golfing

Our town has a funeral home with a miniature golf course in the basement. I am not entirely sure why it does, but it does. It also has pinball machines, arcade games, shuffleboard and one of those old bowling games with the really heavy silver puck-things that you slide as hard as you can down the wooden surface to make the pins fold up.
Luckily, the grandson of the owners of this funeral home is in my daughter's Kindergarten class. (The son of the owner is our neighbor and he is also "in the business". We are not friends with these neighbors. This is not because they are not really nice people...they are. It's because I am not very neighborly. My husband, Tony is and if he had his way we would know all of our neighbors and have them over for drinks and stuff. I am a total misanthrope. Shortly after we moved in this house Tony noticed our next door neighbors were outside in their front yard. So, he walks out of the house with his tumbler of Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other waving and saying hello while I was cringing at the front door while hissing to him, "Don't talk to them. Then they'll be waving to us whenever they see us, and coming over to borrow sugar and God knows what else!" They must have thought Dean Martin and Marlena Dietrich had moved in.)
Anyway, like I said...the grandson of the owners is in Bronte's Kindergarten class and he and Bronte are friends. So, when he threw a pre-Christmas mini golf bash in his "grandparents basement" I was dying (not literally...ha!) to go and see the legendary but not often seen funeral home playroom. You see, the basement is fairly common knowledge, but not many people get to see it or play in it. You have to be invited.
So, on the appointed morning my daughters and I went to the funeral home to play. When we walked into the funeral home we were greeted by Bronte's friends grandparents. They were all dressed up and whispered that they would hang up our coats for us. For a minute I was worried that we were there on the wrong day, but then the grandma told us how to get to the party. Although the basement was full of excited kids, you couldn't even hear them until you got half-way down the stairs. It was even better than I expected. The golf course had this fabulous macabre theme. One hole had a miniature graveyard in it. There was an old wooden coffin standing up as an obstacle for one of the holes. The pinball games both have ghoulish themes as well. The basement itself is not of the fluorescent lit variety either. It is sort of dark with spinning red lights on the ceiling and dark paneling. It was very cool. I headed over to the vintage Galaga arcade game (just like the one that was in the basement of my dorm in college. I spent way more quarters on those stupid arcade games in college than I did on laundry.) and started to play.
Then it happened. I heard a voice say to me, "Isn't this great? I really needed a break from all the Christmas decorating the boys and I have been doing!" I turned slowly, in absolute horror. Yes...it was that woman I wrote about previously. You know, the hideous one that I can't stand. I should have known that the basement of a funeral home was going to be a scary place. Of course, her son was invited too and she followed me around for upwards of a half an hour telling me all about HER Christmas tree with all the hand strung popcorn and cranberries on it, and the 8 billion kinds of Christmas cookies she and her boys made and the precious scrapbooks she labored over to give to her boys for Christmas, blah, blah, blah. Then she started telling me about how much her son loved Bronte and kept saying, "Look how he's following her around! Aren't they cute?" I wanted to point out that Bronte looked about two seconds away from telling her son to back off, but I didn't. Instead I excused myself and went up to the bathroom to take some Tylenol. (It was at that moment that I decided to ask my doctor about a Valium prescription. What the hell?)
The minute I came back down to the party she was all over me again. It was like she knows that I can't stand her so she was trying even harder to win me over. Her idea of buddying up to me included pointing out that she and I were, BY FAR, the oldest moms in attendance. She backed this up by going around to all the other moms and asking them how old they were and then running back to me and telling me. "John's mom is only 30!" "Nathan's mom is 31!" Honest to God, if I would have had a gun her body could have been the ultimate decoration for the golf course.