Waiting for 1836 Euclid Avenue to open was like staring into an oven and wondering when good times would return to my stomach. In September I made sure to take my family to the old place at Euclid and 21st so we could say goodbye before demolition crews razed it. In early December big machines…
Every now and then a book comes along that grants us the privilege of peering into the lives of people and seeing the good in everyone. A Secret Gift: How One Man’s Kindness – And A Trove of Letters – Revealed The Hidden History of the Great Depression is such a book. Written by Ted…
A while back I wrote an essay called Telling Stories About Garfield Heights. It was published in a local newspaper and online. At the time, the outlook of Garfield Heights (a suburb about 4 miles southeast of Cleveland, Ohio) was bleak. The city had not passed a school levy in 20 years, businesses were closing,…
Poetry flows like kayaks down mighty rivers. Songs possess words that are decent and can be heard over the music. Movies inspire you to become leading actors in your own stories. And sports take you back to a time when athletes weren’t bigger than the games they played – yet they changed the games forever.…
When I was a boy, nothing beat a night at Grandma’s. It was free, the rooms were nice and cozy, and the award-winning food was, well, worthy of winning lots of awards. Even though she lived in Cleveland, her kitchen was sautéed in southern hospitality and smothered with goodness. One whiff of her chicken and…
One more time across every bridge in Cleveland circle the flats cross the river smooth, rhythmic strides to Whiskey Island touch the abandoned lighthouse and hightail it to Edgewater knees up, on toes along the sandy beach waves crash against our calves a sandstorm brews like the dust bowl behind us grains inside our socks…
As a kid growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s I dreamed of two things happening. One, the Cleveland Indians would make it to the World Series. And two, my favorite player would make the highlight reel of This Week in Baseball. Well, the Indians never made it to the World Series. But one of…
In theory, sleigh bells and muckrakers go together like Nicholas Sparks and Stephen King. So what compelled me to lump them together in my first e-book published earlier this year? I had written some stories and allowed them to simmer on the back burner for a while. The Internet and the explosion of publishing without…
Tracy Kidder writes in Home Town ‘how small a piece of time the living occupy’. In this instance he is referring to a place where a mental hospital once stood, now a mound of dirt covered in snow where children go sledding. This transformation is just one example in Northampton, Massachusetts – the physical cornerstone…
This is an article I wrote in January of 2012. It was published as a letter to the editor by the nice people of “The Neighborhood News” in Garfield Heights, Ohio. The content remains relevant because it concerns K-12 public school funding in Ohio and some of the challenges that school districts face when school levies…
i make words go vroom. 