Was up in Boston Monday and Tuesday for my uncle Bobby's funeral. This was the husband, actually widower, of my mother's younger sister, who died twenty years ago. I don't know about you guys, but in my family a funeral is always a mixture of sadness and circus.

Jewish tradition calls for burial within 24 hours of death. Some traditions sit with the body for a few days (like a Catholic wake, e.g.) and then have the funeral at the end of the mourning period. We bury the body immediately, and then the mourning period extends a week as we visit with and comfort the bereaved. That's sitting shiva, in case anyone was wondering. This 24-hour thing worked well when we all lived in villages and everyone who needed to get to the funeral was right down the street. The circus aspect comes in when the deceased lived his last decades, and died, in New York, his kids live in California, other relatives live in various other places, and the gravesite is in Boston.

So we didn't quite make the 24 hours -- Bobby died Sunday afternoon, the funeral was Tuesday morning -- and the crowd was small. My sister was there, and another cousin and his wife, from Minneapolis, though when they got the phone call they'd been in North Carolina on the beach, so they had to go to a shop when they got to Boston on Monday and buy her a dress, him a jacket, slacks, shirt and tie. And shoes for them both -- all they had was their flip-flops and sneakers. See what I mean about a circus? Though Bobby wouldn't have cared, anyway; he was an informal kind of guy. And my cousins, the sons of the deceased, hell, they're Californians. Neither of them was wearing a tie.

It was a hot, sunny day, a graveside service. We crowded around the plot, where my parents and grandparents, and Bobby's wife, my mother's younger sister, are all buried. A rabbi did the ritual, and my cousins both spoke beautifully about their father, who was a difficult man. My mother's brother and his wife flew up from Florida, and he also spoke. And a friend of the deceased spoke, someone who'd known my uncle for 60 years. The cemetery's a place of gently rolling hills, the clouds came and went... very peaceful, a good way to be sent off.

Then, seeing as how my cousins live in LA, we couldn't go back to the house for the shiva. So we went to lunch in a private room in a local restaurant. Then the stories started flying, about my uncle, about my grandfather, about us when we were kids...

So tune in again; some of them are worth sharing.