April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
Like, for example, when you're 20 years old and set goals 30 years down the line, you're thinking of the 50-year-old version of yourself. That may seem pretty old to you as a young adult, but those of us who have passed that age know that 50 is still a time when you have lots of energy to do the things you want to do.
Now, however, when I undertake that same mental exercise as a 55-year-old, it's a little different. In 30 years, if I'm still blessed to be around, I'll be 85.
Suddenly that 30-year projection takes on a whole different character. While it's true that age is just a number and you're only as old as you allow yourself to feel, 85 is still 85, no matter how you slice and dice it.
Unless you were around in early Bible times when people apparently lived well into the triple digits, 85 has always been a ripe old age for human beings.
Emphasis on "old."
Advances in medicine and the understanding of genetics are pushing the boundaries of our collective lifespans, but if you read the death notices in the newspaper, you can't help but notice that most people who pass away are still mostly in their 70s and 80s.
And so, as I undertake any sort of long-term planning, I do it now for the first time with the idea that I can only look so far ahead.
Barring acute illness or accident, I'm nowhere near the point of shuffling off this mortal coil, of course. But you do start to realize that we all have an expiration date. And it's coming sooner or later, no matter how hard we try and stave it off.
It's not like I'm constantly thinking about death. It's just occasional, though I imagine it gets a little more frequent as you get into your 60s, 70s and beyond.
I could very well still be kicking until I'm 100 or more. Can't say for sure. But any longer-range goals I set for myself these days tend to be within a shorter time window than they used to be.
Say, for example, "I want to still be living next Thursday."
That feels pretty manageable.
My performance varies from day to day, but generally speaking, I'm OK at Wordle, pretty good with Connections, very good at Strands, and not so good with The Mini.
The Mini is a small crossword puzzle that can usually be completed in about a minute. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.
I thought I was pretty decent at The Mini until I accepted my daughter Chloe's invitation to create a leaderboard for the game whereby you can compare your performance with other people. We have since added Elissa and Jack to that daily leaderboard.
I quickly realized that either Chloe and Elissa are geniuses at this puzzle, or I'm slow to the point of potential brain dysfunction.
As an example, here was a typical five-day stretch in mid-February comparing how quickly Chloe and I completed The Mini each day:
February 11: Chloe 33 seconds, me 1:07
February 12: Chloe 27 seconds, me 54 seconds
February 13: Chloe 1:05, me 1:29
February 14: Chloe 59 seconds, me 2:29
February 15: Chloe 1:12, me 2:12
In the several weeks since we created our leaderboard, I think I have been faster than my daughters maybe twice each, and those involved lucky guesses on my part.
I know Chloe and Elissa, at 28 and 31, respectively, are in their mental prime, while I (at 55) clearly am not. But still...when you think of yourself as a "Word Guy" and your kids – along with probably nearly everyone else who regularly completes The Mini – leave you in the dust, it's time to question whether you're losing it for good this time.
My only recourse is to assume my kids are somehow cheating. They're highly intelligent, sure, but I can't accept this level of defeat at face value.
If you took 1978 Scott and transported him into the world of 2025, here are three things he would immediately notice:
I like my first name. Always have. But if I had to change it, here are five alternatives I wouldn't mind:
(1) BRUCE: Seems like a solid, manly name. Maybe because it reminds me of Brut aftershave, a bottle of which could often be found in our house when I was growing up in the 70s. The bottle was green plastic, which probably spoke to the quality of the product inside, but I thought it smelled nice. And some bottles of Brut came with a cool silver medallion. I would wear the Brut medallion today, if given the chance.
(2) TIM: Tims are good people. You don't run across a lot of annoying Tims. And if you do, they're most likely a "Timothy." Big difference. (NOTE: In no way am I implying that guys named "Timothy" are necessarily annoying. Just some of them. If you're named Timothy and you're reading this blog, you're probably not annoying.)
(3) DAVE: The Tim Rule applies here, too. I have good associations with the name Dave. Like Dave Matthews, for instance. Seems like a good guy. Someone you'd want to hang out with. Or my brother-in-law Dave. He's a good guy. Or former Cleveland Indians manager Dave Garcia, who according to Wikipedia is 92 years old and still going strong. Apparently Daves live a long time, which is a plus. (NOTE: Dave Garcia passed away in 2018, five years after this post was published. He was 97 years old, so the point stands.)
(4) HANK: A dark horse candidate. I used to associate Hanks with people missing most of their teeth. But then the TV show "Royal Pains" came along, and now I think Hank is kind of hip. Still, it's hard to separate "Hank" from Hank Williams, and it remains my go-to generic hick name. But it's still an up-and-comer. (By the way, have you noticed so far that all of these are short, one-syllable names? So is "Scott." I'm just lazy enough to want a first name that doesn't require a great deal of effort when writing it out. Let's see if #5 bucks the trend...)
(5) KAI: Not only did we stick with the one-syllable pattern, we actually went back to the three-letter first name. "Kai" is a cool name. It's actually a relatively common name in several different cultures, most notably in Finland. I associate "Kai" with Kai Haaskivi, a Finn who played professional indoor soccer here in Cleveland back in the 80s and early 90s. "Kai" also means "probably" in Finnish, which is fitting because I would "probably" be the coolest person on the planet if my name was Kai.
HONORABLE MENTION - DJ: My dad wanted to name me DJ. As he explained it, it wouldn't have stood for anything. Just the letters "D" and "J." I think I would have liked that, but he was overruled by my mom. And as we've mentioned before, the pregnant woman always gets veto power over name suggestions. It's OK, Mom. I really do like Scott...
When I'm trying to think of a subject about which to write, I'll first consider the date on which a particular post will publish. In this case, of course, it's St. Patrick's Day. But it's also the day before my wife's birthday.
So which do I choose? Considering it's a family-oriented blog, the logical choice is to write about Terry, which I've done many, many, many times in the last 13 years. And for good reason. Without the 1 Wife, there obviously wouldn't be the 5 Kids.
But there's also the fact that she is the reason and the foundation for so much of what I do every day. When there are life choices to be made, I make them together with her. If I'm stuck on a particular problem, I will usually pray first and then go right to her.
If I have no idea where we keep the small red cooler with the white lid (and I don't), I will ask her.
I've known the woman since 1986, and in that time I have used essentially the same list of adjectives to describe her over and over. She is smart, funny, pretty, generous, honest and kind, and she has a smile and a laugh that make life worth living.
You do not have to tell me I hit The Wife Jackpot. I'm well aware.
It's a day early, but if you want to wish her a well-deserved happy birthday now, I think it's entirely appropriate. In fact, I'll do it myself:
Happy birthday to my four-leaf clover.
When Terry and I were first married in 1992, one of the upstairs rooms in our house was designated "the computer room," but it was in most respects really "Scott's room."
Oh, we both used it, but I was the one who "decorated" it, if you want to call it that. It had hockey and music posters on the wall. It featured stuffed Bill the Cat and Opus dolls from my favorite comic strip of the time, "Bloom County." It had a little nook in which I placed the Yamaha keyboard on which I would doodle from time to time.
As I was just 22 years old at the time, it was in some ways the college dorm room I never had.
It was the only room in the house over which I had (or wanted) any real say when it came to what we put there and how it looked.
Fast forward 33 years to our current house and this tradition of giving me one room to play with has continued. Terry uses our upstairs office all the time, but most of the stuff there is mine.
There are, for example, three bookshelves to hold my personal library, including this one devoted largely to my military history books:
Then three things happened that gave me pause:
Which means Terry is going to be a grandma, something at which she will be exceedingly good.
It also means I'm going to be a grandpa, a prospect that's certainly welcomed, but one to which I had given little thought to this point.
Chloe gave us the news several weeks ago, but until now we've had to keep quiet about it. It happened on a Thursday evening in early January when she and I were scheduled to attend a Cleveland Orchestra performance together. She came to our house an hour or so early to have dinner with us before the concert.
When she walked into the house, Terry jokingly said to her, "Do you have a present for me?" Chloe replied that, yes, actually she did.
The conversation turned in a different direction for a minute before the idea of Chloe's present came up again, and she told Terry, "It's actually for you and Dad both."
That was the moment I knew what was going on. Amazingly, though, Terry didn't. She almost always picks up on the sorts of cues I don't, but in this case, she didn't see what I was seeing.
Chloe then handed her a plastic test stick with a little digital screen that displayed one word.
"Pregnant."
The expected cheers and hugs followed, after which Chloe told us it was still very early and that only a couple of other people knew at that point. So we had to keep it under wraps until now, which we did.
Mom-to-be Chloe and grandpa-to-be (yikes) me
With Chloe having posted the news on Facebook a few days ago, and Terry having informed her extensive personal network, I guess the knowledge is as public as it's going to get.
Last fall I wrote a post here in which I said that while I was looking forward to having grandkids someday, I wasn't in any particular hurry. And that was true.
But now that the reality is here and Chloe seems to be progressing with no issues. I'm all in.
She isn't due until September 14, so we obviously have a way to go, but already I'm wondering what this little one will call Terry and me.
For my part, I have no real preference. "Grandpa" is fine, as is "Grampy.” As is just about anything, really.
We know many people our age who have multiple grandchildren, but we're only just now for the first time confronting the reality of what it means to be grandparents. It's exciting, humbling and a little scary, all at the same time.
Kind of like it was back in 1993 when we found out Terry was pregnant with Elissa.
So...here comes another life milestone, ready or not. Whatever lies ahead, I can't wait.
We were returning to our car after taking in a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game. It was bitter cold that day, so we parked at the Tower City complex in Downtown Cleveland and took the 1,000-foot underground pedestrian tunnel to and from the arena, rather than walking outside.
When we got back to Tower City, there was a line of people waiting to use the elevator to get down to the lower parking levels. Rather than waiting with them, we decided to go around the line and look for stairs or another way to reach the area where our car was parked.
We weren't sure where we were going (in retrospect, we should have just waited in the elevator line), and at one point I had us mistakenly go down an escalator I thought would get us where we needed to go.
Turns out it was an escalator to an RTA Rapid train station. Even before we got to the bottom, we knew we were going the wrong way and would have to find our way back up to where we started and search elsewhere.
Just as we got to the bottom of the escalator, though, Terry pitched forward and fell. I thought she had just tripped, and I reached down to help her up.
But she wouldn't (couldn't) get up and instead just kept saying, "It's got me! It's got me!"
I didn't understand what she meant. What had her? Why wasn't she standing up?
Fortunately, a guy behind us saw instantly what had happened. Terry's shoelace had gotten caught in the escalator and her foot was being pulled down. He grabbed her leg and yanked her foot free, and immediately apologized that he had to break her shoelace to save her.
No apologies necessary, Mr. Good Samaritan. Once I understood what had happened, I was just grateful he had helped her. We both thanked him and eventually made our way to the parking garage and our car.
Terry came away mostly unscathed, though she was a little sore the next day.
And I'm not sure I'm getting her back on an escalator any time soon.
I love them so much that I often eat right into (and sometimes through) the core.
This is potentially hazardous for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it exposes the seeds and allows them to fall out of the apple and onto our floor.
You can tell I've recently been in any given part of the house simply by counting the number of apple seeds on the floor.
I don't leave them there intentionally, but sometimes (many times) they escape my notice.
They do not, however, escape Terry's notice.
She has told me that (a) I can leave a little apple on the core and throw it away when I'm finished, rather than biting into the very middle, and (b) In any case, I need to stop leaving seeds all over the place.
The latter instruction is perfectly reasonable. I'm trying my best to comply.
But leaving even a few molecules of sweet, tasty, Gala apple goodness on the core and tossing it away? That's blasphemy. I will do no such thing.
Marriage is about compromise. But I will not compromise my adoration for the greatest fruit God put on earth for our collective enjoyment.
At some point you have to draw the line.
Or, depending on how you have it set and the direction it's pointing, when a squirrel runs by or a bee lands on a flower 100 yards away?
We just got a Ring last month. Actually we've had it for quite a while, but it was only recently that my daughter Elissa and her boyfriend Mark came over and installed it for us.
It's not that the Ring is especially difficult to set up, but there was some mechanical work involved, and well...as we've established, it's better if you don't give me tools of any kind.
It helps, too, that Mark is very mechanically inclined. I wasn't there when he got the Ring doorbells mounted outside our front and back doors, but he probably did it in less time than it would have taken me to pull everything out of the package.
He also cooks well and is generous with his time when it comes to helping others. It's disgusting.
Anyway, the Ring has worked out fine, but at first it was more of an annoyance than anything else. It's designed to detect motion and to tell you when a person is approaching your home or a package has been dropped on your porch.
Which sounds great except for the fact that, 99% of the time, the people approaching (or leaving) our house are us.
For days after the Rings went up, this sequence repeated itself:
I would walk out the door, my Apple Watch would vibrate, and I would immediately look at it, only to find a small photo of myself with a notification reading, "There is a Person at your Back Door."
YES, I KNOW, THAT PERSON IS ME.
If I was headed to, say, our mailbox, my watch would again vibrate seconds later. And I would again check it, forgetting that it was going to be another Ring notification, this one telling me, "There is a Person at your Front Door" as I came into range of the front camera.
This has happened over and over, and I have yet to try and figure out how to change the motion sensitivity of the cameras. Eventually I might just turn off the notifications altogether.
Which largely defeats the purpose of having a Ring camera.
But at least I will maintain my sanity.
ATTENTION POTENTIAL INTRUDERS: Yes, there's a Ring camera there, but trust me: I'm not checking it. You're free to enter our home as you please. And don't hesitate to rip the Ring camera off the door frame and take it with you.
(NOTE: This post originally appeared here on the blog nine years ago on February 12, 2016. I remain the family Noo Noo.)
I know a lot of people are weirded out by the Teletubbies, the British kids TV show starring Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po. And rightly so. They're creepy, no doubt about that. They're meant to be innocent and fun, but whoever created them was clearly under the influence of a substance of questionable legality.
One of the minor characters on the Teletubbies is a little thing called Noo Noo. Or "The" Noo Noo. I'm not sure which. And I do mean "thing," by the way, because that's what Noo Noo is. It's a little living vacuum cleaner that goes around cleaning up messes. The Teletubbies at least speak, even though it's gibberish. Noo Noo just rolls around making sucking and slurping noises.
Noo Noo's sole purpose in life is to clean, but he/she/it sometimes takes things too far, as in this video:
This, I freely admit, is me. I am Noo Noo, and Noo Noo is me. When I am home, I take it on myself to clean up anything and everything: Stuff on the floor, the dishes, various messes, etc.
I will also freely admit that sometimes I clean up stuff that is not at all intended to be cleaned up.
Like, for example, there will be a glass of water on the kitchen table, and my instinct is to remove it before one of the cats knocks it over. But the person who owns the glass of water has just stepped out of the room and their cold beverage has been dumped in the sink and the glass deposited in the dishwasher. All in the space of 17 seconds while they were gone.
My bad.
On Christmas morning, I have one primary job: I walk around with a garbage bag and collect all wrapping paper, discarded bows, tissue, packaging, etc. If you don't proactively give me the paper you tear off a gift, I will come over to you and snatch it. THERE WILL BE NO MESSES ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, DO YOU HEAR ME? NO MESSES!
I don't mean to annoy anyone, but I really, really prefer having a clean house whenever I can. It makes me happier. And if you're someone whose mess-making detracts from the cleanliness of the house, I will rectify the situation post-haste.
Compare me to a Teletubbies character if you must. I proudly wear the Noo Noo badge.`
Anyway, at one point, this woman said to me, "Your wife has left the room twice, and both times when she came back, your eyes lit up. When she talks, you look right at her. I thought that was lovely."
I didn't realize I did either of those things, but I suppose she was right. The fact is, I really, really like being around Mrs. Terry Tennant. I always have.
Well, since 1986, anyway. That's when we first started dating.
When you're in a relationship that's pushing four decades (or five, six, seven or more), you don't spend every day telling the other person how wonderful they are. It's just kind of understood.
Truth be told, our days are spent laughing and making fun of each other more than anything else. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
And that's all you need to know. I could go on and on here telling you all of the great things about Terry, but that's enough right there. I love that she's there when I wake up in the morning and there when I go to bed at night.
And all of the in between, of course.
It's a bonus that she tolerates me.
Happy Valentine's Day to Terry T., and to everyone out there who is blessed to have a Someone in their lives.
Whether or not we feel we deserve it.
Today is the 216th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, which reminds me of the time I thought he was going to kill me.
Well, to be clear, I was dreaming when this happened, which makes sense considering President Lincoln died 104 years before I was even born. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure the 16th president of the United States was out to get me.
I must have been 8 or 9 years old when I had this dream. And I seem to remember it being one of those vivid, right-before-you-wake-up dreams.
The only thing I remember from it is that I was lying in my bed and Abraham Lincoln opened my bedroom door and peeked in.
That was it. Just Honest Abe cracking open up the door, leaning in, and staring at me for a few seconds before closing the door and leaving. Presumably to go back to his full-time job of winning the Civil War or whatever.
It was not an especially terrifying sequence, other than the whole thing of Lincoln being dead, but I was paralyzed with fear.
I immediately woke up and found myself with a fast-beating heart and taking very deep breaths.
Understand, this was not some demon version of Abraham Lincoln like the image at the top of today's post. This was normal, bearded Abraham Lincoln in his black frock coat wearing his trademark stovepipe hat.
Unless you lived in the Confederate States of America in the 1860s and were fed a stream of propaganda about Lincoln being Satan in the flesh, you are not inclined to be afraid of be-hatted President Lincoln.
But I was. And, if I'm being honest, I still am, somewhat.
For what it's worth, around that same time of my life, I also remember laying in my bed in fright one early morning because of a repeated sound coming from the hallway outside my bedroom door. Over and over again I heard this strange metallic sound, like a thin wire being plucked.
Once I had worked up sufficient courage, I sprinted from my bed and into the safety of my parents' room to tell them about the ghostly sound in the hallway.
Mom got out of bed, went out to the hallway, and informed me the sound was just our smoke alarm signaling that its battery was low.
It was not, in fact, President Lincoln or one of his hell minions coming to kill me.
I was admittedly neither the bravest nor the smartest child you'll ever meet.
And all three of those places are in the same city.
I grew up at good old 1807 Harding Drive, living there from birth through age 22. Then I moved into 1913 East 300th Street, our first house after we got married. We lived there for 11 years before moving up here to Miller Avenue in beautiful Wickliffe Heights.
For my local friends, it should be noted that while "Wickliffe Heights" is not a true political entity, it is the real name of the subdivision on and around Rockefeller Road in the southern part of the city. It even says "Wickliffe Heights" on our house deed.
Anyway, the point is, there was a time not long ago when, once you moved out of a house, your chances of ever seeing the inside of it again were pretty slim. You would have had to sell it to someone you know, or at least someone who was willing to let you back in if you would randomly swing by years later.
Nowadays, however, real estate listings are easily accessible online, and they often include copious photos of the inside of the house.
Take the Zillow.com listing for 1807 Harding, for instance. While it doesn't contain a "copious" number of photos, there are still five shots of the interior of the house that bring back a flood of memories.
There's the living room with the big front window looking out onto the porch. The one and only bathroom in a house that at one time contained six of us. The small but peaceful fenced-in backyard.
I love being able to look at these images whenever I want. My parents moved into that house 62 years ago this month, and it still holds considerable sentimental value.
The Zillow listing for 1913 East 300th offers much more in the way of photos, many of which reveal significant upgrades to the house since we moved out in 2003.
The enclosed front porch is familiar enough, but that deck in the backyard? Yeah, we didn't put that in.
Nor did we rip out the island in the kitchen or make the dining room look so fancy.
(In our defense, we spent most of our 300th Street years having and raising babies. We were a bit preoccupied.)
This shot of the kitchen?
Having grown up a dog owner, I find cats to be very quirky. Or at least the ones we have are.
Take our kitty Molly, also known as "Fat Molly," "Floofy Molly," "Fat Floofy," or any number of other names that describe her two defining physical characteristics:
Molly is, like the cat in the stock photo above, colored black and white. But she's much larger than the cat pictured there, which means she tends to take up a considerable amount of room wherever she decides to park herself.
This is a significant fact for me, because as it turns out, Molly often likes to sleep near me.
What happens is that Terry and I will get into bed and spend a few minutes scrolling on our phones before turning out the light (which I realize you're not supposed to do, but I never seem to have much trouble falling asleep). Molly will often jump onto the bed and plop herself right on top of me as we do this.
She will then proceed to knead my belly with her front paws while suckling the bedspread, as if she were a kitten nursing from her mother.
We got Molly when she was very small, and the assumption has always been that she was separated from her mom much too early and has thus carried mommy issues with her to this day.
Anyway, getting to one of Molly's quirks, once we turn out the light, she will immediately jump from the bed and leave the room. I don't know why she does this, but at some point during the night she usually returns and jumps back onto my side of the bed.
Terry says she often wakes up in the middle of the night and sees me with my legs hanging off the side of the bed so as not to disturb Molly, who is sleeping where my feet would normally be.
I don't do this consciously, but apparently it's important to me that any cat who wants to sleep on or next to me not be disturbed.
Which is fine except for the fact that it diminishes the quality of my own sleep somewhat. I would very likely sleep better if I kept my legs under the covers with my body straight, rather than curled almost in an "L" shape because God forbid I nudge Molly and she leaves.
That cat really should appreciate everything I do for her, which includes not only accommodating her preferred sleeping spot but also giving her fresh food and water every day and cleaning up the litter boxes after her. Then there are the pets I give her throughout the day along with occasional tasty food scraps from the dinner table.
She loves me, I know, but I'll be honest and say I still don't think Ms. Chonks is being sufficiently grateful for all of this.