Sid Shroyer

It was my good fortune to be in attendance the evening that the Carter Build Habitat for Humanity folks treated themselves to a night out at the South Bend Cubs game at the end of August.  I would have been on the couch at home, otherwise, checking the TV for the latest episode of “What Goes Around Comes Around,” if my buddy Doug Snyder had not called the night before and said,

My friend Arthur was struggling with things, things like life and death, and everything in between, and so with advice from someone who is paid to smile when she joyously reads what she is told to read, by anyone who will pay her, my friend Arthur enlisted the support of the DNA analysis company “21 and Done” to help him see if he could find out what was up with him.

Back in April, that first weekend when it seemed like winter would, in fact, end, a group of Kiwanis fellows got together to pick up the trash along State Road 2 between Mayflower and the bypass.

This was my first time to the task, being a new member, and if I say I was surprised by the amount rubbish along the road, that would suggest that I’d given it some thought, which I hadn’t, really.  

I grew up in a place where people had “jobs.” The first time the word “career” hit me I was 15, listening to a song called “Here We Are in the Years,” on the first Neil Young album, that Joe Petro lent me, on the little yellow G-E “Wildcat” record player in my room.

...Lives become careers

……Let us out of here

It would take more than two days of driveway shoveling and the snow piled up around South Bend Riley High School last month to keep my friend, Terry, and me, and three thousand other people, out of the gym for the Saturday evening basketball game between two of the best teams in the state of Indiana. I had anticipated a great game and, sure enough, the start of the fourth quarter, had me thinking, “Man, I hate to see this thing get over.’

This weather reminds me of the “old house.” The “old house” was where we lived while, after work and on weekends, Dad was building the “new house” in the backyard. Then, and mostly since, that was the time in my life when I couldn’t wait to get out of that old house.