Flying Island

  When an equitation rider on an American Saddlebred trots to the rail for pattern work, the show ring goes soundless. No organ music. No applause. No cheers from horse show moms. No whispers from the spectators in the red bunting-hung stands. No tap-tap-tap of the trainer’s whip on her thigh. It’s so quiet, the other riders, left to wait their turn or—God forbid—not get called to the rail at all, can hear their horses breathe. Or themselves breathe. It’s hard to tell the difference. Focused, they feel every crease in their gloves, see every hair on their horses’ necks, and smell their own sweat.             Horse shows have the agricultural ambiance of any barn, but with a party twist. There’s the tang of livestock urine soaked into sawdust, but on top of it, the Aqua Net used on both horse and human manes and the grease of hot dogs rotating endlessly behind the concession stand. The ring, which might also take turns bein...

Image credit: Roman Kozhevnikov  It’s the last walk of the night that makes my mind wander along with my body. The dogs relish an unencumbered path, stopping occasionally to watch their breath hang in the air, while the cold arrests our lungs.    It’s the cold and the quiet that make me think of another night.    A different cold. A different place.    A different time.   He drove north and swung right where the road dead-ended into a cornfield. Defrocked stalks jutted from the frozen earth in jagged, incongruous patterns—a life-size, child’s crayon depiction of the landscape. A cold 12-pack of Milwaukee’s “Beast” as we called the cheap, watery beer, slid along the seat between us. Pat reached over and grabbed a couple cans, then wedged the flimsy cardboard against the gear shift in his beat-up pickup. Michael Jackson’s voice rose softly in the background from a mixed tape that belonged to his sister. A product of our homogenous small town 19...

Every morning, I walk around Martin Luther King Jr. Park and Peace Memorial with my dogs. Only a block away from my home, it's my neighborhood greenspace. The three of us take in the breathtaking cityscape, or at least I do, with the Salesforce Tower framed by spruces, maples, and oaks. The brown George and the black JJ for the most part sniff and run heartily.  image credit: DowntownIndy.org The area, referred to in real estate parlance as  Kennedy-King , was formerly considered “an African-American ghetto,” a description pulled from Wikipedia. But that reference doesn't necessarily point out the exact location. It could have been any Indianapolis area during the Sixties. I assume, though, Kennedy-King is a perfect square, using the streets east of Central Avenue and west of Monon Trail, while Sixteenth Street borders to the south, then Fall Creek fences in the north. Now, even with gentrification, many empty lots grow weeds instead of Indiana corn, situated next door to a pe...

I was three years old when my parents bought their first house. It was located a few blocks from Main Street and not far from the downtown business district in Goshen, Indiana. In 1956 our “inner-city” neighborhood had scads of other baby-boomer kids. Most of the houses were modest, sided with clapboard, and had small yards. There was one vacant lot where we had massive football and baseball games with ten or twelve kids on a side.  Four years later my dad got a promotion. We moved into a larger three-story house on the edge of town with a big yard which sloped down to a canal behind the house. Across the canal was open farm land. My brother and I restored a decrepit row boat we bought from an old duffer who lived up river from our house. We’d paddle down the canal and meet up with other barefoot kids at the junction of the canal and the Elkhart River. Our gang in cut-off shorts and t-shirts captured frogs, turtles, and crawdads along the muddy banks of the river. On Saturday after...