My best friend died on last Thursday; no, not my pet, but my best friend. He was a crotchety old fart who could harass anyone and everyone.
When I wrote his obituary, I didn’t realize it would create such a response. I only wrote as I knew him; but I had calls for days after telling me not just how well I captured him, but how well I could write an obituary, something I never thought of as a chosen profession.
So, here is the obituary (minus a few names), and I will explain what made him, well, him…
On May 10, the Magic Valley lost one of its greatest treasures when he left the world to join his twin brother and best friend, another brother and two cousins at the eternal coffee shop.
He was born in Pomona, California. During his years in California, he was involved in several businesses, including demolition and dairying; however, his favorite pastime was creating as much mischief as possible with his twin.
When their younger brother got married and bought his first house, it had this horrible green shag carpet in it. My friend and his brother decided it looked too much like uncut grass, so they grabbed their lawn mowers and mowed it.
He enjoyed telling stories about some of their adventures, including a rather creative recipe for salsa.
He was only married once, and it didn’t even last a year. One night, she got drunk, called him a bunch of names, and passed out on their couch. He took the hottest salsa he could find and poured it all over her nether regions.
If you didn’t stop in at his place for your morning coffee, the rest of the day didn’t seem to go right. (Of course, everyone knew to keep his hand over his cup so something else besides coffee didn’t end up in it.)
Some of the things that ended up in the coffee: cookies, dentures, dishsoap, salt, marbles, bull testicles and Viagra.
He was a prankster; he instigated several water fights, and was rarely without his squirt gun. And when his grass didn’t get mowed in time, he made his point with the appearance of two big white goats on his front lawn.
Thanks to my minivan.
Whether it was picking up cows, having lunch at the sale yards or cruising around the dairy, his favorite place to be was right in the middle of everything. No matter where he went, he always knew someone, and there wasn’t a waitress he couldn’t give grief to, or a nurse he couldn’t harass.
He had a cane made from a bull’s penis. He would take that with him where ever we went, and he was always able to talk a waitress or a nurse into feeling it. They would get to rubbing it trying to figure out what the wood was. When he would tell them that it was a bull’s apparatus, the women would come unglued. One even threw it across the room. He would laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Instead of flowers, find a nice spot in your garden for a tomato plant. When the first tomato gets good and ripe, grab it and eat it while having a nice, cold beer and thinking of him. He would have loved nothing better.
He loved tomatoes and he loved beer. A bunch of people brought tomato plants to the funeral.
Probably only funny to me, but I thought someone else might get a chuckle or two.
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