Flying Island

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...