All my life, I have taken my grandma for granted. See, I'm really lucky. For some people, grandparents are part of an extended family, people you see at holidays or on some weekends. It was never like that with my grandma. No, my grandma was more in our immediate family. I'd wake up for school and she'd be at the house already, having coffee with my mom, so we'd have breakfast together every day. After school, I went to her house and played until I was old enough to stay at home (and even then, some days I'd still go visit her). Honestly, she was at our house as much as my parents were, and somehow I've ended up with a kind of third parent who, as grandparents do, spoils me to death.
Some of my favorite childhood memories have her at the center. Saturday morning bowling, for example, was a weekly ritual she rarely missed. It was the only sport I was ever good at, so her and my mom supported me week after week from the time I could hardly hold a ball until I was a senior in high school.
When I was younger (in elementary school), I went to her house after school and we played together all afternoon. She tolerated my rambunctiousness (I know it's hard to believe, but I did once have a lot of energy... I wasn't always a lazy college student...) and played whatever I wanted. Some days we played Red Rover in her driveway, using a random crack as the line you had to cross to win; some days we shot hoops on the basketball hoop purchased just for me, spoiled as I was; and some days we played board games, or watched the "Tom and Jerry" movie we'd both seen a hundred times but I absolutely loved, so she watched it for the 101st time. We baked cookies together (side note -- my grandma's cookies dominate everyone else's grandma's cookies. Sorry, there's just no contest), and we colored pictures, and sometimes we just rolled a soccer ball back and forth on the ground (somehow one of the most entertaining things to me). When it snowed, she watched me sled down the six-foot hill outside of her house, created by my dad's plow, and cheered every time I went down -- even when I went down more times than you could even count.
You see, my grandma is awesome. Most grandmas are. And there are so many grandparents out there that we just don't thank enough. When I was little, I was a brat - we're all brats when we're little -- so I never thanked her for playing basketball with me, or watching me attempt to tunnel through a yard full of snow. And now I'm 21, and to be honest, I still rarely thank her. She's a given in my life, a person I always assume will be there forever. As if that excuses not saying thank you enough.
If you're lucky enough, as I am, to still have some of your grandparents around, it's time to thank them for everything. For the extra presents at Christmas, for all the lunches and dinners they've cooked for you, for the hugs and the laughs and the memories you wouldn't trade for anything in the entire world. Appreciate your grandparents while you have them! And especially now that we're older, it's time to start spoiling them, don't you think? Take them out! To dinner, to a movie, to the mall. Go where they want to go for a change; do what they want to do. Make brand new, fantastic memories with them.
Grandparents aren't forever, so you better shower them with love every minute of every day while you can. Nothing you do can possibly ever measure up to the years they've spent loving you, but taking time out of your life to call them, meet up with them, spoil them a little -- it comes close.
So I'd like to give a special shout out to my grandma, Louise James, for being the best grandma ever! I'll never be able to thank you enough for loving me the way you did when I was little, and the way you still do today. Let's face it, 21 years later you're still spoiling me, and I hope you know how much I appreciate that -- and you. Love you, grams.
