Memoirous

O-hi-o as my grandson Jack calls it. I was gone for 10 days. Not exactly a vacation as I ended up helping friends move. More on this later. I designed the trip around friends. Folks I had not seen since before the pandemic and even longer. One was my college housemate during my final year at Ohio University in Athens. It is in Athens Ohio where my friends Keith and Darlene Wasserman live; they facilitate a homeless shelter and several outreaches to the poor/elderly/children in southeast Ohio. Good Works was started by Keith while he was a student at OU when he decided to buy a house and invite homeless singles to stay in his basement. Very grassroots and organic. His motto is: Love is a verb. My plan after Athens was to bus to Cincinnati to visit Dave and Debbie who also used to live in the same ministry I was in in Chicago. They now work at a Catholic Worker house in Norwood called Lydia’s House where they assist families in crisis and moms and their babies with housing. I travele...

I’ll be leaving my job soon at the bike shop and starting at a local version of REI in Okemos called Playmakers. This coincides with an effort on my part to get out more and meet people and broaden my network. A 2024 goal of mine after being in the area for two and a half years. Using Facebook, I joined a women’s hiking group that meets multiple times a week all over the area. So on any given day I can locate a walk and meet up! Before starting my new job, I wanted to take little break and planned a trip to Ohio. I’ve already got my bus/train tickets. I arranged an itinerary that takes me in a loop from East Lansing to Detroit to Cleveland where a college friend will pick me up. After a few days she and I will drive to Athens, Ohio for me to meet up with an old high school friend. After a few days there, I’ll bus to Cincinnati to see friends from my Chicago days. My grandfather lived in Cincinnati; it’s where my Dad went to high school. His school still stands. The couple told me the...

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/09/cicadas-broodx-environment/ Brood X, the last time they appeared in hordes was in 2004. In a few months these monstrous looking bugs will burrow out of their 17-year hiatus and attach themselves to Everything. They will be everywhere, leaving exoskeletons and nesting in trees. If you miss seeing them—don’t worry—you will hear them as the average male mating song can reach 100 decibels, on par with living with a leaf blower. I mention all this as the 17-year cicada makes an appearance in my book Cloud of Witnesses. Roland comes out of his family’s trailer to find his bicycle covered with winged locusts, big-eyed bugs. Later Granny will fry some up to eat in her black-iron skillet. “Tastes like bacon,” she’ll inform Roland.   I pulled my bike out of the rack in front of the school and shook half a dozen cicadas off the seat. They had begun to hatch earlier in the week, googly red-eyed insects the size of...

New Title for Young People Features Iranian/American Relations Cloud of Witnesses by Jane Hertenstein (ages 11- 14, published by Golden Alley Press) is set in Athens, Ohio during the Iran Hostage Crisis. Roland Tanner is a hillbilly, someone from rural Appalachia, and often feels like an outsider within his family and community. Tested as gifted, he is bused from his rural trailer to the town middle school where he meets Hassan, another outsider, whose family has relocated to from Iran to Athens where his father works at the university. The friendship is challenged when hostages are taken when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is overrun in November 1979. While crowds in the streets of Tehran chanted “Death to America,” news outlets depict incidents of Americans burning the Iranian flag. Roland is forced to examine his alliances and loyalties. In many ways Roland and Hassan have a lot in common—both feel like they don’t belong. Hassan: “The kids at school think I’m a terror...

Children’s Book Title Suddenly Relevant   There has been an uptick of interest in southeast Ohio because of Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow’s viral speech. In his acceptance speech he mentioned his hometown and the poverty affecting that part of Ohio, where, as he mentioned, students often go to bed hungry. Cloud of Witnesses recently released by Golden Alley Press is a middle-grade novel about an Athens, Ohio eighth grader struggling to find his place in school, his family, and the world outside his small-town. Author Jane Hertenstein has given talks and compiled a bibliography of books written about children growing up in rural areas of America. “There are very few resources that reflect these children and their particular struggles.” She gave a seminar at the Illinois Reading Council for teachers and librarians. She cited Dave Eggers’ new novel The Lifters as a book using a rural setting. Appalachia and what is termed “fly-over country” has suddenly captured our ...