2001. My wife served as cantor, beautifully singing all the parts of the Mass. She did “Ave Maria” as a prologue, which always gives me chills. Fortunately, I did all my choking up when I heard her rehearsing an hour before Mass. Our daughter read the Prayers of the Faithful, which was emotional because it mentioned people in the room and deceased members of the family.

For my remarks at the end of Mass, I talked about how Grandma had 25 grandchildren if you count her sixteen grandchildren and the spouses of the nine who got married. Grandma treated our spouses as if they were her own grandchildren. She knew all our birthdays and sent us all cards with birthday checks enclosed. We celebrated Grandma’s birthday too, with big parties on her 75th and 95th birthdays.

Grandma visited my family in Burbank on her 80th birthday. She enjoyed traveling, which let me transition easily into the story about her wanting to see St. Damien’s hand while we were in Hawaii. When we found the hand, it was mission accomplished. During Grandma’s life, she set a great example for us to live life to the fullest and now her mission is accomplished. God bless you Grandma! We love you!

June 30, 2011 | Filed Under Catholic | 1 Comment 

Nursing Home Movies

Grandma was having a good day the last time I saw her alive. Her loved ones are gathering today and tomorrow for her funeral. We are blessed that she lived to be 98.

A month ago, my family and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Northern Virginia. My mother had found a gift box belonging to Grandma that contained $95 worth of $5 bills. We carried the box with us to Richmond on our way home to Knoxville. We had lunch with Grandma before her weekly Bingo game at the assisted living facility. After we ate, I surprised her with the box.

June 29, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Receive Her Soul

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz is likely to say two things when he and I see each other at various Catholic functions. He’ll mention that he occasionally sees my blog posts about Catholicism and he’ll ask about my mother and my grandmother. He remembers meeting them at my daughter’s Confirmation ceremony at All Saints Church in 2003. The next time I see him, I’ll have to tell him that Grandma died peacefully at age 98.

Grandma visited us in Tennessee a few times. During one of her visits, we took her to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a picnic lunch. We spent some time driving around Pigeon Forge before dinner. I had received free tickets to the now-closed Black Bear Jamboree Dinner & Show. The staff seated us front and center and treated us like royalty. Grandma was so impressed that she left a huge tip.

Grandma liked to travel. She went to Turkey and Ireland. She visited us in Burbank on her 80th birthday and went to Hawaii with my family a couple of years later. She went to Las Vegas to show support for a Cold War Memorial honoring the men who died in a plane crash there, including her son Terry.

Grandma also had a grandson named Terry, who died a hero on 9/11. Because of her connection to Terry Hatton,  VAFireNews.com published Grandma’s obituary today.

June 28, 2011 | Filed Under Catholic | 1 Comment 

Tiles Per Hour

Grandma loved to play “tiles.” The game is officially known as Rummikub, which we pronounced “rummy cube.” Every household in the family had a Deluxe Edition of the game in case Grandma came to visit. I am sharing memories of Grandma this week because she passed away on Saturday at age 98.

playing "tiles" (Rummikub) with Grandma in 2007 In 2007, my wife and I took our son on a wide-reaching tour of college campuses. We made sure to route the trip through Southampton to spend time with Grandma. It wasn’t long before the tiles were on the table. Grandma announced that we each had to put in a dollar. The winner of each game of Rummikub would get a buck from the pile.

In 2009, my son and I spent Spring Break with Grandma in Florida. She was a notoriously late sleeper. Frank Jr. and I would go out to a restaurant for lunch while Grandma was still getting up and getting ready for the day. After our sightseeing adventures, we returned to the condo to play tiles with Grandma before and after dinner.

I feel fortunate that my family has always kept a sense of humor about death. Yesterday my daughter and I joked that she should bring a set of tiles to play on headstone of the family plot in Gate of Heaven Cemetery. On Saturday, I told my daughter that I was glad Grandma didn’t die on my birthday, unlike that b—- Judy Garland.

June 27, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment 

How About a Nice Hand

One of my favorite stories about my grandmother happened when nine members of our extended family took a trip to the Hawaiian island of Molokai in 1995. Grandma died yesterday at age 98. In her honor, I am sharing a few of my memories of her. Some of what follows appeared on my blog in 2009.

In addition to my wife and kids, my mother, my grandmother, my sister and her husband and his mother all made the trip to Molokai. The whole group went on sightseeing expeditions to places like Tuddie Purdy’s macadamia nut farm and a church built by St. Damien de Veuster. Fr. Damien had been beatified shortly before our visit. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.

The older generation stayed back at the condo resort when my wife and I took our kids to the beach. While we were off at the beach one day, my grandmother saw a TV news story about a relic of the holy man returning to the islands. The hand of St. Damien was going to be somewhere in Honolulu on the same day that we would be flying home. Grandma wanted to see the hand before we left. Nowadays, it would be easy to Google the hand and find the news story Grandma had seen. Back then, I had no Internet access on vacation but I wasn’t going to let Grandma down.

We flew from Molokai to Honolulu on a Sunday morning. We had gone to a vigil Mass the night before and had some time to kill before our flight to Los Angeles. I took the group to Hilo Hattie’s and told Grandma that all I needed to find the hand was a phone and a roll of quarters. In the olden days, if you weren’t at home and needed to make a phone call, you would look for a public phone and put coins into it to make it work.

The payphone had a phone book with it. I looked for listings that started with St. somebody or Our Lady of wherever. One church after another told me the same thing: the hand had been displayed there but had since moved to another church. I went through a bunch of quarters until I got confirmation that the hand was at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.

I got everybody to the cathedral before the next Mass started and eagerly went inside to see the hand. An usher pointed us toward a side altar where it was displayed. I had been expecting to see a hand that looked like a mummified Thing from the Addams Family. I was a little disappointed that the hand was in a small box, which they called a coffin. Grandma didn’t seem to mind.

We were told that when Fr. Damien died in 1889, he was buried among the lepers he served on Molokai. His body was exhumed and returned to his home country of Belgium in 1936. After his beatification in 1995, his “healing hand” was removed and sent back to Hawaii.

June 26, 2011 | Filed Under Catholic | 3 Comments 

A Death in the Family

Grandma at her 95th birthday party in 2008 It’s unusual for someone my age to have a living grandparent. I know that I was blessed to have so much time with my grandmother. She passed away today at age 98.

Grandma was always supportive of my interests. She knew I liked traveling to different states, so she gave me a collection of state quarters. I used to be a radio producer. One day when Grandma was working at Villeroy & Boch in Southampton, “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt came into the store. She told him that her grandson was a producer too. After I sent her a printout of blog posts that might interest her, she started telling people that I was a writer.

Grandma visits the statues outside the Television Academy in 1993 In the next few days I will be preparing to travel to Virginia for her funeral. I will also share some of my memories of Grandma. Before her hearing deteriorated, we used to have long phone conversations about topics as diverse as politics and the show “Lost.” When she came to visit us in Burbank on her 80th birthday, we took her sightseeing to places like the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace. I loved the way Grandma defended her favorite president and didn’t care whether anyone agreed with her or not.

June 25, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments 

Just One More Thing…

Peter Falk died Thursday night. The actor who played Lt. Columbo also had a passion for painting, which is how I ended up in his driveway with Mark & Brian. The guys liked getting out in the Mark & Brian Mobile whenever possible. They also loved doing celebrity interviews. However there weren’t too many stars willing to let us broadcast from their homes.

I don’t recall the details of why we were invited to Peter Falk’s place. Maybe it was the only way to get him on the show. What I remember most is that we weren’t allowed in the house. There was an outbuilding at the end of the driveway that looked like it had been converted from a garage to a greenhouse to an art studio. Falk did allow me to step inside the studio to see his paintings. Several of them were nudes.

Charlton Heston also let us on his property but not in his house. The guys interviewed him on his driveway too. John Travolta and Kelly Preston let us in to the backyard for a poolside interview, which concluded with a dip in their pool.

Before my first trip to Los Angeles, I arranged for Don & Mike to interview Casey Kasem at his home. We went to the front door but were escorted around the house to the back patio. Years later when I was doing some freelance work, I interviewed actor Ken Howard at a table in his backyard. It must be something in the celebrity handbook: don’t let deejays in the house.

June 24, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off 

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