Summers in Hollywood

Growing up in Florida, I used to spend about one month every summer in Hollywood with my Grandma Ellen. She was a large lady whose spirit was forceful and gritty, though she always followed up with a laugh. I don't remember exactly, but I must have been with her every summer from age 9 to 12 or 13.
Her house was just a mile or so from the coast, so we used to go to the beach often and lay on a blanket with that radio, soaking up the rays. I remember the weight of her body and how she would roll back and forth on her belly positioning her arms beneath so she could look around us. Grandpa Bob often took me to the beach also, usually in the mornings we'd park by the boardwalk and speedwalk to the rising sun with all the other plastic dignitaries. On the way home we would stop by the donut shop and pick up an assortment of day-olds for half-price. Once Grandpa told me we were lost, and he drove around and around their neighborhood for thirty minutes or so until he was bored enough to go home. Sometimes my cousin and I would hunt lizards with rubber-bands, which were strong enough to tear their skin and prove fatal when close enough. At night I'd fall asleep in the guest room, watching tv on the couch. The window unit ac was cranked up high so that the hum was pervasive and the air crisp like foil. I liked to have the fan on also, to feel the air move around my body wrapped in icy sheets. One night I saw a huge cockroach crawling on the ceiling and just as I became nervous so did he. His wings clapped and began to fly, though with a sharp knock the fan blades sent that roach to his death and a hard collision with the wall. Grandma Ellen died when I was 14 I think. She had an anuerism in her brain, brought on by a hasty switch of blood thinning meds; her head collided with the white porcelain of the bathroom toilet as she collapsed.