This weekend, I flew to Pittsburgh for a family funeral; my 92-year-old great aunt passed away last week. This was the good kind of funeral, if there is such a thing, the kind of funeral where mourning the deceased means laughing until you cry about that time that you and your brother nearly got into a fight in the restaurant parking lot because neither of you wanted to ride in the front seat if Aunt Ish was driving.

That sort of thing.

My aunt was a beautician (does anyone even use that word any more?) in a small town outside of Pittsburgh. For years, she did the hair on the corpses at the funeral home, before they were laid out for the viewing. The mortician (is that word still around?) told my mother that Ish would come to the funeral home for a 20 minute job and sit around and visit for an hour afterward. He also said she used to joke with him: “When I die, you’d better make me look beautiful.” They did.

Ish left my mother a diamond ring; the men at the funeral home remembered Ish wearing it, all those years ago. “You know where she got the money to buy herself that big diamond?” they asked my mother. “Working here!”

Funerals are like traveling through time; you spend a day or two reviving this just-ended life, talking about other long-dead family and friends, and piecing together one story, about the deceased, which of course is really so many different stories, all tangled up together. This weekend the story was about my mother’s aunt Ish, but then of course it was also about Ish’s brother, Huck, who was my mother’s father and who died when she was nine, and about Ish’s husband, George, who helped my grandmother raise my mother and her siblings after their father died, and about my mother’s sister, Sue, who lived through all that with my mother and then died very suddenly nine years ago.

This weekend was also like traveling back in time because Butler, the little Pennsylvania town where my aunt lived for so many years, has the air of being frozen in the past, somewhere in the 1950s. The funeral home looks like something out of a John O’Hara short story, with floral wallpaper and white wainscotting and elaborate crown molding. On Saturday, before the funeral, my brother and I walked up Main Street, to pass the time before the viewing (a very 1950-something tradition, I think) and we stopped in an antique store, him in his jacket and tie and me in my Audrey Hepburn LBD, and browsed furniture and pictures and nick nacks as though we were just out for the day shopping and strolling, but all dressed up for church. We must have looked like something from the 50s there, too.

I have some funny stories from the weekend, because my family is always good for the funny, but I’m tired from going all the way back to 1950, to my aunt’s youth. It was a long trip.

And a sad one, in the end, although in a good way.

1. Baseball sleeves, little boy size, in black and orange (we couldn’t choose a school with stylish colors, we had to choose the school with good academics — what were we thinking???).

2. Batting helmets, to prevent any (more) brain damage.

3. Socks that come up to their knees and make them look like extras in a production of Oliver Twist.

4. New baseball cleats! That leave black marks on the white kitchen tile! Woo!

5. Kids who wear their baseball uniforms around all day, just because they can.

So clearly baseball season is starting here; fortunately I have Chris to rely on for moral support. Like tonight, when I texted her to say, “Two kids, two practices, two different fields. I am living your life.”

And she came back with, “Haha, double that.”

I cannot win. But I can drive less. I guess.

Do you watch Heroes? I do not, but I’m starting to wish I did, because on Monday, I interviewed Greg Grunberg, who plays the police officer who can read your mind (what’s his name again?) and honestly, he was the Nicest Guy Ever.

You can read more about him at ParentDish — he’s got a cool new project that has nothing to do with being a superhero and everything to do with saving the world. So to speak.

He was a great interview — maybe because he could read my mind? Hmm.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve gotten a series of lovely emails from various people I work with about different work-related projects, all saying essentially the same thing: “You are so organized! I don’t know how you do it.”

Smoke and mirrors, people. Smoke and mirrors.

Right now every single surface in my living room is covered with laundry — clean laundry, yes, but unfolded and just heaped on the furniture because I don’t have time to fold but I have to get it out of the dryer to put the next load in. The folded laundry, on the other hand, is on the floor in my bedroom, in neat piles. Unfortunately, those piles are arranged by color, not by size or owner, so the kids have to come in and poke around every morning to find pants or socks or underwear or whatever it is they’re looking for.

I’m telling myself that I’m fostering their independence by not putting the laundry away.

I spent all day Wednesday essentially in my pajamas, because I had two articles due at the exact same moment (or something like that). Every time I thought I might get fifteen minutes to shower and get dressed, another thing would come up that needed to be finished right now, please, and I wound up taking the boys to baseball practice (two kids, two practices, two different fields, yee haw) in the yoga pants I slept in.

Sexay.

By Thursday, I had completely lost track of what day it was, which meant that I came this close to letting the kids go to school in their regular uniforms, rather than their dress uniforms (Thursday is Mass day; they have to wear a tie). Fortunately, Charlie remembered, although I have no idea how. Today I forgot that it was Spirit Day, the one day each month when the kids aren’t required to wear their uniform shirts, and sent the boys to school in their regular white polos.

But they also forgot, or at least forgot to remind me, so there’s that.

This afternoon we have track practice AND soccer practice, which of course are not at the same time or place, so this morning Wade and I had to have a long conversation about how everyone was going to get where he needed to go and who was going to take what kid where. I think I know what the plan is, but really, I’m not sure.

But I just got another you’re-so-organized email, as I was writing this, so I guess I sort of have things under control. The bottom line is: Virtual office, FTW! Seriously.