It was one of my favorite summers in my childhood.
I was skinny, long-legged and awkward 12-year-old who lived for St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball and had dreams of being a drummer in the next big rock band.
That summer my cousin and I got to spend two weeks with my great-grandparents at their summer home in Florida.
It would be my first big trip without my parents, and it was a great chance for me to bond with my father’s grandparents. Papa Dick, as he was kindly referred to in our family, was a huge baseball fan like myself. He loved the St. Louis Cardinals, of course, and he loved the Atlanta Braves. He became a Braves fan because all of their games were televised on TBS, which was a rarity back then.
Papa Dick and I would spend much of those two weeks in Florida playing catch on the property at their village community. We would talk about our favorite players. Of course, he loved Stan Musial and the players of the 1950s and 60s, while my heroes were Ozzie Smith, Jack Clark, Willie McGee and members of Whitney Herzog’s teams of the 1980s.
My great-grand-parents took us all over Florida that summer, including visits to DisneyWorld and Busch Gardens.
To this day, some 20-plus years later, Papa Dick would never let me forget how I spent nearly $20 at a carnival game at Busch Gardens just to win a Frisbee. He would joke all the time how it was the most expensive Frisbee he had ever seen, and then gave me a lesson on the value of money.
Years later, when I would return for a visit during the holidays, he would say, “Hey, Rick, how is that Frisbee treating ya?” He would then crack a big smile.
Now, remember, I was an awkward 12-year-old kid during my Florida vacation with my great-grandparents, so there are some memories I would soon rather forget, like the time I managed to flip a tricycle.
Yes, I flipped a tricycle. My grandparents had two large, adult-size tricycles that they would ride in around their village together. One evening, my cousin and I decided to race the tricycles down the street. In a moment of what I thought to be glory, but turned out to be stupidity, I decided to do a wheelie — and flipped the tricycle backwards and nearly cracked my head open. All Papa Dick could do is laugh, and then give me a life lesson on “why you don’t do stupid things like that.”
