We latchkey kids never understood the city life that our parents gave up for us. Other than a holiday trip to the city, their urban world was a mystery to us. We grew up off of potato fields, and woodlands, rolling pastures and apple farms, where our childhood adventures played out. Unchaperoned, we ran wild under those suburban skies.
     As a latchkey kid in the early sixties, I found my love for story telling, a taste for adventure, and a strong sense of the lyrical in the farmers’ fields, blue summer skies, and the cool shadows of the woods of oak and maple that formed the landscape of my Long Island childhood. This collection of vignettes is a homage to those years.     

     In the late 50s suburbia exploded across the farmlands of Long Island, changing its landscape and small town culture forever. Families from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx pushed out to the sticks, looking for fresh air and a safe haven to raise their children. I, like so many of my generation, lived an unsupervised childhood that characterized many of Long Island’s suburbs of the early 60s.  
     Later known as latchkey kids, we considered ourselves frontiersmen, daredevils, and self-confessed hellions, running wild through our neighborhoods. Keys around our necks, we escaped the loneliness of our empty homes and banded together to share escapades and the consequences of our antics. Always attuned to nature and the changing seasons, we waifs, marooned on islands of our own imagination, skirted trouble, plotted capers, and shared grand adventures in the fields and woods of our Long Island.
     This collection of vignettes recounts the exploits and pranks of us kids who loved adventure, roaming the fields and woods, and liked to just mess around.

     After a stint in Gettysburg College, the author studied in the University of Bolivariana and the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. He traveled extensively through this Andean country, as well as Ecuador and Peru. During more than three decades of teaching, he shared many of these stories with his students. His adventures during those years can be found in his memoir, Conversations on La Playa: A Gringo’s Tales of Medellin. Available through iUniverse and Amazon.  https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/371170-Conversations-on-La-Playa

     The author’s many trips to Spain inspired him to walk the pilgrimage route and investigate the life of Saint James the Greater. After having traveled the route to Santiago de Compostela, he resolved to provide today’s pilgrims with a clearer understanding of who the namesake of the Spanish pilgrimage route might have been. His work Pilgrims’ Steps: A Search for Spain’s Santiago and An Examination of His Way explores the life of Saint James and examines the history of this ancient pilgrimage route. Available through iUniverse and Amazon.   https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/399900-Pilgrims-Steps

      Hodum’s paternal grandfather, John Cross, known to draw tales in the air with his many limericks and tales, valued the lyrical and recognized the magic of turning a phrase. The author credits him as well as Jose Asunción Silva and Pablo Neruda, and his many years of teaching Spanish and Latin American literature for his love of poetry. Catching Winds North, a collection of Hodum’s poetry, celebrates the seasons and beauty of Long Island, nature’s mysteries, and the joys and conundrums of life. Available through iUniverse and Amazon.   https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/758005-Catching-Winds-North

     Bone Dust, the author’s most recent work, is a collection of chilling tales filled with horror, suspense, magical realism, and the supernatural world. Psychological twists and frights highlight the unsettling lives of engaging characters that inhabit eerie and sinister worlds. If you seek the unexpected and relish intriguing plots, you will enjoy the ghostly twists to these tales of horror and suspense. Magic, mystery, and the unexpected manifest in the most otherworldly and horrific ways in these accounts that will disturb, fascinate, and haunt you.

     The author lives near the bluffs, beaches, and farmlands of his youth and paddle the waters of the Long Island Sound.