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A good brain holds data in neat filing cabinets, alphabetized and ready for recall. Others, like mine, have stuff stored every which way, in shoe boxes and scribbled notes that can't be trusted. As a result, I often find myself saying, “I think I remember this.” And one such memory is of a person named Dominick DaCosta. His name slithered from my information heap when I started hearing about George Santos.
One of the great disappointments of my life came when I learned that Brick Road in South Bend was never actually paved with bricks. In retrospect, it should have been obvious. It wouldn't have made any sense for the disjointed rural route to have been paved with bricks back in the day. In fact, for a long time, the glorified dirt lane wasn't paved with anything at all.
On February 16, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed Indiana State House Bill 1383 into law, further reducing an already eroded set of protections for Indiana's already diminished wetlands. For many Hoosiers, it might not seem like a big deal. Cruise the state for long enough and you'll start to wonder just what wetlands there are to protect.
“You guys wanna go see the egg?” I asked as we pointed our car south on Indiana 19 from Etna Green, all part of our backroad sojourn from South Bend to Muncie. “The egg?” Of course, I needed to explain that I meant the world-famous Mentone Egg, the largest in the world, and an irresistible roadside attraction and photo spot for generations of eager tourists moving back and forth between places like Rochester and Warsaw or Bremen and Wabash or Plymouth and South Whitley.
The golf world watched in rapt attention last May at the PGA Championship as club pro Michael Block snuck through the cutline and hovered at the very top of the leaderboard, climbing as high as second place on the second day of play. They cheered uproariously when he aced the 15th on Sunday, and when he finished the tournament in 15th place, Block reported that he received hundreds or thousands of congratulatory messages, including one from Michael Jordan himself.
This story is going to end with a naked, famous poet; but it's going to begin with a wedge of fine Italian cheese that I never even got to eat. On a Friday filled with errands and appointments, we made a spontaneous decision to pick up some provisions from Oh Mamma's on Mishawaka Avenue. We’d decided that day that cheese sounded like a good thing, but then again, cheese sounds like a good thing every day.
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