Ireland

There is this old army joke about a tough drill sergeant. One day he had a recruit in the mud doing push ups and he screamed at the boy, "I bet you want to someday piss on my grave"

"Sir! No, Sir!", answered the recruit, "I promised myself after I got out of the army I'd never stand in another line!"

I have decided that I WILL make it to Ireland.... dead or alive. Of course I would prefer it be alive. I have plans. I want to climb around the Giants Causeway. Stand on Tara. Watch the sun set while standing on the outermost edge of the Dingle peninsula. Most of us from the States want to ramble around a couple of graveyards looking for that name that just might be kind of, sort of related to auntie or uncle somebody or other, twice removed. Then we have that feeling of kinship, like we really do belong to Ireland in some way.

An absolute must for me is a visit to the blarney stone! As I tell my friends, I'm in dire need of the gift of eloquent speech! I don't care that I have to lay on my back off the top of this castle with some stranger hanging onto my legs while I stick my head through a hole in the wall. I don't care!! I'm going to do it!! Megan, a friend of mine, says a tour guide told her that the blarney stone was found at the bottom of an ancient outhouse. I don't care!! I'm sure that anything I have to worry about has worn off in the course of four hundred years! Besides, I DON'T CARE!! I'm going to kiss the blarney stone!!

My desire is absolute. I have a contingency plan in the event that the dead rather then alive comes into play. Each of my daughters are suppose to take three thousand dollars from the life insurance money. (hope that's enough) I'm to be cremated, stuffed into an urn, thrown into the luggage...better make it a carry on, just in case, and taken on my trip to Ireland! I won't be able to see anything this way but I am hoping for a descriptive narrative. You know, "Look Mom, there's the Dingle peninsula and the sun is setting in shades of red and blue and purple. It's really pretty" so on and so on. I won't be able to kiss the blarney stone so one of the girls will have to do that for me. We'll manage.

Then there's the tricky part. If I die before Mac then they are to find a family type grave, give me a quick introduction and dump my ashes there. My oldest daughter saw some difficulties in that seeing how most Irish cemeteries are consecrated as catholic and I'm not. So one of the girls will be assigned to distracting the priest while the other two get me dumped. I figure it's a small price to pay for a free trip to Ireland.

I'm not going into the ground here in the States, alone and defenseless. Who knows how many in-laws will be lining up to pee on my grave?!! No! I'm going to Ireland! I'll just have to make sure that the girls dump me on a grave that doesn't have any urine stains on that headstone either.... you see, I KNOW what my family is like!