A 37-year-old video clip brings back a flood of memories

The video at the top of today's post is a 1-minute snippet of a longer segment recorded on Wednesday, November 2, 1988, my 19th birthday.

The clip was captured by my dad using our trusty old – and decidedly heavy – Curtis Mathis video camera. The quality is exactly what you would expect nearly four decades on, though I'm not sure the lighting and the videographer were exactly top notch to begin with.

(I say that with all due respect to my dad, who made up for whatever he lacked in moviemaking skills with love and enthusiasm.)

No matter, though. What's important is that it captures a moment in time that, while receding further and further into the past, still vividly recalls the optimism of young adulthood.

I was a freshman at John Carroll University, while my then-fiancée Terry (seen in the last few seconds of the video) was working at Lincoln Electric and banking the money we would use to buy our first house 3 1/2 years later.

There's much to savor here, including:

• A striking resemblance between 1988 me and the 2025 version of my son Jack. People have said we look alike, and I see it here.
  
  
• A starring role for my niece Jessica, who was 3 years old at the time and the star of nearly every video my dad shot.
  
  
• Cameos from loved ones long gone (Mom, my sister Judi) and those thankfully still with us (my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Becky, my brother-in-law Jess).
  
  
• Mark with my stuffed Bill the Cat on his head.

Mine is not the first generation to have its life chronicled through home movies, though I think the VCR era did make it easier to record and watch moments like these.

And I'm so grateful for that. A few years ago I went through our VHS tapes and digitized as many as I could. They're full of clips like these I never want to lose.

Time marches on. Technology makes it possible to remember the people and places we encounter along the way in more than just our hearts.

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.

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.

You get used to your parents being gone, even if you don't want to

Today would have been my mom's 93rd birthday. She passed away five years ago this summer, right in the middle of the pandemic.

What made the whole thing tougher is that we didn't get the chance to see her in person from mid-March, when she went into assisted living after a stay in the hospital, until the day before she died in early July. Covid restrictions and everything, you know.

We got to see her on FaceTime during those chaotic months, but that's obviously not the same thing.

Terry and I were scheduled to see her on July 2nd for a "window visit," where the assisted living folks would bring her to a window (maybe a window screen so we could talk? I can't remember) and we could actually see her face to face.

But a catastrophic fall earlier that week changed those plans in a hurry. Yes, we did get to see her in person on July 2, but it was instead at hospice when she was unconscious and nearing the end of her time on this earth.

She passed away the next day, but not before we had the chance to say our goodbyes. I've always been grateful for that.

Anyway, with my dad having died several years earlier, I've been without my parents for a while now. Terry's mom passed away less than three weeks before mine, and she lost her dad a year and a half ago, so she's in the same boat.

You still have those moments when you want to call them and share some big news or just talk about something that happened to you, and then you remember they're not around anymore. It's a sad, jarring realization.

It happens less frequently now, but it still happens. I've become accustomed to being an "orphan" (as my daughter jokingly put it), though I'm not sure that makes any of it easier.

Have you seen that meme going around on social media that shows a phone screen with an incoming call from "Mom" and "Dad?" It says something like, "If you still receive these calls, be grateful."

I agree. You don't know what you have until it's gone.

Three hilarious things my mom did that make me miss her

That's my mom with Jared and me at Jared's graduation party, 2017.

My mother was one of the sweetest, funniest, most genuine people you would ever want to meet. Everyone loved her, from her kids and grandkids to the many people for whom she sewed during her 57 years living in Wickliffe.

She also had a tendency to make the occasional verbal gaffe, which only served to make us love her that much more.

This is just off the top of my head:

• One time she was introduced to a guy named Stan Barwidi. Upon being told his name, Mom very politely said, "Well hello, Stanbar!" She apparently thought his name was "Stanbar Widi." (There was also the time she mixed up another guy's name, but I don't know whether his real name was Al Filidoro and she called him "Phil Alodora" or the other way around. Either way, it was a classic Mom move.)
  
  
• In the same vein, she once referred to the Paul Simon song "Kodachrome" as "Polaroid." Close. Sort of.
  
  
• Then there was the occasion when my sister Judi had a friend, Larry Mathay, come to our house. Larry arrived at our front door, at which point our dog Trixie started barking loudly. Coming into the living room to let him in – probably while cooking dinner and trying to take care of toddler me – Mom tried to diffuse the noisy chaos by shouting, "Larry, shut up! Trixie, sit down!" As you might suspect, she meant it the other way around.

That's not to mention the time she whacked me in the head with a loaf of Italian bread when I wouldn't stop teasing my little nephew Mark, or when she couldn't understand a friend's thick Southern accent and tried repeatedly (and hilariously) to decipher what the woman was saying.

Oh Mom, I wish you were still around.

Our Thanksgiving dinner table looked exactly the same every year in the 1970s and 80s...and the 90s...and the 2000s

 

Full disclosure: I stole the photo above from the folks at Bob Evans, who want you to know they're basically ready to cater your entire Thanksgiving if you'd like.

But in some ways that image isn't too dissimilar from the reality of my Thanksgivings growing up on Harding Drive. We had a lot of the same foods, and every year we would take a picture once they were all cooked and set out on the table.

The thing is, other than maybe some discoloration from the early years before film technology really evolved, you very likely couldn't tell the difference between the 1972 photo and the 1998 photo.

Or between any two years, really. This is because we ate the same stuff year after year, decade after decade.

Don't get me wrong, it was all tasty stuff, but it never varied.

Which was fine by me, though I always thought it was funny that we took pictures of the same table with the same tablecloth and the same platters of Thanksgiving deliciousness, with no regard to the fact that these images ended up being essentially photocopies of one another.

My mom was a great cook, but she also scored points for consistency.

Terry started attending our Thanksgiving dinners as a teenager. She found it strange that we had turkey and ham and roast beef as options, but we never had homemade pies (they were, she recalls, usually store-bought Marie Callender pies).

To be fair, I always thought it was odd that her family had side dishes like rutabaga on their Thanksgiving table, though for the record, I liked that rutabaga. Some years I think my mother-in-law Judy and I were the only two people who ate it.

Anyway, I miss the Thanksgivings of years past, probably because so many of the people who were there are now gone. So it goes.

I still don't think there's anything wrong with having multiple meats on Thanksgiving, though.

A lifetime ago, I used to walk home from school to eat lunch and watch game shows

I logged countless episodes of "Card Sharks" growing up.

I am repeatedly reminded of the fact that I grew up in a very different time. I guess anyone above a certain age (say 30) can say the same.

When I was young, for example, game shows were a thing. All the networks had them, and they were particular staples of the daytime TV lineup.

I also attended a neighborhood elementary school where many of the kids walked home for lunch. I think there are still schools that allow this, but it felt far more prevalent when I was growing up.

It was many years before I understood how good I had it. When I arrived home, my mom would have lunch ready for me on a TV tray. It was usually a sandwich and canned fruit.

I would turn on the TV, find a game show to watch, and dig into Mom's delicious repast. The game shows varied over the years, though "Card Sharks" is the one that comes most readily to mind.

I would happily wolf down the food (that 10am elementary school snack never quite satisfied) while playing along with the contestants on TV. I knew exactly when I had to leave to make it back to school before the 1pm afternoon bell.

I was rarely, if ever, late, though I sat in our living room until the last possible minute. I wanted to fully enjoy my mid-day break at home before heading back to good old Mapledale Elementary.

In later years (5th and 6th grades), lunch times were more about playing football or baseball with my classmates. While I still came home to eat, those lunches were suddenly rushed affairs in which the goal was to eat as quickly as possible and dash back to school before the other guys had made it outside for recess.

None of my kids were ever able to come home from school for lunch, and the TV game show lineup of today pales in comparison to what it was in the 1970s and 80s. All of which is OK, but man, what I wouldn't do for a chance at one more baloney sandwich/fruit cocktail lunch and a rousing 30 minutes with host Jim Perry and those random, middle American contestants on "Card Sharks."

It was, as I often say, a simpler time.

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.

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.

"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.

This seems as good a time as any to once again mention that my mom once hit me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread

My mom passed away one year ago today, so my choice here was either to write about how much we miss her and how wonderful she was, or to bring up the time she smacked me with a baked good.

I'm going with the latter.

For the record, though, we do miss her and she was wonderful. One of the best human beings I ever knew. You can't say enough about her.

But even Kathryn Tennant had her breaking point.

This is a story I relayed at her memorial service, but I love it so much I'll recap it here, too.

I'm guessing it was maybe 1978 or '79. That would have made me about 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark maybe 3 or 4.

My mom would often watch Mark while his mom, Mary, went off to work, so he was around a lot and, as I've often said, was more like a little brother to me than a nephew.

It was late afternoon and Mom was busying herself getting dinner ready, probably nearing the end of an exhausting day taking care of the two of us and trying to keep the house in some order.

I was doing something to irritate Mark. I don't know what, but it was enough that he kept crying and whining. We were in the living room, and Mom repeatedly yelled from the kitchen for me to stop it.

But apparently I didn't stop it. I kept right on doing whatever it was that was upsetting Mark, and he was making no secret of his displeasure.

Then, suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, Mom came storming out of the kitchen yelling at me to STOP IT. I looked up at her, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a full swing at me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread. I don't know where it hit me, but the bag made solid contact and burst open, sending slices of bread flying around the living room.

I was stunned. Mom never hit me. It didn't hurt, but it was so out of the ordinary and so scary that I started crying. That, in turn, started Mark crying.

So there we were crying, and there was Mom, flustered and tired and on her hands and knees, crawling around the living room picking up pieces of far-flung bread.

In retrospect, it's one of the funniest things I have ever seen, though I obviously couldn't appreciate it at the time.

What I wouldn't give for some video evidence of that moment.

Boy, do I miss her.

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.

Time rolls on even after we're gone, and that's really OK

I am far from the first person to consider this, and I won't articulate it especially well, but it's rolling around in my head on this, the day when my mom would have turned 89.

Insightful News Flash #1: Some day, you are going to die.

Insightful News Flash #2: When it happens, the world will not suddenly grind to a halt.

Insightful News Flash #3: This is the way it has always been, and it's fine.

Like I said, nothing new here, but still something to consider.

Of course, you already know the lesson we're all supposed to take from this set of facts. Something about not sweating the small stuff. The things that cause us the most stress are also often the least important, least consequential things. In the grand scheme, they really don't matter much.

Many people worry about leaving behind a "legacy," whatever that means. But the vast majority of us will be all but completely forgotten less than 100 years after we're gone.

That sounds harsh, but again, it's OK. It forces us to focus on the smaller scale and the day-to-day.

Love people. Tell them you love them. Work hard. Do things you enjoy. Give to others even when you think you may not have a lot to give.

And honestly, that's about it. My mom lived that way, and as I've been saying since her passing last summer, hers is the best legacy I can think of leaving.

Heavy stuff today. This coming week I promise we'll get back to topics such as my terrible handwriting or why my children are incapable of cleaning up crumbs on the counter when they make toast.

"Sleeping in" for me is now 6:00 AM

I have almost always been an early riser.

When I was in 3rd grade, my mom was still making me go to bed at 9:00 PM even though I usually needed no more than 7-8 hours of sleep. So it was common for me to be wide awake by 4:30 in the morning, just looking for something to do in my room until it was time to get ready for school.

Often I would listen to the old WWWE 1100AM radio station, which back then featured music on its overnight show (something that may have been unusual for an AM station even then). The hosts were local, and I would sometimes call in to request a song.

Having this little 8- or 9-year-old kid calling to request a song in what was essentially still the middle of the night for most people must have been hilarious, but they usually humored me...as long as the song I requested fit their mostly mellow format.

One time I asked for "Rock Around the Clock." It was the first song I could think of. The DJ, whose name I believe was Vicky, laughed and told me she couldn't play that one, but she would play the theme from "The Goodbye Girl" and dedicate it to me.

And she did! All 17 people listening at the time heard it.

Anyway, other than a stretch during my teen years when I would stay in bed until nearly noon on the weekends, I've continued my early-rising ways for decades. On the mornings when I exercise, I'm awake before 5:00 AM.

On the days like today when I "sleep in," I roll my lazy bones out of bed at the advanced hour of 5:30 AM.

I am a wild man, I know.

You tend to need less sleep as you age. So if I'm like this at 51, I figure I'll be waking up around 3 in the morning by the time I hit my 70s.

No wonder old people want dinner at 4 in the afternoon.

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.

The picture in the basement

 

I'll start by apologizing for hitting on such a heavy theme (death) two days in a row, but this one is actually kind of nice.

The beautiful lady pictured at the top of this post is my mom, who passed away last summer at the age of 88 and left behind the sort of legacy we all hope to leave behind someday.

Right after she died, I was tasked with writing her obituary, which was an honor. She had a lot of siblings and other relations, so it was good to have my brother and sister there to copy edit for me and make sure I had all of the connections right.

One of the things the funeral home requested (and which you always see in newspaper obits) is a photo. I hadn't given this much thought until the moment I actually had to come up with one.

How in one photo do you sum up a person's life? In some ways it's impossible, but I thought this image worked about as well as any.

It's actually a cropped photo of Mom holding my great-niece Ella right after Ella was born. Whoever took the picture was standing while Mom was sitting. She's looking up into the camera smiling, and she clearly loves the chance to hold another great-grandchild.

This image became The Official Picture of Mom's Passing, because it started showing up everywhere...in the funeral home announcement, in the newspaper, on Facebook, etc.

A framed copy of it sits on the bookshelf in our basement. Because I pass through there several times a day for various reasons, I see the photo all the time. And almost every time, I say, "Hi Mom." I really do.

I do it of course because I wish she was here in person for me to say hi. But I also do it because it makes me happy. For a very brief second, it's like she's there sitting in her chair at home watching TV as I come through the front door for a visit.

It's a small thing, but like I said, it makes me happy. At some point after you lose a parent, those small moments start meaning the most.

Hi Mom!

The best Christmas gift I got as a kid? That's easy.

I spent 1982 longing after a Commodore 64 computer.

I tried to find ways of saving up for one, but for most of that year I was 12 years old and in no position to earn the hundreds of dollars it would take to buy a C-64 and a floppy disk drive.

I put it at the top of my Christmas wish list with no real expectation it was going to show up under the tree.

Until it did.

I was pretty sure my premiere gift was going to be The Generals, an admittedly cool electronic board game that had come out a couple of years earlier. And I would have been fine with it.

My mom and dad, tricky as they were, had me believing that was what I was getting while going out and secretly finding a Commodore 64 for me. I'm not even sure where they got it. I'm guessing Sears.

Anyway, that little computer (laughably slow and weak compared even to today's low-end smart phones) became a huge part of my life over the next few years. I played games with friends. I learned to program in BASIC. I procured a modem and got online for the first time ever in 1985.

Back then, going "online" meant calling local bulletin board systems (BBSs) and exchanging messages with other people. The Internet existed, but I sure had never heard of it.

I should note that saying I "procured" a modem for my Commodore is a little misleading. That 300-baud device was stolen from the local BEST store by a group of kids with whom I went to school who were known simply as "The Vandals." They weren't sure what to do with it, so one of them gave it to me.

I chose to remain officially ignorant of the modem's origins, but I had a sneaking suspicion where it had come from. The guy who gave it to me confirmed its status as stolen merchandise only years later.

My obsession with the Commodore faded once the late 80s arrived and I had bought an IBM XT. From there it was one step after another up the technology ladder...more processing power, more storage, more features. The Commodore was put back into its box and relegated to the attic.

I was reunited with it earlier this year when we were cleaning out my mom's house. It was fun to see it, and I could have taken it home, but I chose not to. For one thing, I have a full-fledged Commodore emulator on our home desktop computer that completely simulates the original C-64 experience. For another, I hadn't kept any software for it, so its features would be limited.

And then there's simply the fact that you can't ever really go home again. The Commodore and I had had our thing, and we had both moved on.

Or at least I did. I have a feeling it wouldn't have minded playing one more game of Jumpman or Law of the West with me.

I received a lot of great gifts as a spoiled youngest child growing up. But nothing ever beat the surprise and delight of that little computer.