On Saturday afternoon, I was convinced I'd crashed a memorial service. Such an event is not one that I should make light of, but I just couldn't help the thought, as I sat down to a glass of mimosa at the subsequent mercy breakfast.

It's like smirking at the thought of the unblessed bulk packages of communion wafers in RM's kitchen cabinet. It's irreverence to the nth degree (depending on your system of beliefs).

Nonetheless, I sat through a Catholic Mass next to my Jewish father, listening to the eulogies of a man I had never laid eyes on. Afterward, we went to the Holiday Inn with his family to feast on a brunch buffet.

And it turned out to be a really good time...

Now before you think me horrible, like Chazz from Wedding Crashers, let me explain--

The deceased, well known to family and friends as "Chickie," was my great uncle's close friend. They grew up on the same Somerville street in the 1920s and 1930s, played sandlot baseball together and worked at the Loews Orpheum Theater in Boston. They went off to war at the same time (my uncle to Italy, Chickie to Normandy). It wasn't until Chickie's wife died 15 years ago that the two italoamerican ragazzi started their weekly tradition of "guy's night out."

Chickie's death was not expected, even though he had serious medical conditions. He was buried quickly and in private. My uncle was asked to u-google-y him at a memorial service at St. Catherine's in Somerville. We went to the service first and foremost to support my uncle, who delivered a fine tribute to his dear friend.

Now, we weren't like the strange couple no one could identify in the Super 8 video of my parents' wedding--I met Chickie's sister and her husband in Paris last year. His sister is a US ambassador in Paris and a former Maryland congresswoman, who invited my NU seminar to her stately (and heavily guarded) home near l'arc de triomphe for an evening. We chatted that night about life on Hudson Street in Somerville and took a picture together that my uncle brought to Chickie a few weeks later.

The sister and her husband--one of the kindest, most jovial people I've ever met--invited us to the mercy breakfast. It's not like we were trying to prey upon the mournful to pick up dates (me and m'ole man), or trying to score free lunch. We ended up roaring with laughter over some of the stories Chickie's brother-in-law told about being the retired husband of a dignitary in a foreign country.

The French government pays for two French secret service to follow Chickie's sister around wherever she goes. But they don't follow her husband--and one day during a polite yet dry conversation with one of the SS, he asked why there was a need for such security, jokingly. And not-so-jokingly, the guard replied, "well eef somezing happened to eer, it would be an incidente internacionale!"

"Well, what about me?" the husband asked.

"Ahh, you are guist anozzer funeral."

He had us in stitches. Absolutely in stitches.

In the end, I feel like it wasn't so irreverant for me to have been there. And even though I never met Chickie, I got to hear his voice--his nephew held a boombox that played an answering machine message Chickie had left him a while ago. It was a haunting, yet funny little message that made me realize that he probably would have loved the fact that there were people at his memorial service that he had never met.