Stuart Long:  

Walking to school back in Shaker Heights for kindergarten and first grade and second grade is a thing of the past in the world we live in. I remember the long trips with the backpack and my mittens on the cold days, and the adventure of the warm weather in the other parts of the year. The giant gray blocks of sidewalk or larger than life, and some of them so old they had cracked as the roots of trees reaching for water from yards juxtapose the sidewalk, reposition them out of the way, making those on a journey navigate more closely to not trip. 43 years is a long time ago, But I remember having a Jewish friend name Ysha Rosenbohm, an Australian friend named Jonathan down the street, two little black boys across the street named Christian and Courtney that taught me how to shoot basketball ghetto style with a left-hand swAng, and a little redheaded girl from England name Annie, who would have me over when her mother would make us mixed colored marshmallows and graham crackers in the oven. We lean in staring through the window watching the marshmallows puff as they move towards golden brown before we took them out and devoured them as an afterschool treat. I found out later that Shaker Heights, according to my mother, it was a government experience of multinational placement. Learning French in kindergarten or first grade or second grade back in 1979 or 1980 or 1981, was head of its time for the known science but very interesting to have shared in. The multinational cultural neighborhood that I grew up in definitely formed me to have an international bent in interest in the people of the world. Our family saw no color and had missionaries live with us when they came home on furlough, so we got to meet all the people of the world as little children in our own home. Memories of my father taking me up the street to the proud pickle, a Jewish delicatessen where you could get a delicious Reuben sandwich, on crispy Ryebread, with 1000 island dressing mixed into the hot sauerkraut on a lunch while he was on break from med school, was the treat that I had usually on Saturdays when we got to spend the day with dad. The three children that ended up gracing our home or STUART and Sara and stanley), but stanley) was just a little baby so Sarah and I ended up sharing Saturdays with dad every other Saturday. We went to some Nazarene church with Pastor Rhodes, who had a lighthouse tie that a child could remember, and would go sledding over by the ice-skating rink on some hill that seemed a mountain to children of our size. Afterwords dad would always take us out to Dreger‘s candy store for hot chocolate and I always tried to get a rocket pop that would stick to the top in the bottom teeth if you bit down to heart. Many fun memories of Cleveland and Shaker Heights stay with me to this day. As an adult I’ve popped back into the neighborhood and even parked the car to walk the exact same path to school to stir the memories of my mother who has recently passed. It was the time right after Vietnam, my father made it through the war alive, luckily station in Savannah, without having to go over, and I was blessed to have two parents that love God, and raised us in the way that a child should go, that they would not depart from it. Since these days many turns and twists of my life have led me to become an ordained minister, which came to me, although I didn’t seem to go looking for it, it did find me, and when I asked, I said yes to the Lord. I always like to ask people what I called, “14 words“. Should I never see you or hear from you or you ever run into me ever again in your entire life, please don’t leave an interaction with me without having the invitation that goes like th...Expand for more