Every scar tells a story

I wish I looked as good as this guy, though I could do without the foot-long leg scar.

You might have read today's headline and assumed I was referring to emotional scars. While it's true those types of non-visible scars always have a story, today I'm talking about actual physical scars.

I have four of them on my body, and on those rare occasions when I notice and think about them, they take me back to different times of my life.

There is, for example, the gash on the side of my right leg I got when I was 10 and we were jumping over the bushes at Mike Ostack's house.

As I leapt over those bushes and landed, I grazed against the jagged edge of a rusty old metal garbage can on the other side. It was enough to tear my jeans and the skin underneath, resulting in my first set of stitches (five of them). I think there was also a tetanus shot involved, or at least I hope there was.

Mike was one of my best friends in the world, but within a year he and his family would pack up and move to Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've seen him only a few times since. Nowadays our only communication comes in the form of LinkedIn messages exchanged once a year on his birthday in February.

Life goes on. We all have people who come in and out of our little spheres.

There's also the cut on my chin I got playing football.

Well, to be honest, I wasn't "playing" football. It was during pregame warm-ups my junior year. I was on the scout defensive team as a cornerback. On one play, Dave Engeman, a strong, talented senior guard, pulled around my side and gave me a stiff forearm to the chin strap.

I walked back to the sideline, unbuckled my helmet and felt my chin, only to pull back my hand and see it was covered in blood.

That was a four-stitch cut sewed up by our team doctor in the locker room. He used a topical anesthetic that lasted for maybe two of the four stitches.

I'm not going to lie: It hurt. And later the cut got infected and smelled funky for days.

On the top of my left foot is a gnarly scar I picked up in my friend Matt's basement, sometime between the garbage can and football cuts. We were playing hide and seek in the pitch dark, as we often did, and I somehow managed to rake that bare foot across the sharp metal corner of a dehumidifier unit.

You have to understand, kids: In the 60s, 70s and 80s, consumer products were often made with only functionality in mind and not necessarily safety.

My mom took me to the hospital, and amazingly the staff there decided not to stitch the cut but instead just bandaged it. It eventually healed after several weeks, but I always thought that was the wrong call.

Anyway, the only other prominent physical scar I have is actually two scars, and I don't remember a thing about how I got them.

They were the result of a hernia surgery I underwent at 18 months of age. I've heard stories of how I would cry and cry at night, and no matter what my mom or sisters tried, they couldn't comfort me.

Turns out I had a bilateral hernia. One day they dropped me off at the hospital for the surgery and I had to stay there overnight. My sister Debbie always says it was the saddest thing to see me in a crib in my little cowboy-themed hospital gown as they waved goodbye and left me alone.

All's well that ends well, though, and I'm happy to report I've had no issues since.

I was thinking of leading today's post with a photo of one of my scars. I didn't ultimately do that, but rest assured that if I had, it wouldn't have been the hernia scars...

My interactions with recreational fireworks as a kid were nearly disastrous

I don't know if kids still do this, but when I was growing up, my friends and I would play with fireworks any and every chance we got.

By "fireworks," I mean not only things that make loud noises, but also relatively innocent stuff like black snakes, smoke bombs, pop-its, and jumping jacks. If you could light it or throw it, and it did something cool, we were all over it.

In general, we were all over anything involving fire. I don't know what drove us to be such little pyromaniacs, but we loved us some flames.

The problem was, at least as far as I was concerned, the potential for injury was real and frequent. I never actually got hurt playing with fireworks, but that was only by the grace of God.

I remember once being with my friend Matt, who had gotten his hands on an M-80. These little bombs were the kings of neighborhood fireworks simply because of the explosive power and noise they generated. We couldn't have been more than 10 years old, yet here we were playing with something that could have blown our fingers off.

We decided to wedge the M-80 into a little crack in a picnic table at the playground. Matt lit it and we backed up a few feet. When it went off, splinters of wood flew in almost every direction, with one whizzing within an inch or two of my head. It could easily have gone into my eye.

Then there was the time Matt and Kevin were shooting bottle rockets across the street. I opened the front door to our house to see what was going on, and they very smartly decided to shoot one straight at me. I didn't get hit, but it did enter our house before exploding just inside the storm door.

I almost got in big trouble for that one.

My worst near-miss, without a doubt, was the time I nearly burned down my school with a jumping jack.

I've told this story here on the blog before. Here's how I described the incident in a post 10 years ago:

I was playing with a pack of jumping jacks I'd, um, borrowed from my dad. I was with my nephew Mark, who had to have been only 6 or 7 years old at the time. We were by the old Mapledale Elementary School, and ringing the building was a two-foot-high pile of dry leaves. My genius idea was to light a jumping jack and throw it into these leaves, so that's what I did. The leaves, of course, immediately caught fire, and the flames started spreading rapidly around the perimeter of the building. Mark and I ran away as fast as we could. Someone who was there told the cops I had done it, and by the time I got home, there was a Wickliffe police cruiser waiting in the driveway for me. My mother was, to put it mildly, not happy.

You'll want to know what I was thinking there. Heck, I want to know what I was thinking, but I don't know. Not even an 11-year-old boy can fathom the thought processes of an 11-year-old boy.

The only positive outcome was that the school did not, in fact, burn down. But that's only because the good folks from the Wickliffe Fire Department came and put out the mini inferno I had started.

Anyway, it's Fourth of July here in America, which means recreational fireworks will be out in abundance. If you celebrate in this manner, please stay safe and use a little common sense.

Like, for instance, make sure that when an M-80 explodes, it doesn't create projectiles that could potentially kill you and your friends.

That would really put a damper on the holiday.

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!

Running through neighbors' backyards probably carried less risk in the early 80s than it does now

Mr. Kevin C. Buchheit, the man who served as my Phone-a-Friend when I appeared on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" (true story).

Today is my friend Kevin's birthday. I've known Kev as long as I've known our mutual friend Matt, which is to say since about 1974.

Kev has always been one of my best friends. We shared a lot of common interests growing up, and I'm very proud of the work he did for 20 years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent (a job from which he is now officially retired).

Back when we were annoying adolescents, Kevin, Matt, Jason, Todd and others of our band of Harding Drive friends would do something we simply called "The Route." We would traverse the entire length of our street on foot, but not using the sidewalk.

No, we would do this by sneaking through people's backyards, one after another. This would involve hopping fences, pushing through pricker bushes, avoiding dogs, and generally trying to keep a low profile as we trespassed on everyone's property.

The logical question is why exactly we did this. And I have no logical answer.

I have no answer at all, actually, logical or otherwise. It was just something obnoxious that, had the Wickliffe Police ever been notified, probably would have landed us a stern talking-to, if not outright conviction on some low-level misdemeanor.

I believe I completed the entire Route on both sides of the street, though for whatever reason, the west side was easier to navigate than the east (fewer bush-related obstacles and lower fences, as I recall).

As I think back on this, I realize we were fortunate not to have been threatened by an angry neighbor at one point or another. Plenty of them probably owned firearms, and some were likely of the shoot-first, ask-questions-later variety.

But then, the people of Harding Drive tended to be a little more tight-knit in those days, and I'm guessing most would have recognized who we were (even in the darkness of a summer evening) and simply yelled at us, rather than putting a bullet in our backsides.

Nowadays? My sense is that just as many people own guns in 2024 as did 40 years ago, but now they seem to be less trusting and more likely to use them on unidentified intruders.

All of which is to say I'm thankful we survived long enough to celebrate Kevin's 55th birthday today. Lord knows, we pulled plenty of stupid stunts back then that could have kept at least one of us from making it this far.

Happy birthday, Kev.

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.

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.

Remembering Dave Sasek on the Fourth of July

This is Dave.

Earlier this year a childhood friend of mine named Dave Sasek passed away in a car accident. I hadn't spoken to Dave in a number of years, but like many who graduated from Wickliffe in the late 80s/early 90s, the tragedy of it really knocked me for a loop.

The years in which I hung around with Dave were relatively short, starting maybe in sixth grade and lasting into the early part of high school. He lived on the next street over from me and we played football together.

I'm thinking of Dave today in particular because of an episode that happened on this day in (I want to say) 1984 or so. Dave and I, along with our friends Matt and Kevin, attended the Wickliffe fireworks and were walking home afterward, since none of us could yet drive.

We passed a yard in which some little kids were playing with sparklers. Dave paused, looked at them, and said very matter of factly, "You'd better stop that, or the police are going to come and set you on fire."

It was stupid, obnoxious, and utterly perplexing. And I couldn't stop laughing. When you're a 14-year-old boy, trust me when I say you laugh at dumb things like this constantly.

Yet it was right in line with Dave's twisted-but-intelligent sense of humor. He did stuff like that all the time, and he was one of the few people who could make me laugh on cue.

Dave also turned me on to the music of The Doors, and we played quite a few hours of Atari in his basement together. That was where we found the secret dot in the Atari game "Adventure" and discovered the message hidden in the game by the designer...quite the find at the time.

Anyway, as  I said, we lost track of each other post-graduation, but I was incredibly sorry to hear what happened to him. I just may light a sparkler in his memory tonight (and believe me when I say I'll be giggling in his honor the whole time).