Lunch

Just now, a memory:

I cruise up to The Ville on a random weekday afternoon. No one is expecting me because, hey, I was not expecting to be going up there on this particular day.

Before going to my parents’ house, I decide to swing by Grandma Ginny’s to see if she wants to have lunch with me. I run by McDonald’s first and grab a couple of cheeseburger Happy Meals.

Maybe we’ll go to the park and eat them, who knows.

I drive to her house and pick her up. We head to the park — empty at this time of day, right in the middle of the day in the middle of early spring or late fall or whatever offseason time of the year this happens to be. We sit at the picnic table not far from the scout cabin. Not far from where, many years before, Roger Stranc left my baseball glove one evening after a youth group meeting, taking it out of the basket on his bike and leaving it there, on the picnic table or the ground or somewhere else that I did not know about, for someone else to find it and keep it and, hopefully, use it every day, like I did, for so many years.

Grandma and I sit at our picnic table. In-between bites of cheeseburger and pickles and fries (not to sound all “Go, Corporate America!-like,” but McDonald’s really does have the best French fries), we talk and laugh, laugh and talk, enjoying our lunch together.

The road to the right of the picnic table goes back to the Hulick Addition, where there are trees and trails and open spaces, too — one of which was the host site for my best birthday party ever (I think I was 8 or 9 or 10; I am not quite sure, but we played baseball the whole time, I remember, and one of my presents was a green baseball bat). Across that road, and back, is the Little League diamond, where I used to go watch Tony Hammond play ball, and I used to wish I were playing, too. (I petitioned the league, in second grade, but it was a no-go. No girls allowed in Little League. Girls were too fragile, too delicate; they might get hurt playing ball.)

(They might get hurt not playing ball, I came to realize.)

As usual, I have a camera with me, so once we are finished, I take a picture of Grandma and then decide to get a few shots of her and me, together, using the timer. I set the camera on the table, look through the viewfinder, and tell her we will have to hunker down so we will be in the frame. I press the shutter button and scramble over to get next to Grandma, where we watch the blinking light. This process, too, makes us laugh, as we are never quite sure when the shutter is actually going to click.

Blink blink blink blink
blink blink blink blink
blinkblinkblinkblink
CLICK!

Most of the photos turn out pretty good, though. We are smiling in every one. Wish I could find one right now; I’d post it.