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A friend told me a funny story recently:

His grandmother, a card-carrying Texan well into her ’90s, is a devout racist. My friend doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and is a tad embarrassed by grandma’s attitudes, but realizing he’s not going to change a 90-something, he just deals with it.

Grandma had to undergo surgery recently, and the doctors pumped her full of morphine. In a hallucinatory state, she ended up in heaven, where, to her horror and disbelief, all the angels were black. To add insult to injury, they were rolling her in mud trying to make her look like them.

Part of me wants to believe her vision was more divinely inspired than drug induced, and that god has a really cool sense of humor …

(BTW: She emerged from the surgery fine, though a bit shaken.)

Hey, good news! After spending the entire summer paralyzed from a back injury, Landry, my basset hound, is walking again. He can even run a bit. The old boy will always have a pronounced limp because he did not regain much feeling in one of his rear legs, but I’m going to invent an exciting tale about his weak leg, one he can tell to strangers in bars.

Something like, “He was dragging children out of a burning house when a glowing, hot timber fell on his leg. He managed to get himself and the last child out of danger, but he was scarred for life.”

My brother Jeff came to vist last week, en route to the NASCAR race a Bristol. NASCAR was a sport we never thought about growing up. Not sure where he got this addiction, but it definitely has hit him. He had a buddy with him, a shaggy guy named Joe, complete with a Jeff Gordon T-shirt. Joe’s favorite epithet is “jagoff,” one of the pillars of Pittsburghese, a language all its own. Joe’s use of jagoff is so persistent that when he calls the house, my niece announces: “Jagoff Joe’s on the phone!” Listening to the two of them jabber in Pittsburghese and swill Coors Light brought back a lot of Burgh memories. If only we could have had Iron City instead of Coors …