Thanksgiving

My grandmother once told me that everything good in the world happens because of love and the rest is because everyone's crazy.

The day she died, I was standing beside her bed, watching as she slept, soaking in every last moment of her. I got . . . uhm . . . distracted . . . and when I turned my attention back to her, she had opened her eyes and was looking at me picking my nose.

"Great, " I said. "Your last sight is going to be me with my finger up my nose."

She smiled through the haze of her painkiller-cocktail and said, "Yes. It's good. Eat it."

A few years earlier, her daughter--my Mom--lying in a hospital bed, early in the process of her dying had encouraged me to steal the clamp that had just been removed from her chest-tube. "It will make a great roach-clip," she said.

"But Mom, it's been used in a medical procedure on you."

She rolled her eyes, sighed like genetics was a complete mystery to her and made me pocket it.