Looking Back

I often try to remember many of the things my grandkids -Maya and Kurtis -say because sometimes, the stuff they come out with is really so darned comical. Like yesterday morning for example, when Mandy came back in the house after getting Kurtis in his van and on his way to school, Maya greeted her with an announcement of "We have a situation here!"

Looking around, Mandy spied immediately what Maya was referring to as it seems our silly cat, Miss Pearl the Purrball, had hopped up onto the counter, knocked over the open bag of cat food and it was all over the counter and the floor. As Mandy was starting to clean up Miss Pearl's mess, Maya told the cat, "Pearl, this place is not self-serve!"

At least that little chuckle Mandy got from Maya's comment made the clean-up a little easier to deal with.

But sometimes, when the grandkids say the things they say and make me laugh, it also reminds me of days, about 3 decades ago, when it was often their uncle who was quite the entertainer in the family. Clate almost always seemed to have a way of saying things that would crack everyone up.

One of his prize comments came about when he was 8 years old and his sisters and I had gone to Illinois to have a little visit with their paternal grandparents there. Grandpa was so excited after we arrived as his plans for the grandkids and me was that he and Grandma were taking us to their "camp" a little, very old trailer they had parked near the banks of the Mississippi and he also had a motor boat for fishing there too.

The first thing he did when we got down at their camp was to take all three kids out on the river for a ride in his boat. Then he brought the girls home and he and my son, Clate, took off then for some quality time -grandpa and grandson -fishing on the Mississippi.

The boy managed to catch two small fish -very small -and then, lo and behold, got a hit on his line. Grandpa said it took the two of them a good twenty minutes to fight with and finally reel in the fish which was a big, very ugly, Carp!

Upon finally getting it landed in the boat, Clate leaned back in the far corner of the boat and said, "Let's go home now, Grandpa. It's Miller Time!"

Grandpa came away from that fishing expedition with the idea that I must have some kind of millermatic or some such thing in our house back home in PA.

I had to explain to the grandparents that Miller's was actually their son's brand of beer and not mine!

After that, the boy really got things on a roll again when he told his grandmother that he was going to have me take that carp and "freeze it, really, really hard" and we would then bring it back home with us and he was then going to mount it on a piece of wood and hang in on a wall in the living room!

At that announcement, Grandpa got a bit worried and told Grandma to go get the shovel and start digging a hole to get the darned fish buried then as quickly as possible. Apparently he didn't want to take any chances that the boy was actually going to be able to transport that fish back to PA.

I didn't want that to happen either, believe me!