Flights

Flights

I'd bicycle, or sometimes walk—six or seven blocks I think it was, nothing for twelve year old legs, especially my well-traveled pair. I had seen much of Columbus from a bike, more than my folks might have ever suspected.

But the hobby shop down at the end of the street (if you turned by the school) wasn't very far, as I said, where Broad Street and James and my own route made a five-way inconvenience and the Ho-Jo sat out on the point but I stayed on this side of the street.

We ate there once, a few days before we left Ohio. I probably had the clams. I always liked the clams.

But the hobby shop was my destination, each week, when I had enough money from my allowance to buy another model airplane or maybe check the paperback racks for the latest reissue of a Burroughs novel. A visit to Africa or Barsoom was only a quarter or thirty cents, and that was a good deal compared to a one-forty-eighth scale Revell.

Such flights I took on both, and on a green bicycle, that last year in the city.

Stephen Brooke ©2014