Sid Shroyer

On a windy, wet Wednesday morning in the middle of March, Sara Stewart, the president and executive director of Unity Gardens, is out in the field, at the Main Garden, seven acres of urban farm land, between Prast Boulevard and Ardmore Trail near Honeywell and Beacon Heights, on the west side of
South Bend.

At the end of the long paperwork process that put South Bend Mayor Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg into the Navy, the induction officer, says, “You said you work for the city, right?”

“That’s right,” Pete says, without adding that he’s the boss.  

Is your employer supportive?

“Yes, everyone has been great.”
 

Put in for the employer service support award when you get home, he says to Pete. Elected officials always come to the ceremony.

“They just eat that (shit) up.”

Once a month I meet with my retired teacher colleagues from New Prairie High School for breakfast and it’s like heaven for me. We’ve crossed over into the other side and our friends are there, the lucky ones who made it into the land of milk and honey, French toast and bacon for five bucks, that is the senior menu at Manny’s Café.

I had a different piece for Michiana Chronicles prepared for today, one for election season, about the first time I voted back in 1972 and two years later when a funny guy running for Bloomington mayor smashed an egg on his head while I interviewed him on public access cable TV. It was my latest attempt at being heartwarming and universal, but the universe I occupy no longer seems like the right home for what I had to say.     

And “Heartwarming”?

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.