Hi! Welcome to “What’s Your Story,” the every other Tuesday space where I invite the “Living in a Body” community to participate in the writing. Thank you to everyone who participated in Your Musical Moment! It was a success. For each episode, I offer a writing prompt. In under 200 words, YOU get to practice telling YOUR story.
Tell us a story from your hometown.
Last Tuesday, in “a Body of Work,” I shared an old song that celebrates my hometown. In 200 words or less (here's a word counter), tell us a story from your hometown. Don’t have a hometown? Tell us that story!
Maybe it’s the time you were almost prom king or that neighborhood block party that survived the microburst or that time you ventured to the “other side of the tracks” or how about that memory from the dive bar that your friends dad owned. Tell us the story.
Tip of the Week:Come up with a catchy first line. In TikTok, you have to grab the viewers attention in the first two seconds or they swipe to the next video. Try to keep that in mind here as well.
Keep it under 200 words. Be honest. Have fun. Leave your contribution in the comments. I’ll go first.
I have a special relationship with muffins. I'm the kinda guy that can tell you exactly where to get the best muffin in Ohio. It's a little place in Yellow Springs called, The Emporium. The muffin is called the “Good Muffin.” It's the perfect combination of healthy, sweet, crunchy, spongey and salty. It's the best muffin in Ohio.
I live in a town where there are no good muffins. Now to be fair, I don’t eat muffins anymore. I haven't eaten a muffin since 2014, so I'm not the most current muffin connoisseur. But let me take you back to the early 2000’s, the height of my muffin awareness. There wasn't a single good muffin in town. Jerry’s diner was gone. Susan's and Brady's were the options, but I don't wanna eat a muffin with a name like Lemon Poppyseed or Morning Glory that was poured out of a bag. It always baffled me. This is a town that should have a muffin. Being the muffin guy that I am, I'd drive all the way to Yellow Springs just to get a good one. Actually, I used to wish I lived in Yellow Springs for that muffin. But I'm a Kent guy... forever.
What’s an anarchist? What do they cook? I grew up in Charlestown Township, a small rural community outside of Ravenna. Charlestown is home to a large chunk of the Ravenna Arsenal, not much else. However, there was a magical place called “the Survival Center” when I was growing up. During the summer, my neighborhood friends and I would ride our bikes to there. My first time going I was about 11 or 12 and completely in awe of the strange smells of dehydrated foods and military surplus. We would spend hours inspecting everything on the shelves- machetes, canteens, dried fruits, how to guides, water purification equipment, anything you might need to survive an apocalyptic event. A book on the shelf caught my eye, the Anarchist Cookbook. I had no idea what an anarchist was or what they liked to eat. Naturally, I had to find out. To my surprise, it wasn’t a cookbook at all (unless anarchists eat pipe bombs and poisons). I felt like I was doing something wrong by looking at this book, so I hurriedly put it back on the shelf. Not too many years later, I learned what an anarchist is and that possessing their cookbook could end you up on some government watchlist.
14 yrs old and newly at high school .. no more grey uniform, yippeee ! Pink socks the beginning signs of my rebel with a cause ..
And then it happened . He Nick C 1 yr older calling out of a high up classroom window to me . Me telling him to get lost or words to that effect . I can't remember our meeting after that but I quickly knew I loved him , my god I loved him .. 2.5 yrs of dizzy happiness . He was dashingly good looking a bit of a young Harry Connick Junior. He bought me flowers , took me to the cinema and we used to kiss in alleyways - a lot ! Seeing him , being with him , thinking about him was pure joy ..
The stand out moment was he bought us tickets to see Bon Jovi ( I know ! . Me telling my mother I was staying at his on the sofa and us not telling his mum I was staying at all ... We got caught ! Young love hey 💖
“Belmont Girls’ Bottle Found”. That was the title of the local newspaper article in 1963, which described how my sister and I had thrown a champagne bottle over the side of an ocean liner (there used to be such a thing) on its way to Europe, and it was found by a young girl in Normandy, France. Nothing much happened in Belmont, California in those days; this was big news. I still have the clipping.
Home is where the berries are growing. As a kid growing up in Florida, we had lots of ways to keep cool during the hot summers. Sometimes on Saturdays, my dad would ask if my sister and I wanted to ride our bikes to the railroad tracks and pick blackberries. Of course we said yes, because it meant we would also stop at the Sack 'N Save and pick up a gallon of vanilla ice cream. Then we'd hoof it back as fast as we could before it completely melted and make ourselves a nice fat bowl of ice cream piled high with a mountain of blackberries. If you could still see the ice cream, there weren't enough berries in that bowl.
When my kids were young, we rented a house in Hartville that happened to have an enormous patch of raspberries. My kids would wander in to go snacking, and I would lose sight of them. They would emerge a long time later with red lips and chins. We've never stopped marveling at those glorious berries.
Now, in my hometown of Kent, I've planted black raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I think this is home now.
I grew up in El Segundo, CA and the planes taking off and landing at LAX were quite loud, but one got accustomed to them over time. We knew to turn up the TV, or pause our conversation until they passed over.
Once when I was about 4, my dad took me on a walk to the park. But what we saw there was an apartment with a single engine airplane sticking out through the roof, its tail in the air and smoke billowing all around it.
The woman in the apartment had been killed just sitting in her living room. And I thought, if it happened to her, it could happen to us.
We didn’t have central heat so my parents had a heater installed in my bedroom, which required cutting a hole in the wall
That night, the sound of the planes’ roaring engines was amplified so intensely I was certain the huge jets were going to crash into our house. I spent the night clutching my pillow tightly and hiding in the bathroom thinking I would be safer there because it was quieter.
Eventually I got used to the sound, but I often dreamt about plane crashes.
and let me take you way back, Hal! in the early eighties, my bestie, Judy Carrier and I were on a quest for the quintessential muffin in the Hartford, Connecticut vicinity. we called our meanderings, *Muffin Life* ❗️`````````````````````````````````` that's it! a short story!
We had drainage ditches on either side of our narrow street in Westlake, Ohio. Back then there was still a lot of land, and our family had 3 acres. We had a party when I was in high school. We told people to park on the grass in the empty lot,next to our house ( part of our land, with a separate driveway), or to the side of the driveway in the grass, but to not park on the street. Someone didn’t listen and his car slid sideways into the ditch. I called a friend, who lived at the end of our street, who was able, with a truck and heavy chains to tow the car out. Years after my parents sold the front lots and eventually the family home, the city put in sidewalks where the ditches had been. It’s a silly memory. Hard to believe that Westlake was once so rural!!
I grew up on the side of the tracks. Not the right side or the wrong side of the tracks, just the side of the tracks. We would line up army men on the rails and wait for the train to come. Waiting to see if any would survive and what kind of damage they would take. We progressed to putting pennies on the rails when we would find them on the street.
Now, living on the side of the tracks, trains never bothered me much. Glasses and dishes would rattle in the cupboards. We lived near a few schools. In daylight hours, the trains had to blow their horns from just before our house until after they had passed the schools. The only time the trains bothered me was when they made my records skip from the bouncing.
The first time I had a sleepover with a friend at our house and a train went by in the middle of the night, they sat bolt upright and screamed. After that, I warned my friends before they slept over.
When my family first moved to Kent, Ohio, Ann Marie came up to me at my 5th grade locker and said "Do you wanna be my best friend?" I was scared and lonely and didn't have any friends yet so I said "Sure!"
We played together after school most days. One day she said "Let's go to Reinker's and get candy." Candy was a Special Occasion in my family. Definitely NOT something I did without my parents' permission. But with great trepidation I said "OK."
Now here's the thing -- neither one of us had *money.* So we went to Reinker's and STOLE candy. Pockets full of candy. Then we found a secret place in the woods (I have no idea where these woods were, but they were dark and dangerous) and ate the candy. Most of it. It was such a special occasion to have candy that I didn't want to eat it all in one shot, so I took some home and hid it in my drawer.
Occasionally my mother would surprise me while I was at school and clean my room. This particular day my mother cleaned my room and she FOUND THE CANDY. She took me aside and said "Where did this candy come from?" All I could think of to say was "I have no idea how that candy got there. I definitely didn't put it there." 🤷♀️ I don't remember what happened next. I was terrified of getting in trouble and I did everything I could to not get in trouble, but I'm pretty sure I got in trouble. I never stole candy again (or did I?) and I never went to those mysterious woods again.
My home "town" was the rural township of Brimfield, just south of Kent. I liked to go with brother David and friends to a swimming hole on Plum Creek. The channel of the creek was about 10 feet wide in most places, and only a foot or so deep. But here the creek widened into a pool 4 or 5 feet deep. A large log had fallen across the pool over the deepest part, just right for diving. It was quite private, not visible from any road or open field. One time Albert dove into the pool straight down and rammed his hands into the rocks at the bottom. The force dislocated his shoulder! We thought we should get dressed fast and walk back to Albert's house and call his parents and probably get an emergency ride to a doctor, or a hospital or...just one problem. Albert was not supposed to be off the property. So I just grabbed his upper arm and guided the bone back into the socket. The pain went down immediately, and the shoulder looked normal again, so we just didn't tell any grown-ups. I felt rather proud of myself, but I couldn't tell anyone. Bummer!
I experienced a Cat 5 hurricane named Carol on Eastern Long Island in 1953.
We lived in an old farm house with a large yard for the tractors to turn around in and a large front lawn sloping down to Main Road. A 2 lane road went west from Main Road and past the side lawn and we were trapped in by trees that had fallen across the driveway, the side road, and the main road.
We had no electricity for a week so my dad rigged a bicycle chain to the water pump and would keep pedaling until there was enough water to fill the bathtub, the sinks, and all the buckets we had. We had to eat all the perishable food quickly before it spoiled, then ate produce that had been canned over the summer and store bought canned goods. It was lucky that electric can openers hadn't been invented yet!
My sister and I thought it was fun to lean back into the wind as far as we could. The eye passed over then the winds came at us from the opposite direction and damaged whatever they didn't get on the first round. It was an unforgettable experience! Houses and barns back then were built to last so there was very little property damage.
we used to walk along the tracks where we weren’t supposed to go to watch the construction workers building a fancy new housing development where we used to have woods to play in. I had on my BRAND NEW RED KEDS. One day, it had rain a lot & a big pit at the site had filled with water. We were messing around taking turns jumping over it. When my turn came,I didn’t make it across. My foot sunk deep in the muck & my right shoe got sucked off my foot. I scrambled to the edge in horror. BRAND NEW KEDS! “You’re DEAD if dad finds out!” my sister taunted. I poked around with a stick for a long time in the rain but no way, my red Ked was gone forever in that mud pit. My sister carried me home piggy back. My dad was sooo angry, he marched me back there the next day with a shovel to dig for that shoe. I cried and begged & promised I would save money to buy new shoes. “DAMN RIGHT YOU WILL,” he roared, “BRAND NEW GODDAM KEDS! KEEP DIGGING!” All the workers stood around the pit laughing their heads off at me.
“Asshole ,” I muttered under my breath.
“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME ?!”
He heard me say it, and I meant it.
Things were different with me & him from then on. And I never found the shoe.
My hometown…Chicago is! Living in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Chicago has some risks. Often our friends in the apartments building would get together and order pizza from Lenny’s on 53rd street. This particulate Friday night when the ‘MOMS’ ’ decided they didn’t want to cook, they sent ‘the guys’ out for pizza. Everything went smoothly….orders taken and paid for….and the owner handed them the two boxes of hot, cheese-loaded pizza and the guys headed out the door. SUDDENLY, two ‘intruders’ confronted them and within seconds swiped the two boxes of pizza and off they ran. Aaaargh. Yep….no pizza that night for the hungry families waiting at home. Sigh. 🥵
I have a special relationship with muffins. I'm the kinda guy that can tell you exactly where to get the best muffin in Ohio. It's a little place in Yellow Springs called, The Emporium. The muffin is called the “Good Muffin.” It's the perfect combination of healthy, sweet, crunchy, spongey and salty. It's the best muffin in Ohio.
I live in a town where there are no good muffins. Now to be fair, I don’t eat muffins anymore. I haven't eaten a muffin since 2014, so I'm not the most current muffin connoisseur. But let me take you back to the early 2000’s, the height of my muffin awareness. There wasn't a single good muffin in town. Jerry’s diner was gone. Susan's and Brady's were the options, but I don't wanna eat a muffin with a name like Lemon Poppyseed or Morning Glory that was poured out of a bag. It always baffled me. This is a town that should have a muffin. Being the muffin guy that I am, I'd drive all the way to Yellow Springs just to get a good one. Actually, I used to wish I lived in Yellow Springs for that muffin. But I'm a Kent guy... forever.
What’s an anarchist? What do they cook? I grew up in Charlestown Township, a small rural community outside of Ravenna. Charlestown is home to a large chunk of the Ravenna Arsenal, not much else. However, there was a magical place called “the Survival Center” when I was growing up. During the summer, my neighborhood friends and I would ride our bikes to there. My first time going I was about 11 or 12 and completely in awe of the strange smells of dehydrated foods and military surplus. We would spend hours inspecting everything on the shelves- machetes, canteens, dried fruits, how to guides, water purification equipment, anything you might need to survive an apocalyptic event. A book on the shelf caught my eye, the Anarchist Cookbook. I had no idea what an anarchist was or what they liked to eat. Naturally, I had to find out. To my surprise, it wasn’t a cookbook at all (unless anarchists eat pipe bombs and poisons). I felt like I was doing something wrong by looking at this book, so I hurriedly put it back on the shelf. Not too many years later, I learned what an anarchist is and that possessing their cookbook could end you up on some government watchlist.
Young love in Leicester, England ,UK
14 yrs old and newly at high school .. no more grey uniform, yippeee ! Pink socks the beginning signs of my rebel with a cause ..
And then it happened . He Nick C 1 yr older calling out of a high up classroom window to me . Me telling him to get lost or words to that effect . I can't remember our meeting after that but I quickly knew I loved him , my god I loved him .. 2.5 yrs of dizzy happiness . He was dashingly good looking a bit of a young Harry Connick Junior. He bought me flowers , took me to the cinema and we used to kiss in alleyways - a lot ! Seeing him , being with him , thinking about him was pure joy ..
The stand out moment was he bought us tickets to see Bon Jovi ( I know ! . Me telling my mother I was staying at his on the sofa and us not telling his mum I was staying at all ... We got caught ! Young love hey 💖
“Belmont Girls’ Bottle Found”. That was the title of the local newspaper article in 1963, which described how my sister and I had thrown a champagne bottle over the side of an ocean liner (there used to be such a thing) on its way to Europe, and it was found by a young girl in Normandy, France. Nothing much happened in Belmont, California in those days; this was big news. I still have the clipping.
Home is where the berries are growing. As a kid growing up in Florida, we had lots of ways to keep cool during the hot summers. Sometimes on Saturdays, my dad would ask if my sister and I wanted to ride our bikes to the railroad tracks and pick blackberries. Of course we said yes, because it meant we would also stop at the Sack 'N Save and pick up a gallon of vanilla ice cream. Then we'd hoof it back as fast as we could before it completely melted and make ourselves a nice fat bowl of ice cream piled high with a mountain of blackberries. If you could still see the ice cream, there weren't enough berries in that bowl.
When my kids were young, we rented a house in Hartville that happened to have an enormous patch of raspberries. My kids would wander in to go snacking, and I would lose sight of them. They would emerge a long time later with red lips and chins. We've never stopped marveling at those glorious berries.
Now, in my hometown of Kent, I've planted black raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I think this is home now.
I grew up in El Segundo, CA and the planes taking off and landing at LAX were quite loud, but one got accustomed to them over time. We knew to turn up the TV, or pause our conversation until they passed over.
Once when I was about 4, my dad took me on a walk to the park. But what we saw there was an apartment with a single engine airplane sticking out through the roof, its tail in the air and smoke billowing all around it.
The woman in the apartment had been killed just sitting in her living room. And I thought, if it happened to her, it could happen to us.
We didn’t have central heat so my parents had a heater installed in my bedroom, which required cutting a hole in the wall
That night, the sound of the planes’ roaring engines was amplified so intensely I was certain the huge jets were going to crash into our house. I spent the night clutching my pillow tightly and hiding in the bathroom thinking I would be safer there because it was quieter.
Eventually I got used to the sound, but I often dreamt about plane crashes.
and let me take you way back, Hal! in the early eighties, my bestie, Judy Carrier and I were on a quest for the quintessential muffin in the Hartford, Connecticut vicinity. we called our meanderings, *Muffin Life* ❗️`````````````````````````````````` that's it! a short story!
The day a car slid sideways into the ditch!
We had drainage ditches on either side of our narrow street in Westlake, Ohio. Back then there was still a lot of land, and our family had 3 acres. We had a party when I was in high school. We told people to park on the grass in the empty lot,next to our house ( part of our land, with a separate driveway), or to the side of the driveway in the grass, but to not park on the street. Someone didn’t listen and his car slid sideways into the ditch. I called a friend, who lived at the end of our street, who was able, with a truck and heavy chains to tow the car out. Years after my parents sold the front lots and eventually the family home, the city put in sidewalks where the ditches had been. It’s a silly memory. Hard to believe that Westlake was once so rural!!
I grew up on the side of the tracks. Not the right side or the wrong side of the tracks, just the side of the tracks. We would line up army men on the rails and wait for the train to come. Waiting to see if any would survive and what kind of damage they would take. We progressed to putting pennies on the rails when we would find them on the street.
Now, living on the side of the tracks, trains never bothered me much. Glasses and dishes would rattle in the cupboards. We lived near a few schools. In daylight hours, the trains had to blow their horns from just before our house until after they had passed the schools. The only time the trains bothered me was when they made my records skip from the bouncing.
The first time I had a sleepover with a friend at our house and a train went by in the middle of the night, they sat bolt upright and screamed. After that, I warned my friends before they slept over.
When my family first moved to Kent, Ohio, Ann Marie came up to me at my 5th grade locker and said "Do you wanna be my best friend?" I was scared and lonely and didn't have any friends yet so I said "Sure!"
We played together after school most days. One day she said "Let's go to Reinker's and get candy." Candy was a Special Occasion in my family. Definitely NOT something I did without my parents' permission. But with great trepidation I said "OK."
Now here's the thing -- neither one of us had *money.* So we went to Reinker's and STOLE candy. Pockets full of candy. Then we found a secret place in the woods (I have no idea where these woods were, but they were dark and dangerous) and ate the candy. Most of it. It was such a special occasion to have candy that I didn't want to eat it all in one shot, so I took some home and hid it in my drawer.
Occasionally my mother would surprise me while I was at school and clean my room. This particular day my mother cleaned my room and she FOUND THE CANDY. She took me aside and said "Where did this candy come from?" All I could think of to say was "I have no idea how that candy got there. I definitely didn't put it there." 🤷♀️ I don't remember what happened next. I was terrified of getting in trouble and I did everything I could to not get in trouble, but I'm pretty sure I got in trouble. I never stole candy again (or did I?) and I never went to those mysterious woods again.
My home "town" was the rural township of Brimfield, just south of Kent. I liked to go with brother David and friends to a swimming hole on Plum Creek. The channel of the creek was about 10 feet wide in most places, and only a foot or so deep. But here the creek widened into a pool 4 or 5 feet deep. A large log had fallen across the pool over the deepest part, just right for diving. It was quite private, not visible from any road or open field. One time Albert dove into the pool straight down and rammed his hands into the rocks at the bottom. The force dislocated his shoulder! We thought we should get dressed fast and walk back to Albert's house and call his parents and probably get an emergency ride to a doctor, or a hospital or...just one problem. Albert was not supposed to be off the property. So I just grabbed his upper arm and guided the bone back into the socket. The pain went down immediately, and the shoulder looked normal again, so we just didn't tell any grown-ups. I felt rather proud of myself, but I couldn't tell anyone. Bummer!
I experienced a Cat 5 hurricane named Carol on Eastern Long Island in 1953.
We lived in an old farm house with a large yard for the tractors to turn around in and a large front lawn sloping down to Main Road. A 2 lane road went west from Main Road and past the side lawn and we were trapped in by trees that had fallen across the driveway, the side road, and the main road.
We had no electricity for a week so my dad rigged a bicycle chain to the water pump and would keep pedaling until there was enough water to fill the bathtub, the sinks, and all the buckets we had. We had to eat all the perishable food quickly before it spoiled, then ate produce that had been canned over the summer and store bought canned goods. It was lucky that electric can openers hadn't been invented yet!
My sister and I thought it was fun to lean back into the wind as far as we could. The eye passed over then the winds came at us from the opposite direction and damaged whatever they didn't get on the first round. It was an unforgettable experience! Houses and barns back then were built to last so there was very little property damage.
BRAND NEW KEDS
When I was around 9 or 10
we used to walk along the tracks where we weren’t supposed to go to watch the construction workers building a fancy new housing development where we used to have woods to play in. I had on my BRAND NEW RED KEDS. One day, it had rain a lot & a big pit at the site had filled with water. We were messing around taking turns jumping over it. When my turn came,I didn’t make it across. My foot sunk deep in the muck & my right shoe got sucked off my foot. I scrambled to the edge in horror. BRAND NEW KEDS! “You’re DEAD if dad finds out!” my sister taunted. I poked around with a stick for a long time in the rain but no way, my red Ked was gone forever in that mud pit. My sister carried me home piggy back. My dad was sooo angry, he marched me back there the next day with a shovel to dig for that shoe. I cried and begged & promised I would save money to buy new shoes. “DAMN RIGHT YOU WILL,” he roared, “BRAND NEW GODDAM KEDS! KEEP DIGGING!” All the workers stood around the pit laughing their heads off at me.
“Asshole ,” I muttered under my breath.
“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME ?!”
He heard me say it, and I meant it.
Things were different with me & him from then on. And I never found the shoe.
My hometown…Chicago is! Living in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Chicago has some risks. Often our friends in the apartments building would get together and order pizza from Lenny’s on 53rd street. This particulate Friday night when the ‘MOMS’ ’ decided they didn’t want to cook, they sent ‘the guys’ out for pizza. Everything went smoothly….orders taken and paid for….and the owner handed them the two boxes of hot, cheese-loaded pizza and the guys headed out the door. SUDDENLY, two ‘intruders’ confronted them and within seconds swiped the two boxes of pizza and off they ran. Aaaargh. Yep….no pizza that night for the hungry families waiting at home. Sigh. 🥵