Kool-Aid® got a bad reputation in November, 1978, when Jim Jones (a Hoosier in case readers were unaware of the fact) exhorted (or threatened at gunpoint) his followers in Jonestown to drink from vats a brew of powdered soft drink flavoring agent laced with potassium cyanide. To accuse someone or group of people as having been drinking the Kool-Aid® has come to mean those people blindly follow a view or position despite catastrophic consequences. However, it is easier to accuse someone…

   Groundhogs were familiar visitors at my parents’s farm. When I told my father that a groundhog was in the mulberry tree next to the Upper Barn, he thought I was joking him. He saw for himself, however, that a specimen of Marmot monax, indeed, had burrowed into the main trunk of the dying tree, about ten feet above the ground.

   Each year, a groundhog, with its home (I finally figured out) under the foundation of the silo on the east end of the Upper Barn, scampered to the nearby pear…

   In the early 1980s, I visited Indianapolis from Chicago. I thought construction of a football stadium here was rather odd, given Indianapolis lacked a National Football League® team.  “Field of Dreams” had yet to be produced, but the concept of “build it and he will come” was a reality. Mayflower® moving trucks, as everyone well knows, transported the Colts from Baltimore to Indianapolis in 1983.

   The Colts now have played as the team of Indianapolis longer than as the team of Charm…