My father always said the worst thing about getting old was watching
your friends die. Second worst was diminished distance off the tee.
Now that I’m over sixty, I can attest he was right on both counts.
Nonetheless, even death and the rituals that accompany it, somehow
never fail to offer up a little comic relief. On the other hand,
there’s nothing funny about losing yardage.
Of course, the memorial services for friends in show business
are always filled with laughter because on those occasions you have
talented, funny people telling stories about other talented, funny
people. However, non-pro deaths offer their own moments of black
comedy. As cases in point, I offer the following two examples.
After my mother died, my father, my sister, her ten-year-old son and I
went en masse to buy her tombstone at a place called Swink Monument. I
have no recollection exactly why we picked them, but price may have
been involved. Their office was in a mobile home surrounded by a
concrete slab, on which various markers were displayed. (In case you
haven’t guessed, this is in North Carolina). My father, following
through on his philosophy to the end, picked neither the grandest stone
nor the plainest. Then, we went inside to fill out the paperwork,
except for my nephew who remained out doors, skateboarding through the
monuments.
Dotsie Swink, the heavy-set woman who was assisting us, took down the basic information, then asked a question I’ve never heard before or since: You want slick on top?
I grew up drinking 
My dad clumsily peeled the skins off a few garlic cloves and then looked up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. He looked like a little boy.
Built in 1933, the handsome round red brick building was called "La Ronda de las Estrellas" (the round court of the stars) which provided Westwood village with its early identity. On the south wall of La Ronda (on the Lindbrook drive side) is a hand painted fresco (now faded) of a maid and a man of old Spain, playing his guitar, painted by artist, Margaret Dobson, who flew in from France to do the work, when the building was erected.
In our house, the first smell of Thanksgiving was not turkey roasting or pumpkin pie but the bleach-sweet steam of my mother ironing the good tablecloth. I remember it from a time when I was small enough to creep unnoticed beneath the ironing board while she painstakingly transformed an undistinguished hump of wrinkled linen into a curtain of shimmering white. With a curt flick of her wrist, my mother sprinkled each length with water from a yellow, plastic bottle designed for this purpose, and then the iron would sizzle a path just above my head. Soon I was surrounded by a linen tent. The smell sparkled like hot stars.