When your niece or nephew may as well be your sibling

There are two people in the world to whom I could text the words "goony goo goo" and get a laughing/crying emoji in return.

One is my high school classmate and track teammate Ken Beavers.

The other is my nephew Mark, who as I've documented before is only five years younger than me and thus has always served much more as my surrogate little brother than as a nephew.

Mark turns 46 years old today. He would immediately recognize "goony goo goo" as a line from Eddie Murphy's "Delirious" comedy special, which came out 38 years ago when Mark was a grade-schooler, but which he and I quote back and forth endlessly.

It doesn't have to be an Eddie Murphy quote in these random texts we send each other, by the way. It can be almost anything that strikes us both as funny: a comedy bit (often from Eddie or Norm MacDonald, but we draw from a wide range of comics), a line from a movie, or just something funny one of us has said or done at some point.

We have similar comedy and musical tastes along with our shared last name and ancestry. Mark and his wife Tiffany are expecting their second child this year, which means that increasingly, we also share parenting stories.

I don't know if you have a niece or nephew who is very close in age to you—I've known a few to be older than their uncles and aunts—but it really is fun. Mark has been a blessing in our lives from the moment he was born way back in the Dark Ages (1975).

So to my little nephew, I have only two things to say today. One is Happy Birthday!

The other, of course, is goony goo goo.

5 ways you can tell it's summer in Northeast Ohio

(1) Acres of pasty white flesh. Everywhere.
My buddy Kenny Beavers, a wise man of African-American descent, once said, "The snow melts and white people think it's summer." Which is of course absolutely true. White people around this part of the country have been walking around in shorts since late March. But here we are three months later and there's no denying that summer is actually here. The direct result of this is that those same white people think it's perfectly fine to wear next to nothing when they're outside these days, regardless of their physical condition or the degree to which they do or do not tan when exposed to sunlight. If the sight of these people bothers you, then I can only apologize on behalf of my fellow Caucasians.

(2) Fourteen people per square foot in every public pool
Our Window of Summer Fun Opportunity is very small here on America's North Coast, which is why we try to cram in all the summer activities we can from mid-June until school starts up again in August. Your neighborhood pool is likely packed with people doing their best to have fun despite the fact that they are hemmed in on all sides by others trying to do the same (every third person of whom has most definitely peed in that pool sometime in the previous 20 minutes...just saying).

(3) Mandals
I don't know how I feel about man sandals. I don't think they look good on me because I have big calves. But guys with sleeker legs than mine can pull them off, I think. Not everyone agrees with me (case in point: my former Dix & Eaton colleague Lisa Zone ). And when I say sandals, I'm talking the strappy brown variety. I'm cool with the black athletic slider-type sandals that also come out of hiding this time of year.

(4) Cookouts and their associated smells
We don't own a charcoal grill, but I love the smell of charcoal because it just screams "June" to me. If you live in the suburbs, then you know how much people like us love their cookouts. "I can cook outside! On the deck! Without shoveling a path to the grill! Isn't this awesome?

(5) Cornhole
I hate to come back to the white people thing again, because I'm sure there are plenty of other ethnic groups who enjoy this game. But by and large, cornhole is the domain of white people. They even love making their own customized cornhole boards. Technically you could play cornhole in the fall or even the winter, but just...no. It's a summer game. Playing it any other time violates the spirit of Middle Class Person Summer, and I won't have it.

White guys, dark tans

For years, I have had a love-hate relationship with the sun.

My friend Kenny Beavers, who is of African descent, used to say, "White people can at least tan in the sun. Black people just get blacker."

And he was right, of course, as Kenny often was during our high school years.

But there are at least two complicating factors here:

• Tanning requires one to remove one's shirt. And I hate to take off my shirt in public. Never have been a fan of it.
• Because I'm in an office all day, my exposure to the sun is limited. And when I am outside, I'm usually wearing a shirt (see previous bullet point). Which means I develop the time-honored farmer's tan.

So I would just as soon live in Seattle or someplace where the sun doesn't come out a lot and persons of Caucasian ancestry like me aren't expected to have deep-brown tans in the summer.

The only time in my adult life I've had a really nice tan was in 2008, and that was only because it was artificial. I bought my skin coloring that year in the form of several 15-minute sessions in a tanning booth.

We know now, of course, that tanning is stupid. You may as well take pills designed to give you skin cancer.

We also knew that fact in 2008, but I chose to ignore it because I had just lost a bunch of weight and figured I might actually be willing to walk around shirtless that summer. And the last thing I wanted was to assault other people's visual senses with the sight of my pasty white body.

You could easily tell when I had visited the tanning salon because I smelled like coconuts, a product of the tanning accelerator lotion I would slather all over myself before each session.

Now, understand that if I feel self-conscious when I take off my shirt, I felt really self-conscious whenever I walked into that tanning place. The whole thing (giving the proprietors money so they would allow me to engage in a patently unhealthy activity) just felt stupid and vain.

Of course, after a couple of weeks of doing it almost every day, I looked pretty good, which made me forget  how stupid and vain it was.

This is an unfortunate tendency of the human race: If something makes us look or feel really good (or both), we'll willingly ignore the fact that it is also likely to hasten our deaths.

Because, if we're being honest with ourselves, we'll admit that we might actually agree to die at age 50 if we were guaranteed to have fabulous, sexy bodies our entire lives.

(Right now, some of you are weighing this proposition over in your minds. Hot and dead after five decades? Or ugly and unhappy at age 90?)

I haven't been tanning this year, but I'm a lot more likely to remove my shirt this summer now that I've dropped a few pounds. And when I do, my torso will almost inevitably be bright white and contrast sharply with my golden brown arms.

I think I've resigned myself to replacing the tanning accelerator with sunscreen and drawing comments from people at the city pool along the lines of, "Good Lord, that is the whitest man I've ever seen."

Maybe Kenny Beavers will be there, too, and we can console each other as I somehow get even whiter and he gets darker.