Over the last couple of years, I've enjoyed writing a series of "Where Are They Now?" articles for my high school alumni association newsletter.
Friday, August 30, 2024
I simply cannot call my former teachers by their first names
Over the last couple of years, I've enjoyed writing a series of "Where Are They Now?" articles for my high school alumni association newsletter.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
What I didn't tell the kids I spoke to at football camp
Last month, I had the privilege of briefly addressing a group of young boys getting ready to participate in the Wickliffe Football Camp.
When I say "briefly addressing," I mean it. This was a collection of nearly 40 kids from kindergarten through 6th grade who just wanted to run around, learn a thing or two about football, and generally have fun. They couldn't have been especially interested in what some middle-aged guy who hadn't played the sport in nearly four decades had to say.
So I kept my remarks very brief, as you might imagine.
I talked about my own experiences playing in Wickliffe. I talked about the city's great football tradition. I talked about my role as an announcer for Blue Devil football games and how I couldn't wait to announce their names on Friday nights in just a few years.
That kind of thing.
I was looking to motivate them a little and get them even more excited for what they would be doing at camp.
What I didn't want to tell them was that they had chosen a fiercely difficult sport...one that could be frustrating and even dangerous at times.
I didn't tell them how, in the middle of my sophomore season, seeing no clear path to ever becoming a starter at the varsity level, I wanted to quit football.
I didn't tell them how my forearms, every year from August through October, were bruised various shades of purple and yellow from all of the blocking and hitting we did in practices and games.
I didn't tell them there were times I got hit so hard I saw stars.
Or about the practice when I took a handoff, got tackled low by one of my teammates, and found both knees swollen and full of fluid just an hour later.
I didn't mention the fact that I opted not to lift weights in the offseason as so many guys did, and that this hurt my chances of getting more playing time (though I always thought this was fair...it was my decision, and there were rightful consequences for it).
I didn't bring up the time in a junior varsity game when I got speared in the groin and went down in intense pain, having to reveal to my coach that I stupidly wasn't wearing a cup because I thought it slowed me down.
I didn't talk about the sweat and pain of endless summer double session practices.
Yet maybe I should have brought up some or all of that. Because collectively, those experiences made playing football one of the best decisions of my life. I learned all of the cliched lessons about toughness, determination, persistence, teamwork, etc.
They were probably too young to realize how anything worth doing is probably going to come with some discomfort, and how there would be times they would question their decision to engage in it in the first place.
That will all come later. For now, they just needed to know that running, catching and throwing a football around is a heck of a lot of fun.
They'll learn the deeper lessons in time.
Monday, August 26, 2024
Home renovations: Hemorrhaging money and loving every minute of it
We are the midst of a series of home renovation projects, all of which involve us hiring various contractors to complete projects around our property that, had I been born with the Handy Gene, I might have done myself.
Alas, though, I was not, and therefore we have a choice either to shell out thousands of dollars to these professionals or watch our house fall down around us.
Like many other homeowners before us, we have chosen to deplete our savings account.
It all started last fall when a basement flood forced us to replace all of the trim and various doors in our basement. We hired a contractor to perform the repairs, and he turned out to be...less than satisfactory. His replacement, recommended by our daughter Elissa, was the complete opposite: Fast, competent, skilled, and a great communicator.
He completed the job in a matter of a couple of weeks.
So we hired him to replace our battered old wooden deck. It's beautiful.
We would love for him to do even more work for us, because I've discovered that a good contractor is worth his weight in gold.
We're still looking to remodel our nearly-30-year-old kitchen this year, and we need a lot of interior painting done.
With each job and each batch of building materials and supplies, our bank account gets lighter. Sometimes by frightening leaps and bounds.
Yet we grin and bear it, because the end result of each job is so nice.
Nice enough to justify huge depletions of our rainy fund?
Well...I don't know. I can tell you the Trex deck is amazing, though, for what that's worth.
Friday, August 23, 2024
My daughter wants to be a double doctor (I don't know what else to call it)
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is
We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.
Monday, August 19, 2024
In an increasingly dark world, high school sports remain a source of light
This week begins my 11th year as a high school public address announcer, and I couldn't be more excited about it.
Between now and mid-October, I'll probably announce more than 50 different events, from volleyball and soccer matches to football games and marching band performances.
I even get to do several Division I college soccer matches for Cleveland State University, something to which I'm really looking forward.
My enthusiasm for PA announcing stems partly from the fact that it's fun, and partly from the way in which sports provide a wonderful-yet-temporary escape from everything that's wrong with the world.
These days, there is no shortage of things that seem to be going haywire. In the U.S., we're divided now as badly as we were in the late 1960s, and perhaps nearly as much as were during the Civil War.
I take great comfort in the undeniably wholesome nature of high school athletics. In my experience, the kids who participate tend to be smart, friendly, motivated and brimming with potential. They are fun to watch and even more fun to interact with.
Even if you don't really like sports, it's easy to admire the sustained effort and dedication of these athletes. The things they learn and apply are highly cliched (teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, etc.) yet still very real.
They give me hope.
I've been around prep sports for more than 40 years as an athlete, coach, journalist, league administrator and now as an announcer. I get just as excited for the opening kickoff of a football game now as I did back in the Stone Age when I was playing.
For those next few hours, I don't give the presidential election or any divisive social issues even a single thought. I am absorbed in the game.
Is this naive? Pollyanna-ish? Unrealistic? A case of the privileged white man sticking his head in the sand because he can?
The answer is probably "yes" on all counts. But I don't care.
I would rather watch a well-played high school volleyball match than two candidates yelling at each other on a stage any day.
Friday, August 16, 2024
The Mystery of the Holy Tupperware Lid
We recently got a new back deck. The old one was well past its prime and overdue for replacement. The new one, made from Trex decking material, is bigger and better in every way.
In the process of tearing down the old deck, our contractor Evan found the faded, beat-up Tupperware lid pictured above. Terry had been looking for that lid for years and never would have guessed it had somehow ended up underneath our deck.
What was most intriguing, though, was the small rectangular hole cut into the middle of the lid. When Terry sent a picture of it to our family group text chat, there was speculation that perhaps some critter or other had chewed through the lid during its long years of dark isolation under the deck.
But upon closer inspection, the hole seems too rectangular and clean to be the work of a raccoon or possum. Plus, there appear to be slice marks around the hole, which would suggest that someone had taken a knife and intentionally cut out a small square of the plastic.
When you live for many years in a house of seven people, five of whom are children, you usually assume the "someone" in situations like this is one of your offspring. You don't try to make sense of it, because there is no making sense of it. There is no logical answer to why someone would cut a hole in a Tupperware lid and then hide it outside beyond, "Well, we have kids, you see..."
Terry and I are at a stage of life where our older children feel comfortable confessing various illegal and otherwise inadvisable things they did while growing up. At least one of these stories comes out at every family gathering, and as I've said before, I am simultaneously amused, fascinated and horrified when it does.
No one fully owned up to cutting the hole in the lid and hiding it, but Jack thinks it's fairly likely that he was the culprit. He doesn't specifically remember doing it, but in his own words, "It seems like the kind of dumb thing I would have done when I was little."
So mystery solved, I suppose. The lid is no longer usable, but at least Terry can finally rest easy knowing what happened to it.
And she and I together can say a prayer of thanks that our children have all grown up safely despite occasional and egregious lapses in judgment along the way.
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
One thing I learned at the Olympics: We should let the Dutch run the world
Last week I was in Paris with my wife Terry, my daughter Elissa, and Elissa's boyfriend Mark. We were there for the Olympics, and other than coming home with a case of Covid to a house without electricity thanks to a powerful storm a few days earlier, it was incredible.
Monday, August 12, 2024
BLOG RERUN: Things I miss and don't miss about growing up in the 70s and 80s
NOTE: This post originally ran here on the blog 11 years ago today (August 12, 2013, for the calendar-challenged). I bring it back now because I still miss and don't miss these things.
Things I Miss
Things I Don't Miss
Friday, August 9, 2024
As personal tech devices become more sophisticated, don't forget the value of shared entertainment experiences
This was the scene from our pavilion seats for a recent screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the Cleveland Orchestra performing the film score live.
One of my favorite things about having a smartphone is that it allows me, with just a pair of earphones, to listen to music, watch a movie, and even check out a televised sporting event through our DirectTV streaming service.
Things that used to require large pieces of equipment when I was growing up (a theatre screen, a TV, a VCR, a stereo, etc.) are now available for personal consumption thanks to the miracle of the iPhone/Android. No one else needs to see or hear what I'm seeing or hearing.
Which has its advantages, of course, especially when you're traveling.
But along with all of this miniaturization and personalization also comes increased isolation.
As technology advances, so too does the ability for people to live – almost literally – in their own little worlds. Opportunities for social interaction decrease, which many of the introverts among us will celebrate but which can also have real (and negative) long-term effects on our collective emotional and psychological wellbeing.
This was brought home to me last month when Terry, Jack, our family friend Josie and I all spent a Saturday evening at Blossom Music Center watching the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" while the Cleveland Orchestra played the background music in sync with the film.
I would guess I've seen Raiders in its entirety 10-15 times, but this most recent experience was the first time I had seen it with a crowd of people since I originally watched it in the theatre in 1981.
And it was wonderful. Far more enjoyable than watching it alone in my living room.
Part of the reason was that Sarah Hicks, the orchestra's guest conductor, encouraged the several thousand of us in attendance to interact with the movie. She pushed us to clap for the heroes, boo the villains and generally enjoy the movie viscerally as I would say Steven Spielberg originally intended us to.
It made the whole thing so much more fun. We would clap whenever Indiana Jones got himself out of a particularly tight situation. We would boo and hiss whenever one of the Nazis came onto the screen. And we would laugh wholeheartedly whenever Indy would make one of his understated jokes or amusing observations.
It made me realize how seldom I watch movies in the theatre now. There is something about the shared experience of a concert or a film that adds to my enjoyment of it. As I've increasingly relied on my phone to serve as a primary source of entertainment, I have somehow managed to forget that.
Art, in whatever form you consume it, is meant to have a social component. Every once in a while, put down the phone and get to your local cinema or concert hall for some shared fun.
I don't think you'll regret it.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
The fundamental question when taking your vacation time: Long breaks or extended weekends?
I question the AI Blog Post Image Generator's choice of hat for this man sitting on the beach, but otherwise it's well done.
One of my favorite feelings in the world is getting near the end of the weekend and realizing, late on a Sunday afternoon, that I'm off work the next day and free to do whatever I like.
But its close cousin is the Friday afternoon "Hey, I'm on vacation all next week and won't be back in the office for the next 10 days!"
When it comes time to plan out my vacation for the year, I find both of these dynamics playing out in my head.
Do I take a few full weeks off and sprinkle in a few personal days here and there as needed?
Or do I take a series of four-day weekends throughout the course of the year?
The answer for me is usually "all of the above."
I'll take a week or more off when we're going somewhere, as we're doing right now for our trip to Paris. But I also like pinpointing a Friday and a Monday per month (preferably bracketing the same weekend) and taking those days off as well for no particular reason.
It's a good blend of planned/purposeful/destination-oriented breaks mixed with "hey, why not?" mini-vacations.
Your philosophy may differ.
Either way, as I've mentioned before, take those vacation days!
Monday, August 5, 2024
As if we needed more proof that evil exists in this world, along come Bulgarian split squats
- I have given much of the credit for me taking up the gym life to my daughter Elissa, and rightly so, but my son Jared also had a hand in this. He has been lifting for years, which not only provided inspiration but also led him to piece together a pretty formidable home gym in the back room of our basement (on his own time and using his own money). I now benefit from having that gym. Also, today is Jared's 26th birthday, and he's a good guy, so please wish him a happy happy.
- This is the third or fourth time I've written about lifting in the past month, but please rest assured that this is not going to turn into a gym bro blog or anything. It's just that I write 150 or so new posts a year, and they're generally based on what's new in my life as a husband, a dad, and a middle-aged guy. Lifting is still new to me, so it's probably not surprising that I've been writing about it. I'll dial it back, I promise.
Friday, August 2, 2024
The sleeping (or lack of sleeping) is my least favorite part about flying to other parts of the world
The worst was probably the time I spent 8+ hours from Chicago to Frankfurt in a middle seat next to a guy with a very active cold who was apparently gunning for the Guinness record for World's Loudest Cough. I somehow managed to avoid getting sick, but needless to say, I didn't get much sleep on that flight.
The best was undoubtedly the time I went from Newark to Brussels in business class. I slept like a baby in my little pod with the lie-flat seat and the comfy pillow and blankets. The only trouble was, they woke us up for landing way before I was ready to leave Dreamland. It was the one time I could have done with a 10-hour flight.
I fondly remember the first time I flew to Europe in 1999 because it was a daytime run from Toronto to London. We left early in the morning and got to the UK that evening. I may have dozed a bit, but the important thing was that, unlike overnight flights, I didn't feel I had to sleep.
It's that pressure to get significant shuteye that makes me dislike late-night flights of the sort I'll be taking this evening. Tonight I'm scheduled to fly from Cleveland to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Paris to spend a week in the French capital to watch Les Olympiques.
(That's the Olympics, for those who don't know a baguette from a hole in the ground.)
The overseas flight from Atlanta doesn't take off until 11:30pm Eastern, which is 5:30am tomorrow in Paris. Basically I'll be trying to sleep on the plane at a point when it's already morning at my destination, thus ensuring that my internal clock will never, ever adjust to the local time zone while I'm there.
Now on one hand, hey, I get to go to the Olympics in Paris. I should quit my whining.
On the other hand, why can't I find flights that arrive in Europe the same day? Why do these seem so scarce anymore?
First-world problems, I'm aware, but they're the only problems I know.
Allons-y!
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