Day 10

Happy Birthday Lolo!

Today is my mother's father's birthday.

I wished that I had stopped by Burger King today and had a whopper jr. meal with a diet coke today for him, but I don't think my stomach could have handled it. Instead, I thought I would take a picture of this wooden chest.

My parents are in the middle of selling their house in Vegas right now, and I had to go back last month and go through all my stuff. In the middle of strolling through memory lane, I found this wooden chest. When I was a kid, it belonged to my grandpa. He would spend the entire year filling it up with coins and then, on my birthday, he would give it to me with a few extra bills. My mom would empty it out and put it into savings, and then give it back to him for the following year. I stopped receiving it maybe by the time I was 11 or 12 or something, but I think aside from my brother (who stopped getting it once I was born), I was the only grandchild of his to have it.

When my grandpa died, my grandma found this in his room and gave it to me. It still has a few coins in it from him. (Mostly nickels, I think. No quarters, since I used it up in high school for days when I was desperate and broke.) I kept it at my parents' place for safe keeping but since they won't be in the country for a little bit, this time, I decided to bring it home with me. Inside, I also kept a card I got from him maybe from when I was one or two. It says, "Princess Joyce Alvarez." I never even knew he called me that. It's one of the only cards I'd ever seen him write to me as all the ones later were written in my grandma's handwriting telling me to clean my room and drink water all the time and to be good. haha

I think he would have been 91 today... It's strange to think that he died eleven years ago when I was 15, as it hasn't occurred to me that time has gone by that quickly. And strange to think that for all the occasions after he passed, he wasn't in any of the pictures with his pimpin' off white fedora, smiling up at the camera. For some reason, I feel like I can look back and imagine him there in all the pictures...

Anyway.

I'm a grown woman; almost twice the age I was when he passed away... but sometimes, I still wish for him and wish for when I was five and we were best friends driving to Bunny Market and walking out hand in hand with a plastic bag filled with candy and Pullman's white bread and chocolate ice cream (to make ice cream sandwiches)... I guess you are never too old to miss your grandpa...