Checkered Thoughts

Nothing says summer like a red and white checkered vinyl table cloth spread over a picnic table.

I saw such an All-American picnic table this past weekend and was immediately transported to a time when grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my parent's house for barbecues.  Real barbecues where my father worried over whether there was enough lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes and a hot dog could go from appetizingly brown to crusty black in less than a minute.

It was usually I who was in charge of shuttling hot dogs and hamburger patties from the kitchen to the grill (a heady responsibility for a nine-year-old) where a team of men would monitor my father's cooking while discussing the latest baseball statistics.

In the kitchen, my mother, grandmother, and aunts worked to put the finishing touches on fruit, chicken, and potato salads - placing each in a colored bowl covered with plastic wrap.  That was in the days when it took three tries to tear off a length of plastic wrap without having the piece wrinkle into an unusable stuck-to-itself mess.

Entertainment came courtesy of transistor radios. Games of whiffle ball and badminton generally ran until the object being batted or swatted could no longer be seen in the dusk.

And at the end of it all.... there was no escaping a bath.