Four days without air conditioning revealed just how soft we've become

Like much of the U.S., Northeast Ohio has experienced extended periods of heat and humidity this summer.

At first we barely noticed, as we spent much of the time cooped up in the house with our central air conditioning working 24/7 to maintain a comfortable temperature.

That is, until our AC gave up the ghost.

Thankfully, it happened after the worst of the first heat wave had passed, but it was still plenty warm and humid outside.

Soon, it became warm and humid inside, as well. And the three of us (Terry, Jack and me) were miserable.

It turned out our entire AC system needed replacing at a cost that was not unexpected but still painful.

In the four days between the start of the problem and the installation of the new system, we lived much like I remember living in the 1970s and 80s. We sat around under ceiling fans, sweating and generally longing for winter.

We also complained. A lot. That's not something we did much when I was growing up on Harding Drive. Back then, having a hot house in the summer was just a fact of life. I knew very few people with central air.

My parents did have a powerful window AC unit in their bedroom, and on the hottest nights they would set up blankets on the floor so I could sleep in comfort with them.

But most of the time you just kind of gutted it out.

The whole thing made me realize just how dependent we've become on central air, and how we simply don't need to be as tough as we used to be in order to live day to day.

I love technology, but perhaps predictably, for many of us it has stripped away our ability to deal with any sort of adversity, no matter how minor.

The only thing I can think to do is purposely shut off the air several times a summer and force my family to endure heat the old-fashioned way.

I would probably only get to do that once, though, because Terry and Jack would rip me apart once the indoor temperature hit 80 degrees.

Instead, to ensure my own safety, I'm just going to pray the AC never gives out again.

This old house: Where we sleep, eat, and pile up memories

Later this month, we will celebrate having lived in our house for 22 years.

We moved in on July 19, 2003. I remember the exact date because...well, because I remember dates like that. There are vast expanses of my brain crammed with dates and details I really don't need taking up space perhaps better filled by more practical information.

I also remember that day because it was my friend Kevin's birthday, and while he has nothing to do with this story, I still equate move-in day with Kev's birthday.

Anyway, 22 years is in some ways a long time and in others not so long at all. My mom lived in her house on Harding Drive for 56 years. And I know lots and lots of people who have been in their homes nearly that long.

Still, it feels like Terry, the kids, and I have always been here at 30025 Miller Avenue. When we took occupancy of the house, Elissa was 9, Chloe was 6, Jared was a few weeks away from turning 5, and little Melanie was still two months from turning 3.

Jack wasn't even a thought yet.

The house has hosted graduation parties, countless birthday celebrations, our 25th anniversary shindig back in 2017, and a whole lot of visits and sleepovers involving family and friends.

I've cut the grass 8 million times (or so it feels). And I think Terry has pulled an even higher number of weeds from the flower beds.

It's the house to which we brought Jack when he was born in 2006. It's the place where we watched all of the kids grow up.

And for now, it's the place where Terry and I intend to spend at least a few more years, if not several.

When you're in your mid-50s and still able to get around well, you don't often think about stairs, for example, being much of an issue. But in 20 or 30 years, if we're still in the house, they very well could be. We have both an upstairs and a basement, and we travel between them regularly.

Interestingly, by the end of this year, our current house will be the place where I've lived the longest in my life. I spent the first 22 years and 4 months of my existence living on Harding Drive before Terry and I bought our first house in 1992.

It gets to a point that even if you decide you want to sell your home, you can't imagine anyone else living there after you. I still feel that way about the place on East 300th Street where Terry and I spent the first 11 years of our marriage. Three different families have lived there in the two decades since we moved out, but part of me still thinks of that house as ours and the others as just renters.

In the end, there's an obvious difference between a house (essentially a container for your stuff) and a home (a place where you always feel warm, welcome, and safe).

I would like to think we've created a nice little home on the southern edge of Wickliffe over 22 years filled with love, light and fond memories.

Zillow is great for stalking houses in which you used to live

I grew up here.

Including the house Terry and I currently own, I've only lived in three places my entire life.

And all three of those places are in the same city.

I grew up at good old 1807 Harding Drive, living there from birth through age 22. Then I moved into 1913 East 300th Street, our first house after we got married. We lived there for 11 years before moving up here to Miller Avenue in beautiful Wickliffe Heights.

For my local friends, it should be noted that while "Wickliffe Heights" is not a true political entity, it is the real name of the subdivision on and around Rockefeller Road in the southern part of the city. It even says "Wickliffe Heights" on our house deed.

Anyway, the point is, there was a time not long ago when, once you moved out of a house, your chances of ever seeing the inside of it again were pretty slim. You would have had to sell it to someone you know, or at least someone who was willing to let you back in if you would randomly swing by years later.

Nowadays, however, real estate listings are easily accessible online, and they often include copious photos of the inside of the house.

Take the Zillow.com listing for 1807 Harding, for instance. While it doesn't contain a "copious" number of photos, there are still five shots of the interior of the house that bring back a flood of memories.

There's the living room with the big front window looking out onto the porch. The one and only bathroom in a house that at one time contained six of us. The small but peaceful fenced-in backyard.

I love being able to look at these images whenever I want. My parents moved into that house 62 years ago this month, and it still holds considerable sentimental value.

The Zillow listing for 1913 East 300th offers much more in the way of photos, many of which reveal significant upgrades to the house since we moved out in 2003.

The enclosed front porch is familiar enough, but that deck in the backyard? Yeah, we didn't put that in.

Nor did we rip out the island in the kitchen or make the dining room look so fancy.

(In our defense, we spent most of our 300th Street years having and raising babies. We were a bit preoccupied.)

This shot of the kitchen?

You could have shown me that photo and asked if it looked familiar, and I would have said no. I spent more than a decade eating breakfasts and washing dishes in that room, but it's almost unrecognizable to me 20+ years later.

They say you can't go home again, and that's usually true. But you can at least see what home looks like now, which I think is pretty cool.

My wife thought it was sad when I told her I used to play board games by myself as a kid

I received the Happy Days board game one Christmas in the late 70s. More often than not when I played it, I was by myself.

Growing up, I had a core group of friends with whom I used to spend a lot of time. In the summers, especially, we did a lot of stuff together.

But even when you're 9 years old and your options are somewhat limited, there are still times when you're not with your friends and you have to figure out how to amuse yourself.

The child psychologists call this "independent play," my oldest daughter informs me, and it's a skill I developed pretty early as the youngest (by far) of four siblings. I was rarely bored.

One of the things I used to do was to take one of the several board games I owned down from the shelf in my room and play it by myself.

Even if the game was designed for four players, I would put four pieces on the board, roll the dice, and take each piece's turn individually.

Amazingly, I never told Terry about this until recently. I say "amazingly" because I've known the woman for nearly 39 years and figured I had absolutely exhausted my childhood stories (and adulthood stories, for that matter) with her.

But apparently this had never come up before. When I mentioned it, she at first laughed, then she got a pitying look on her face, which was worse than the laughing.

She even took to our family text group chat to let the kids know their father had been a sad, lonely little boy who was forced to engage in multiplayer board games by himself for lack of friends.

But as I explained to the kids, it wasn't like that at all. It was just one of the things I did to amuse myself whenever Matt, Kevin, Jason, Todd, Mike or any of my other Harding Drive/Mapledale Road compatriots were unavailable.

The sad thing is, I now appear to have lost this ability. I'm typing this blog post on a Saturday night in our living room, only because I have completely finished today's (and most of tomorrow's) to-do list and wasn't sure what to do with myself.

Maybe it's time for a little solo Monopoly!

It's jarring when the numbskulls you grew up with turn out to be responsible and productive adults

 

This is not the Matt I knew in the 1980s, believe me.

The guy pictured above is Matt Schulz. Or "Matthew G. Schulz," as he's officially known in his capacity as Councilman at Large for the city of Kirtland, Ohio.

I've known Matt (Matthew G...whatever) since about 1975, I would guess. We grew up across the street from one another and spent many hours hanging out. Later we played high school football together and graduated a year apart.

Today is Matt's birthday, an occasion for looking back at the many memories we made before marriage, kids and all the responsibilities of adulthood conspired to limit our communications to sporadic texts and once-every-two-years lunch dates.

Matt is not only a respected longtime councilperson in Kirtland, he is also a civil engineer for the Ohio Department of Transportation. He has a wonderful wife and four great kids. He is, by all accounts, a pillar of his community.

Which is amazing to think about, because when we were kids (and please understand how much love I have for this man when I say this), Matt was a knucklehead.

He just was. We were ALL knuckleheads. I spent my formative years around a group of boys who, in any given situation, would always choose the stupidest course of action.

We threw rocks at each other, ran through people's backyards together, committed occasional acts of vandalism on stopped freight trains, set off firecrackers we had no business playing with, and just generally set the bar very high when it came to being young, dumb and annoying.

Matt was the ringleader of many of these shenanigans. He would later go on to do even stupider things in his life, as so many of us do.

But then he got his act together, earned his college degree, met and married Katarina, and became the upright citizen you see pictured above.

At his core, though, he is still Matt. He is still funny, smart and sarcastic. He became a grumpy old man in his 20s and continues to live up to that title in his 50s.

But he is Matt in responsible adult clothes, and he's someone to be admired.

It's just that I still think of him as one of the holy terrors of Harding Drive, the street where we grew up. The man you see today is a direct descendant of the hellion I once knew, and it's difficult sometimes to understand how he ended up in such a good place.

Such, I suppose, is the product of having a good wife, a mother who loves him, and a faith in God that I know sustains him.

Happy birthday, my friend. In celebration, I will be driving by your house tonight to throw a rock at you.

I'm counting on you having the maturity not to throw it back at me.

The smell of dinner cooking in the late afternoon takes me back 40 years

Several weeks ago, my beloved Wickliffe Swing Band performed in the front yard of one of its drum majors. The drum major's mom had bought the winning ticket for Band on Demand, an annual fundraiser in which the winner gets to have the band play outside their home.

The kids did their usual bang-up job, after which I walked down Wickliffe's Maple Street and Elm Avenue on the way back to my car. Just as I took the left turn from Maple onto Elm, it hit me.

It was the unmistakable smell of someone cooking dinner. I don't know exactly what they were making, but it was that combination of savory aromas familiar to anyone who has ever walked a suburban American street at 5:30 in the afternoon.

I hadn't experienced that smell in years, and it immediately took me back to Harding Drive in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Most of the kids with whom I grew up ate dinner with their families. You would play together all afternoon, and at some point you each had to go home for dinner with parents and siblings. Then you could meet up again afterward to continue doing whatever you were doing before soup was on.

Those dinners were almost invariably prepared by moms. More than once I remember heading home for my own dinner and along the way smelling the entrees and side dishes the mothers of Harding were preparing that particular day.

It was a different time. I don't know that it was ultimately any better or worse than now, but it was most certainly its own unique time.

People still cook dinner, but they don't eat together as often as they used to. And far more frequently than was once the case, it's often a dad doing the cooking.

Like most people, I infuse my childhood with a degree of romanticism it probably doesn't deserve. But smelling that dinner cooking somewhere near Maple and Elm reminded me how blessed I was to grow up when and where I did.

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.

We always just assumed we were middle class

The Pew Research Center offers this online calculator that will tell you whether you're considered to be in the lower, middle, or upper income tier based on the part of the U.S. in which you live, your annual household income before taxes, and the number of people in your household. (If you click that link, it should open up in a separate window so you don't have to navigate away from this post.)

My personal results were just about where I figured they would be, but it made me think back to when I was growing up on Harding Drive in good old suburban Wickliffe, Ohio. We always thought of ourselves as middle class, as did everyone else on our street, as far as I knew.

I say "as far as I knew" because over time, I've come to learn there are people who secretly have lots of money but who, for whatever reason, choose to live very frugal lifestyles and only appear to be middle class.

The gauge I used as a kid for figuring out whether people were "rich" was not so much the size of their house, but how close the house was to their neighbors on either side.

On my street, there was never more than about 50 feet from one house to another, so in my mind, we were all pretty solidly middle class.

There were other parts of Wickliffe, up in "Wickliffe Heights" where I live now, for example, where people had big yards and lots of space between houses. I figured those must be the rich people.

I know better now that I actually live up here, but veterans of this area of town always laugh when I tell them what my perception of it was back in the 70s and 80s.

Of course, this is all a matter of perspective. Salaries in Northeast Ohio tend to lag behind many parts of the country, largely because the cost of living is so reasonable around here. What we paid for our house in Wickliffe might get us a two-room apartment in San Francisco. Might.

But when you start thinking globally, we middle-class folks in the U.S. live like kings and queens. The Washington Post a few years ago published a calculator that allowed you to compare your income with people in specific countries around the world.

Suffice it to say that most of us are Bill Gates in comparison with the citizens of certain nations.

So we should be grateful, middle class or otherwise. Growing up, I didn't know any better anyway, so I've always been pretty satisfied with where my family and I fall out, socioeconomically speaking.

Long live the bourgeoisie.