9/11 was the closest thing my generation has experienced to the JFK assassination

Today marks 61 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Every year on this day I go back and read old news accounts of the assassination, and I watch Walter Cronkite's coverage of the event, including his emotional confirmation that the President had died.

It would be six more years before I was even born, so I of course did not experience JFK's death firsthand. But I've heard enough about it from my parents and siblings to get a sense of just how shocked the nation really was.

My brother Mark tells a story of having to play outside by himself later that week because so many families were keeping their kids inside, apparently as part of some unspoken, quiet and respectful mourning process.

Talk to any American who was a child on Friday, November 22, 1963, and they will likely have a story of being in school when the news broke. For many, it was the first and only time they saw their teachers show emotion, let alone cry.

The only point of reference I have as a Gen Xer is September 11, 2001, though I wasn't in school at the time but rather a 31-year-old father of four toiling away at my job in marketing communications at the Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital for Rehabilitation.

One of the nurses came running down the hall past our office that morning saying, "They bombed the Pentagon!" While that wasn't strictly true, it did get my co-worker Heidi and I to turn on the TV to find out what had happened.

The first of the two World Trade Center towers had already come down, and we watched live as the second one fell, shockingly and unexpectedly.

Then we heard about the plane crashing into the Pentagon. That was quickly followed by rumors that another hijacked plane was flying near or above Cleveland, prompting the Clinic to shut down and send us all home.

That night our family attended a prayer service at church, then we waited in a long line at a Shell gas station amid speculation that the price of gas was going to spike above $5.00 the next day (it never did).

The parallels between JFK's assassination and 9/11 are somewhat obvious. In both cases, if felt like the world had changed forever.

But I get the sense that JFK's death was a bigger collective shock. Kennedy's election had brought a fresh new spirit to the United States. The aura of "Camelot" made him and his family objects of adulation by millions.

There hadn't been a presidential assassination in 62 years, since William McKinley was gunned down in Buffalo in 1901. There was no template for people on how they should react, how they should mourn, how they should speak.

Not that 9/11 wasn't horrifyingly unique in its own right. But we had been dealing with lower-level terrorist attacks for many years, both inside and outside of our borders. It was horrible, but it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.

Not that it matters either way. Both events are seared into the brains of those who experienced them, and few will ever forget where they were and what they were doing when they got the news.

It's not the kind of thing you ever want to carry with you, but if you were there, there's simply no getting around it.

Watching heart surgery? Piece of cake. I saw my wife give birth five times.

My first corporate communications job was at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's foremost academical medical centers. It was a great experience for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I got to watch so many different surgical procedures.

When it comes to witnessing a surgery – actually standing two feet from the table as a real human being is cut open – there are only two kinds of people: You're either OK with it or you're not, and there's simply no in between.

I was always very OK with it. In fact, I loved watching surgeries and would jump at the chance to don a set of scrubs and step into the O.R. whenever the opportunity presented itself.

As a hospital media relations representative, I had many occasions to enter the surgical suites as an escort for print and broadcast journalists. Sometimes they were there filming documentaries, other times it was for a newspaper or magazine feature about a particular health condition.

The first surgery I got to watch happened when I was managing editor of Urology Times magazine. We traveled to the University of Iowa to meet with our chief medical advisor, the friendly Dr. Richard Williams, and stood tableside as Dr. Williams performed a bladder augmentation (a procedure in which a piece of intestine is grafted onto your bladder to increase its capacity).

At one point, as Dr. Williams was resecting the section of intestine he intended to use, he pulled something green and parsley-looking from inside the patient. As he held his forceps up to the light and examined the glob of whatever it was, he off-handedly said, "I thought I told her not to eat anything before surgery." And he flicked the offending vegetable matter over his shoulder and continued with the procedure.

Dr. Williams also had a box of penis-shaped pasta in his office. He was a fun guy.

One of the reasons I could stomach watching surgeons at work up close and personal was because, by the time I started working at the Clinic in 1999, I had already seen Terry birth three kids.

With only a few exceptions, the surgeries I saw were pretty clean and orderly affairs when compared with human birth. The incision had already been made before I arrived on the scene, and the surgical area was neatly surrounded by blue towels. Most of the time you couldn't even see the patient's face, which somehow made the whole thing less real.

But with babies? Well, there's nothing especially "clean" and "orderly" about it. There are immense amounts of goo, liquid and general bodily substances flying everywhere.

Or at least that's how it always seemed to me, and I wasn't even the one giving birth. I was the one sneaking peeks every once in a while to see how the baby's exit from the womb was coming.

Usually what I saw made me realize the perfect little illustrations of the birthing process they show you in parenting books have little to do with reality.

So honestly, when I started at the Cleveland Clinic and got to see so many world-class surgeons at work, it was the medical equivalent of watching an accountant do her job. Nothing I encountered rivaled what I had seen in the battlefield-like conditions of the delivery room.

All of which makes me glad I wasn't the one biologically assigned to get pregnant and give birth.

Also, as the man in our relationship, I just want to state for the record that I think penis-shaped pasta is hilarious.

Dress pants and khakis are way more comfortable to me than jeans

When I began my career, I worked at a newspaper. My summer office attire was a t-shirt and shorts. If I was feeling fancy, it was a pair of jeans and a polo.

When I transitioned to the 9-to-5 world in the mid-90s, the bar was raised to wearing a dress shirt and tie most days. For my first PR job at the Cleveland Clinic, it was a full suit every day, apparently on the off chance that as a hospital spokesperson, I might unexpectedly be asked to go on camera if a TV crew showed up and wanted a statement (which never actually happened).

Nowadays I have a formula when it comes to dressing for work: If the weather is warm, you will see me in a button-down shirt and a pair of solid-color pants (either dress pants or Dockers). If it is chilly, I wear the same thing with a sweater over top of the shirt.

I rarely stray from this approach. As a 53-year-old suburban dweller, I feel it is my right to dress in a boring, formulaic manner.

Here's what I don't get: Why do office workers treat "jeans days" as some sort of bonus? Over the years at the various organizations where I've worked, there has always been a desire for Friday jeans days. Or in the case of certain office competitions, one of the prizes has often been a jeans day.

I do not understand this. Maybe I'm buying the wrong jeans, but to me, jeans are not the ultimate in comfortwear. I would much rather wear my looser-fitting dress pants or those good old, dad-approved Dockers. They just feel better, especially when I'm wearing them for 9-10 hours at a stretch.

Office dress codes have evolved to the point that – at my place of employment, anyway – you can wear jeans just about every day of the week if you want. And I have done that before, but it only served as a reminder that jeans are not the sartorial delight they're cracked up to be.

Of course, your perspective on this may vary greatly. I'm someone who honestly never minded wearing a suit and tie every day (it greatly simplified the process of picking out clothes in the morning, I'll tell you that). So maybe my definition of "comfortable" clothing doesn't necessarily match that of the rest of the world.

There's also this: I'm a man. Maybe women value jeans more highly than the office-approved alternatives they're given.

Jeans were originally developed in the 19th century for mineworkers, weren't they? I'll you what, then...the next time the Materion Corporation asks me to descend 300 feet underground to search for gold, I'll throw on a pair of Levis.

In the meantime, my closet full of patterned button-downs and black, blue, gray and brown pants serves me just fine, thank you very much.

I've carried these nine books with me from job to job for the last 20 years

It can sound pretentious to call your job a "craft," but I do consider the writing portion of my vocation to be just that.

Whatever your personal craft may be, you should never stop trying to get better at it. I plan to be working toward clearer, more concise writing up until the day I die (well, maybe I'll take that day off...but not the day before).

There was a time when it was imperative for writers to keep a set of reference books at their desk. A dictionary and thesaurus were de rigueur, of course, but depending on the focus of your writing, there were others on the required reading list.

One was a stylebook, such as the Associated Press Stylebook pictured here. Stylebooks tell you everything from whether to hyphenate certain words to how you abbreviate the states to which nouns are capitalized and which are not. And everything in between.

You'll also find a book of quotations on my shelf, as well as Plotnik's "The Elements of Editing" and the densely populated "Macmillan Handbook of English," 1960 edition.

Here's the thing: These books, or at least most of the information they contain, can be found online -- in most cases quite easily. Technically, I don't need the physical books whenever I have easy access to Google.

But I keep them for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I still love the feeling of cracking open a book to get to whatever I'm looking for (just as I still love reading an actual newspaper). They have traveled with me from workplace to workplace over the past two decades, starting at the Cleveland Clinic and moving on to Dix & Eaton, The Cleveland Foundation, OneCommunity, Vitamix, and now Goodyear.

There are memories wrapped up in these books. A few I associate with particular work projects, maybe a script or press release of which I was proud. Others take me back to my newspaper days, when the whole idea of writing for money was new and exciting, and I wanted so badly to be good at it.

There's also this: As much as I love and embrace technology, I also believe books hearken back to a time when the written word was more revered and the library card catalog meant something. They represent a pathway to knowledge and experiences otherwise unattainable for most of us, even online.

Books are, in my mind, the genteel medium. And at age 51, I'm just old enough to appreciate that.

(By the way, the slim brown volume tucked between the AP Stylebook and the Macmillan Handbook is "The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing." So good. Oh man, so good.)

Deciphering what "business casual" really means in your office

Over my 30 years in the full-time workforce, I have worked in enough places for enough companies with enough people to know that the single most difficult thing for many employees is figuring out exactly what the "business casual" dress code means.

It seems simple enough, but there's a whole lot of room for interpretation under the business casual umbrella. As with many things in life, it's probably even tougher for women, but I can only speak from the male perspective here.

Look up "business casual men" online and you'll see everything from sport coats with button-up shirts on one end of the spectrum to nice t-shirts with jeans on the other. And of course a whole bunch in between.

In my first real job at The News-Herald, we in the sports department always went with the "extreme casual" look, which meant shorts in the summer and jeans with sweatshirts in the winter. The news side reporters wore shirts and ties, whereas we all looked like we had just come from a frat party.

Later, when I entered the 9-to-5 world, I also went the shirt-and-tie route most days, and even the everyday-suit look when I was at the Cleveland Clinic.

But for most of the past 20 years, business casual has been the rule with my employers. And I've always taken my cues from both company leaders and my immediate peers. Whatever they wear, that's what I'll generally wear.

Granted, if I err, it's almost always on the side of dressing a bit more professionally, which could be a generational thing and/or having learned to dress for work from my dad. He was a data processing/computer guy who always went with a shirt and tie.

I recently took one of my every-three-year shopping trips to Kohl's to stock up on work clothes, and the load of stuff I brought home was heavy on button-up shirts and different-colored dress pants. I'm already well-stocked with khakis and have enough different kinds of shoes and belts to create nearly endless color and style combinations.

But again, the way I dress is largely dictated by what I see around me at Goodyear. And what I see around me are a whole lot of engineers and tech types who, it must be said, subscribe heavily to the stereotype of how you think engineers and techies dress. So maybe the bar isn't set as high as it might otherwise be, particularly in an older, traditionally more conservative company like Goodyear.

I will say that our CEO often wears jeans, and that sets a pretty relaxed tone.

So it you're confused about business casual, pay close attention to your co-workers, particularly those of the same gender (obviously) and job level as you. You'll figure it out quickly enough.

I would leave the Led Zeppelin shirt at home, though. Even if the CEO is a big fan.

My opinion of you will not be affected by the tires you have on your car

As I knew would happen, I find myself these days walking through parking lots looking at people's tires to see which brand they have.

I recently joked on Facebook that I now judge you depending on which tires you bought, but that's not really true. I don't tend to be particularly judgmental in the first place, since my opinions and preferences are clearly no better than yours.

But I'll admit that, when I check out those four tires on someone's vehicle, I'm rooting to see "Goodyear" and the iconic wing-foot logo molded into the sidewalls.

This is more about rooting for the team I represent than anything else. Michelin, Bridgestone, and other companies make great tires, just as Goodyear does, so it's not like you or I have done anything "wrong" by selecting a particular brand.

Admittedly, I've had other jobs where this wasn't the case. When I worked for the Cleveland Clinic? I judged those who used any other hospital system, including the excellent University Hospitals of Cleveland. At Vitamix? Yeah, even though those machines are crazy expensive, it caused me physical pain to see people making smoothies in a cheap Oster.

But with tires I'm a little more neutral. Or maybe it's that with age I'm a little more neutral. I want Goodyear to succeed, but I'm not going to think less of anyone whose tires happen to be made by a different company.

Admittedly, my opinion of you is somewhat dampened if I see you wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey. But then I remember it takes all kinds of craziness to make up this world.

We mark the passing of time through anniversaries...good and bad

Dates stick in my head, so it's never a problem, for example, when I have to recount the various jobs I've had and the precise start and end dates for each.

I can rattle those off no problem. Even though it's probably sufficient to say I started at Dix & Eaton in "December 2002," I'm always very specific. It was December 2nd, 2002. My last day at The Cleveland Foundation? Why, that was February 1st, 2011 (a Tuesday).

Today is one of those job-related anniversaries. On this day in 1997, I started as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. As I always like to point out, this is and was a real publication, and it was such an interesting and fulfilling job. I was only there for a little more than two years before I accepted my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic, but without Urology Times, that Cleveland Clinic job likely wouldn't have happened.

So in that sense, May 12th is a good day.

Unfortunately, it's overshadowed by another May 12th date. On May 12th, 2009, as I was brushing my teeth in preparation for a trip to the dentist, we received a call from my brother telling us that my sister Judi had suddenly, shockingly, passed away.

She was only 56, just five years older than I am now. And she was Judi, the oldest sibling and driving force of our family. She organized things. She laughed and smiled. She made everyone happier.

And then...she was just gone. In many ways, we still haven't recovered.

Every May 12th for the rest of my life, I will think about that day and the days that followed. It was just stunned sadness, and it lasted for a very long time.

It never really ended, I suppose.

Still, we move on, because there's nothing else to do. Days like this come and go on the calendar, and as we get older, connected to each one is a memory, a milestone, and a set of emotions.

Some are good. Some aren't.

On balance, this one is an "aren't."

I have almost three dozen neckties that get little to no use

There was a time when I wore a tie five or even six days a week.

When I worked at the Cleveland Clinic, for example, I wore ties Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Friday depending on what was going on), and then I would wear a full suit on Sunday mornings for church.

Nowadays, my office (like most others) has gone business casual. And with the pandemic and subsequent work-from-home routine, my dress code has loosened even further.

Even for church my usual attire now is a sport coat with open shirt collar. I'll wear a tie only when I'm giving the exhortation, which happens about five times a year.

I just went into my closet and counted 35 very nice neckties hanging in there, most of which I haven't worn in years.

Some are very formal and were bought to match a particular dress shirt.

Others are informal, including the holiday-themed ties I have for Christmas and Valentine's Day.

None are likely to see the light of day more than once or twice in a calendar year...if even that often.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I was always comfortable wearing a tie to work. It was never constricting to me, and honestly, the days when I wore suits were easier, sartorially speaking. Just match a suit with an appropriate dress shirt and tie (there were really only so many combinations, so even I couldn't screw it up), and you were good to go.

I always thought, too, that there was something to the idea of "dress professionally, act professionally." A tie didn't make me feel stuffy, it made me feel confident and well-dressed.

Of course, no one is stopping me from wearing a tie now. I could do it whenever I want. But I know that when I go back to the office, a tie always generates a lot of questions from people. Why the tie? What's the occasion? What made you decide to wear that?

My response, by the way, never varies. Unsmilingly, I look at them and respond, "I have a job interview today." At first they look surprised, then they realize I'm just messing with them.

I kind of miss tie-inspired humor.

Clothes shopping and the middle-aged male

By the time you read this, I will have blown somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 on new clothes.

Give or take a few bucks. And that number includes three new suits, which are big-ticket items.

But really, two grand.

I'll have done this for three reasons:

1. I have the money. I spent a chunk of my unemployment tackling freelance writing assignments for the Cleveland Clinic, which is a "nonprofit" (heavy on the quotes) that has more money than it knows what to do with, so giving me a small piece of the pie certainly didn't break the bank for them.

2. I have a new job, which you already know. It's a business casual environment, but I wasn't all that stocked up on biz casual clothes, so it's off to Kohl's I go.

3. I'm a smaller person, which you also already know. I'm pushing 40 pounds on the old Weight Loss Meter. There's just not as much of me as there used to be to fill out the shirts and pants hanging in my closet, so I figure I'm go out and buy tinier versions of those same shirts and pants.

A couple of notes on point #3:

I file this under "Problems That Are Nice to Have," but for two months now, I've been walking around hiking up my pants. Even with my belt on the last notch, I've still been fighting Droopy Drawers Syndrome thanks to my weight loss. Again, nice problem to have, but more than a little annoying after a few weeks.

Also, it should be noted that I really will go out and buy smaller replicas of the stuff I already own.

This is because I'm a 43-year-old man. We have our tastes and we're pretty well set in our ways. Short of a midlife crisis that drives us to start shopping at Aeropostale, we see no need to change what works for us in the way of sartorial choice.

So when I take my big blowout shopping trip later today (about a week ago from your future perspective), I'll pretty much just find the section that contains Scott Clothes and start pulling stuff off the rack.

The stereotype is that men don't like shopping. I'll say that's half true for me. I don't relish the thought, but I don't hate it, either.

I will, however, do it in about half the time it would take, for instance, my wife to purchase the same items. I will be in and out of that store in a couple of hours, which is pretty good when you're blowing four figures on new duds.

Really, all I care about is coming away with:

• Some decent sandals to wear this summer
• Some work pants that aren't four inches too big around the waist
• Some new underwear

I am seriously excited about the underwear. Nothing excites Caucasian males in their middle years quite like the feel of fresh tighty-whiteys, let me tell you. Or maybe that's just me.

Either way, the Hanes people are going to be making a few bucks today, so good for them.

I can also guarantee that I will walk away with at least a few items of Dockers clothing. White guys love us some Dockers. My only rule there is no pleated pants. This isn't 1997 anymore. It's flat-front or nothing. That much I know.

Beyond that, though, I'm sticking with what I know works: Khaki pants, plaid button-downs, and the occasional dark-rinse jeans when I'm feeling hip. And tight-whiteys, of course. It all starts with the tighty-whiteys.

Thoughts on childbirth from someone who has never had to do it

I know several women who either recently have or very soon will be giving birth. This is extremely impressive to me. As I've mentioned before, I've had a front-row seat to this event five times, and the whole thing is mind-boggling.

I often say that the sheer physics of the process alone is puzzling. You can talk all you want about how a woman's hips widen and her body adapts in order to accommodate the exiting child, but it still doesn't change the basic fact of large-baby-passing-through-small-opening.

I don't get it. I really don't. I've seen it happen, but it seems like an elaborate magic trick or something. Like after the child emerges, David Copperfield should walk into the delivery room and explain how the whole thing was just an illusion and the baby was actually grown in a laboratory somewhere. That would be far more plausible than what really occurs in childbirth.

My wife had four conventional deliveries (as if there's anything "conventional" about it) and one Cesarean section. The C-section was with baby #5, and Terry still says she wished it would have come the normal way.

(NOTE: In that one paragraph alone, I referred to the commonly accepted method of delivery as "conventional" and "normal." I did this because I can't bring myself to type the V-initialed medical term for these sorts of births. I know it's no big deal and all, and we're (mostly) adults here, but my fingers just won't do it. I'm eating lunch as I write this, and typing that word would very likely ruin the experience for me. Just so you know.)

Anyway, the C-section was a real trip. We had planned to have Jack the, uh, regular way, but at some point during labor he decided to flip upside down, and the doctor pretty much said it was either a C-section or else the baby was going to stay in there forever. Terry opted for the C-section.

Once that decision was made, they whisked her away to do whatever it is they do to women who are about to undergo this procedure. A nurse came in and gave me a set of scrubs to change into, so I did that and then waited around for someone to come and get me so I could be there when my son came out.

This took a long time. Or at least it seemed like a long time. I waited and paced for something like 45 minutes, when I guess someone in the O.R. with Terry looked around and said, "Wait, is the dad here? Someone needs to go and get the dad." So someone came and retrieved the dad and I walked into the delivery room, where my wife was laid out helplessly on a table with a surgical curtain draped across her chest.

The curtain was there so that she didn't have to view all the messiness associated with an operation in which they cut you open and lift a child from your womb. I, on the other hand, had been in operating rooms several times during my years at the Cleveland Clinic, and I tend not to mind blood and gore. As they were working on her, Terry asked me to peek over the curtain and let her know what I saw. So I did.

"Organs and goo," is what I reported back. Because that's really all I saw. They had taken various bodily organs out of her abdominal cavity, as far as I could tell, and laid them off to the side like jigsaw puzzle pieces. I made a mental note to ask later if they remembered exactly how everything fit back in there, because I'm terrible at puzzles and would be of no help.

Anyway, after a few minutes they hoisted Jack out of his mother's belly and held him up to allow me to announce his gender to the room. We never found out the sex of any of our babies ahead of time, instead preferring the very cool surprise you get when you discover the answer at the moment of birth. But they held him up at a strange angle, and it took me several seconds to get a clear view of the goods. It was pretty clear he was a boy at that point, and as if to confirm the verdict, Jack peed all over his mother right then and there. I was so proud.

It may have been messy and required several stitches afterward, but the C-section was a far more enjoyable experience for me -- not that I obviously counted for much, but still -- than the four clearly-physically-impossible births had been. Watching my first four kids being born was a lot like being in a car accident: I was dazed and confused afterward, I wasn't quite sure what I had seen, and there was a heck of a mess that I was willing to pay someone else to clean up.

Because honestly, there's a lot going on when a child is born. They show you the video in biology class or Lamaze, but nothing at all can prepare you for the reality of it. Things came out of my wife that I didn't even know existed. Medical personnel whom I hadn't seen all day suddenly came out of nowhere to fulfill whatever small role they were assigned in the birth of my child. People started speaking in urgent tones, telling my wife to PUSH PUSH PUSH, though I'm quite sure she didn't need any prodding from them.

And I wasn't even the one giving birth! I was just a clueless bystander. My wife, the star of this whole show until the moment the baby came out, displayed a quiet confidence and ability I had no idea she possessed until she gave birth the first time. I may have been freaking out, but she was pretty clearly in control. There was always this look on her face that said, "Seriously, don't worry, I've got this." And she did, too.

A lot of women like to say that men could never have babies. And I don't know that I fully agree. I mean, I could do it. If you put a growing baby inside of me, I would eventually find a way to pass the thing. But there's no way I would ever do it as well as Terry did. God just didn't give me the same capacity for this that He gave her, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.

It's not so much the actual birth that would throw me off. It's the nine months or so leading up to it. In addition to your body getting larger, there are all sorts of physical discomforts associated with pregnancy that would seriously wear me out. Especially in the summer. Two of our kids were born in August and September, which means Terry spent the last trimester of two pregnancies during the warm, humid summer months. Not good.

But she bore up well under the burden of it. I, on the other hand, would have whined about it 24 hours a day. Seriously, I would have complained constantly. One baby would have been enough for me. But she somehow made it through five. God bless her.