2646 Ivanhoe Rd.

Yesterday, I decided that we would have cheeseburgers on the grill for dinner and asked Wes to cut up a cucumber, onion, and tomato and throw some olive oil and vinegar and spices on it for a summer salad to go along with them. We also had sweet potato fries. Yummy! The burgers were so good and my mouth is watering thinking of them. Wes asked me about the salad, he said, "Where did you get the idea for this salad, did you just make it up or what?" It was then that a myriad of memories flooded into my brain, all stemming from that salad. I told him that I hadn't made it up, but that my Grandma and Mom always made it with dinners in the summertime at my Grandparents house. The reason being was that my Grandfather always had a garden and it always yielded large amounts of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and sometimes onions in the summer! Sometimes we even had multiple different kinds of peppers. I used to help my Grandpa plant that garden and plant all the marigolds to help keep the bunnies from eating the plants! Then I used to eat the tomatoes once they were ripe. My favorite time to eat them was in the afternoon when they were warm from the sun. See, since my Mom was a single Mom and we lived across town from my Grandparents it was almost routine that we would go stay with my Grandparents at their house on the weekends in the summertime mostly. I absolutely loved this. It was like going on vacation every weekend. I got to pack my clothes and toys into suitcases and go to stay with them where we always had a great time. Weekends at my grandparents included lots of great things. For one you could always count on Grandpa's breakfast. He liked to cook breakfast and had a good friend, named Ted McIntyre, that used to wake him up by telling him, "Larry, get up, the day's half shot!" Even though he would be waking my Grandpa up at 630 am. Ted was a great guy and had one of those Scottish terriers that I really liked. My Grandpa used to get up and start cooking breakfast (the only meal he ever cooked) and I can remember laying in my bed smelling the bacon frying. He would then come into my bedroom and tickle my toes to wake me up. If I didn't get up soon he would yell, "Krissy, come on the day's half shot!" which I found so amusing! We would have breakfast together at the table and on Saturdays head outside to play. I can remember from a very small age my Grandfather carrying me around their big yard and letting me touch everything. We used to find baby blue Robin's eggs in bird's nests in the big evergreen trees and rabbits homes under the bushes. We used to dig in the dirt for night crawlers for my Grandpa to take fishing. My favorite memories in the summer were those of when my cousins were home from Florida and we would all stay at my Grandparents house, lined up in sleeping bags on the living room floor. We would often wake up to my Grandma (who claimed she wasn't hard of hearing) in her chair in the corner with the TV on blaring! At night we would go to sleep while she sat in her chair and sang us songs. Those are some of the best memories I have. We would play all kinds of sports in the yard, as well as capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, hide and go seek and anything else that involved running and screaming. We would also play in my Grandpa's boat and pretend to drive it. The best, though, was when my cousin Jasmine and I would pretend to host a cooking show, in our sand box. We had bowls and fake cake pans and cooking utensils and we would pretend to bake cakes, all the while putting on a demonstration and talking in our cooking show host voices.(it was like a bad combination of Justin Louis (that Lousiana guy) and Julia Child) We would then force my Uncle Butch to video us while doing so, so that we could later watch the video. After dark, we thought it was the coolest thing ever to hang out in the basement and play video games or what not. We would also use the video camera (which was so huge at the time it was hard to carry) and make music videos while using the hose from the vacuum as a microphone. We performed numerous Wilson Phillips videos and also choreographed a ton of dances to the Hungry Eyes song and every other song from Dirty Dancing. Oh my those were the days! We had so much fun. On Sundays, sometimes, I would go to church with my Grandparents. They went for a long time together, but later in life as my Grandma got ill my Grandpa would go alone. I liked to go with him. I always felt bad when I saw other older people at church alone or out to eat alone. Grandpa would sometimes take me out to breakfast if I went with him or sometimes to lunch. If we went to lunch we always went to McDonalds because it was my favorite and my Grandpa would let me get chicken nuggets and a cheeseburger because I could not make up my mind. In the evenings we would always watch baseball and if there wasn't a Pirates game or Indians game on TV then we would sit out in the breezeway and listen to it on the radio. Lots of times my Grandpa would be watching one game and listening to another. I have no idea how he did it, but he managed to keep stats on both games at the same time. We would have peanuts and root beer floats or even Drumsticks! He instilled my love of the game of baseball and still to this day I think of him everytime I enter a Major League Stadium. I used to love the Atlanta Braves and he would get so worked up when I would root for them over the Indians. Actually I really just loved Chipper Jones and had the biggest crush on him. Sometimes we'd even play checkers. Grandpa never ever let me win. He beat me everytime. I remember once hearing my Mom say, "Dad, just let her win one time." He said, "What will she learn from that?" I'll never forget that. Then I tried even harder to beat him, but never did. We had a grand old time together. I have so many fond memories I could go on forever, but I shall stop here. It's sad that Wes never got to meet either of my Grandparents or my cousin Jasmine, they surely would have loved him. Jasmine would surely have given him a hard time, but that was just her way. My Grandfather especially would have been pleased with Wes's love for the game of baseball and his love for his grandaughter.