Strange, Very strange...!

Summer vacations would always bring a smile to our faces. The thought of not having to go to school anymore gave us a renewed and bursting sense of energy. I remember the vacations I spent at gramps place tucked away in a little layout far from the maddening city. I loved my stay there and the beautiful view of the garden in the backyard which my grandfather fervently tended to. It is here that I met Ralph who lived with his parents in the opposite street.

Ralph and I became friends almost instantly, for one we were the same age and then Ralph had these uncanny little habits and objects which i never came across around where i lived. We would walk around the layout all day and talk about everything from the removing of bicycle spokes to the reflection of the sunset on the lake nearby helping ourselves with loads of popsicle and crackers as we walked along those roads which became familiar before too long, meeting the other kids and playing marble games and heading to the lake afterwards where we would play on the swing and run around until sunset on most days, when we all would marvel at the reflection it cast on the lake.

I never really felt more friendly with anyone else but Ralph, because no other kids our age around there had any of the uncanny sense of life as Ralph did back then. On other days we'd just stroll around with our popsicle and start hunting for empty matchboxes from the many streets around the area and keep it in our little bags which we usually kept marbles in. By evening we would go through our matchbox collection for the day and marvel at all the different types we would find and show it off to the other kids of the neighbourhood.

The thing with Ralph was he seldom went home during the day, he would generally come and stay around gramps place and we usually had dinner together, gramps told me that there were certain things that he wanted to avoid maybe but never told me what they were. I thought Ralph probably had a lot of lizards around the house, because even though he was not afraid to lift cockroaches and throw them at people, he was always scared of lizards.

By nights i would sit with gramps by the fireside where he would tell me stories about his days in the army and how he had to return because he was shot in the leg by the enemy. I didn't understand why the enemy would want to shoot my gramps, because he was such a kind man. Whenever i went to live there, gramps would always be happy to see me and never refused to provide anything i wanted. It was because he was very fond of me my mother would say. On sundays Ralph and I would accompany gramps to the club in his car, where we would swim and play ball with the other slightly snotty kids around the club, while gramps would play cards with his friends. Going to the club was always fun because there was always lots of delicious food there, Ralph and I would devour the filled patties and and gobble up loads of ice cream afterwards and then there was Jenny. Ralph would always be a tad bit shy when Jenny was around and he would almost suddenly stop talking on seeing Jenny, who was always vibrant and would come up and tell us about her little tea parties and invited us whenever we met. We never went. She stayed on the other side of the lake and we would always be busy playing marbles or collecting matchboxes or other vague things which tickled our curious fancy.

It was always sad when the summer vacation would end and i would have to return back to the city, Ralph would come running behind gramps car as we left, waving and shouting promising to visit me and write to me. For three years i always enjoyed going to gramps' place and all the fun that we had, until i found out that Ralph was moving, He said that his father would stay back and that he was leaving with his mother to another town because they had a new house there. He never wrote to me from his new house and I never heard from him since.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 10:54. |