We go to a lot of hockey games, often more for connections with family and friends than the actual hockey

We have been full season ticket holders for all 18 seasons the Cleveland Monsters hockey team has existed.

While the Monsters are a minor league team (playing in the American Hockey League, which in baseball terms is equivalent to the Class AAA level), they play in a major league facility in Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, and they put on a major league game presentation.

Even when the team itself isn't playing so well, the experience of going to the games is still fun.

What I've come to find out during these 18 seasons, though, is that while the hockey game is the focus, the benefit has a lot more to do with human relations than anything else.

For one thing, it has given Terry and me plenty of one-on-one time with our kids. We've always had two season tickets, so for years it was usually the two of us going together or one of us plus a child.

Nowadays, with the kids all grown, they often take the tickets themselves and attend with their significant other or a friend.

Still, we have lots of great memories of attending those games and cheering on the Monsters together.

Beyond our family, we've also bonded with the great group of fellow season ticket holders (officially "Monsters Hockey Club members") who sit around us in section C108.

Right next to us is Mike, a retired anesthesia tech who is always quick to laugh and takes genuine interest in what's going on with our family.

Behind us are Dave and Karen. Dave is a retired postal worker, while Karen is an artist whose talent amazes me. Like me, Dave is a fountain of random (and generally not entirely useful) knowledge, and we often trade baseball trivia questions while watching the hockey game.

To Mike's left is Perry, one of the most genuinely nice and hilarious people you will ever meet. Perry survived a medical scare a few years ago, and we're all grateful to have him with us on game nights.

In front of us are Anthony and his family, who like us have used Monsters games as fun nights out together over the years. To their right are Scott and Garth. Scott spends a lot of time in Las Vegas these days, so we don't see him as much as used to, but Garth is a regular and a graduate of Brown University, so he's both smart AND funny.

I only see these people at hockey games, but it's like we're old friends. Anyone who has ever been a long-term season ticket holder for any sport knows what I'm talking about.

Whether or not the Monsters win on a given night, the time spent with family and friends is always a victory regardless.

Three random things I can do, but probably not as well as you

(1) I can snap my fingers, but I use the wrong ones
When you snap your fingers, you probably use your thumb and either your ring or middle finger. I don't. I use my thumb and my first/index finger. This is partly because I have short, stubby fingers, and neither the ring nor the middle finger reaches well enough to the thumb to get a good pop. Plus neither one "feels" right, whereas using my index finger does. So I go with what (at least partially) works.

(2) I can whistle with just my mouth, but I can't do that loud whistle people do with their fingers
Again, something to do with my fingers fails me. I can whistle pretty well through my teeth or using only my lips. But that thing some people do when they stick their fingers in their mouth and produce a loud, piercing whistle? Can't do it. Never understood it. Not even sure how it's supposed to work.

(3) I can back into a parking space, but rarely am I perfectly straight
I don't know why it is, but when I back into a parking space and think I'm far enough back and positioned perfectly between the lines, I almost never am. I'll get out, look at the car and realize I'm turned slightly to the left or the right. Again, not sure why, but I lack the ability to judge my car's true orientation while I'm sitting in the driver's seat. And I'm the one who has largely taught each of our kids to drive, which does not bode well for them.

Our youngest is n-n-n-n-n-nineteen today

If you recognized the reference to Paul Hardcastle's song "19" in the headline, you're either hardcore Gen X or a big fan of mid-80s electro pop. Or both. Nice job.

Why are we talking about the number 19? Because our youngest, "little" Jack, turns that age today. That photo of us above was taken last summer when we visited Toronto.

Jack is still at a point in life where every birthday is a milestone, regardless of whether it brings new legal privileges. Most kids when they hit 19 come to the startling realization that they've entered the home stretch of their teen years, and it can be jarring.

What they don't realize, of course, is that it sometimes affects their parents even more. Terry and I have had a nonstop string of teenagers in our family since 2007. This time next year, they will all be in their 20s and 30s.

Time, in addition to being undefeated, is also unstoppable.

I love having Jack living at home with us. He's funny, extremely smart, persevering, and one of the most likeable people you'll ever meet. He makes me laugh at least twice a day, and I enjoy watching him navigate the process of becoming an adult. He's doing great (with a little help from Mom and Dad from time to time).

Happy birthday, Jackie T. I hope you have the best time being n-n-n-n-n-nineteen.

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.

I am simply no good at being sick

I don't know what the AI Blog Post Image Generator
did to this guy's right eye...

Last month I was sidelined for close to a week with some sort of bug. Not sure if it was bacterial or viral or what, but I generally felt crummy, spent a few days with heavy congestion, coughed a lot near the end of it, and passed my days sitting around gaining weight and being bored.

And that, you see, was the problem. Whereas many people I know would welcome the excuse to take it easy and watch TV, I can't stand it. I am the world's worst relaxer. I much prefer to be on the go, getting stuff done and being active.

My patience wears thin very quickly on those occasions when I come down with something. After a day or two I end up annoyed that I'm still sick. Which I realize is unrealistic, BUT I HAVE NO TIME TO BE SICK.

I don't become sterotypically pathetic and whiny like a lot of men do when they get sick. I become angry and whiny. Why is this happening to me? Why?? Why now?? This cold or flu or whatever it is needs to go away RIGHT NOW.

But of course it never goes away until it chooses to go away. Which is usually days later than I would have preferred.

Last month's sickness (again, whatever it was) spanned a weekend, and I spent that Saturday on the couch with Cheddar the cat on my lap watching "Forrest Gump," "Apollo 13," a few episodes of "Law and Order: SVU," and portions of the Army-Navy football game.

Sounds like a nice day, right?

I hated it. Hated almost every minute of it. I was antsy the whole time, but I couldn't deny that I felt much better staying on the couch than I would have if I had gotten up and tried to do household chores or whatever.

The previous evening I had served as the PA announcer at our local high school for a girls basketball game, which in retrospect was not smart. My voice was cracking from the start, and by the end of the game it had devolved into a barely discernable rasp.

I should have called off.

But calling off would have meant acknowledging that I was sick, and I didn't want to be sick, so I simply ignored reality and risked passing my nasty germs on to others in attendance.

Which was selfish and dumb.

Here's the thing: One day I will die, and so will you. As Sally Field says in "Forrest Gump," death is just a part of life. When it happens, I pray it will be quick and easy, because I lack the mental fortitude to lay in a hospital bed declining for weeks or months on end.

It's more likely I will die in our bathroom, having just cleaned the sink and toilet.

But at least I'll die happy.

That time I was invited to the presidential inauguration and didn't go (though I WAS on the Channel 8 news)

This is what the set of the WJW Cleveland newscast looked like in 1977 when they aired a little segment about me.

(NOTE: This post originally ran on the blog on October 7, 2021. With today being presidential Inauguration Day here in the U.S., I thought it was a good time to bring it back.)

One day in 1976, I walked into the living room and announced that I was bored.

My dad, knowing the kinds of things that interested nearly-seven-year-old me, suggested I write a letter to a famous person like the president.

I was intrigued by this idea, but I did him one better (or thought I did): Rather than writing to President Ford, I would write to Gov. Jimmy Carter, who was running for the presidency against Ford.

I don't remember what I wrote, but whatever it was, I'm sure it was done in pencil on one of the yellow legal pads I kept in my room.

(You may wonder why a six-year-old had yellow legal pads. I do, too. It was a long time ago.)

Anyway, I remember getting some sort of form letter response a month later from Gov. Carter, who went on to win the election by a fairly narrow margin.

That was enough for me. I thought it was pretty cool.

But then, in early January of '77, a large envelope showed up at our house. I think it came via registered mail. It was an invitation to President-Elect Carter's inauguration in Washington, D.C.

At the time I don't think I understood the significance of it. All I knew is that we weren't going to attend.

I don't remember why this decision was made, but I think it had something to do with the fact that we would have had to supply our own transportation and would have been small faces in a crowd of many thousands.

There may also have been something to the fact that both of my parents were Republicans, and they wouldn't necessarily have been thrilled to go and celebrate the inauguration of a Democratic president.

Whatever the reason, I don't remember being too put out.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to mid-January. I'm in gym class at Mapledale Elementary School, where I'm a first-grader. A local TV news crew shows up and talks to my gym teacher. Then they start walking in my direction.

It turns out they're there to film me. I am incredibly confused by this, though the on-air reporter, legendary Cleveland television newsman Neil Zurcher (who just recently passed away), explains it's because I received a personal invitation to the presidential inauguration.

They get me on camera doing some rudimentary tumbling, as we were in the midst of a gymnastics unit. Then we go to our classroom, where I sit at my desk and they interview me. I don't remember any of the questions or any of my answers.

They tell me it's going to air as part of the 6 o'clock news on WJW Channel 8, which is exciting.

However, at some point that day it started snowing. And it kept on snowing. All day. Lots of snow. A real blizzard (almost exactly one year before the epic Cleveland Blizzard of 1978).

As a result, all planned stories for that 6 o'clock newscast are shunted aside in favor of weather-related coverage.

Somehow we find out that my piece will now probably air during the 11pm news later that evening. I think my sister Judi was the one who called the station to get this update (as I recall, she was also the one who called them about me in the first place).

At that time of my life, I went to bed every night at 9pm, almost without exception. I rarely stayed up until 11.

I remember laying down that evening on the couch, intending to stay awake until the news came on. But I don't think I even made it to 10:30.

The next thing I knew, my mom was shaking me awake. She pointed my attention to the TV, where I saw myself talking. I was still half-asleep and missed most of the segment.

This was, you will note, a few years before the VCR era began, so we had no way of capturing the moment. There is no existing record of this interview, which is too bad.

I would like to see myself doing that somersault in gym class.

Sometimes the kids come home when they're sick and it's just like the old days

It should be noted that my sick daughter looked far better than this virtual woman cooked up by the AI Blog Post Image Generator.

Last month my daughter Melanie woke up with a 103-degree fever, chills and a generally rotten sick feeling. She texted Terry, who went and picked her up and took her to the urgent care.

After being diagnosed with an unknown virus, Mel came to our house and spent the rest of the day (and night, and much of the next two days) on our couch.

Terry waited on her and made her feel as comfortable as possible. I felt so bad for Mel, but I'll admit it was nice having her around.

I was working from home, and at one point in the afternoon I came downstairs from my office to find both Melanie and Terry fast asleep on the couch. The last time that happened was probably 2001 when Mel was a baby and an exhausted Terry would nurse her there.

It was a very sweet and nostalgic scene.

You want your kids to grow up and move out and be independent, but you inevitably miss them when they do.

So these little visits – even if they result from less-than-ideal circumstances – are kind of nice.

And the best part? Mel got better, and the only person who caught whatever she had was me. (Well, Terry eventually got sick and blamed me, so maybe this wasn't "the best part" for her.)

A win-win for Jack, at least.

When the only thing separating you from a fun hobby is motivation and effort

Until recently when I sold them, I owned three saxophones: an alto, a baritone, and a 100-year-old C melody. I kept them in my office/computer/music room upstairs.

I loved playing them, but I never actually did.

I also have a telescope in our basement storage room that I've used to observe the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. I'm always amazed at what I see through the viewfinder, but I haven't brought it out in probably two years.

This is not to mention the shelves full of books I don't read or the running gear that sits unused in my closet because all I do these days exercise-wise is lift weights and walk.

What unites all of these activities is the fact that (a) I enjoy them, and (b) I never seem to do them.

And the only reason I don't do them is because I can never seem to drum up the motivation.

Not that any of them requires extraordinary motivation and effort. The worst thing with the saxophones, for example, was getting them out of the case, putting them together, and warming them up so I could play music.

This isn't difficult, but it was apparently a barrier to entry for me because whenever I thought about playing, I would instead decide that another game of solitaire on my phone was preferable to, you know, actually walking up the stairs and pulling out one of my horns.

The telescope is even easier to use. Just bring it up from the storage room, go out in the driveway and point it at the sky. I know how to find stuff from there, but...well, I'm on the couch petting the cat, you see, and that's a whole lot easier.

I'm realizing that life would be more fun if I could force myself to give the slightest effort whenever I'm not working or engaged in some household chore.

Is this because I'm 55 years old? Am I stuck in some sort of rut? Or has my iPhone turned me into a slug?

The answer is probably yes to all three.

Here's the good news, though: I'm very close to buying myself a nice, intermediate-level alto sax from my instrument repair and sales guy, Jon-O. And when I do, I plan to play it regularly. At least once a week.

Really, I will.

Of course, the saxophone requires a lot of air and mental energy, neither of which my phone's Yahtzee app requires of me, so...you know...maybe it's still kind of a toss-up.

In the bleak Ohio midwinter

It has been mentioned here (more than once) that my wife and I have lived in one city our whole lives.

We've traveled to many places, but we've never really wanted to live anywhere else.

Still, no place is perfect, and Northeast Ohio has its flaws. Like the weather, for instance.

More to the point, the weather in November through March (and some years October through April).

We live a few miles away from Lake Erie and are often recipients of the dreaded "lake-effect snow." Our town is right on the edge of the Snow Belt, meaning that if Downtown Cleveland gets 2 inches of snow, we are likely to 6 or more.

And even when the snow isn't piling up, it's still unfailingly gray, dreary and cold this time of year.

Indeed, January is not Wickliffe, Ohio's best moment, and we're entering the heart of it. These coming few weeks are historically some of the worst our area has to offer, weather-wise.

So we collectively grit our teeth and get through it.,

The reward is a beautiful late spring and summer that, to me anyway, is unlike anything you'll experience elsewhere. It's more than enough of a payoff for the unchanging bleakness of the winter months.

But we have a long way to go before that comes, so onward we push.

Not that it's all misery around here in January, February and March, mind you. Our basketball team is pretty good right now, as is our minor league hockey team.

And if you're into skiing or other outdoor winter sports, you could do worse than Northeast Ohio.

I just...well, the older I get, the less patience I have with Old Man Winter.

He needs to get his butt in gear and shuffle on out of here so that this "sunshine" we hear about from our friends to the south is once again less myth and more reality.

My brother-in-law's birthday reminds me of a time when slow-pitch softball was all the rage

You can't really see it, I know, but when I was with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1991, I wrote this feature story about my brother-in-law Jess and some of his longtime softball buddies. Jess is the guy standing in the very middle of that group of seven players.

Today is my brother-in-law Jess' birthday. He was married to my oldest sister Judi from 1972 until she died very unexpectedly in 2009. I was only 2 at the time of their wedding, so Jess has always seemed a part of my life.

Jess was an accomplished athlete at Benedictine High School, and he kept his sports career going through the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s as a slow-pitch softball player in the Cleveland area.

You wouldn't know it nowadays, given the relatively low participation numbers, but when I was growing up, softball was a thing. Every city had a league, and many people played on multiple teams.

When I started my career as a newspaper sports writer in the early 90s, my colleague Scott Kendrick and I were put in charge of The News-Herald's weekly slow-pitch softball coverage. This section took up several pages in the Saturday paper, and I was once told it accounted for hundreds – maybe 1,000 or more – in extra copies of the newspaper sold.

People loved seeing their names and their friends' names in the statistics we would publish. We also printed league standings, a weekly ranking of the top area teams (the "Sweet 16"), and a notes column that Scott and I co-wrote.

We in the newsroom also played the game ourselves. Because we worked weird night shifts, though, we weren't available to play in the regular city leagues, which scheduled most of their games on weekday evenings.

Instead, we played in the Ohio Day Men's League, which as I recall had its games on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As you might imagine, the teams were made up of guys who did night work...policemen, fire fighters, third-shift factory workers, etc.

And us.

I always looked forward to those weekday morning games, which were relatively early (9:30 and 10:30am) for those of us who had stayed in the newsroom until the first papers came off the press some 8-9 hours earlier. But they were always so much fun that it was worth losing a little sleep.

Anyway, Jess played softball at a very high level for some of the best teams in Northeast Ohio. He was primarily a pitcher and first basemen.

He let me serve as bat boy for a few of those teams, and man, I felt like king of the world walking out onto the field several times a game to retrieve the team's bats and take them back to the dugout.

When you're 8 or 10 years old or whatever I was, getting to sit on the bench with a bunch of great athletes (all of whom were very nice to me) was a real treat.

Like I said, though, softball has waned in popularity over the years. And, now in his early 70s with the battle scars of decades of competition to prove it, Jess isn't playing these days anyway.

But like me, he still has his memories. And I hope they're good ones as he celebrates another trip around the sun today.

Happy birthday, Jess, and thanks for sharing some of those glory days with your little brother-in-law.

I just remembered something my dad used to do for me that I loved

Earlier this week I had a post here describing how I used to play board games by myself as a kid whenever my friends weren't around.

It reminded me of another gaming activity I used to do solo that was a lot of fun, and it was thanks to my dad that I ever did it in the first place.

Like a lot of sports-minded kids in the late-70s, I owned the Mattel "Classic Football" electronic game pictured above. It was extremely primitive compared with the Madden football video games of today, but to us it was great and I never tired of playing it.

One time my dad drew up a bracket involving all 28 NFL teams (at the time) in a single-elimination tournament. He did it by hand on a sheet of paper. I can still picture his distinctive left-handed writing in which the various first-round match-ups were laid out (Dallas vs. New England, Minnesota vs. Houston, Cleveland vs. San Diego, etc.)

My job was to play each game of the tournament on the Mattel device and write down the result on the tournament bracket. Over the course of a few days I could play all of the games and determine a "champion."

Being a budding Cleveland sports fan, I wanted desperately for the Browns to win the tournament, so I would admittedly play a little harder whenever I was representing them.

But just like real life, no matter how much I tried, some other team always won out in the end. It was never my guys.

Dad created similar tournament brackets for me on several occasions, and it infuriated me once when, despite my best efforts, the hated Pittsburgh Steelers won my little electronic simulation.

To my credit, though, no matter how much I didn't like it, I always accepted the result of each game however it turned out. No do-overs or anything like that.

Now, from a distance of 45 years, I realize not only how much fun I had playing out these tournaments, but also how enjoyable it probably was for Dad to set up the brackets for me whenever I asked. 

It was a time-consuming task, I'm sure, and he would have been perfectly justified to say he simply couldn't do it. But he never said no.

What a great dad he was to me. I miss him.

My wife thought it was sad when I told her I used to play board games by myself as a kid

I received the Happy Days board game one Christmas in the late 70s. More often than not when I played it, I was by myself.

Growing up, I had a core group of friends with whom I used to spend a lot of time. In the summers, especially, we did a lot of stuff together.

But even when you're 9 years old and your options are somewhat limited, there are still times when you're not with your friends and you have to figure out how to amuse yourself.

The child psychologists call this "independent play," my oldest daughter informs me, and it's a skill I developed pretty early as the youngest (by far) of four siblings. I was rarely bored.

One of the things I used to do was to take one of the several board games I owned down from the shelf in my room and play it by myself.

Even if the game was designed for four players, I would put four pieces on the board, roll the dice, and take each piece's turn individually.

Amazingly, I never told Terry about this until recently. I say "amazingly" because I've known the woman for nearly 39 years and figured I had absolutely exhausted my childhood stories (and adulthood stories, for that matter) with her.

But apparently this had never come up before. When I mentioned it, she at first laughed, then she got a pitying look on her face, which was worse than the laughing.

She even took to our family text group chat to let the kids know their father had been a sad, lonely little boy who was forced to engage in multiplayer board games by himself for lack of friends.

But as I explained to the kids, it wasn't like that at all. It was just one of the things I did to amuse myself whenever Matt, Kevin, Jason, Todd, Mike or any of my other Harding Drive/Mapledale Road compatriots were unavailable.

The sad thing is, I now appear to have lost this ability. I'm typing this blog post on a Saturday night in our living room, only because I have completely finished today's (and most of tomorrow's) to-do list and wasn't sure what to do with myself.

Maybe it's time for a little solo Monopoly!

Someone needs to be in charge of restocking paper products in your house. In our family, it's me.

Every house has a variety of jobs, big and small, that over time fall on the shoulders of one occupant or another. As comedian Paul Reiser once observed, these are often jobs that nobody especially likes, but one of you happens to hate it a little less than the other, so the job goes to that person.

Among my many assigned duties at 30025 Miller Avenue are two tasks I take seriously. They are in no way onerous, and I actually enjoy them both.

One is changing the clocks twice a year whenever Daylight Savings Time begins or ends. With so many of our time-keeping devices now fully digital, this isn't nearly the job it used to be, but there are still clocks that need to be manually adjusted (the stove, the microwave, the coffeemaker, Terry and Jack's cars, etc.)

The other is making sure we have paper towels in the kitchen and plenty of toilet paper in each of our bathrooms.

Ideally, you should never get to the empty cardboard tube inside the paper towels or a roll of toilet paper without a replacement readily at hand.

Thus, I'm always glancing into the kitchen and various bathrooms to gauge current supply levels and the precise moment when I will need to go to our basement storage room to procure fresh stocks.

Running out of paper towels isn't a national emergency or anything, just inconvenient.

But running out of toilet paper when it's urgently needed? That simply cannot happen.

And it rarely does, though I will admit there have been times when I haven't been quick enough with reinforcements and someone will yell for help from the bathroom.

I would submit that, if you're planning to do something in the bathroom that will require toilet paper, you should first determine if there is sufficient paper on hand before you begin. But I know that sometimes you're simply in a hurry.

Overall, though, I am probably the best choice in our family for this job, as I am detail-oriented and generally very conscientious, even when it comes to things about which you probably don't need to be especially conscientious.

No one appreciates the toilet paper guy until they're in desperate need. Then, and only then, he becomes the most important person in the house.

I only want one thing from 2025

I used to come into every new year with a list of things I wanted to accomplish and/or have happen in my life.

Some were achievable, others were probably unrealistic.

Never did I manage to check every one off the list. Not once.

So now I'm paring down my list of demands, mostly because I am in no position to demand anything. It's more of a plea, I guess.

All I want this year is for everyone I love who is alive and well on January 1st to still be alive and well on December 31st.

This is a lot to ask, I know. It's unfair to ask God that I experience no pain or suffering when you consider the amount of pain and suffering experienced every day by most of the 8 billion other people in the world.

But I'm asking anyway. While I haven't lost an inordinate number of family and friends to this point in my life, I've lost enough that I would like to keep the ones I still have as long as I can.

So, if it's all the same to 2025, I would appreciate it if the people in my life can just get through the next 365 days healthy and happy. Or at least vertical and breathing.

Really, it doesn't feel like that much to ask.