crazy family members

What is your most memorable meal? Why?

My most memorable meal was one that I did not actually attend in person. But I still ended up with a great story.

Back in November of 1996, five months after my husband and I got married, our families decided to have Thanksgiving together honor our new union. At the last minute the two of us ended up not being able to go because I got sick. But our families had dinner together anyway.

Included in the invitation was my husband’s eighty-something-year-old grandmother, who when greeting my twenty-year-old brother (whom she had only seen once before, at our wedding, decked out in full wedding regalia) said, “Well hello there. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on!”

Read more responses here.

For some odd reason, “prison” seems to be a recurring theme lately. Not for me, personally (hi, mom! no prison stays here!), but in the stories that people have been moved to tell me.

Recently I was talking with a friend, who had just visited with one of her friends to compare Thanksgiving family stories.

“I told him that my grandma was really crazy,” she told me, “and then he looked at me and said, ‘Oh yeah-how many times has your grandma been in prison?’ ”

“Uh, what?!” I asked, shaking my head in disbelief.

“Yeah, she has tattoos, too,” my friend replied, pointing to the outside of her eye and drawing the shape of a tear.

“His grandmother has gang banger tattoos?!”

“Yep. His grandmother kills people.”