You may not have known that I was a local celebrity, at least I used to be, courtesy of my Grandpa. Now, my Grandpa was truly a local celebrity. He was the sports caster for a local radio station all my life, until the day he died, when I was a teenager. He died suddenly. Went to work that day, went to bed and died of heart failure in his sleep. Along with doing the sports, he also did the weather. People used to tell him that they only followed his weather forecasts and wanted to know how he was always so accurate. "I look out the window," he would tell them.
My Grandpa drove me home from school every day from first grade through sixth grade. He drove me to dance lessons too. He had a VW beetle in baby blue at first. I used to call it the Mickey Mouse car because it sort of looked like Mickey Mouse and it squeaked. I also called milk "mook" because cows said "moo" and cows made "mook." Yeah, I was a strange kid. He eventually replaced it with a Dodge Colt, which would become my first car when I was seventeen.
I was also rather precocious, and my Grandma had this habit of making tape recordings of me. She had dozens of tapes of me when I was about three or four, reciting stories and singing songs - The Three Little Pigs, Goldie Locks, Eggbert the Easter Egg, and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. My Grandpa must have had a real soft spot for my rendition of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He brought it to work with him, and he would play it on the radio at the opening of every baseball season. It was rather embarrassing once I got to be a teenager, but I never paid much attention to sports, nor did I listen to AM radio, so it's not like I had to suffer through it. But one person or another would always tell me they heard me on the radio after he played it.
I hadn't thought about that tape recording in years. Blackstone contacted a fellow Mason who works at the radio station for some reason. He remembers my Grandpa, and me from when I was a kid. He said they don't play the tape at the beginning of baseball season anymore. He said he thinks it was destroyed per my request. I don't remember ever making such a request, but I suppose it's entirely possible. I guess my fifteen minutes of fame are up, but how much can that matter when I had completely forgotten about them?
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