Some of my fondest memories are the times I spent with grandma and grandpa Myers. Every summer, my brother and I would go to Patterson for two or three weeks and stay with them. They lived on a half-acre parcel about a mile and a half out of town, next to a pig farmer. My grandparents had some chickens and I remember watching my grandmother ring the heads off a chicken, pluck the feathers off of it and then toss it into the fat to fry it. By the way, there really is something to that cliché about "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"; chickens really do that, and I’ve seen some brethren do that, too! That crazy chicken – once he settled down – became our noon "dinner" (that was the noon meal, the big meal for people of that generation). My most enduring vision of grandma sees her standing at the oven in an apron doing her "grandmotherly" duties. She was always serving others.

But more important was the respect, trust and love my grandparents showed toward me. My cousins lived in a house right behind grandma and grandpa. We always had some business enterprise we wanted to pursue and grandma and grandpa never discouraged us. One time, we picked a bunch of my grandfather’s broccoli, put it in a wheelbarrow and sold it door-to-door for 5 cents a bunch. That was a successful business primarily because 5 cents was quite a bargain for a bunch of broccoli, even in those days. I’m not sure my grandpa appreciated our entrepreneurial spirit as much as we did, but he never reprimanded us.

One of our favorite pastimes was to walk the mile and a half into the booming metropolis of Patterson (there wasn’t even a stoplight in the town back then). On a rare occasion, we’d go to a movie. But most of the time, we’d go to the RexAll Drug store and buy good stuff, like Beaman’s or Cloves chewing gum, fake candy lips that you could wear, then chew, or those wax straws filled with Kool-Aid. We even bought an occasional bumble gum cigar in yellow, blue or green (we were blissfully ignorant of many things in those days).

On the way to town, we walked by a railroad freight station, a cannery, an apricot cutting shed, and the creamery where my grandpa worked. We took it all in – the sounds of the cannery’s machinery grinding away; the sight of young ladies in bandanas cutting apricots, the hustle and bustle of real men working in real jobs. No one was checking stock holdings on laptops, or talking on cell phones, and there were few people dressed in suits and ties for work. Mostly, overalls, as I remember.

Sometimes we would pause to play in a park on the way back to grandma’s house, oblivious to the heat of the Valley summer. We talked about whatever 9 and 10 year olds talk about and, on the way, whoever saw a Lucky Strike package and stomped on it first got to whack the other kids. I was the oldest so I got to stomp the packs and whack the others first most of time. Life was good.

We could kill about 2 or 3 hours of a summer’s day with those trips, and I loved every minute of it. There was nothing I’d rather be doing. Besides giving me a view of the world that I could never get from a TV show, it helped me develop a sense of responsibility. I knew my grandma trusted me to behave myself, to spend my limited amount of money wisely (only one pair of wax lips!) and to return home in a reasonable time. They never had to send my older cousin out to track us down. Sometimes, knowing people trust you makes you more trustworthy.

How things have changed! Today, parents are frightened to allow their children to walk any distance into town, even when there’s a town to walk to. The world is not safe for children any more. How sad. I feel for many kids today who find their greatest joy in fictional worlds like a Star Wars movie or a video game.