I’ve lived a long time, and plan to live a good while longer. To that end I try, to the best of my ability, to take care of my physical, mental and emotional self.

The earliest memory I have is one of chasing my brother (the only one I had at the time) down the hall in the modestly-sized mobile home where we lived (in a trailer park near the shore of Lake Erie), tripping over a heating register on the floor, and crashing into one of the steel bars of a folding bed – with the bridge of my nose. I don’t recall much after that besides, perhaps, a very cold washcloth on my face, but I still have the scar – lo, these decades later. I had to have been about 2 years old at the time, a stage of life before conventional wisdom holds that one can remember things, yet I remember it. I always have.

My next memories are of us moving into and refurbishing a log cabin at the end of a short driveway that crossed a wooden bridge just downhill from the county road that stretched south from Cleveland, OH, where I had been born. The bridge crossed a creek which, I learned later, contained trout. Lots of trout, apparently. But more on that later. I was around 3 years old when we moved to the cabin.

So while we were moving in to the cabin, a number of changes were made. Those I recall specifically had to do with the roof, some kind of furnace or heater, electric and water. There was a spring house, with (one supposes) a spring in it, and my folks ran a pipe from that to the summer porch on the side of the cabin and installed a hand pump for water. Later, I think they actually put in indoor plumbing of some kind. I don’t recall using an outhouse. The single bare bulb hanging from the roof inside was augmented with some additional wiring, outlets and whatever. A big steel enamel heater of some kind (I think coal-fired, as we had a coal pile) was pressed into service. And the tin roof was covered over with plywood and roll-out roofing. The seams of the roll-out roofing were sealed with some kind of liquid tar compound from gallon cans, which occasioned one of my more vivid memories of that time, when I tried to lift one of these gallons to give it to someone on a ladder, and dropped it on my left big toe. The toenail, to this day, has never grown right again.

Some black fellow, whose name I don’t recall any more, was always there helping my parents refurbish the place. I don’t know where he came from, or how my parents met him, but they seemed good friends with him in time, and I have to assume they paid him for his labor (there’s no other reason he’d have worked all those hours). A story my mom used to tell concerned how people treated each other in the early Fifties. She needed to make a phone call, and we had no phone, so she had to go to the neighbor’s. Our black friend had a truck, so she got him to give her a ride. When they alighted from the truck and Mom knocked on the neighbor’s door to ask to use the phone, the neighbor said, “Oh, sure, Honey! Go on around back, Boy.” Whereupon, my mom, deeply offended by the clearly prejudiced treatment of our friend, stepped down off the porch and accompanied our friend around the side of the house to the back door. The neighbor opened it and said “Oh, no, Honey! I didn’t mean you!” Mom used the phone and left, but I’ve kind of wondered over the years if the neighbor learned ANYTHING from that interaction. We eventually got our own phone, on a party line, and one had to pick the receiver and make sure no one else was using the line, jiggle the cradle to alert the operator, and then ask for the desired number. Good times.