Ah Pope Paul, he looks just like my mother

So the other night my Nana and Grampy Z, on my mother’s side, came over for dinner with her and me. As usual, I was skeptical about how this meal would go, but with my underwhelming current social agenda I had nowhere else to be. So they arrive and the excitement begins. Grampy asks the usual probing life questions that I’ve gotten pretty decent at reciting since he seems to forget between each of our gatherings.

The whole point is to fluster me so that he can punch Nana going, “Listen to this, ha, listen Mum.” Things get pretty heated and eventually Linda starts berating me for asserting my flawless points and accidently saying “Jesus” to my grandfather. Apparently now that I’m older, running my own life and living on my own it’s important to her that I don’t take the Lords name in vain, but it was fine those other twenty years.

My Grampy is quite an intelligent old Italian man (mum always says she wishes she got his brains instead of Nana’s), so he starts throwing out questions like “How many dollars is the US currently in debt?” (I got it wrong last time, he clearly has selective memory), and making statements like “You can’t trust some of those people from the Middle East,” and “Why are you in Communications you need to be a lawyer so you can get me out of trouble." Meanwhile Nana is throwing in stuff like “Why are you on birth control?,” and "No Pope Paul looks like my mother, not Pope Benedict," “Are you getting married in a church?” To the latter I casually answered “Nope.”

My Nana looked at me as if I had literally just spat on Jesus himself.

Then swore at him.

Then flipped him off.

Then kissed a woman.

After her initial “NO YOU WILL NOT,” complete with wide eyes and heavy breathing, Nana demands to know why. When I say that I don’t believe in Christianity and that I don’t go to church, Grampy (at this point he joins his wife on the Christian battlefront) asks horrified, “When did you stop going to church?”

“Umm, when you guys stopped making me?”

In retrospect that probably wasn’t the most suitable answer for diffusing the situation at hand.

At this point the dinner breaks out in full on pandemonium. Nana and Grampy are yelling—they’re old so it’s not that scary—and Linda goes into full backup mode like “STEPHANIE that’s not true. Mom it’s my fault I never took them to church.” She’s also forgetting the part that she additionally never went.

On a side note, if there were ever a King and Queen of the Ptown Catholic church, it would be Theresa and Danny Z. Need an example? My sister and I spent approximately three weeks in CCD classes. We quit after the woman told us to live our lives like salt (plain and simple) and never looked back. To say the least we were not qualified to be baptized. Where we baptized?

Damn straight we were.

A good four years after the age deadline.

In our own private ceremony.

Why? Because Theresa and Danny wanted it done. So yay I’m not going to hell at least on the most basic level—I didn’t bother to tell Nana and Grampy I don’t believe in hell because they are old and I didn’t want to be responsible for their deaths (I also didn’t mention that they would probably be dead by the time I got married anyway).

So to sum up the topic had to be changed stat before Nana was carried away in a stretcher and we all enjoyed the rest of our meal as if I didn’t just stomp all over their beliefs and vice versa. The rest of the gathering was pleasant until Grampy shouted on the way out the door, “Don’t marry a Muslim for Christ’s sake whatever you do!” Needless to say I ended the night in a glass of Pino Grigio.