We're enjoying having a college kid in the family again

Jack on his first day of college

The recent birth of our grandson has somewhat overshadowed another significant family milestone, which is the fact that our youngest son, Jack, started college a couple of weeks ago.

Jack is a freshman data science major at Cleveland State University. He's a little older than the typical freshman at 19 1/2, the result of a two-year process of trying to figure out exactly what he wanted to do in life.

Lots of young people go through the same extended period of self-reflection that Jack did, and I'm surprised it's not even more common. Asking 17- and 18-year-olds to pinpoint exactly what career path they're going to follow is a tall order, especially in a world that changes as rapidly as ours.

Since graduating high school in 2023, Jack has had a brief fling with community college, considered a career in the trades, and worked full time for nearly a year cleaning cages in an animal research laboratory.

Eventually he came to Terry and me and said he thought it would be best to go to college and earn a bachelor's degree of some sort. He is interested in statistics and data analysis – a field that will surely be reshaped by the emergence of artificial intelligence – so data science it is.

Starting in 2012 when Elissa began her own four-year journey at Cleveland State, we had a kid or kids in college continuously for 11 years. For me as Dad, it was a blur of FAFSA forms, dorm move-ins, and essays to edit.

Now, after a two-year break, I'm excited to get back into that world.

Like me so many years ago, Jack is a college commuter. He lives at home and drives downtown five days a week to attend class. There are advantages to doing that (particularly financial ones), but it can also mean being somewhat disengaged from school activities outside of the classroom.

I made an effort to be involved in the band and the school newspaper when I was at John Carroll University, at least until the demands of a nearly full-time work schedule at The News-Herald made those extracurriculars impossible. Jack has talked about joining the CSU pep band, and I hope he does. It would be good for him.

You know, becoming a grandparent can make you feel old. But I'm finding that once again having a college kid in the family balances that out. It makes Terry and I realize we're still very much in our primes.

Good luck to Jack, and go Vikings!

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.

I recently had my second bout with Covid...still zero stars, do not recommend

Terry and I both contracted Covid back in January 2021 and were down and out for a solid week. I was kind of hoping that would be my one and only experience with it.

But the virus was nice enough to mutate and hit me again last month. And once again, it took a solid week (and then some) for me to come back. This time, for good measure, I also experienced the loss of taste and smell I had somehow avoided with the first go-round.

Everyone who gets Covid seems to have somewhat different experiences. For me, both times it has been a combination of a nasty head cold with flu-like symptoms that have included fever/chills and a general feeling of extreme "blah," if you know what I mean.

Sickness of any type tries my patience. I simply don't have time for illness, which is why, by day #3 of Covid the Sequel, I was antsy and annoyed. I had work to do. I was missing PA announcing gigs and the income that goes with them. I got tired just cleaning a single toilet, let alone an entire bathroom.

When I get sick, I don't become self-pitying so much as bitter and angry. I HAVE NO TIME FOR THIS.

Speaking of PA announcing, the previous weekend's assignments are likely where I picked up this latest round of Covid. That Friday I had announced a Wickliffe football game, and the next day I did both college volleyball at Cleveland State University and a band festival in the nearby town of Solon.

At some point during one of those events, some attendee unknowingly shared the virus with me. I'm all for sharing, but you can keep this particular gift to yourself, Patient Zero.

I will go way out on a limb to give you this expert medical opinion: Covid sucks. Do not get it.

I would like more coffee mugs, but I don't have any place to put them

When I started drinking coffee 10 years ago, there were certain things about the habit of which I was unaware.

Like the variances in coffee quality, depending on where you get it. I have pretty low standards, but even I can tell the difference among French press, restaurant, and weak Mr. Coffee brews.

Or the fact that powdered creamer is nasty and should be illegal. I could not have known that until I tried it.

There is also this: I like having a large collection of coffee mugs. I have three at home that I guess are "mine," though we have so many total mugs in our house that the hooks behind the kitchen sink are all occupied and the cupboards probably can't hold any more.

I also have three mugs at work, though one is my everyday go-to (pictured above), while the Donkey Kong and Cleveland State University School of Communications mugs are there more for display and to serve as back-ups than anything else.

So, as gifts go, I suppose coffee mugs are a lot like ties: I can always find a use for them, but I'm running out of places to put them.

Should you be looking for something to give me, I still say you can't go wrong with cash. Or a Starbucks gift card. Unlike coffee mugs, both are easily stored.

What we did right with each of our kids - Part I - Elissa

(NOTE: Parents are forever lamenting the things they wish they had done differently with their children. "I should have been more strict about this" or "I wish I had let her participate in that." That type of stuff. I see nothing productive there, so instead I choose to celebrate the things that Terry and I appear to have done well with our children. Plus, it's a good way to fill five days of blog posts. So there's that.)

Elissa is my newly minted 23-year-old daughter. I don't mean "newly minted" in the sense of "we just got her." I mean she just turned 23 recently.

Also, you will note that I did not hyphenate "newly minted" in that first sentence. Long ago when I first started at The News-Herald, Robin Palmer taught me not to hyphenate "ly" words. I don't know if that was an AP Style thing, a News-Herald thing, or just a Robin thing. But to this day when I'm editing copy, I will remove the hyphen after a "ly" word.

Anyway, Elissa. When she was little, she was shy. A borderline genius, mind you, but shy and introverted. As she grew, she became a little more extroverted with each passing year. Now, the thing comedian John Mulaney says about Jewish women also applies to Elissa: You do not need to ask how she's feeling. She will tell you.

And this is an exceedingly good thing. Women are often conditioned in this society to believe that "shy and quiet" is more attractive than "opinionated and vocal." I will take the latter any day of the week, and I like to think we encouraged her to be that way.

Here are five other things we did right with Elissa:

(1) We made her play her oboe until she graduated from high school. She was ready to be done with the instrument by her junior year (maybe sooner), but we prodded her to stick it out. I believe studying and performing music is an inherently beneficial thing. As is seeing through something you started. Elissa would disagree with me, but I think we did right by her in this decision.

(2) We let her make her own decision about college when it came to living on campus. She could have saved a ton of money living at home while she attended Cleveland State University, but she wanted the on-campus experience, and it's clear how much less she would have grown over those four years had we made her live at home.

(3) I played Barbies with her when she was little. Whatever you think of Barbie and whether she actually imposes unrealistic standards of beauty on little girls (I happen to think most little girls are smarter than that), we had some of our most fun times together playing with the gigantic stock of Barbie merchandise stored under Elissa's bed. Of course, once I got sick of playing, I would concoct some sort of fiery death for Barbie, Ken, and whomever else joined us in our adventures. But PRE-DEATH, Barbie sessions were fun.

(4) We let her make mistakes. This one is going to come up a few times in these posts about my kids, because I see great value in being allowed to screw up in your life. Protecting your children from every stumble and fall is unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive. To Elissa's credit, she has made relatively few mistakes to this point, but she has learned from the ones she has made. I'm pretty sure, anyway...

(5) We helped develop within her a healthy appreciation of 80s music. Elissa listens to a lot of stuff I like and a lot of stuff I probably don't understand. But in the end, we can always find common ground in "Come On, Eileen."

Sometimes having a kid in college is like not having a kid at all

As you may know, my oldest daughter Elissa is a sophomore at Cleveland State University. Unlike most CSU students, however, Elissa lives on campus.

This concept is still foreign to me, more than a year into her tenure there. Cleveland State was always a commuter school when I was growing up, and it still largely is.

Elissa is a member of an elite group of 1,000 or so kids (out of a total student body of 17,000-plus) who live their lives mostly within the physical confines of the university. For the second year in a row, she calls the venerable Fenn Tower in Downtown Cleveland home.

Cleveland State is only 20-25 minutes from our house, and last year Elissa kept a car on campus. Which meant we saw her all the time. Which in turn meant it never felt like she was really living "away from home." We saw her so much that it was like she was just having a series of really fun, academically themed sleepovers at friends' houses.

But this year Elissa chose not to pay the $500 parking fee to keep a car at CSU, and she works right there on campus. So the only time we get to see her is when she bums a ride home or when we bring her here ourselves.

Now, for the first time, I'm experiencing what it's really like to have a child away at college. And I'm not sure I like it much.

For nearly two decades, Elissa has always been nearby. And while, geographically speaking, she's still nearby, she may as well be going to school in Shanghai, for as much as we see her.

She still has a bed here at the house, of course, though now she has to share a (large) room with Chloe. Over the Labor Day weekend, we moved Melanie out of Chloe's room and into The Room Formerly Known as Elissa's Room, a move with which Elissa wasn't especially happy.

But let's face it...we're not going to maintain an empty room for nine months of the year while Elissa is off doing whatever it is that college kids do (which I'm sure consists only of going to classes, doing homework, and watching reruns of "Little House on the Prairie"). For the relatively small portion of the year when she lives with us, Elissa can share a room with her sister.

I'm actually glad we did that, because the sight of that lonely, empty room really made me miss her. I know millions of parents have been through this before and everything turned out just fine, but that doesn't make it any easier.

For the first few years of Elissa's life, she spent most of her days with me. I worked nights while my wife worked days, so we never needed a day care provider. I would take care of Elissa from about 8  in the morning through 5:30 in the afternoon, at which point Terry would come home and take over childcare duties while I went off to work.

The result was that I became extremely close to my daughter, and knowing she was living just upstairs these last several years has been a comforting thought.

Now she's almost 20, and the paradigm from here on out will be NOT seeing her far more than actually seeing her. That's just the way it is when your kids become adults, and the logical half of my brain is perfectly fine with this arrangement.

But the other half, the half that's more "Daddy" than "Father," isn't quite ready to accept it. It chooses to ignore the fact that what Elissa needs at this point in her life is independence. She needs to stretch those proverbial wings, make her mistakes, and become the grown-up we want her to be.

I just wish there was a way she could do all of that here at home. She could even have her old room back. I just need to tell Melanie...

I think I have milestone fatigue

Yesterday, Terry and I spent nearly seven hours at Cleveland State University for Elissa's college orientation. She signed her first-ever college housing contract, selected a meal plan, and started to make the friends who will have a lasting effect on her four-year undergraduate experience.

Tonight is Elissa's prom. She and Sean will attend the dance and then go to the after-prom activities, and they will of course remember the night for the rest of their lives.

Today is also Elissa's last day of classes as a high school student. Starting Monday she will engage in a two-week senior project working in the marketing department at Great Lakes Mall, with the goal of gaining a taste of real-life work experience.

Two weeks from today, Elissa will graduate from high school, wearing her cap and gown and walking off the stage with the diploma for which she has worked since the age of 5.

I'm not sure I can keep up with everything.

More than once, I've mentioned how much I enjoy having a senior in high school. It's a fun and exhausting experience, with enough highs and lows (both physical and emotional) to fill a thousand pages in the kids journal Terry maintains and even remembers to update every few years.

But now that we're near the end of it, I think I'm running out of steam. The last six weeks or so of senior year are so crammed with life achievements and memorable milestones, you as a parent start to take them for granted. And I suspect Elissa may be doing the same.

Yes, these are things we'll all remember forever. But right now they just seem routine. It shouldn't be that way, but when everything comes this fast and this furious, you lose a little perspective.

You know what it reminds me of? My game show experience. (NOTE: You know how I deny it every time Terry accuses me of deliberately bringing up the game show thing in conversation or on this blog? Well, she may be right on this one.)

But seriously, it reminds me of my "Millionaire" and "Price Is Right" appearances. When you're thrust into the middle of an experience like that, it doesn't seem real after awhile. Instead of trying to process the strangeness of what you're doing, your mind instead turns it into a mundane experience. "Why, yes, Bob Barker, I'm CONSTANTLY playing cheesy pricing games for the chance to win a new car and a trip to Tahiti. It gets so boring sometimes. Why do you ask?"

It's the same thing when dealing with this particular phase of my 18-year-old daughter's life, which is kind of a shame. Maybe if they spaced these things out a little more over the school year, I would appreciate them more. But then I suppose that would take something away from it all. Part of the fun, at least for the student, is the pace of events that make up your 12th-grade year.

I'm glad summer vacation is upon us, if only because it gives us a chance to catch our breaths, enjoy the warm days, and take it easy for awhile.

That is, of course, after we get past Elissa's graduation party. And soccer camp in mid-June. And the family mini-vacation we're planning. And Fourth of July activities. And our annual trip to church Bible school. And summer sports practices.

I seriously need a nap.

The one where he grumbles about college tuition...again

(NOTE: This is one of those posts where I'm going to complain about the high cost of college, as if I'm the only parent in the history of the universe who has helped pay for their child's education. Honestly, I wouldn't blame you at all if you skipped this one. Just know that even I'm starting to have a hard time listening to my own whining on this subject.)

So Elissa got her acceptance letter to the University of Dayton yesterday. It was actually kind of nice. They mounted the letter on a piece of cardboard with a little fold-out stand on the back so you can prop it up and show it off to your friends and family, I guess.

She applied to four schools (Dayton, College of Wooster, Miami of Ohio, and Cleveland State), and so far two - Dayton and CSU - have sent letters that, to Elissa, say, "We think you are awesome and would love to have you here. Just the thought of being in your presence makes us all giddy." But to me they say, "Hey, bozo, time to whip out the checkbook. This is going to cost you...big time."

I was surprised the Dayton letter made mention of the money thing. The third paragraph read this way: "It is also my pleasure to inform you that you have been awarded the Trustee's Merit Scholarship in the amount of $60,000 over four years. Worth $15,000 per year, this scholarship is valid for a four-year period."

$15,000 per year? All right, then! Now we're getting somewhere. Actually, the figure that caught my eye was the 60 grand. That's a slick bit of marketing by the Dayton folks: Give 'em the total figure so they get really excited, and hope they don't start doing the annual math in their heads.

Unfortunately for the Dayton people, I did start doing the math. Here, according to the Dayton website, are the school's undergraduate costs for the 2011-12 school year:

Tuition and fees: $31,640
Residence halls: $5,400- $8,100
Meal plans: $3,890 - $4,520

I like how they give you ranges for the last two categories. Let's just assume that Elissa will live in a large cardboard box and eat ramen every day if she attends Dayton, thus putting her on the low end of the scale. $31,640 + $5,400 + $3,890 = $40,930. And that doesn't count books. Or gas. Or spending money. Or everything else a college student is likely to spend money on.

Let's see, then...$40,930 minus the $15,000 scholarship they're promising leaves us with...a scant $25,930 to come up with every year! Over four years, that's $103,720. For one kid. I have five of them.

Hold on a second while I check my wallet to see if I have $100K just sitting there.....Uhhhh, nope. Nope. I found $3.57, pictures of the family, and my Starbucks card. I'm a little short.

Now granted, the Trustees Scholarship is just the beginning of the entire financial aid package that Dayton is likely to put out there. At some point over the next couple of months, they'll come back to us with the academic equivalent of an offer sheet. And that offer sheet will probably include other (smaller) scholarships and grants, along with possible loans and work-study programs.

Make no mistake there, by the way. As Elissa well knows, she'll be working her butt off throughout college to help defray the cost. I'm just hoping they can secure her a nice, easy $5,000-an-hour job somewhere on campus.

Anyway, the point is, I know there's more help coming, and that's not even to mention the independent scholarships and grants we've been researching. But as usual, I've used a few hundred unnecessary words to make a few very basic points:

* College is expensive.
* It costs more money than I have.
* This distresses me greatly.

And you know what's worse? We'll still not through this process yet. I have at least three more whiny, pathetic blog posts on this subject in me. Please accept my apologies in advance.