I have always believed in being on Vince Lombardi time... you know, 15 minutes early for every appointment and every event. There is one exception to that rule and it concerns my beautiful grandbabies.

I lovingly call Ashley and Ava, my granddaughters, my “hyetti’s,” which is an Arabic word which roughly translated means “my heart” or as I’m fond of saying… “the breath of my life.” They are that and so much more.

I’ll show up a day early, if necessary, at be with my beautiful little “hyetti’s.” Whenever the call comes, no matter what I'm doing, I immediately drop it to be with Ashley and Ava…. I am never late. I’ll lie, cheat or steal from someone else’s time to be with my babies. PERIOD! It’s a rule and you’re going to have to get over it if you’re the victim I’m robbing on their behalf.

So here I sit in what my grandbaby Ashley calls "the bounce house." What a riot. We're celebrating Ashley's third birthday in the Playtime Playhouse, just east of our digs in St. Cloud, Florida. Just when I thought everybody had thought of everything, somebody comes up with a clever way to party hearty for pre-school kids.

Parents rent the joint for a couple of hours and invite all the girl's buds in for a couple of hours of fun and frolic. The place is loaded with inflated phony castles and imitation beach slides that tempt even the shyest kid in the group.

Ava is only a year old and just acquired her wheels, so she can now walk and run with the best of them. The kids float around from play area to play area, inspecting everything as toy trains and airplanes to fake and real computers. They even have Wii Sports video games. There are donkey and fish rockers. God I wish I were three again.

When I was Ashley's age, our idea of a birthday bash was a hotdog cookout out behind my grandfather's house. He lived right next door to our home in the town of Lexington, SC. My grandfather was affectionately known as "Jew Mack." He was Mayor of Lexington, SC in the late forties and early fifties.

No, he was not Jewish. He was Lutheran by faith and of Lebanese blood descent, but in the old deep, south, he was lovingly called "Jew Mack.”

Birthday parties weren't the only event "Jew Mack.” hosted in his back yard. He was a big sports fan and routinely fed Lexington High football, basketball and baseball teams a meal after a big game. Everybody in the community showed up for the gala celebrations, which usually toasted a big Wildcat victory.

These kinds of wonderful gatherings are too often a thing of the past. Yes, the setting is different today, but the gathering of family and community to celebrate what is good in your life is still a terrific way of creating memories that will last forever.

We didn't have a "bounce house," but we did have a tree house with a swing that hung from the trees.

We didn't have Wii Sports; we did have real sports.

We didn't have fake donkey and horses on which to rock; but we did have real chickens we could chase around the back yard.

We didn’t have inflated plastic slides, but we did have the hill beside the Lexington County Heath Department that we could slide down year round. Grab a garbage can lid or a shovel and you’re in business, be it summer or winter.

We didn’t have plastic, inflated castles but we could build our own sand castles.

We didn't have a phony fish rocker, but we did have the old Mill Pond at the bottom of the hill below our home on South Lake Drive where we could go to do some real fishing, swimming or swing from a close by tree.

It didn't matter what we had back then or what our grandkids have today. What matters is that family gets together to celebrate life. And that's why it's important to be on Vince Lombardi time for things like birthday parties and other celebrations.

These are events on which memories are made and one should never be late for "memory makers."