I simply cannot call my former teachers by their first names

I had forgotten the fact that virtually all of my male teachers in the 70s and 80s used to wear coats and ties to school every day.

Over the last couple of years, I've enjoyed writing a series of "Where Are They Now?" articles for my high school alumni association newsletter.

These pieces, as you might imagine, spotlight a retired teacher, administrator and/or coach who spent a significant number of years working within our school district.

I love connecting with these folks. Their stories are uniformly interesting to me, from the reasons they originally got into education to their favorite memories at Wickliffe to the things they've been doing since retirement.

I relish forming new and deeper connections with people who had such an impact on my life many years ago. I end up feeling much closer to them now than I ever could have as a student back in the 1980s.

That familiarity, however, only goes so far. More than once when I've gotten on the phone to interview them and said "Hello, Mrs. ______________!" I have been admonished to call them by their first names.

"You've been out of school for a long time now. Call me ___________________," is the type of thing they will say.

Each time, though, I politely refuse. I realize these former authority figures don't hold the same place in my life now as they did way back when, but I still admire each of them deeply. And to me, it will always be Mr./Mrs. Last Name and never, ever "Pat" or "Dan" or "Barbara" or "Bill" or whatever the case may be.

I just can't do it. I could no sooner be on a first-name basis with them as I could with the Pope.

I'll bet most people my age can identify with this feeling. I'm one to tell my kids' friends to call me by my first name, especially once they graduate, but there's a part of me that resists doing the same for my old teachers and coaches.

Call it deep respect, even reverence. I will always consider myself to be one or two notches lower than them in the hierarchy of adult relationships.

Which I think says something about the high esteem to which we should hold educators in our society.

What I didn't tell the kids I spoke to at football camp

Photo credit: Kathy Rypinski

Last month, I had the privilege of briefly addressing a group of young boys getting ready to participate in the Wickliffe Football Camp.

When I say "briefly addressing," I mean it. This was a collection of nearly 40 kids from kindergarten through 6th grade who just wanted to run around, learn a thing or two about football, and generally have fun. They couldn't have been especially interested in what some middle-aged guy who hadn't played the sport in nearly four decades had to say.

So I kept my remarks very brief, as you might imagine.

I talked about my own experiences playing in Wickliffe. I talked about the city's great football tradition. I talked about my role as an announcer for Blue Devil football games and how I couldn't wait to announce their names on Friday nights in just a few years.

That kind of thing.

I was looking to motivate them a little and get them even more excited for what they would be doing at camp.

What I didn't want to tell them was that they had chosen a fiercely difficult sport...one that could be frustrating and even dangerous at times.

I didn't tell them how, in the middle of my sophomore season, seeing no clear path to ever becoming a starter at the varsity level, I wanted to quit football.

I didn't tell them how my forearms, every year from August through October, were bruised various shades of purple and yellow from all of the blocking and hitting we did in practices and games.

I didn't tell them there were times I got hit so hard I saw stars.

Or about the practice when I took a handoff, got tackled low by one of my teammates, and found both knees swollen and full of fluid just an hour later.

I didn't mention the fact that I opted not to lift weights in the offseason as so many guys did, and that this hurt my chances of getting more playing time (though I always thought this was fair...it was my decision, and there were rightful consequences for it).

I didn't bring up the time in a junior varsity game when I got speared in the groin and went down in intense pain, having to reveal to my coach that I stupidly wasn't wearing a cup because I thought it slowed me down.

I didn't talk about the sweat and pain of endless summer double session practices.

Yet maybe I should have brought up some or all of that. Because collectively, those experiences made playing football one of the best decisions of my life. I learned all of the cliched lessons about toughness, determination, persistence, teamwork, etc.

They were probably too young to realize how anything worth doing is probably going to come with some discomfort, and how there would be times they would question their decision to engage in it in the first place.

That will all come later. For now, they just needed to know that running, catching and throwing a football around is a heck of a lot of fun.

They'll learn the deeper lessons in time.

Home renovations: Hemorrhaging money and loving every minute of it

This is our new 23-foot Trex deck when it was completed and before we started putting stuff on it.

We are the midst of a series of home renovation projects, all of which involve us hiring various contractors to complete projects around our property that, had I been born with the Handy Gene, I might have done myself.

Alas, though, I was not, and therefore we have a choice either to shell out thousands of dollars to these professionals or watch our house fall down around us.

Like many other homeowners before us, we have chosen to deplete our savings account.

It all started last fall when a basement flood forced us to replace all of the trim and various doors in our basement. We hired a contractor to perform the repairs, and he turned out to be...less than satisfactory. His replacement, recommended by our daughter Elissa, was the complete opposite: Fast, competent, skilled, and a great communicator.

He completed the job in a matter of a couple of weeks.

So we hired him to replace our battered old wooden deck. It's beautiful.

We would love for him to do even more work for us, because I've discovered that a good contractor is worth his weight in gold.

We're still looking to remodel our nearly-30-year-old kitchen this year, and we need a lot of interior painting done.

With each job and each batch of building materials and supplies, our bank account gets lighter. Sometimes by frightening leaps and bounds.

Yet we grin and bear it, because the end result of each job is so nice.

Nice enough to justify huge depletions of our rainy fund?

Well...I don't know. I can tell you the Trex deck is amazing, though, for what that's worth.

My daughter wants to be a double doctor (I don't know what else to call it)

 

That's my kid on the left, performing surgery on a pig.

Until a few weeks ago, my master's in Integrated Marketing Communications made me the most educated person in our family.

I proudly held this title the moment West Virginia University conferred on me that M.S. degree back in the summer of 2020, the culmination of a two years of very hard work.

Four of our children have college degrees, but prior to August 2, 2024, they were all at the Bachelor's level. I reigned supreme for four glorious years as the most-schooled person in our family of seven.

That ended three weeks ago when my daughter Chloe successfully defended her thesis and became known as Dr. Chloe Edmonds, having earned a very well-deserved PhD in neuroscience. I was more than happy to yield my crown to her as Most Schooled Tennant.

But get this: Now she wants to go to medical school. I have heard of M.D./PhDs before, and I have even met a couple. I just never imagined that any of our offspring would be so ambitious as to become a doctor twice over.

If all goes according to plan, Chloe will enter med school in the fall of 2026. Her goal now is to be a pediatric neurology physician researcher.

If my assumptions and math are correct – four years of medical school, four years of residency, a two-year fellowship – Chloe will be about 40 years old by the time she is fully in practice.

The world needs people like her, of course. People are who willing to undertake complex medical research. People who work tirelessly to address a particular disease or condition.

People who are OK taking on a massive amount of student loan debt.

Today's post is an unashamedly sorry-not-sorry form of bragging about my daughter. It also represents a heartfelt thanks to Chloe, on behalf of the rest of society, for her commitment to advancing medical science.

And it's my non-check-writing way of wishing her the heartiest good luck in paying down that debt.

We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is

We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.

In some cases I think these folks simply found their perfect houses and have stayed ever since. In other cases, I think it's reverse inertia at work: It's such a hassle to move that many simply choose never to do it again.

For us, it was a matter of finding a big enough home to hold our young family while staying within the comfortable confines of Wickliffe, Ohio, the city where my wife and I have lived our whole lives.

I was thinking back recently to when we were looking to move out of our first home on East 300th Street.  I remembered that Terry found our current house not on the Internet (though she could have), but rather through a classified ad in The News-Herald, our local daily newspaper.

An ad in a print newspaper. Talk about a different era.

This memory is timely because it was 36 years ago tomorrow (August 22, 1988) that I started working at The News-Herald as an 18-year-old sports agate clerk. I took game scores and stats over the phone and soon began writing articles with my byline on them, which was always a thrill.

More importantly, it was a time when The News-Herald and community newspapers in general played a much more prominent role in society than they do now. Most households had a subscription to at least one paper in the late 1980s, so I could always be sure that whatever I wrote would attract plenty of eyeballs.

Newspapers retained their position of influence for several years after that, at least as long as 2003 when the previous owners of our house, John & Lisa, saw fit to advertise in the classified ads.

Nowadays, of course, that simply wouldn't happen. Classified ads aren't really much of a thing anymore, and even if they were, no one would think to look there for a house anyway.

The comedian John Mulaney said, "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old sentence."

I feel you, John. I can say in all honesty, "One time I bought a house that was advertised in a newspaper, which is a very, VERY old sentence."

In an increasingly dark world, high school sports remain a source of light

This week begins my 11th year as a high school public address announcer, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Between now and mid-October, I'll probably announce more than 50 different events, from volleyball and soccer matches to football games and marching band performances.

I even get to do several Division I college soccer matches for Cleveland State University, something to which I'm really looking forward.

My enthusiasm for PA announcing stems partly from the fact that it's fun, and partly from the way in which sports provide a wonderful-yet-temporary escape from everything that's wrong with the world.

These days, there is no shortage of things that seem to be going haywire. In the U.S., we're divided now as badly as we were in the late 1960s, and perhaps nearly as much as were during the Civil War.

I take great comfort in the undeniably wholesome nature of high school athletics. In my experience, the kids who participate tend to be smart, friendly, motivated and brimming with potential. They are fun to watch and even more fun to interact with.

Even if you don't really like sports, it's easy to admire the sustained effort and dedication of these athletes. The things they learn and apply are highly cliched (teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, etc.) yet still very real.

They give me hope.

I've been around prep sports for more than 40 years as an athlete, coach, journalist, league administrator and now as an announcer. I get just as excited for the opening kickoff of a football game now as I did back in the Stone Age when I was playing.

For those next few hours, I don't give the presidential election or any divisive social issues even a single thought. I am absorbed in the game.

Is this naive? Pollyanna-ish? Unrealistic? A case of the privileged white man sticking his head in the sand because he can?

The answer is probably "yes" on all counts. But I don't care.

I would rather watch a well-played high school volleyball match than two candidates yelling at each other on a stage any day.

The Mystery of the Holy Tupperware Lid

 

We recently got a new back deck. The old one was well past its prime and overdue for replacement. The new one, made from Trex decking material, is bigger and better in every way.

In the process of tearing down the old deck, our contractor Evan found the faded, beat-up Tupperware lid pictured above. Terry had been looking for that lid for years and never would have guessed it had somehow ended up underneath our deck.

What was most intriguing, though, was the small rectangular hole cut into the middle of the lid. When Terry sent a picture of it to our family group text chat, there was speculation that perhaps some critter or other had chewed through the lid during its long years of dark isolation under the deck.

But upon closer inspection, the hole seems too rectangular and clean to be the work of a raccoon or possum. Plus, there appear to be slice marks around the hole, which would suggest that someone had taken a knife and intentionally cut out a small square of the plastic.

When you live for many years in a house of seven people, five of whom are children, you usually assume the "someone" in situations like this is one of your offspring. You don't try to make sense of it, because there is no making sense of it. There is no logical answer to why someone would cut a hole in a Tupperware lid and then hide it outside beyond, "Well, we have kids, you see..."

Terry and I are at a stage of life where our older children feel comfortable confessing various illegal and otherwise inadvisable things they did while growing up. At least one of these stories comes out at every family gathering, and as I've said before, I am simultaneously amused, fascinated and horrified when it does.

No one fully owned up to cutting the hole in the lid and hiding it, but Jack thinks it's fairly likely that he was the culprit. He doesn't specifically remember doing it, but in his own words, "It seems like the kind of dumb thing I would have done when I was little."

So mystery solved, I suppose. The lid is no longer usable, but at least Terry can finally rest easy knowing what happened to it.

And she and I together can say a prayer of thanks that our children have all grown up safely despite occasional and egregious lapses in judgment along the way.