David Giffels - Barnstorming Ohio

T he predawn moon poured its cold white shine through the kitchen window and across a countertop spread with two dozen freshly frosted Ohio-shaped cookies. The lights were still off, but I could see the cutouts, lined up from the night before, pale blue with navy piping, in rows on waxed paper. The coffee dripped one last time, then the beepbeepbeep of the machine. Ready.

First Monday in March, 2019. By days end, those cookies would be decimated by a wide-eyed pack of fourth graders, my twenty-three-year-old son would walk through the back door wearing an Akron Police uniform for the first time, the GM Lordstown auto plant just up I-76 would be tooled for its demise, and Luke Perry would be dead.

A farmer down in Delaware County was loading corn to market, preparing for a trip later that day to Virginia, where he would talk to legislators at an agriculture conference, all the while worrying about the prospect of another wet spring. After months of speculation, one Ohio politician was preparing to announce that he would not run for the Democratic presidential nomination, while another was preparing to announce that he would. My local paper that morning carried the death notice for a beloved son, brother, father, uncle, best friend, a man just thirty-two years old, who struggled for many years against his disease of addiction until God carried him to Heaven, a jarring obituary verse that had suddenly become standard in a county where death by opioids was an epidemic.

Three miles away, a recently discharged twenty-two-year-old army vet was waking up in the same low-income housing project LeBron James used to call home, preparing for his daily hour-long walk to a downtown Akron community college, working to correct his lifes course. A baby would be born that day at Mercy Medical Center and a miniature orange Massillon Tigers football would be placed in his bassinet, a longstanding tradition in the town where American high school football began. Nine random people in Dayton were starting another morning with no reason to think the unthinkable: a nightclub horror of gunfire that awaited them five months hence.

People got up. They dressed for work. They argued with their spouses, they urged their dogs to do their business, they fretted over bills on the desktop, they phoned in prescription refills, they asked whats for dinner tonight.

Mrs. Gina Giffels, a teacher at St. Vincent de Paul Elementary, Akron, Ohio, entered the kitchen in her bathrobe, turned on the light, poured herself a coffee, and began her workday, arranging those cookies side by side in plastic containers. I helped.

Not everybody in Ohio celebrates Statehood Day, but Mrs. Giffelss students sure do. In commemoration of the Buckeye States 216th birthday, she would spirit those cookies into her classroom, breaking them out for the afternoon lesson. She would show her students how the dark blue icing along the edges designated the water bordersLake Erie to the north (assuming one uses compass directions to navigate baked goods) and the Ohio River curving down the eastern and southern edges. She would tell them how important these waters have been to every part of life in Ohio, and she would point out the red dot of icing shed put near the upper right, indicating their shared hometown. State history is a fourth-grade educational standard across the country. Students learn the story of their home place, the territory that designates them part of America but that also gives them the beginning of a notion of their own unique version of Americanism.

Ohio isnt any more American than any other place, but it is completely so, a unique cross section that maps the persona of the nation in a way that has prompted others to turn here again and again to plumb our collective identity. In my lifetime here, it has been easy to believe, as novelist Dawn Powell once observed, that all Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly. It is an ur-place, sublimely average in both the dispositional and mathematical senses, an intersection of lifestyles and economies, of geographical characteristics and political tendencies, of climates, of conscience, of concerns, a place with answers to the most important question: Who are we?

I was born in Akron and am a lifelong, doggedly committed citizen of a state thats often easier to leave than to love. I have spent much of my adult life thinking and writing about this place in widely ranging forms. For eighteen years, I covered Northeast Ohio as a newspaper journalist. The books Ive written all have Ohio themes and settings. I talk about ita lotsometimes in bars, sometimes in classrooms, sometimes to outsiders looking to understand this place. I teach a course at the University of Akron on Ohio literature. My go-to beer is brewed in a district called Ohio City. I used to play in a band named after Clevelands flagship department store, the May Company. Most important, my son and daughter, born and raised here, were just then coming into their own as adults, as citizens, as young people preparing to commit, each in their own way, to Ohio as their home and to a set of ideals that I still want to believe in.