Today is my Grandfather’s birthday, he is 83 years old today, or if you ask him he’ll tell you he’s 38. He’s dyslexic when it comes to his age. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my Grandmother’s house. I lived out in the country and there were very few kids my age to play with, but my Grandmother lived in town and there were always a ton of kids around including my cousins. So I would beg my mother to let me go into my Grandparent’s house as much as I could.
When I was at my Grandparent’s house, it was always my Grandfather who would organize all of the neighborhood kids into teams for games of baseball or football in the park. He would collect as many kids as he could find and walk us all up to the park to play. We would pick teams and to make it fair he would be “all-time” pitcher or QB, meaning he would pitch for both sides or he would quarterback for both sides. He has always been a big kid, and he would always have a huge smile on his face as we would run out and catch a pass or hit one over the fence and round the bases laughing. One of my fondest memories of him, was when he took me fishing. He used to take all of us fishing, but this time it was just me and him that day. I had spent the night at the house, and he woke me up real early just as the sun was coming up. We had some breakfast and walked down to the city pier. It was great to just be there with him. He let me pay for the bait at the pier bait shop, he showed me how to bait a hook with a soft shell crayfish and with minnows, and we sat there all morning. Me next to him, sitting on our overturned 5 gallon buckets. To tell the truth I can’t remember if we caught any fish that day, or what we talked about, but I remember the sights, sounds and smells of that day just as vividly as they were that day.
Now my Gramps has his own very unique quirks. He lost all of his teeth when he younger, so as long as I have known him he has been toothless. I guess he had dentures at one time, but when they moving from one house to another they got lost or thrown out. He swears that either my father or my Uncle Phil threw them out and both of them blame the other one and deny having anything to do with it. Sometimes when both my father and Uncle Phil are at his house, I like to bring that story up and get my Gramps all riled up about it and have him give them the business all over again as I sit back and laugh. So because of that incident he has never gotten more dentures, and if you ask him his answer is always “Why should I buy new teeth? Someone will just throw them out!”. I’m not sure if it is the fact that he has no teeth, or because he grew up poor, or a little of both of those things, but he eats the weirdest things ever. It’s normally anything he can find put between two slices of bread, then he folds the sandwich in half, sticks in a glass of milk and eats it that way. Anything left in the glass he fishes out with a spoon then he drinks the milk. It’s pretty disgusting but he has always been that way. The worst combination that I have seen was hot dog relish on bread, with Reese’s Pieces candies, dunked into a glass of milk. Even his coffee is different, instead of cream and sugar, he floats a healthy table spoon of butter in his black coffee to “Sweeten” it.
One of his other quirks is what he does when he has company he doesn’t particularly care for. If he hears that people are coming for a visit that he doesn’t like, he grabs the dog’s leash and takes Brutus for a walk. He’ll walk for hours or until the people leave, then he comes home. If he has no prior knowledge of the visit, he’ll say hello but within 5 minutes he is grabbing the dog and apologizing for having to take the dog out. It’s actually pretty funny to watch, and amazingly the people he’s avoiding don’t seem to notice that it happens every time.
But anyway, my Gramps is one hell of a man. I owe a lot of who I am to him. I have his (and my father’s) dirty sense of humor, his occasional hot tempered outbursts, and his love of cards. He is a UNO freak, but also taught all of us to play Euchre, until he quit because he said me and my cousin cheat. He’s a bit of a sore loser, but he’s in his eighties so I think he has earned it. I am thankful to have him in my life.
Happy Birthday, Old Man! I Love you Gramps!
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