At some point in your life, 30 years in the future becomes a very different concept from what it used to be

For much of your life, when you look far into the future, it's almost always to a time when you're still likely to be relatively healthy and active.

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 daughters beat me so badly in The Mini crossword puzzle that I have to believe I'm deteriorating mentally

A few months ago I wrote about the fact that I do four New York Times puzzles every morning (Wordle, Connections, Strands, and The Mini.)

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.

Every month, the good folks at Facebook send me 10 bucks for no good reason

Right from the start of today's post, it's important to mention two things, at least one of which you already know:

(1) This blog is an exceedingly small part of the Internet and is read by only a handful of exceedingly smart individuals (that's the part you already knew).

(2) I am fully aware of this fact and harbor no illusions of the blog's reach and influence.

Having established that, I will also tell you that every month, without fail, the Facebook people send me $10 or so for being a "digital creator." And since 90% of my Facebook posts are blog links, they're basically paying me for driving traffic here to 5kids1wife.com

This is funny to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that I would be doing the same thing even if they didn't pay me. It's also funny because I'm sure there are powerful cyber-influencer types to whom Facebook (actually its parent company Meta) pays hundreds and probably thousands of dollars.

What I get is chump change, and deservedly so.

Still, the fact is I get it, which means the engagement I create on Facebook must be worth something to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't know why Mark finds my traffic to be of value, but he is, if nothing else, pretty savvy when it comes to making money.

The actual amount I receive depends on how many Facebook likes, comments, clicks, etc. I generate in a certain month. It varies from as low as $8 to $12 or more. I just say $10 because it's an even number and it sounds good.

Until I started receiving these payments from Meta, I didn't know this is how the Internet works. The more traffic the better for these giant digital platforms for whom more eyeballs on advertisements means more revenue.

You will be glad to know I invest these monthly stipends back into the blog to make it better, which is to say I usually buy coffee with them. Coffee motivates me to write, which keeps all of you graciously coming back, which keeps 5kids1wife.com going.

So every time you click on one of my blog links, or like or comment on one of my Facebook posts, you are stimulating the economy, which feels like a very patriotic and admirable thing to do.

In the end, your engagement doesn't really benefit me so much as it benefits you and our whole economic infrastructure.

So keep being a virtuous person and click/like/comment to your heart's content. You are an upstanding and high-minded citizen.

Yeah...that's it. 

Our oldest kid consistently brings the funny

One of the funniest people I know was born on this day in 1994. She also happens to be my daughter Elissa.

Elissa's humor is perhaps best described as "dry," "biting," and I'll go so far as to say "dark."

Whatever you want to call it, she makes me laugh all the time.

She is, for example, a master of using capital letters to humorous effect in texts. A funny word is somehow 10 times funnier when Elissa types it in all caps for emphasis.

Each of our kids has the funny gene, but Elissa started at a particularly early age. I remember one time when she was very young – maybe 18 months old – riding in her car seat while Terry and I sat in the front. A song I liked came on the radio, so I started singing along.

Suddenly from the backseat came a little voice urging me, "Sing it, Scotto."

Terry and I died. Elissa knew she was funny, and she has never wavered in her comedic confidence since.

Elissa's hobbies include crocheting clothes for her plastic goose Fernando, who sits in her front window and entertains the whole neighborhood with his fashionable 'fits. Only someone with a deep sense of the absurd would spend so much time making a plastic goose look good.

I am inordinately proud of her.

Happy birthday to our first child and the headliner of our family comedy festival. And thanks for the laughs, kid.

Three aspects of modern life that would have amazed my 8-year-old self

This isn't me in the late 70s, but given the tube socks and the somewhat confused expression, it could have been.
 

I was born in 1969, making me a relatively early Gen Xer. The world in which I grew up in the 1970s and 80s was a very analog one. Everything was bigger and clunkier. It was just a different time.

If you took 1978 Scott and transported him into the world of 2025, here are three things he would immediately notice:

(1) Cars are quieter and less smelly

When I was little, cars ran on regular leaded gasoline. That gas produced a certain kind of exhaust, the smell of which was different from the smell most cars emit today. It was heavier, more industrial, and more (I guess) "gas-like." Cars were also generally louder, even the ones with good mufflers. You could hear a car coming from a greater distance than you can today. Right away, 8-year-old Scott would be impressed by your low-noise, low-exhaust cars of the future.

(2) There aren't as many cords and wires everywhere

The first place I ever remember seeing a wireless television remote was, I believe, my Uncle Still and Aunt Jean's house in North Carolina. We visited there in 1976, and they had this space-age clicker that changed the channel with no physical connection to the TV. I couldn't understand how it worked, though I'm sure it was primitive compared with the remotes of today. We didn't have a remote of any kind in our house at the time, and even the ones we got when cable TV came along four years later had these long, gray cords that cluttered up living rooms and basements across America. The wireless revolution has made us forget how most things needed cords to operate back then.

(3) Smoking? Not nearly the thing it once was

I've written about this before. Many (even most) adults you knew were smokers back when I was a kid. Both of my parents smoked. So did Terry's parents. Heck, we made our moms and dads ashtrays in art class as presents. People smoked in most public places, including malls and grocery stores. You just kind of got used to the smell, though I certainly never liked it...and to this day I've never even tried it. 1978 Scott would wonder where all the clouds of cigarette smoke and  the cig vending machines had gone in 2025. And as someone who was anti-smoking from a very early age, he would love it.

Five first names I wouldn't mind having

(NOTE: This post originally ran here on the blog 12 years ago today on March 19, 2013. It's our monthly Blog Rerun and a list of names I still wouldn't mind having.)

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...

I experienced the luck of the Irish 39 years ago

One time Terry and I went to Australia and we took this photo that is for some reason tilted. The only explanation I can think of is that, if you look at a globe, you will clearly see that Australia is upside down, so it makes sense that we would be a bit off kilter, too.

I write these blog posts about five weeks in advance. Sometimes I'll adjust if a topic is more time-sensitive, but for the most part, I like to stay well ahead of the game.

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.

A Room of One's Own

 

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:

And on top of that is a little shrine to our dearly departed cats Fred, George and Charlie:

The music theme continues in this little corner with the inclusion of two instruments (a keyboard and guitar) that I technically cannot play, though that never stops me from trying. Note that the room also contains my alto saxophone, which for the record I can play.

On the walls are various photos reflecting my interests, from a large autographed image of Sting to an autographed Lake Erie Monsters (our local hockey team, now called the Cleveland Monsters) layout. I also have a map of the Appalachian Trail and these two pictures of my mom and dad presumably taken on Parents Night when I played high school football:

Above those are my undergraduate and graduate school diplomas from John Carroll and West Virginia universities, respectively:

There's also a closet containing music and sound equipment and a large bin of sheet music I won't even bother showing you.

The point is that, while this room will never win any interior decorating awards, it's my room, and I love it. Terry does a wonderful job putting together the other rooms in our house, but I'm very grateful to have one to myself.

After all, I have helped us make a lot of mortgage payments over the years. It feels like I've earned a few square feet of my own.

I didn't think I was especially old at 55, but then...

Even when I was very young, I never thought 55 was particularly old. And I still don't, given that I turned that age myself a few months ago.

Then three things happened that gave me pause:

• I drove past the site of a new development here in Wickliffe where 55-and-over housing is being built. A sign out front referred to the soon-to-be-constructed houses as "senior living" units. Senior living.
  
  
• I was flipping through the Wickliffe Connection, our town's quarterly newspaper, when I came across an article about the Wickliffe Senior Center, which I've always thought of as a nice gathering place for the very elderly in our community. Then I noticed this line: "Anyone 55 and over may become a member" of the Senior Center. I'm sorry, what??
  
  
• Every year, my company generously makes a lump-sum contribution to each employee's 401(k) account. This contribution is a certain percentage of your eligible earnings, with that percentage rising as you get older. The age group receiving the highest-percentage contribution – the old fogies of the company who presumably need the money the most – is 55 and over. Yes, I'm now considered essentially the same as a 70-year-old. I appreciate the infusion of cash, but that one hurt.

I guess I always thought stuff like this didn't happen until you turned at least 65. But even as lifespans increase and people generally maintain their youthful vigor for longer periods, we're suddenly associating age 55 with "senior citizen," and I'm admittedly shaken.

On the other hand...

I'm thinking Terry and I should consider moving into one of the new 55-and-over houses and joining the Senior Center. It may be disconcerting to find ourselves in the old person demographic, but compared with our prospective neighbors and fellow Senior Center members, we'll be the young, rowdy kids! Like the slightly overweight person who hangs out only with very fat friends, by comparison, we'll be the life of the party.

Shuffleboard at our house. 3pm tomorrow. BYOE (Bring Your Own Ensure).

5 Kids, 1 Wife..and 1 Grandchild

To avoid "burying the lede," as they say in the journalism trade, let's begin with the big news in our family these days: My daughter Chloe and her husband Michael are expecting their first baby and our first grandchild in mid-September.

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.

An escalator tried to kill my wife

Today's headline is admittedly a bit melodramatic, but it's true that Terry was almost eaten by an escalator not long ago.

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.

It's admittedly not very good, but this piano song I taught myself is the definition of, "Well, I did my best"

Terry bought me a Yamaha keyboard for Christmas, and I just love it.

Well, technically, I bought it for myself and we said it would be from her, but the result is the same.

Here's the thing, though: I can't play the piano. I mean, I can figure out simple tunes with my right hand. But actual two-handed songs with chords and such? It's not happening.

I lack the talent, the patience, and the finger length to do it. Plus, bass clef and I simply don't get along.

I have several Facebook friends who are wonderfully talented piano players. I admire (and envy) them. I will never be able to match them.

I mention all of this as context for the personal triumph that is teaching myself to play Beethoven's "Für Elise," a song that requires the use of both the left and right hands.

Now, when I say "teaching myself to play," you have to understand that my definition of that is getting from the beginning of the song to the end without crashing and burning. It does not imply that I'm going to get everything right, nor indeed that the melody I play will really match the original.

The video above of me playing "Für Elise" is full of issues that would make a piano teacher cringe.

For one thing, I know my finger positioning is incorrect. And several times I hit the left hand keys too hard, giving the bass notes far more oomph than Herr Beethoven would have intended.

Then there's the unfortunate pause in the middle of the song as I temporarily lose my bearings and try to get my fingers on the correct keys.

And of course the left-hand note I completely miss near the end of the song.

I also freely admit that the little right-hand-only breaks in the middle of the tune do not match the original. Those for sure don't align with what Beethoven wrote. I'm pretty much just making those parts up.

In short, it's a mess.

But it's my mess, and I learned to do it all on my own.

I know I sound like an 8-year-old who just figured out how to multiply two-digit numbers, but I'm inordinately proud of this recording for two reasons:

(1) The tune is somewhat recognizable. There was no guarantee I was ever going to get to that point...again, especially when you consider my inability to play the left-hand part of almost any other piano song.

(2) I was satisfied with doing my personal best. Normally I can't stand being anything but perfect with any task to which I set my mind, but in this case I learned to be happy with my wonky version of an iconic classical melody (one that any semi-competent pianist can play with ease). I tried, and this is the result...mistakes and all.

I've been informed that I need to stop biting so deeply into my apples that I strew seeds around the house

I love apples. Gala apples. I've mentioned this fact before.

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.