A few years after I was born, my parents bought a house next-door to my maternal grandparents. These two houses backed up to a former farm. The farmhouse was long gone and the owner at the time lived out of state so we had the run of the abandoned fields. Out past the ball diamond, through the blackberry and black raspberry bushes, down the hill near the creek was the Old Dead Tree. My mother, her sisters, my grandparents, and neighbors all knew the Old Dead Tree. It was the main landmark in the center of this 40 acre property. My aunts all told stories about climbing the tree (one of them falling out and getting knocked unconscious).
My parents divorced when I was five and my mother moved my sister and me to an apartment on the opposite side of the field. We had to move several times after that (I think there were five more moves before I finished high school), but we never lived more than two blocks from that field. I moved away to Cincinnati for college and stayed there for about 12 years before being transferred to Houston for two more. Then back to Cincinnati, Lebanon (Ohio), and finally Worthington, Ohio. I once joked that, as a kid, every time we moved, we seemed to be orbiting the Old Dead Tree. It occurred to me that, in my move to Houston, I had almost left the gravitational pull of the Old Dead Tree, but not quite.
In 2018 I set aside enough money to open a small arcade in a dumpy warehouse in Columbus. I put about 25 arcade games in there along with three vintage computers, a Merit Megatouch, and an Atari 2600. We also had a TV showing monster movies and cartoons. It ended up staying open for 17 months before the money ran out. Below are a few pictures (taken by my friend Alan M.)
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