The middle-aged man with the graying hair and the wonderful life

I get sentimental in October.

I have no idea why this is. It's not like October should be any more likely than another month to make me intensely grateful for the things in my life. And there seems little reason for me to become more appreciative of friends and family now vs. other times, though I suppose next week is the 19th anniversary of my father's passing, and later this month is my daughter Chloe's birthday.

It probably has something to do with the coming of fall, the closing of another summer, the change in the weather, and the way all of that makes you take stock of where you stand.

A month from tomorrow I turn 49. Nothing really special about that, other than the fact that it officially begins the countdown to 50. Turning 40 didn't really bother me. We'll see if 50 is another story.

Fifty is a half-century. That's a milestone by any measure, and it's also the point when they start insisting you undergo various invasive and potentially unpleasant medical tests. The underlying message is, "Hey buddy, the bloom is off the rose now. We're going to have to start performing more routine maintenance on you so that we can delay the inevitable as you start to fall apart."

Which is cool. I can deal with that.

I'm also probably more in big-picture mode these days because of my mom. She is 86 years old, and she is enduring all of the physical and mental challenges we associate with that age. She recently spent a few weeks in a long-term care facility after surgery and a hospital stay led to some health complications.

She is back home now, but she isn't alone for long periods of time. My sister Debbie, saint that she is, arranges a schedule for someone to visit her every morning and every evening. Debbie herself pops in more often and calls Mom throughout the day. Meals on Wheels visits, as well.

Mom is almost always cheerful and happy when we visit her, but the reason we all have to visit in the first place is to make sure Mom is OK. Just like she always made sure each of us was OK. She gets confused over which pills to take. She has lapses in memory of which she is aware, and which frustrate her at times. She shows early signs of dementia.

Mom has another surgery scheduled in two weeks to address a cancer-related issue, and none of us knows what the outcome of that will be.

I love her, I love what she has meant to me, and I love her attitude toward just about everything. I want her to be around for a long, long time, and so does she.

We just don't know how long that will be.

So it goes.

There is also my wife, who – if you have visited here with any frequency over the past seven years – you will recognize as the central theme of my writing. It always comes back to Terry, and that is only fitting, because my life always comes back to her.

Terry recently quit her job at the library after nearly two years of working there. She enjoyed it, but too often it got in the way of the things that are most important to her. She missed too many track and cross country meets, too many soccer games, too much of everything for her taste. So she decided it was time to hang it up at the library and go back to being Full Time Mom.

She is awesome at this job, you understand. My goal is always to make sure I have my own life in order so that she can focus on the kids and the house and the day-to-day craziness of our family instead of me.

Yet she still worries about me sometimes, God bless her.

It's what she does. It's what all truly selfless people do. She remains the most generous, most honest, most beautiful, most giving person I know. It's impressive to watch her work.

Part of her caregiving efforts in the near term will focus on Jack, our 12-year-old youngest/fifth child who, I've said many times, has essentially been raising himself.

Jack, like his brother Jared before him, is tall for his age. He's pushing 5-9, which is tall-ish but certainly not freakish for an eighth grader. Except he's not supposed to be an eighth grader yet. He accelerated midway through his second-grade year, so technically he should be in seventh grade right now.

Combine that with the fact that he's a 12-year-old boy and beginning what is likely to be the most hormonal, most chaotic, most confusing time of his life, and you can understand why he might need a little guidance these days.

But he'll be fine. I know that. Terry will see to it.

And I'll be fine, too, though I whine a lot about the fact that my days are so busy. My job is part of that, of course, but there's also the self-imposed burden of school.

I started a master's degree program seven weeks ago. If all goes well, it will take me until the end of 2020 to complete it.

Graduate school – even when it's just online – is tough, as it should be. I'm working toward a Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications through West Virginia University, the ancestral home of my people. Go Mountaineers!

It takes a lot of time, and I knew that going in. But I reserve the right to complain about it, even if I have no one to blame but myself.

In the meantime, the other kids are thriving. Elissa, my whirlwind of a 24-year-old oldest daughter, works for a marketing/branding agency and maintains the kind of schedule that makes me tired just looking at it. She's smart, she's organized, and as my mom likes to say repeatedly, is "just so different from what she was when she was little!" I love her.

Chloe, who will turn 22 in a few weeks, is engaged to be married in a couple of years. She is working toward a double major in biomedical engineering and chemistry at the University of Akron, and is back interning at a medical device company. She has a lot going on. She is all-around impressive. I love her.

Jared, my 20-year-old firstborn son, is a sports management major at Cleveland State University. He lives downtown in a nice apartment with a friend, works when he can at the Cleveland Indians Team Shop, and has a sweet internship with the Mentor Ice Breakers, a new professional hockey team not far from our home. He works hard and I don't see much of him these days, but I'm so proud of him. I love him.

And then there's Melanie, my recently-turned-18 high school senior. She drives out to Mentor High School every day for a marketing course that is preparing her for a career in business. Maybe HR. Good choice. She's also an intern like Chloe, working for a metal products company. Melanie is finishing up a 12-year soccer career over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to miss watching her play. She always goes hard. Always. I love her.

I already told you about Jack, but I should have added that I love him.

I love almost everything about my life. I am insanely, wonderfully, absolutely undeservedly blessed.

And as the leaves start to turn and the air gets a little colder, I'm reminded of that again and again.

OK, Dad, now I see what you meant

I moved away from home in March 1992 at the age of 22. Terry and I had just bought our first house, and I went off to live in it by myself for three months before we got married (the full extent of my bachelorhood, I guess).

Sometime later that year, after I had been gone for several months, I was at my parents' house when my dad said something I thought was a little sad at the time, but that I never fully understood until recently.

He and I were talking about something or other to do with Cleveland sports. We did that all the time. He was giving one of his long and convoluted opinions on why this coach wasn't the right fit for the team or what that franchise had to do to stop losing so much. I don't even remember specifically what he was talking about.

But I do remember what he said when he finished. He said, "At least that's what I think. I don't have anyone to talk about sports with anymore."

He said it with a little smile on his face, but it was the very definition of a sad smile. And I remember feeling a little pang of guilt in the pit of my stomach at his words.

Which, by the way, wasn't at all his intention, I'm sure. He missed having me around the house, and I think it was just his way of letting me know that.

Now fast forward about 25 years.

My son Jared is a freshman in college. He takes a full slate of classes and works a lot of hours at Dick's Sporting Goods. In between, he tries to find time to spend with his girlfriend, Lyndsey, who for the record is pretty awesome and definitely someone worth spending time with.

Jared is my sports kid. From a very young age, he and I have connected over sports. It's my fault he's an ardent Cleveland sports fan. I raised him to live and die with the Browns, Indians and Cavs, and those teams are often our main topics of conversation.

I also raised him to be a diehard hockey fan. He played the sport a little bit, and he knew more about it by the time he was 10 years old than most adults. So we talk hockey, too.

Except we don't talk about hockey or anything else as much as we used to. There just isn't time anymore. He comes home from school or work at 10 in the evening, just as I'm getting ready to go to bed. And I'm out the door the next morning long before he wakes up.

When we do have a few minutes to talk about our favorite subject, we both talk fast, as if we have to cram in everything we've been thinking before it slips our minds. They're fun conversations, punctuated with sarcasm over Cleveland teams' perennial (mis)fortunes and hope that the Cavs' 2016 NBA title won't be the sole championship for us to celebrate in our lifetimes.

Only recently did I gain a full appreciation for what my dad meant when he said he missed having his sports talk buddy around. Jared is my sports talk buddy. I have another son, Jack, but he's not so much of a sports guy, which is fine. He and I connect over other things, and we talk just as much.

It's just that the thing that bonds Jared and me is the same thing that bonded my dad and me. And there's a certain sentimentality and profound sense of legacy in that.

So I get sadder than I probably should be when Jared and I go a few days without talking Browns, Indians, Cavs, Monsters, NHL hockey or whatever. It's no one's fault that it happens, it's just the way it goes when you have a busy college kid and a busy middle-aged dad running in separate directions.

The obvious moral of the story is to take every opportunity to talk with your kids or your parents about whatever it is you have in common, whatever it is you celebrate and fret over together. That could be sports, or it could be a million other things.

What's important is that you never take it for granted.

My dad has been gone for more than 17 years now. In retrospect, I should have stopped over there more often or just called him every once in a while to talk sports. We still had our conversations after I was married, but they weren't as frequent as I would have liked. Certainly not as frequent as they had been when I lived at home.

I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen with me and Jared, especially while he and I still technically live under the same roof.

We'll see how it goes.

Go Tribe. Go Browns. Go Cavs. And go Monsters. My dad would have agreed wholeheartedly.

I'm trying to decide whether Terry and I should move after the kids all leave the nest

It is only in the last five years or so that my wife and I have even mentioned the possibility of eventually living someplace that is not Wickliffe, Ohio.

Neither of us has ever had a mailing address that didn't end with 44092, the zip code for my hometown and the only place I've called home for 48+ years. Born and bred, and well on our way to being lifers.

Except...maybe not.

We've tossed around the idea of living somewhere in the Carolinas, most likely North Carolina. Seems like a nice place.

We've talked about a far less radical move to Willoughby Hills, which is the next town over and a place that bills itself as being "where the city meets the country."

And just recently, Terry wondered whether we should move to one of the Olmsteds (Olmsted Falls, Olmsted Township or North Olmsted), which would cut my 45-minute daily commute by 75+%. An appealing thought, that.

None of this would likely happen until Jack, our youngest, at least graduates high school, and probably not until he graduates college. The boy just turned 12, so we have some time to think about it.

Moving south would mean not having to face the ordeal that is winter in Northeast Ohio. And it's not just the occasional snow shoveling and slippery roads I mind. It's the seemingly endless, depressing, gray slog that gets you (in painfully slow fashion) from November to March.

I know people say they like to watch the seasons change, but if we could arrange it so that it goes from summer to fall and immediately to spring, I think I would be fine with that.

Even a move to the southwest side of Cleveland – which is where the Olmsteds are located – would have its challenges.

You spend your whole life going to the same stores, seeing the same people at the same events, knowing instinctively where everything is. And suddenly, that all changes. You have to reorient yourself to a new existence, even though you're only 35 miles away from the place you grew up.

Most people our age have already had to do this in their lives, and they've done it without a problem. I just wonder how we would react.

Here's the thing: I would not consider it a disaster if in my obituary I'm described as "a lifelong resident of Wickliffe." I like this place. I really do. And I always will. But as time goes by, and as the place we grew up undergoes its own sort of changes, we start to wonder whether it's time to do something most of our friends did decades ago and fly the coop.

Jack is in seventh grade. In five years, he'll be off to college. He's the kind of kid who would likely adapt well if we moved tomorrow and he suddenly found himself a student in the excellent Olmsted Falls school district.

Him I don't worry about. But us? Change definitely gets a lot more difficult the older you get.

We'll see.

Today I have a 17-year-old who impresses the heck out of me

As I sat thinking about the fact that today is my daughter Melanie's 17th birthday, I was seriously about to type this sentence: "I wonder what it's like to be a fourth child."

This would be a stupid thing to type, you see, because I AM a fourth child. But really, I'm a different kind of fourth child from Melanie. I'm the baby of my family, the fourth of four, and my siblings were (are) all more than decade older than me.

I was essentially raised an only child.

Melanie, on the other hand, is the fourth of five siblings who are closer in age. She has spent her life living in the kind of chaos that reigns in households as big as ours.

She has learned to adapt, of course, but more than that, she has learned to thrive.

For a long time, Melanie was like the true baby of the family in that she was the youngest girl and, well, she just always seemed like a little kid to me.

Then one day – suddenly, shockingly – she wasn't. She was a young woman. This happened a couple of years ago and I'm still trying to get over it.

But while I stumble, she flourishes. She's an honors student who plays soccer and serves as vice president of her class. She has a boyfriend (whom I like very much) and engages in all of the activities and programs in which smart kids engage.

She's rarely the first to do anything in our house. It's hard, when your the sixth-oldest person in the family, to be truly original. But where she shines, where she's unique, is the way she pulls it all off. She has to work hard to succeed, and she does just that. Even in the things that seem to come easily to her.

And today she's 17, which is one of my favorite ages. You're not an adult, but you're also quickly leaving behind all vestiges of kid-hood. She has a lot to learn, and she has to mature as much as any 17-year-old, but it occurs to me that no matter where life takes her, she's going to be just fine.

That's as much as you can ask for as a parent. Once you know they're going to be fine, you breathe a little sigh of relief. That doesn't mean you won't worry about them. It doesn't mean they won't screw up...sometimes majorly.

But it does mean that, all things considered, you know she's going to be the kind of grown-up of whom you as a dad will be proud.

In a lot of ways, she already is.

Happy birthday, little Melanie.

For it's money they have and peace they lack

There is a cult within America – populated largely by white, middle-aged males, but not limited exclusively to them – that has romanticized the game of baseball beyond what it probably deserves. I am perhaps one of them, but at least I know I am one of them.

The reasons for this idolization of the sport are varied. For many, baseball was their best (and perhaps only) connection with their fathers. Addressing his dad, Sting once sang of a childhood in which "everything I did sought your attention." Many of us root for the teams our fathers rooted for because there is an indelible bond, strengthened ever further by blood, among those who live and die with the fortunes of a common athletic team.

For others, baseball represents a simpler time. In most cases, I think that simpler time for which they yearn was really no simpler than today, but it certainly seemed simpler in a pre-Internet age...and with the passing of time, of course, which tends to whitewash every flaw.

In the days before massive youth soccer leagues, baseball was the one sport in which most young men – it was softball for the girls – participated at one level or another. I played through the age of 13 until I could no longer keep up with the fastballs and had no hope of hitting a curveball. More importantly, I became a fan of the game at the age of 9 and remain one to this day.

It is a slow game, some will say, and I don't disagree with them. But "slow" does not equate with "boring." Watching a well-played baseball game is just about the best way I can think of to spend a summer afternoon, even if it takes 3+ hours to play and ends with a 2-1 score.

I bring this up because, as I type, my beloved Cleveland Indians have won an astounding 14 games in a row (the second consecutive season in which they've accomplished this feat). And tonight they go for No. 15 with ace pitcher and Cy Young Award candidate Corey Kluber on the mound.

So many people I come across these days, including my doctor as she poked and prodded me this morning as part of my annual physical, want to talk about the Tribe. Could this be their year? Will they stay healthy? What's up with Jose Ramirez's incredible bat? And his hair, for that matter?

They ask these questions with that note of restrained, even fatalistic, optimism that Cleveland sports fans have perfected. We have been burned in a variety of creatively cruel ways over the years, and there is a part of us that always assumes the worst will happen.

But the important thing is, talking about the Tribe is fun, and it makes us happy in a way. It gives us a few minutes to stop thinking about hurricanes and politics and flag protests and everything else that makes us cry and worry and act viciously toward one another.

There are poor people in this country, no doubt about that, but as comedienne Marsha Warfield said about hunger in the U.S., "It ain't but so bad." The vast majority of us have the essentials we need to live. Most have roofs over their heads and some sort of food on the table.

We have the things our wages can buy us. What we don't have, what perhaps we've never had, is peace. A sense that everything is going to be OK. Maybe that's impossible to have in this (or any) age, so we settle for small glimpses of it. We talk about the things that make us feel good and that remind us that humans have the capacity to do meaningful, inspirational things.

And I include baseball in that. It's just a game, you might say, and you're right. But it's also an escape, albeit temporary, from everything else that weighs on us. It is a way to connect to the part of our collective consciousness that shuts down in the face of worrisome news and constant conflicts and the mortality of this life.

There are bad characters in baseball as in anything. There is greed, there is selfishness, and there is cheating.

But there is also a purity and honesty and beauty there that mostly eludes us as we manage our way through the mundane details of everyday life.

It's purity, honesty and beauty that can be had for the price of a ticket, or even the click of a TV remote.

If acknowledging that simple fact constitutes over-romanticizing baseball, then I can only plead guilty.

But in the end, I'll be back season after season to watch and cheer and fret and fume. I follow other sports, but in the end, it was baseball that was my first love. And she never fails to deliver.

A year without parenting milestones

As the 2017-18 academic year gets underway, my wife Terry and I find ourselves very much "in process" when it comes to being the parents of five children.

What I mean is, we've got kids going every which direction, but no one is graduating or necessarily reaching any sort of academic or vocational landmark in the coming year. Yes, one kid is starting college, but compared with graduation, that's a relatively tame thing, if only because we've been through it before at different levels.

We stand thusly in the Tennant household as summer 2017 wanes and the first signs of autumn make themselves evident:

Elissa

My 23-year-old eldest child has earned her bachelor's degree in marketing from Cleveland State University. She works for a great little strategic branding agency called Hey Now! Media as a digital strategist/social media manager. That's a very Millennial job title, and come to think of it, that exclamation point in the name of the agency is pretty darn Millennial, too. Elissa has officially moved out, though she lives only 5 minutes or so away in a rented house with one of her longtime friends.

She is, by almost any standard you care to name, an adult. I'm good with this, but I'm also not. She was ready to be on her own and all, but I miss having her around. I will always miss having her around. That's the way this game is played. (And hey, you can see my pretty little girl here and read her very professional sounding bio while you're at it.)

Chloe

Little Chloe is nearly 21 years old, which makes me think I probably shouldn't refer to her as "Little Chloe" so much anymore. She is a junior biomedical engineering major at the University of Akron who has designs on attending medical school and becoming some sort of doctor, possibly a pediatrician (though she also talks on occasion about becoming an eye doc...I think she would be good at either). She is at the point of her engineering studies where everything gets pretty intense and serious, and as a result she is no longer a member of the Akron marching band, which is sad but also necessary. Engineering students, I'm told, regularly drop out of band at Akron once they hit that third year. She is in the process of moving into a just-off-campus apartment as I type, and will be officially gone as of Sunday evening. She's a hard worker, that one is.

Jared

The Boy begins his college career next week as a freshman at THE Cleveland State University. OK, CSU doesn't use the "THE" like Ohio State does, but it just sounded good so I went with it. Anyway, I've only seen him for short stretches throughout this summer because he spends a lot of time working at the Cleveland Indians team shop. And hanging out with his girlfriend. This is what happens when you have an 18-year-old son. By all accounts, though, he's ready to start this college thing and plow ahead with his intended major in business administration. I have no idea what he's going to do with his life, and maybe he doesn't, either, which is just fine. I never understand why we push 18-year-old kids to make decisions that could affect the course of their professional lives for the next three or four decades. Jared will find his way. He always does. Let's give him a few years to sort things out.

Melanie

Mel grew up suddenly – jarringly even – in the last couple of years. She's a junior at Wickliffe High School, a class officer, a soccer player, and so far a straight-A student. This year she is spending half of each school day out at Mentor High School taking a few general classes and participating in Mentor's business/marketing program, then the second half of the day back at Wickliffe. I can't keep up with her. Next thing I know, she'll be graduating. I would rather not talk about it, but between you and me, I'm super impressed with this one.

Jack

Ah, Jackie. My Other Boy. My 11-year-old, thin-as-a-rail, cross country-running, class clown. Yes, apparently he's the class clown, at least according to his seventh-grade math teacher Danna Huested. I've known Danna since 1975, when we both started kindergarten at the old Mapledale Elementary School, and she is among the best teachers my kids have had. So I found it part amusing and part alarming when I attended middle school open house the other day, and with a smile she said to me, "So you saved the class clown for your last kid? He doesn't fit the (Tennant) mold!" A month or so earlier, Jack's cross country coach (another Wickliffe classmate, the awesome Todd Calic) said something similar: "Everyone on the team loves him. He cracks everybody up."

And it all makes sense to me. Jack is the youngest of five kids, which in itself means he has always had to work to carve out his own identity in the chaos of our house. But when you consider that he skipped a grade back in elementary school, it gets even tougher for him. He's an 11-year-old in a class full of 12- and soon-to-be-13-year-olds. This is a funny age to begin with, and being the youngest one in the class has to make it even trickier. So Jack copes by being the funny guy. I'm OK with that as long as he doesn't become disruptive in class or during team cross country activities. And I think he knows that. He's doing fine, but I'll admit I worry about him a lot.


So anyway, that's where things stand for us. We're just going about the business of living life and continuing to raise a family. With each passing year, thoughts of what happens once we reach The Other Side (i.e., the empty nest) creep into my head, but they're no more than thoughts. We still have a long way to go, with plenty of homework, school projects, sports practices and games, band concerts, and yes, graduations and big milestones to go.

For now, that's good enough. Exhausting, but good enough.

No offense, but you most likely have no idea what you're talking about

I'm not a confrontational person, so I don't especially enjoy arguments or online debates. You will understand, then, how much it pains me to have to tell you that you are clueless when it comes to the major issues facing the world today.

You will also understand that I'm right there with you. I fully count myself among the clueless. I'm not saying I have the right answers and you don't. I'm saying that together, we barely understand the questions let alone the answers.

When it comes to almost any issue on which people are likely to take a stand these days – things like Charlottesville, global warming, North Korea, immigration, any random thing tweeted out by President Trump, etc. – I frankly do not trust your judgment, nor should you trust mine.

The reason is that all of these are stunningly complex problems, and unless you are:

(a) a trained expert with access to and understanding of the relevant information needed to form an intelligent opinion, and

(b) someone who does not take a knee-jerk position to the political right or left

...then I have no choice but to discount your take. And since I know virtually no one who fits both point (a) and point (b), I'm forced to conclude that you're full of poop. I actually hate the word "poop," but this is ostensibly a family blog and I'm not about to drop even a relatively mild S-bomb here.

Take global warming, for instance. You can certainly correct me if I'm wrong (I don't think I am, but again, what do I know?), but climatology is an immensely complex science, is it not? Concomitantly, global warming theory is also very complex and nuanced. Yet every time it's cold in August, some uninformed jack-wad is on Twitter with his "Hey, so much for global warming, huh snowflakes??" take.

There is no need to point out to this person that nothing in the concept of global warming precludes a cold day – or a long stretch of cold days – in what is normally a relatively warm time of the year. They have "won" because something happened that seems to support their supremely uninformed and simplistic opinion on a given topic, and any "facts" that get in their way have been made up by the biased liberal media or are being propagated by right-wing corporate fascists.

This is not intelligent debate. This is a bunch of monkeys with keyboards typing about random things of which they have little to no understanding.

And these same monkeys are called upon to evaluate the opinions of political candidates and vote for the ones they believe are right.

Yet they have virtually no idea what "right" is or how to get there. They (we) are unfairly expected to have a big-picture view of questions and problems that go far beyond anything they (we) are trained to analyze and understand.

Now, having said all of that, I do realize the seemingly inevitable conclusion of this line of thinking: That there's no need to have an opinion on anything, that we should trust our fate to a small handful of experts on each issue, that we should just stick to playing online poker on our phones and watching "Game of Thrones" and let the really, really smart people decide everything for us.

And I have no counterargument to that. That's terrifying to me and it's not at all what I want, yet I still feel strongly that very, very few of us are equipped to rationally and thoroughly pass judgment on the big issues of the day. We just aren't. We can gain some small understanding, but we don't have enough context, knowledge or training to be able to say definitively what course society should take on any given important question.

This, by the way, is why I'm supremely comforted by my belief in the God of the Bible. I am convinced there will be a "happy ending" to all of this, but I'm also aware that I live in a country in which people are free to believe that or not. You are permitted to make fun of me for putting my faith in "sky fairies" or whatever, and I'm free to ignore you because, as I've said, you don't have any more idea than I do what you're talking about.

I need to stop talking now, especially since you've come this far and have realized I have no firm advice for you. This is, I think, an unsolvable question. You either shut down and let yourself be guided by politicians and power brokers, or you take a strong stand on everything, knowing you ultimately lack the capacity to fully understand the question thoroughly or to appreciate opposing viewpoints in an objective way.

Life's crazy, isn't it?