In 1970, my parents built a new house in the woods behind George & Emy’s beautiful garden in Turpin Hills. George had put up a high fence sometime before we moved in and in the typical style of a person who owned a tool “corral”, he dubbed it the “Stockade”. I remember walking through that fence and traipsing through that garden like it was yesterday. George was home recovering from an illness at the time, and I was home pretty much all the time too. I was just four you see. Although that stockade was put there to filter the rush of new homes and the traipsing kids who came with them; the gate to that fence soon had a sign proclaiming “Toby’s Pass”. When my brother Peter was old enough to walk, he got a sign too. George you see would never let anything good or bad upset the balance of his life.
With me at four years old, George at 50 was the oldest man I’d ever met. Every Sunday after church for years and years he and Emy would open their home to me. We would sit on his porch all afternoon, eating Emy’s cookies. Sometimes I’d pretend I was a barber, and comb his silver hair. Sometimes I was a dentist, and George would let me inspect his teeth with a flashlight. Later we would get out his bird books and while I would pray that a bald eagle or a roadrunner would fly by, George would tell me about the bluebirds which used to inhabit his woods. He taught me how to play chess, which I never really got good at, and gin rummy, and backgammon too. We had a ritual about winding his clocks together. He would hoist me up and let me turn the key on the Grandfather clock, and I was in charge of pulling the pinecone on the Cuckoo Clock too. George was responsible for the ship’s clock, which was much too high for me, and the anniversary clock, which he always opened with a handkerchief over his hand.
Our Sunday ritual became less frequent as I got older, and somewhere in my adolescence I stopped going to see George and Emy. But for those many years I had a grandfather in my backyard and the memories of those Sunday afternoons are some of the sweetest I have. I’m 34 now with a child of my own. He rides my knee like the Lone Ranger on Silver the same way I rode George’s knee, and last spring we built a bluebird house together.

- Luke “Toby” Leonard, Columbia, Maryland