David Soubly

So I turned 65 this last weekend in January.

Yippee.

It was a Saturday, so I started it the usual way, which is to do a morning workout. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I do situps, upper body strength training, and (recently - thank you, COVID), stair stepper. The other days, you’ll find me on a morning hike in the woods.

I read email, opened a lot of ecards, most from close friends but a few from websites I didn’t even know had my birthday in their files, somewhere.

One thing I...

When I was a kid, the world didn’t seem dangerous. It was just out there. Whether backyard or neighborhood park, it was a place to explore. I didn’t realize my parents and other adults were watching out for me.

I went to kindergarten when I was five. The school was several blocks away, across a somewhat busy street that had adult crossing guards. But there were still side streets to cross on our own.

My very first day, Mom walked me to school, and a genial old man, the school principal,...

THE GAME.

I used to play a game as a kid called Chutes and Ladders. You probably did, too. You might have known it as Snakes and Ladders. It’s based on the Indian game Moksha Patam, probably invented about eight hundred years ago.

Chutes and Ladders was very easy to learn, so kids of all ages could play it. Basically, each player rolled dice, advanced their piece, and moved upward on a board square by square. If a player landed on a ladder, the player ascended the ladder, which meant...

BEGINNINGS

I wrote SummerDance, a coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Detroit during “that hot dry 1967 summer,” describing “events that ended with me learning to be really scared of my own father, locked screaming in the bathroom, Dad pounding and bellowing to let him in, a thin and splintering door between us.”

The father wasn’t headline-grabbing abusive; instead, he was more have-too-much-to-drink-and-lose-control abusive, beating his boys with a belt,...

(This is the third in a series of observations on our pandemic times.)

I am a Shaggy Man. In that, I am not alone.

A whole lot of guys have become Shaggy Men over the last few months, thanks to the COVID lockdowns. In our state, barbershops and beauty salons were one of the last places to reopen. I suspect that’s the case across the country.

We’ve seen rebellions in this Shaggy Man era. In Michigan, my home state, we had a 77-year-old barber who refused to close his barber shop until the...