My childhood memoir will be releasing on July 6 in paperback and on Kindle ebook. This is a simple collection of stories from my childhood. They are deeply nostalgic, humorous, emotional, and personal. I’m pleased to share the very short introductory first chapter with you today. The ebook can be pre-ordered at the link below. The paperback will be available at the same link starting July 6. Thank you!

Chapter 1: In a Village Called Great Belt

If you find yourself stopping at a 3-way country crossroad, and you crest over the big hill, past a random biker, and down a second hill past a yellow brick house on the left, you’ll be driving straight through the heart of the Village of Great Belt, yet you’d likely not realize it. The two green municipal road signs, one on the east and west sides of the village proclaiming in white letters “Village of Great Belt,” have been missing for decades. No bureaucrat thought it prudent to replace them. Let that sink in.

The village has no commercial properties. A road runs through it—Great Belt Road to be precise, with Becker Road forming a tangential Y off of Great Belt at the bottom of the “big hill” as you head “downtown.” ConRail operated trains through the heart of the village for decades, and the tracks became a playground for wandering boys flattening pennies or hoping the conductor would throw candy from the caboose as the freight train, a hundred cars deep, passed. Long before my time, a hotel and a country store may have enticed a passenger or two to stop briefly on their travels, perhaps conferring the place with a speck of importance. They say—or my brother told me—that Great Belt was named for the oil boom, which exploded in the post-Civil War Gilded Age after Drake’s Well, an hour and a half north in Titusville, became the first commercial oil well in the world. Thus our village was bestowed such a name because some oil prospectors declared it a great belt for oil exploration. Indeed, our little village had a couple working oil wells, even in my days. But the oil industry moved on from Pennsylvania, finding vast oceans of oil underground in Texas and then overseas. The great belt was not to be. Ironically, more than a hundred years later, a drilling outfit began fracking on Kiley’s farm, just down the road from my house, to extract natural gas from the true great belt of energy beneath the Pennsylvania earth—the Marcellus Shale.

Eventually, the Great Belt Hotel morphed into a home. The country store became a short-lived church, before becoming an abandoned building. Even the trains stopped rolling through town and the tracks were pulled up to transform it into a nature trail for bikers and hikers.

In its hey-day, meaning when I was young, I counted about 113 people in Great Belt, spread out over a square mile—the houses interspersed between rolling farm lands and thick woods. I would trick or treat at these houses. I would play ball in their back yards. I would ride bikes on their roads and bloody my knees in the gravel when my skateboard gave way. I fund-raised for school by selling a collection of spices door to door. I dreamed of the cute girls from my bedroom window—girls who lived behind the walls of a house in the distance I would never visit. I explored the woods, drank ice cold water out of the ground, and threw twined bales of hay onto wagons pulled by tractors. I played thousands of games and ran after friends in the dead of the night during our moonlit escapades. I built snow forts and stretched out my pitching arm in the dead of winter by throwing an endless supply of snowballs. I lived, perhaps, the greatest childhood of all time. Steal the flag, kickball, porch swings, sand boxes, bicycles, corn fields, muddy cricks, endless friends, and a loving family providing the backbone of my existence.

I left Great Belt for college when I was seventeen, and I never lived there again. But in my heart, I also never left. I’m still the same country boy with blond hair—now slightly darker—who’s a little unsure of himself, but curious enough to travel the world and grounded enough to find his way home.

These are my memories.