My grandmother was a typical farm-family mother. She would regularly prepare dinner for thirty people, and that meant something was always cooking in the kitchen. All of my grandmother's recipes went back to her grandmother.

Now that I'm a grandfather myself, I realize that the best thing about having grandkids is that you get the kid for the best part of the ride - kind of like owning a car for only the first 10,000 miles. You can have your grandchildren for a couple of days and then turn them back over to the parents.

In high school, I weighed 175 to 180. I looked like Abraham Lincoln. I was 6-foot-3, biggest thing in the class, but tall, not fat.

I had the privilege of having two sets of loving grandparents.