You're not fooling me into false hope, April

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

We have entered the month of April, which you know.

What you may not know is that April's only purpose in this world (at least for those of us living in decidedly temperate climates) is to trick us into thinking spring has arrived.

Sure, technically, spring has arrived on the calendar, but no self-respecting Northeast Ohioan really believes that.

I'm writing this post on February 24. I have no idea what the weather will be like on April 2, and it almost doesn't matter. Even if it's sunny and warm, it won't last. It will be 70 degrees one day and 35 the next.

That is far worse than a week of mid-January temperatures in the mid-teens. At least in January you know what you're getting and don't expect anything better.

But in April? The crocuses and other signs of emerging life make you think everything is going to be OK very soon. And it is going to be OK.

Just not now. Not this month.

You have to wait for May for "OK." In the meantime, winter's long death rattles continue for the next few weeks. You think you see the finish line, and suddenly it moves 100 yards farther away.

You have hope, then April blithely crushes the part of you that believes summer is right around the corner.

We're not finished yet. Not by a long shot.

It was the character Red from "The Shawshank Redemption" who said it best: "Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane."

Indeed it can, Red, indeed it can.

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...