I miss the feeling of flying around the track

High school track and field season is underway here in Ohio. My dad always said he didn't mind watching my cold October football games nearly as much as he minded watching my cold (and usually windy) early-April track meets.

Having had a few of my own kids run track, I understand where he was coming from. And while I don't miss freezing in the stands, I do miss being a sprinter and long jumper like I was in the mid- to late 1980s.

I was the only guy I knew who played football to stay in shape for track season and not the other way around.

Like any sport, track had its good days and bad days. But looking back, the good days were so good that I've blotted the bad ones from my mind. My track memories consist mostly of sunny dual meets and long Saturday invitationals that offered up far more wins than losses for my teammates and me.

What I miss most is the feeling. The feeling of being at the peak of your athletic ability. The feeling of hitting the long jump board just right and flying 20-plus feet into the sand pit. The feeling of attacking the curve in the 200 meters and blowing by the competition.

There's really nothing else like it.

I stayed in touch with the track world after high school first as a newspaper sports writer then later as a track parent and now as a public address announcer for track meets. I watch these young kids speeding up and down the straightaway and I want them to know how fleeting these moments are. I want them to appreciate every race, win or lose.

I want them to understand it all goes away much more quickly than you think it will.

It's not that I abandoned running the minute they handed me my diploma. But for many years starting in my mid-20s, running no longer meant sprinting, but rather long, slow distance races. I can't remember the last time I full out sprinted, though I'm guessing it was sometime in the early 90s.

Nowadays if I tried going all out in a sprint, my hamstrings would probably explode in a gooey mess all over the track.

But there was a time when I and the kids with whom I competed could move. Like, really move.

If they could figure out a way to bottle that feeling, I would buy several cases. As it is, though, I have only my old guy memories of races long completed and medals fairly won.

And maybe, given the ways things work in this life, that's enough.

For someone who grew up in a family of card players, I don't play a lot of card games

Image downloaded from Wikipedia. By J Wynia from Minneapolis, United States - Afternoon cribbage on the patio., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102255562

When I was a kid, any time we held a Tennant family reunion, my dad would inevitably end up at a table with some combination of his brothers (he had a bunch of them) playing a game called Oh Hell.

Oh Hell was/is one of the large genre of trick-taking card games in which you look at your hand and decide how many "tricks" you can take based on the strength of your cards. In that sense, I think it's a lot like Euchre or Whist.

I never understand the game when I was little, but even I could see how much fun the brothers would have playing, talking, making fun of one another, and generally enjoying each other's company.

When he wasn't playing Oh Hell, my dad would sit in our kitchen for hours on end playing solitaire. As I've mentioned before, the sound of Dad shuffling the cards on a Saturday morning was in some ways the soundtrack of my youth.

It's not that I dislike card games – far from it – but I don't think I got the card playing gene. I'm not a poker guy, and I've never once played any sort of card-based table game in a casino.

We do play cribbage in our family, though, which I like a lot. I don't win all that often, but it's fun. If you don't know cribbage, it's the game pictured in the image at the top of today's post.

When my kids were little, I also played a lot of War and Go Fish with them.

And that's about it. I never learned Gin Rummy, Pinochle, Bridge, Hearts, Spades or any of the countless other games of which Americans (particularly of my generation and before) seem to be so fond. Or if I did learn any of them, I don't remember.

I have a feeling card games may eventually go the way of the horse and buggy, or at least "manual" card games will. Digital versions are likely to live on on our phones and other devices.

But even I (a playing card dabbler at best) know there's no cyber equivalent of a freshly opened pack of cards dealt around a table of friends and family intent on beating one another...and loving one another just the same.

I just remembered something my dad used to do for me that I loved

Earlier this week I had a post here describing how I used to play board games by myself as a kid whenever my friends weren't around.

It reminded me of another gaming activity I used to do solo that was a lot of fun, and it was thanks to my dad that I ever did it in the first place.

Like a lot of sports-minded kids in the late-70s, I owned the Mattel "Classic Football" electronic game pictured above. It was extremely primitive compared with the Madden football video games of today, but to us it was great and I never tired of playing it.

One time my dad drew up a bracket involving all 28 NFL teams (at the time) in a single-elimination tournament. He did it by hand on a sheet of paper. I can still picture his distinctive left-handed writing in which the various first-round match-ups were laid out (Dallas vs. New England, Minnesota vs. Houston, Cleveland vs. San Diego, etc.)

My job was to play each game of the tournament on the Mattel device and write down the result on the tournament bracket. Over the course of a few days I could play all of the games and determine a "champion."

Being a budding Cleveland sports fan, I wanted desperately for the Browns to win the tournament, so I would admittedly play a little harder whenever I was representing them.

But just like real life, no matter how much I tried, some other team always won out in the end. It was never my guys.

Dad created similar tournament brackets for me on several occasions, and it infuriated me once when, despite my best efforts, the hated Pittsburgh Steelers won my little electronic simulation.

To my credit, though, no matter how much I didn't like it, I always accepted the result of each game however it turned out. No do-overs or anything like that.

Now, from a distance of 45 years, I realize not only how much fun I had playing out these tournaments, but also how enjoyable it probably was for Dad to set up the brackets for me whenever I asked. 

It was a time-consuming task, I'm sure, and he would have been perfectly justified to say he simply couldn't do it. But he never said no.

What a great dad he was to me. I miss him.

Happy birthday, Dad

My dad and me, circa 1980. Nice bowtie, Scott.

Next month my dad will have been gone for 25 years, which is strange to me.

On one hand, it feels like 25 years since he passed away. So much has happened since that terrible night in October 1999, not the least of which were the births of his last two grandchildren (my daughter Melanie and son Jack). So many milestones missed, so many sporting events I would have loved to watch with him.

At the same time, it doesn't feel like 25 years ago at all. I can still picture him. I can still hear his voice clearly. Heck, I can still smell his post-shower Aqua Velva aftershave! (I am a frequent shower-taker just like he was.)

I think he would be pretty proud to see how his family is doing now. My mom, his wife of 48 years, is gone now, as is my sister and his oldest daughter Judi. But the rest of us are doing OK.

My sister Debbie and brother Mark are the most youthful 69- and 67-year-olds (respectively) you will ever meet. You would have no clue of their chronological ages just by looking at and talking with them. I love them a whole bunch.

Dad's oldest grandkids, Mark Jr. and Jessica, have children of their own and are among the best people I know. They've both lost their moms but soldier on with their wonderful families.

And Terry and I can certainly count ourselves blessed not only by all of our kids but also by the lives we get to lead. Speaking for myself, at least, I don't feel I especially deserve any of it, but I know our situation would have made Dad very happy.

In fact, if he had somehow made it to 95 (the age he would have turned today), I'm sure his life would still revolve around his kids and grandkids, as it did up until the day he died.

This is the point where I'm supposed to tell you to hug the people around you and tell them you love them, but you know that already.

You also know to count your many blessings, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

When you're not someone who swears a lot, people find it either funny or disconcerting when you do

It's a minor miracle that, having grown up with Bob Tennant as my father, I'm not someone who swears particularly often.

(NOTE: We use the word "swears" here in Northeast Ohio in the same way those in other parts of the country might use "curses" or "cusses." It just means uttering what are commonly referred to as "bad words.")

It's not that I don't ever swear, I just don't do it often. And when I do it, most of the time it's in a joking or funny way.

At least a couple of my kids find it borderline disturbing when I use a swear word, though, even when they know I'm quoting someone else or doing it simply for comic effect. They're just not used to hearing it from me.

On the other hand, while my dad didn't go around cussing up a storm, he would routinely toss around many of George Carlin's famous Seven Dirty Words.

I remember one time when I was maybe 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark and I were in the living room with Dad. Dad told us both to kneel down and touch our faces to the carpet, and then to repeat after him. We complied.

DAD: "I suppose."

US: "I suppose."

DAD: "And you suppose."

US: "And you suppose."

DAD: "That my ass is higher than my nose."

MARK (who was 4 or 5 at the time): "That my ass is higher than my nose."

ME: "Ahhhhhhh! Mark, you can't say that!"

Dad and Mark thought the whole thing was hilarious. I, on the other hand, apparently had my delicate Victorian sensibilities gravely offended.

I don't think myself morally superior simply because I'm not someone who swears frequently or with any conviction. If anything, the fact that I don't swear, don't smoke, and only very occasionally drink makes me about the blandest suburban dad you can imagine.

But like Popeye, I am what I am.

And you can take that s**t to the bank.

Memories of sleeping on the floor in my parents' air-conditioned bedroom

I've lived in just three houses my entire life. The only one that has had central air conditioning is the one I live in now.

Not to get all "back in my day" or anything, but when I was growing up, I don't think central air was a thing. At least not among the middle class people I knew.

When it got hot in the summer, we would usually just sleep on top of the covers with the window open. It wasn't the most comfortable arrangement, but when you're a little kid and don't know any better, it does the trick.

There were times, however, when it was so hot in the evening that even that approach didn't work. That was when my parents would invite me to sleep in their bedroom, which had a luxurious window air conditioning unit.

(I say "luxurious" because it was a powerful 70s-era model designed to cool a space much larger than their bedroom. My dad would crank it way up, too, resulting in meat locker-equivalent temperatures.)

Mom would arrange a little nest of blankets at the foot of their bed for me to sleep on and under. Many times I remember laying there curled up with a smile on my face, happy not only to be comfortable but also to be in the same room as my mom and dad.

It was a level of security and contentment that I have seldom known since.

Not that I don't feel secure and content in my life. I do. But once you become a parent, your job is to provide security and contentment more than to experience it. It's a responsibility those of us with children embrace willingly.

Still, even now when we have the AC on and I'm nestled in bed next to Terry, I often think about those times when I happily slept on the floor in my parents' room.

I can't explain it, but on those nights, I knew I was loved.

This is the point when I get really tired of wearing sweaters to the office

I prompted the AI Blog Post Image Generator with "white guy in a sweater" and I love the result. This fake person perfectly conveys the feeling of angst (and frostbite) I'm trying to convey here.

If you choose to live on the southern shore of Lake Erie like I do, you have absolutely zero room to complain about snow, wind, cold, or really anything weather-related.

One way or another, you have options. You can move south. You can go someplace where your face doesn't hurt for extended periods of time during the year. You can become a snowbird.

So when I start complaining about the weather five seconds from now, please understand I have no right to do so.

That said, this whole "winter" thing has run its course, as far as I'm concerned. I respectfully request that my local government, or whoever is in charge of flipping the switch from one season to the next, do so now.

By the time we get to this point in March, even with the sorts of mild winters we've had the last couple of years, I feel like we've paid our dues. Enough of this, let's move on to something resembling spring.

And while we're at it, let's make it possible for me to start wearing only button-downs or thin pullovers to work. As it is, I've run through almost every combination of sweater and shirt I have in my closet. Time for something new.

The problem is that, in my office anyway, it doesn't matter what time of year it is. It's always cold. Always. February, July, September...doesn't matter, it's cold. And thus I need to wear layers when I'm working.

There is a thermostat in my office. It's located under my desk near the floor. Really, that's where they put it.

But its location isn't the problem. The problem is that the thermostat itself is fake. Either that or they simply haven't connected it to the HVAC system in any meaningful way.

Whether I set the dial to 85 degrees or 55 degrees, the conditions in my office are perpetually chilly. As  my dad Bob Tennant would have described it, "colder than a well digger's ass in the Klondike."

The point is, I would love to have at least a few months of the year in which I can wear, say, only a polo to the office and feel fine. But it's impossible. I start showing signs of hypothermia by 10 in the morning if I do that.

So I will continue with the sweaters from now until...well, indefinitely, I guess. I could submit a maintenance ticket to have the issued fixed, but experience suggests the chances of success there are about as close to zero as you can get while still accurately calling it a "chance."

In the end, I'm not complaining about the weather so much as the artificial climate in my office. There is, I would say, solid justification for that.

My sister would have been 71 years old today and sometimes I can't remember exactly what her voice sounded like

 

That's Judi posing with Elissa, Chloe, Jared and Melanie in what was probably 2006 or 2007.

Every once in a while I stop and try to remember exactly what my dad and my sister Judi sounded like.

We have old video recordings of them, and of course I still know their voices. But as the years go by, it takes a little more effort to recall those sounds in exact detail.

This fall, it will be 25 years since Dad passed away, and in May it will be 15 since Judi left us so unexpectedly. That's long enough (at least for me) that their voices don't spring as readily to mind as they used to.

Which seems so strange considering they were both such important parts of my life for so long. You would think the sound of them talking would be indelibly etched in my mind.

And I suppose it is. It just takes a few extra seconds to pull it out of my memory banks.

We are blessed to live in an age when we have digital records of what our loved ones looked and sounded like. I just never thought I would need them.

Whether it's age on my part or simply the erosion of memory over the distance of years, I'm glad I can still bring up recordings of them both using only a few mouse clicks. It's a crutch I don't mind relying on.

Happy birthday, Jude.

Getting your wisdom teeth out: A rite of passage

Depending on which source you believe, upwards of 85-90% of people get their wisdom teeth extracted at some point.

That "some point" is, for most patients, sometime in their late teens. Our son Jack had his out a month ago, marking the seventh and final person in our household to have undergone the procedure.

As "surgeries" go it's a minor one, to be sure, but it does involve general anesthesia, pain meds, and the looming possibility of dry socket, which by all accounts you really don't want to get.

I remember two things about getting my wisdom teeth out in October 1988:

(1) That evening, maybe 6 or 7 hours after the procedure, I went with Terry to watch the Wickliffe homecoming parade. I'm sure I didn't feel 100%, but I was well enough to leave the house for a little while, albeit a little disheveled in a backwards baseball cap and a pair of sweatpants pulled up to my knees, as was the style at the time.

(2) The other thing I "remember" is actually something I don't remember at all. According to my dad, I repeatedly asked what time it was as we drove home and I was still feeling the effects of whatever they used to put me to sleep. There would apparently be long silences broken only by me looking over at him and, my mouth stuffed with cotton, asking what time it was. Over and over. I find this funny.

Indeed, the only really entertaining aspect of wisdom teeth removal is the unpredictable stuff your kids will say or do as they're coming out of anesthesia. For our family, this has ranged from funny questions to unexplained tears.

Being kind and caring parents, we have more than once captured these moments on video and shared the hilarious clips freely through the family text chat.

Having been through (and paid for) so many wisdom teeth extractions, it strikes me that it's an unheralded but very real milestone on the parenting journey. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme, but it's yet another reminder that your child isn't as little as they used to be.

And that you, as the one sharing video of their drug-induced, post-anesthetic verbal ravings, are not nearly as good a parent as you thought you were.

My dad would have loved (and maybe occasionally hated) 2023

This was our living room tech set-up in the 80s, featuring a big old Curtis Mathis VCR and a cable box resting on top of a wood cabinet RCA TV. Displayed on the screen is the 24-hour weather data feed Continental Cablevision used to broadcast. It was a hot, hot day in Wickliffe by the looks of it.

My father was a gadget guy.

He embraced technology, particularly in his later years. Thus, we were fairly early adopters of everything from VCRs to home computers.

Dad hoped to live well into the 21st century, if only to be there for The Next Big Tech Development, whatever that turned out to be. Unfortunately, he died in October 1999, just a little shy of the digital revolution that has irrevocably changed all of our lives.

He would have given almost anything to have witnessed it, I'm sure.

On the other hand, being politically somewhere just to the right of Archie Bunker, I don't know that he would have been thrilled with everything that has happened in the world socially over the last quarter century. And I don't say that judgmentally – positive or negative – but simply as an observation with which anyone who knew him would very likely agree.

As I've mentioned before, we were among the first people in our town to get cable TV in 1980. As I recall, Dad walked a couple of streets over to talk with the Continental Cablevision work crew and find out when they would make it to Harding Drive and what day was the absolute earliest he could sign up.

He bought us a VCR around that same time, and I'm not talking about one of the lightweight, sleek units that would be in vogue a decade later. I mean a big, heavy-duty Curtis Mathis job that could be used equally to watch a movie, record an episode of "M*A*S*H*," or throw at a would-be intruder as a show of deadly force.

We had a home video game system as far back as 1977, when he sprang for a black-and-white Radio Shack Pong console. We also got an Atari 2600 before almost any of my friends. Same with the Commodore 64 and my green-screen IBM XT computer.

The man loved new hardware, and I benefitted from it all as an equally tech-crazy teenage boy.

The first time I used a cell phone was when Terry was pregnant with Elissa in 1994 and I had to be reachable at a moment's notice in case she went into labor. I received the phone on a day I was covering a wrestling match a half-hour's drive away for my then-employer, The News-Herald (which as I recall lent me the phone).

I got into my car, and the first person I called was my dad.

He and I were amazed that we could carry on a conversation while one of us was driving and no CB radio was involved.

Now cell phones are everywhere, and it's sometimes difficult to tell how much of a good thing that really is.

Regardless, if my dad was still around, he would probably own both an iPhone AND an Android.

You know, just in case.

All these years later, I still miss the guy.

I've reached the age when, like many dads, I cannot think of anything I want or need for Christmas

Every year until I was well into my 20s, I would ask my dad what he wanted for Christmas.

And every year he would say the same thing: "Case of beer."

He was always just kidding (he gave up drinking in the early 80s), and I always knew that would be his response, but it was like a little ritual we had to go through.

As I got older, this routine of ours got somewhat annoying because I really, truly did need to know what he wanted for Christmas. It seemed so hard for him to come up with something.

Now I get it.

Let it be known that, as I enter my mid-50s, I have no idea what I want for Christmas.

Clothes, I guess. And Amazon gift cards always work. And maybe the occasional classical CD?

The reality is, I have just about everything I could want. I don't have expensive tastes, and any time I want something, I just buy it for myself.

If I were particularly smart, which I am not, I would hold off on these types of purchases from, say, September onward and allow my family to get these items for me.

But of course I forget and just buy whatever I want whenever I want it. Then this time of year rolls around and someone in the family asks what they can get me and I'm stumped.

I suspect something similar happened to my dad all those years ago.

Which is why he always ended up getting the cheap plastic desk set or picture frame I would buy from the elementary school Santa Shop. (Come to think of it, that's probably the stuff he loved the most.)

The point is, I hate making a Christmas list because I don't need anything and I really don't even want anything. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. I'll take a heaping helping of that, if you can swing it.

Otherwise, I don't know...case of beer, I guess.

My wife says I'm the assistant mayor of our street

When I was growing up, the joke in our house was that my dad – who would have turned 94 years old this week, by the way – was mayor of Harding Drive.

This unofficial-yet-very-real job, which he embraced, obligated him to head outside whenever anything new, different or just plain suspicious was happening on our street.

Was someone getting a tree cut down? Dad was there talking with the crew (and probably offering advice on how to get the job done).

Was there an ambulance in front of someone's house? Dad was on the scene, often acting as a sort of spokesperson to anyone who stopped by to ask what was going on. That is, once he had grilled the paramedics or others willing to brief him on the situation.

Even if it was just a strange car parked in front of our house, he was on the case. You never can be too careful.

I always laughed at this until I became a street mayor myself.

Actually, it's more accurate to say I'm vice mayor. My next-door neighbor Joe has a longer tenure on Miller Avenue and is probably the only person who knows all five families living in the small Wickliffe portion of our street. He is the real Mayor of Miller and deserves the top job.

Still, I take my duties as his assistant seriously. Whenever there's any sort of disturbance outside, Terry knows I will be at the front window assessing the situation within seconds.

What happened? Is there any need to call the police? Should I go out there to offer assistance? It's my duty as vice mayor to check out anything at all out of the ordinary.

Interestingly, I've found this "mayor of the street" phenomenon to be very much a male thing, mostly limited to guys my age and older.

I don't have a solid explanation for this, though I do have two theories:

(1) Our kids are older and mostly (if not fully) out of the house. We need an outlet for the irrepressible urge to protect others and give wholly unsolicited advice.

(2) We are old and nosy and simply cannot be expected to mind our own business.

I have a sneaking suspicion both are true.

My definition of a "nice car" probably does not match yours

This is my current set of wheels

The standards I have for personal vehicles are low, having been shaped by the fact that I am Bob Tennant's son.

When I was growing up, my dad owned a succession of cars that could generously be described as "economical." All of them could get you from Point A to Point B, more or less, but there was no guarantee you would get there in one piece.

I remember one car with a passenger door that would randomly open when you made a right turn. More than once my dad had to reach over and grab my arm so I wouldn't tumble out into the intersection at 25 MPH.

There were floorboards so rusted through you could see the pavement passing by underneath your feet, and a van with a gas tank that once broke off and dragged along the ground for two miles as we drove home. I remember thinking the sparks it created as it scraped along the road were probably more than enough to ignite whatever gas was in there.

You shouldn't have to worry about your vehicle going up in flames when you're 8 years old.

I remember the old man owning one or maybe two decent cars total when I was growing up. The rest were already on their last legs the day he brought them home.

Thus it was no surprise that my own first car was a semi-dependable 1979 yellow Chevy Chevette, or that my subsequent upgrade was a seemingly rubber band-powered Dodge Omni. Back then, I figured nice cars were reserved exclusively for the super rich.

All of this is to explain why, to this day, my idea of a luxury car isn't an Audi, a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz. It's any car with working turn signals and a monochrome center-console display screen.

You will understand, then, why the car I currently drive, a 2021 Honda Civic hatchback, is easily the sportiest and nicest vehicle I have ever owned.

I love that car, and I love driving it. I've never had a car about which I could say that. It has what I consider to be all the best "modern" features, many of which have probably been standard on new vehicles for a decade but few of which I've ever personally had.

Speaking of new cars, I should mention that I've never owned one. And my wife has owned exactly one: her beloved 1988 Beretta, which was eventually passed down to me before I drove it into the ground. We not only are not "nice car" people, we're not even "new car" people.

Terry drove a series of minivans in the 90s and 2000s largely because she often had four or five passengers (i.e., our kids) in tow. Now she drives a 2015 Honda CRV, which while enjoyable isn't on the level of my Civic.

That's why I'm looking forward to her getting her own "bells-and-whistles" car sometime in the next year or so. And by bells and whistles, I'm talking about things that excite us but probably not you: heated seats and/or steering wheel, touchscreen console display, sideview cameras, etc.

If I could afford to buy her a Rolls, I would. But her standards are about as low as mine, and having a dependable, top-of-the-line Honda or Toyota is pretty much the pinnacle for both of us.

On the plus side, we are exceedingly easy to please.

You wake up one day and realize you've been sent back to the 80s...now what?

I'm a nostalgic guy who looks back fondly on his younger years.

The music to which I listen is one example of this. I have many modern/semi-current tracks in my library, and I try to listen to new stuff all the time, but there's no denying that my tastes lean very heavily toward the 1980s.

For every Harry Styles song I own, you'll find 30 by The Police, 25 by Men at Work, 20 by Duran Duran, and heck, probably five by Kajagoogoo.

I follow quite a few retro 80s accounts on Twitter because I enjoy the cultural memories they feature. One of those accounts recently posted a question that caught my interest: If you woke up one day and realized you had been transported back to the 80s, what would you do?

If you are younger than 33, the first thing you would do is wonder why you had been sent to a time before you were even born.

But if you are 53 like me, this becomes something to ponder. If I was sent back in time 40 years, and if, let's say, I was only allowed to stay there a few hours before returning to the present, what would be my priorities?

Here are the five things I would probably do:

(1) Sit and talk with my mom and dad (and if they happen to be visiting, my sisters and brother): Kids, once your parents are gone, you can't believe the things you would do to see them again. They would wonder why 13-year-old me had suddenly taken such a deep interest in having a protracted conversation with them, but it would be amazing. The first thing I would do is walk into the living room and talk with them.

(2) Head to the arcade: I would have to spend at least a half hour at Galaxy Gardens, our local game room. I expended untold amounts of time and money there and it was wonderful. I could do without people smoking indoors like they used to, but hey, that's the price you pay for the privilege of time travel.

(3) Turn on the TV: It wouldn't take long to cruise through the 36 channels we had from Continental Cablevision, so I would stop at MTV and watch some of those classic music videos when they were still fresh and new.

(4) Round up my friends: This would involve actually going to their houses and/or calling their landlines (gasp!), but any combination of Matt, Kevin, Jason, Mike, Todd, etc. I could rouse would be worth the effort. Even if we just headed down to the railroad tracks and hung out (it was much more fun than it sounds, believe me).

(5) Enjoy the freedom of being without a smartphone: I could easily do this now by simply leaving my phone at home, but it wouldn't be quite the same. There was something appealing about a world in which you were mostly unreachable most of the time and everyone was OK with that. As miraculous as the iPhone is as a technological innovation, it also comes with hidden shackles I wouldn't mind shedding for a few hours.

HONORABLE MENTION: 1983 was three years before I started dating Terry, so I might ride my bike to Robert Street on the other end of Wickliffe and see if I could catch a glimpse of her at home. This sort of stalking was frowned upon even then, however, so it might also lead to me spending a few hours in an early-80s jail cell.

Here's why I was on the local TV news in 1977 (and never really saw it)

This is what the set of the WJW newscast looked like in 1977. That's Kathy Adams on the left, Judd Hambrick in the middle, and some guy with very 70s hair on the right.

One day in 1976, I walked into the living room of our house and announced that I was bored.

My dad, knowing the kinds of things that interested nearly-seven-year-old me, suggested I write a letter to a famous person like the President.

I was intrigued by this idea, but I did him one better (or thought I did): Rather than writing to President Ford, I would write to Gov. Jimmy Carter, who was running for the presidency against Ford.

I don't remember what I wrote, but whatever it was, I'm sure it was done in pencil on one of the yellow legal pads I kept in my room.

(You may wonder why a six-year-old had yellow legal pads. I do, too. It was a long time ago.)

Anyway, I remember getting some sort of form letter response a month later from Gov. Carter, who went on to win the election by a fairly narrow margin.

That was enough for me. I thought it was pretty cool.

But then, in early January of '77, a large envelope showed up at our house. I think it came via registered mail.

It was an invitation to President-Elect Carter's inauguration in Washington, D.C.

At the time I don't think I understood the significance of this. All I knew is that we weren't going to attend.

I don't remember why this decision was made, but I think it had something to do with the fact that we would have had to supply our own transportation and would have been small faces in a crowd of many thousands.

There may also have been something to the fact that both of my parents were Republicans, and they wouldn't necessarily have been thrilled to go and celebrate the inauguration of a Democratic president.

Whatever the reason, I don't remember being too put out.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to mid-January. I'm in gym class at Mapledale Elementary School, where I'm a first-grader. A local TV news crew shows up and talks to my gym teacher. Then they start walking in my direction.

It turns out they're there to film me. I am incredibly confused by this, though the on-air reporter, legendary Cleveland television newsman Neil Zurcher, explains it's because I received a personal invitation to the presidential inauguration.

They get me on camera doing some rudimentary tumbling, as we were in the midst of a gymnastics unit. Then we go to our classroom, where I sit at my desk and they interview me. I don't remember any of the questions or any of my answers.

They tell me it's going to air as part of the 6 o'clock news on WJW Channel 8, which is exciting.

At some point that day it started snowing. And it kept on snowing. All day. Lots of snow. A real blizzard (almost exactly one year before the epic Cleveland Blizzard of 1978).

As a result, all planned stories for that 6 o'clock newscast are shunted aside in favor of weather-related coverage.

Somehow we find out that my piece will probably air during the 11pm news later that evening. I think my sister Judi was the one who called the station to get this update (as I recall, she was also the one who called them about me in the first place).

At that time of my life, I went to bed every night at 9pm, almost without exception. I rarely stayed up until 11.

I remember laying down that evening on the couch, intending to stay awake until the news came on. But I don't think I even made it to 10:30.

The next thing I knew, my mom was shaking me awake. She pointed my attention to the TV, where I saw myself talking. I was still half-asleep and missed most of the segment.

This was, you will note, a couple of years before the VCR era began, so we had no way of capturing the moment. There is no existing record of this interview, which is too bad.

I would like to see myself doing that somersault in gym class.

"Dad, you're an orphan now"

That's my father holding newborn Jared, August 1998.

We share what could be described as a dark sense of humor in my family.

There are many examples of this, but one of the funniest happened last summer on the day my mother passed away.

That sounds terrible, but it's true. When we got word that she was gone, there were the initial tears and hugs and sharing of memories. And then my daughter Chloe informed me that, as of that moment, I was officially an orphan.

I laughed at that. Hard. Something about the use of the old-fashioned word "orphan" juxtaposed with the situation just made it funny.

That, I guess, is how we sometimes deal with painful realities: We turn them into somewhat-less-than-polite jokes.

I bring this up because today would have been my dad's 92nd birthday. I inherited my sense of humor largely from him, and I think he would have found the orphan comment funny.

When someone would ask him whether a certain person had died, he would almost always reply, "Well, I hope so, or else they played a hell of a joke on her when they buried her."

If asked how someone died, he would invariably tilt his head to one side, close his eyes, and say, "Like this."

I'm busting up just thinking about it.

Dad has been gone for nearly 22 years, but his legacy of inappropriate remarks and ill-timed humor lives on in his children and grandchildren.

He would be proud to know that.

My love of office supplies started early

When I was growing up, my dad worked in an office environment as a data processing specialist for Lake County, Ohio. He worked with those big, tape-fed computers of the 60s and 70s, which had the processing power of your average tablet computer nowadays.

He would regularly bring home pads of paper for me to use, but it was never ordinary, blank paper. It was always sheets of specialized data processing forms, the back of which were blank for my writing and drawing pleasure.

He also brought home staplers, tape dispensers, binder clips, pens, pencils, erasers, markers, notebooks, file folders, and a whole host of other items that businesses commonly use, most of which were for me to play with.

Other kids wanted toys. I asked for typewriter ribbons.

This was weird, I know, but it has served me well in my career. I am the absolute go-to guy if you're looking for a particular item and don't want to walk all the way across the building to the office supply cabinet.

When I start my new job at Goodyear, one of the first things I will do is get my hands on a bunch of fresh office supplies and store them in a drawer in my desk.

Nothing else will be more exciting to me that first day, I guarantee.

Many of us were home video game system pioneers

In the fall of 1977, Atari released its 2600 cartridge gaming system. When someone asks whether you had "an Atari" back then, this is almost always the unit they're referring to.

We did eventually get "an Atari" in our house, but that wouldn't be for another two years. Instead, one evening in '77 my dad came home with a Radio Shack Electronic TV Scoreboard (it looked just like what you see in the image above).

It was essentially a black-and-white console that featured a number of variations on Pong. Sure, the games you could play included "tennis," "hockey," and "squash," but really, they were all just slight reworkings of Pong.

Still, I was immediately hooked. And fascinated. Back then, the idea of doing anything on your TV besides watching Channels 3, 5, 8, and 43 was remarkable. You could control what was happening on the screen. I can't emphasize enough how novel this was.

I played that Radio Shack game a lot. Then, the following year, I received a color gaming system for Christmas. While it was made by Atari, it still wasn't the 2600. It was this:

You could play four different kinds of pinball as well as Breakout, Break Away, and Basketball. Those knobs on the side controlled the pinball flippers, while the dial moved your paddle in the other games.

I would come home from school for lunch almost every day and play that thing to death.

Then came The King, or at least The King of its time, the Atari 2600. That was my big present for Christmas 1979. It was a huge part of my life for the next four years until I got my Commodore 64. Like my friends, I amassed a pretty big collection of cartridges. We would go over each other's houses and play all the time.

All of these systems were extremely primitive by today's gaming standards, but as I said, for the time they were revolutionary. My dad being an early adopter of a lot of electronic gadgets, we actually had a whole bunch of things that could be characterized as "revolutionary" (or at least "extremely neat").

None of it was Call of Duty or Fortnite, but then again, at the time, it didn't need to be.

We're in that stage of life when the driveway is always filled with cars

Obviously not our house, but this is sometimes what it felt like when I was growing up.

For a long time—from 1992 when we were married and bought our first house until 2010 when Elissa got her license—I never thought much about the way in which cars should be arranged in our driveway.

Because, of course, we only had two cars at any given time during those years. And both our old house and our current house have two-car garages, which meant both cars were always safely tucked away and our driveway generally clear for whomever needed it.

In subsequent years, as other kids turned 16 and bought cars, things got a little trickier.

It was, however, never as challenging as it could have been. We are blessed with a two-car-wide driveway. I grew up in a one-lane driveway home, which meant that the first person out every morning (usually my dad) either needed to be the last one in the driveway lineup, or else my mom—and later me—would have to back cars into the street to allow him to exit.

Even nowadays, though, with two kids out of the house and Jack still not driving, things can get a little funky when it comes to the driveway traffic report.

This is usually the result of one (or more) of the kids' significant others or friends coming over, parking in the driveway, and potentially blocking the way for someone who wants to exit.

Let's say, for example, me.

But really, I can't complain. If nothing else, this part of our lives has given me great appreciation for the person who designed the layout of our property and included that 19-foot-wide driveway.

God bless you, sir or ma'am. You have given the gift that keeps on giving.

My mom used to give me a dollar to go and buy a loaf of Italian bread at Fazio's. I got to keep 25 cents.

It was the early 80s, I guess. And when she was between shopping trips but the family needed bread, my mom would send me to the grocery store on my bike.

This bread was always Italian bread, mind you. Sliced with seeds from Fazio's, where she did most of our shopping. I don't have a drop of Italian blood in me that I know of, but that's virtually the only kind of bread we ever ate.

Anyway, the store was, I don't know, maybe a 5-minute bike ride from home if I hurried? No more than 10 minutes, for sure.

Once I got there, I would enter, take a right and cut through one of the cashier lines, then another right followed by a left to get to the bakery. I would order the bread, which would be placed in a see-through plastic Fazio's bread bag and handed over to me.

I would take the bread, get into a 12-items-or-less line, and pay for it using the crisp dollar bill Mom had likely gotten from the bank when she cashed Dad's last paycheck. The bread cost 75 cents. That left me with a quarter, and that quarter never made it home.

I would always insert it into the video game stationed at the store entrance. The game changed a few times over the years, but the one with the longest tenure that I can remember was Defender.

I loved Defender. I once wrote an article for a middle-school English class on how to succeed at the game. Mrs. Crow gave me an 'A' on it, God bless her.

I would stand there playing Defender for however long I could hold out before losing my allotted three ships. If I had done well enough (which occasionally happened), I would enter my initials into the game as one of the high scorers.

Then I would grab the bread, go outside, get back onto my bike, and ride home.

The whole process rarely took more than 45 minutes.

I would pay a large sum of money for the chance to go back and do it once more.

It was a simpler time, you understand.