I walk into my grandparent’s house, and my grandma is usually either playing games on her laptop or cooking with my grandpa. They are amazing cooks. I visit with them all the time. I might as well just live at their house because I’m always there. My grandma isn’t a milk and cookies grandma. My grandma’s name is Sandy, well actually it’s Sandra but everyone just calls her Sandy. She is my dad’s mother. She is only in her early sixties but looks like she is only fifty. She looks and acts younger. She has short blonde hair and is around 5’5” and wears contacts most of the time. She has blue eyes but she sometimes wears green contacts and I tell her how I’m jealous of her blue eyes and she tells me that she’s jealous of my long eyelashes.
She has worked at a bank all my life and at one point she was the president of the Collinsville Building and Loan, but now she works at Federal Community Bank in Collinsville. She is a very brilliant woman with a wide vocabulary. I love talking to her just because I love to hear the difference in the language use between her and me. She has a very wide vocabulary and I use a lot of slang terms. You can definitely see the difference in the generations.
She is the kind of person that doesn’t judge a book by its cover. She gets to know someone first and even after that she doesn’t judge anybody. She tells me all the time that life is too short to have enemies so just be friends with everybody and if your personalities don’t click then find someone else. I try to live my life like that, but sometimes I catch myself still judging people. She has taught me a lot of what I know today.
When you first meet my grandma, she always looks really nice and some say she looks high maintenance. She tells me that she is not high maintenance; she just knows what she wants. She and I are really close because we are a lot alike. My dad was an only child, so my grandma never got to have a daughter so in a way she treats me like I’m her child. She takes me shopping for my birthday and Christmas, or if I am in desperate need of something and I don’t have money at that time. I love going shopping with her, because I am a very indecisive person and she helps me make my decisions. When I try clothes on sometimes I don’t know whether I like it or not, and she is not afraid to tell me the truth.
Whenever anybody has a problem, they go to my grandma. She is a very giving person and likes to volunteer for things. She volunteers her time every year in September to the Collinsville Italian Fest. The Italian Fest is a big get together with a lot of food and drinks. There are always a bunch of stands where people sell food, drinks, crafts, etc. There are a lot of Italian flags hung all around. There is a wide variety of food like pulled pork, Mexican food, Italian sausages, and pretty much anything else you can think of. There are also beer tents, so she has to be extra careful about those. Usually she is the person that tells the people in the beer tents when to cut people off on drinks because people just don’t know when to stop. Sometimes they have big problems at the Italian Fest like fights, because sometimes intoxicated people aren’t the most cooperative people or something like that and she always knows what to do. For two years she was the chair person for the Italian Fest. Even though she is not the chair person anymore, people still go to her when they have problems. She is always the lady everybody goes to when they don’t know what they are doing. I love just watching the way she talks to people, because she always looks like she is so calm, but then I look at her facial expressions and I know what she is really thinking. It amazes me how she never raises her voice at people when she is mad. That is usually my reaction when I’m mad, but I’m trying to learn from her how not to. I always get upset or a little down when I hear that someone is talking bad about me and when I talk to her about it she says to just brush it off. She tells me all the time how it shouldn’t matter to me what people think, because all that matters is that I like myself and I accept myself for that. I have gotten better about it not bothering me, but it just depend on what people say. She was the president of the Collinsville Building and Loan for quite a long time. She had to hire people and fire people. I asked her how she dealt with it when she had to fire someone, and she simply told me that if they weren’t doing their job or if they were doing something wrong, then you shouldn’t feel bad about it. When she had to hire someone she had to go through a long process. When she interviewed them, she had to pretty much judge them on how she thought they would do at that job. When someone would come in for an interview she would pretty much make a first impression at first glance. They would come in and be all nervous, but she always knew how to make them feel comfortable. She would just talk to them like she was talking to someone she had known her whole life.
In the summer time, I go on vacation with my parents, brother, and grandma and grandpa. We go to Bennet Springs, Missouri every year. It is a state park where everybody goes trout fishing. Bennet Springs is a very peaceful and serene place. It’s a very relaxing place. The hotel we stay at has an indoor pool and a hot tub. It also has a game room, which isn’t to fabulous but it’s is something to do. They have a pool table and my friend, which goes with my family every year, and I have our own pool tournament to see who can win more games. We have a lot of fun. There is also a hatchery there where you can feed the fish. My grandma and I spend a lot of time together down there. We all wade in the water and fish. A couple years ago my grandma and I even learned how to fly fish. To me, it seems more fun to fly fish sometimes. Fly fishing is also way harder than regular fishing because you have to know what you’re doing. I get frustrated really easy and some days fly fishing is just not for me. When I get frustrated, my grandma just tells me calmly, I’m not going to be perfect at it because I’m still learning and I just need to be patient. There is a limit on how many fish you can catch down there. You can only catch four a day. You can’t just fish whenever you want down there. When we go, you can’t start fishing until 7 in the morning. They have a whistle that blows that tells you when you can start fishing and when you have to stop. My dad is so crazy about fishing; we literally go down at 6:30 in the morning and wait to fish when the whistle blows. In the morning, the fish are very alive and that’s usually when you can catch them the best. We usually fish until about 9 or 9:30, then we go back to the hotel to eat breakfast, and then we usually just lie around and nap or just relax. Sometimes we would go back down in the afternoon and fish, or we would go do something. We have a lot of fun down there.