Two years ago, I started writing a series of blogs telling stories from my childhood.\u00a0 I never finished what I started. Today I will continued from where I started.\u00a0 The reason I\u2019m telling these stories is partially to allow myself to reminisce and to remind myself of where I came from.\u00a0 We all have stories we want to tell and my fear is that if I don\u2019t write them down, I may not remember them to tell to my children.\u00a0 Our stories tell a lot about us and their value cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n
Over the coming weeks, I hope to remind all of you of the important stories you have to tell and remind you to tell these to those around you.<\/p>\n
When I was a little boy, my parents would take my little sister and I to Lake Ontario every summer for a week.\u00a0 My aunt and uncle (my dad\u2019s sister) had a house on the lake and were always happy to have us.\u00a0 My aunt and uncle have seven daughters so at times, it was tight and after a couple years, my parents took to renting another nearby house for the week.<\/p>\n
My memories of trips to Lake Ontario vary, but all bring a bright smile to my face.\u00a0 My uncle owned a liquor store in Syracuse at the time and was known to commute from the lake house to the store every morning to work during the summer.\u00a0 As a little kid I always woke up early.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t rare that I\u2019d wake up early enough to eat breakfast with my uncle before he headed off to work.<\/p>\n
I remember one morning specifically where my uncle made himself breakfast.\u00a0 My Uncle Herbie is a diabetic, so he isn\u2019t supposed to eat much sugar.\u00a0 My Aunt would always buy him plain corn flakes instead of frosted flakes that he much preferred.\u00a0 My uncle poured himself a bowl of plain cornflakes, added milk, and then a giant scoop of sugar.\u00a0 This is just the kind of man he is.\u00a0 To be fair, added plenty of sugar to mine too.<\/p>\n
Lake Ontario also always reminded me of barbecues.\u00a0 Since there were always so many people at the lake house, it wasn\u2019t uncommon for my uncle or my dad to cook out on the grill.\u00a0 It was never anything too fancy, just hot dogs and hamburgers and corn.\u00a0 The corn was some of the freshest and crunchiest I\u2019ve ever had even to this day.\u00a0 Just to get to my aunt and uncle\u2019s lake house you had to drive past hundreds of fields of fresh corn.\u00a0 New York white corn was always a tasty summer treat.<\/p>\n
Sometimes after dinner we\u2019d head over to an Ice Cream place called Cleo\u2019s. \u00a0The weird thing about Cleo\u2019s is that it was connected to a gas station and wasn\u2019t even called Cleo\u2019s.\u00a0 Years before, it was called Cleo\u2019s and my dad never took to calling it the new name and I don\u2019t think any of us know what it was called at the time.\u00a0 Cleo\u2019s served giant ice cream cones so it wasn\u2019t too surprising for all of us to order smalls.\u00a0 The small at Cleo\u2019s is the equivalent of most other place\u2019s large.\u00a0 I would always order Moose Tracks and if you don\u2019t know what that is, I suggest you look it up or try it (unless you are allergic to peanuts).\u00a0 I can remember on more than one occasion being piled into the back seat of my mom\u2019s white Ford Windstar.\u00a0 Years later Cleo\u2019s and the gas station burnt down.<\/p>\n
Lake Ontario is also partially where my love for baseball comes from.\u00a0 Up until 1999, the Cleveland Indians had a Minor League affiliate in nearby Watertown, New York.\u00a0 One of the necessary trips of every summer was to see the Indians play.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t really understand baseball at the time, but boy did I love cheering on the Indians.\u00a0 Somewhere I have a Sean Casey autograph from an Indians game, but I\u2019m not entirely sure where it is today.<\/p>\n
One of the other great things to about trips to Lake Ontario was playing with Scruffy.\u00a0 Scruffy was a stray dog that my Uncle Herbie had saved behind his liquor store one day.\u00a0 Back in an alley behind his story, my uncle found two kids being cruel to this poor little puppy.\u00a0 As the story goes, my uncle yelled at the kids and took the dog in.\u00a0 My uncle at the time was a pretty imposing figure of about 6\u20192\u201d or so and the family\u2019s dog at the time TJ had recently passed away, so the timing couldn\u2019t have been more perfect.<\/p>\n
Scruffy was one of the goofiest dogs I think I\u2019ve ever met.\u00a0 Whenever I\u2019d go into the lake, it was not out of the question to hear him running after me into the water.\u00a0 Scruffy wasn\u2019t great at the doggy paddle, so I had to stay shallow to make sure he could \u201ctake care of\u201d my little sister and I.\u00a0 If someone got near us in the water, he\u2019d bark to \u201cprotect\u201d us.\u00a0 Scruffy\u2019s other great skills were digging random holes in the sand, eating anything you put in front of him (I made that mistake once), going through my mother\u2019s luggage and scaring away birds.<\/p>\n
We spent at least one July 4th<\/sup> on the lake.\u00a0 I can remember sitting with my family watching the fireworks over the lake.\u00a0 My aunt and uncle\u2019s neighbors were playing with sparklers.\u00a0 Being only about 7 or 8 years old, I thought they were the coolest things in the world.\u00a0 Sparklers weren\u2019t legal in New Jersey, so I had never see anything like them.\u00a0 I can remember for years begging my parents to buy me some on trips into New York City.\u00a0 They finally broke down once we moved to Atlanta.<\/p>\n I remember so much more about my trips to Lake Ontario, but frankly, I don\u2019t know the right way to tell you.\u00a0 I remember giant coolers filled with clean drinking water, bunk beds, blue boxes of macaroni and cheese, grandparents, paddleboats, seaweed, fishing trips to Henderson Harbor, an antique typewriter I played with, dominos, card games, and far far too much ice cream to the point that I am at times surprised I still have teeth.<\/p>\n Trips to Lake Ontario were only a small period of time during my childhood, but they stand out to me.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to thing about how my trips up to the lake house made my life the way it is.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all had our own trips to the lake house, or down the shore, or wherever our favorite family vacation place was and I think it is important to remember these stories.\u00a0 They tell about who we are and where we came from more than a resume or a passport.\u00a0 Are stories are our lives and tell where we came from like the rings on the inside a tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago, I started writing a series of blogs telling stories from my childhood.\u00a0 I never finished what I started. Today I will continued from where I started.\u00a0 The reason I\u2019m telling these stories is partially to allow myself to reminisce and to remind myself of where I came from.\u00a0 We all have stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rosskressel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}