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What I remember most about my grandfather was the way he did things. He was an old German craftsman who owned every tool known to man, could make or fix anything, and though he spent long hours at his job as a welder for Commonwealth Edison in the Chicago area, he loved his family and devoted every minute of his free time to maintaining the house and yard. His way of showing his love was always tangible.

He built a waterfall garden for me with geodes and interesting minerals because I loved geology and liked waterfalls and wilderness. That miniature escape sat isolated in a large area of flat green suburban lawn, while my grandmother's vegetable patch provided a rich source of tomatoes, zucchini, herbs, cucumbers, even watermelons.

While other men complained about mowing their lawns with electric mowers and ride-on mowers, Grandpa got out there with an old fashioned manual mower. Instead of the sound of motors going off on long lazy summer days as local men did their weekend and evening mowing, he'd get out with a soft clip-clip-clip sound and rake up the sweepings instead of just blowing them into a carrybag. I remember how sweet the smell of those clippings was.

Shortly after they bought the house they'd longed for all their lives, my baby sister and I had watermelons out on his newly poured concrete patio. Grandpa laid the patio of course. One of the reasons our lawn and yard and house were so luxurious was that he actually did home improvements projects as soon as he thought of them and bought the tools and materials. He didn't rest that first year, getting the patio in and seeding his new lawn, so by the time we got there for the summer, wow, the lawn was already lush and green and perfect. Clipped weekly, it looked as if it belonged on a golf course.

We ate watermelons out on the patio and spat seeds at each other and threw them and played games with each other with the seeds. They indulged us and laughed and took pictures of us playing with the sprinklers and hosing down the patio afterward to clean up. Oddly, anytime chores needed doing at our grandparents' house, we didn't gripe about them. We wound up doing them like a game, we wound up enjoying them and taking pride in a good job. It was all attitude. They believed we were good kids and we'd have done anything to keep them believing that, so we hardly ever got in trouble.

Despite being a major trouble maker at school and at home with my parents, I can recall going through entire summers without being

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