Tootsie Pops and Life’s Lessons

An Unexpected Symbol of My Difficult Grandpa’s Approval

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I hopped up into the front seat of the pickup truck next to my Grandpa. He didn’t harp on me to fasten my seatbelt like my mom always did. He wasn’t of that generation. To him, short-trip seatbelts were a nuisance, not a safety essential. I dutifully did it anyway. I was always that girl — bred for caution and safety — even when no one was looking.

We started down the dusty road with the gravel crunching beneath the truck’s giant wheels. Grandpa didn’t say much to me while we drove, but that wasn’t unusual. He never really had too much to say to me. I didn’t really know how to talk to him either. I was no longer the chatty child who crawled up in his lap. In my eleventh year, I was more tween than kid — not that anyone noticed, especially not my Grandpa. I was the only grandchild they had back then. No one was ready for me to grow up.

I stared out the window at the cottages on the lake side of the road. I wondered who lived there. Were they filled with summer people like me visiting their grandparents? Or were they people’s real homes? It was hard to think about people living in these cottages in the dead of winter or in the grey and sloppy Michigan March. This place for me only existed in the haze of summer.