The pilot of my severely delayed flight from O’Hare to La Guardia this afternoon tried to liven up the crowd with some humor (?) over the midwest:

Pilot

For those of you on the right-hand side of the aircraft: a partial view of Toledo, Ohio.

Passengers

[silence; stunned indifference]

And I was born in Toledo. But I was also sitting on the left-hand side of the plane. Booo.

My brother Andrew sorted through a box of his childhood toys that had been in storage in our parents’ basement. Highlights included G.I. Joe, Transformers and random plastic dinosaurs: ah, the memories.

My dad celebrated his 60th birthday tonight with a group of relatives and friends at his favorite local wine bar. At tables set up in the back near the beer coolers, we began with two whites, then five reds, all of which were poured as a professorial type named Reed talked about the wine’s characteristics, its region, trivia about the wineries’ owners and other such hoohah.

I notice increasingly sloppy annotations on my wine “score sheet,” like how Reed started one sentence, as a lead-in to an anecdote on cask-aging: “One time, I went to an oak seminar....” I also seem to have written “Reed hoards port,” which has nice alliteration, and “I thought this guy said he wouldn’t lecture,” which was a gradeschool-style note passed to my sister. Also, here are paraphrased instructions from Reed on how to decant. (He didn’t pun his title like I did; I was feeling saucy.)

How to Turn a Decant into a Decan

1. Stand the bottle upright at least a day.
2. Train the beam of a miniature flashlight on the neck of the bottle while steadily pouring the wine into a decanter.
3. Stop pouring when you spot sediment.
4. If you have a magnum or a double-magnum, you’re fucked.

Afterwards we took what was left of the wine back to my parents’ house for the afterparty, for which my mom had baked two pies (cherry and apple) and, for my dad, apple dumplings, his favorite dessert.

I’d been trying to find a cheap cocktail shaker for a while and while out shopping today in Ohio, I didn’t like the designs or the prices of the models I found at Target. On a whim, I tried Marc’s, which is a great deep-discount chain here, and found a stainless-steel shaker with a classic silhouette for a grand total of $3.09. The metal isn’t the thickest so my hands will get frosty during a good shake, and the stainless-steel surface will attract all manner of water-spots and fingerprints, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for tasty cocktails.

Dana and I loaded our rented Chrysler Town & Country with the milk-crates of books and miscellaneous supplies that have been in storage in my parents’ house for years and drove off for New York City. It was overcast during the 7.5-hour drive with only spots of drizzle.

Midway through Pennsylvania, we encountered a drunk, stoned or distracted driver in a tan safari-like vehicle that frequently crept over the white lines. He’d also do confusing things like leave his left-hand blinker as he drove in the passing lane. We gave him a wide berth and then lost him when we stopped for lunch. Hours later, as we approached the George Washington Bridge just outside New York City, a massive backup of cars clogged the upper-deck tollbooths. Because it was around 5 p.m., we chalked it up to rush hour. But as the line of traffic moved a few hundred feet onto the bridge, we spotted the wayward driver in the tan safari-car who had gotten into an (apparently minor) accident and was blocking the left two of the four lanes at a rakish angle. Sweet, sweet just desserts.

Reaching my apartment building at last, we learned the elevator that had been out of commission for the two weeks before Christmas was still inoperable. We had to make about 10 trips up and down four flights of stairs with all my stuff. When it was over, we were out of breath and ached like old people, and still had a stressful drive ahead of us to return the car to LaGuardia before it turned back into a pumpkin.

In search of whiskey in my grandmother’s kitchen cabinets, I came across these liquor bottles which appear to date from at least the 1960’s. I especially like the “hula girl” on the Trader Vic’s pomegranate grenadine syrup.

Christmas at Grandma’s! It was the usual drill: I ate way too much and had fun hanging out with the family. Here’s Grandma, looking regal as she tears into a gift.

On July 6, 1973, Stephen Shore had pancakes for breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Lima, Ohio. Afterwards he drove to the nearby city of Delphos¹ and took three photos: of the intersections of 2nd and 4th at Main, and of the Pitsenbarger Supply Company on 3rd, its brick side wall painted with a small square advertisement for Scherger Monuments (“Preserve Ancestry for Posterity”).

Having taken his photos, Shore then did something unusual: he left some photos. Rather, they were photos of similarly nondescript scenes from similarly nondescript small towns that he had taken earlier then had professionally printed as postcards. He left 30 of them in Delphos that day; he didn’t say where, but the way he worked was to place them into drugstore postcard racks with the others when no one was looking. Then he moved on. By lunchtime, he was in Battle Creek, Michigan, taking more photos and leaving more postcards.

Shore crisscrossed the country that year doing this same thing. He’d printed 5,600 postcards, so he had a lot of ground to cover, and he kept track of it all in a ledger that included copies of his prints, notes on meals he ate, where he stayed and what he watched on TV in his hotel room, ephemera like business cards, gas receipts, parking tickets and, in neat block print, lists of “Exposures Made” and “Postcards Distributed.”

Pages from the 1973 ledger, some of the postcards, and photos Shore took throughout the ’70s and early ’80s are on display at the International Center of Photography in an exhibit titled Biographical Landscapes, and it’s great in its similarities and ordinariness. The large-format color photos show anonymous architecture of highways, intersections and side streets, billboards and signs, gas stations and parking lots, hotel rooms and fast food meals. This stuff would have been completely ordinary and probably boring to someone then, but now the clothing, the cars and the graphic design have a mystical quality and it’s hard to believe any of it ever really existed.

What’s the point of Shore’s work? He’s a New Yorker, born and bred, so a viewer’s first instinct might be to label him a parodist of the oft-maligned middle part of the country, although his images are presented almost exclusively without comment or irony. It may just be, as he said later, that the ledger was borne from “a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or activity,” and that the photos were records of these days and transitory memories. It’s as if he collected traces and evidence to prove to himself that he was where he was. It reminded me of a quote I’ve saved by Cornell University anthropologist Sam Beck: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate....to leave trails, to say, ‘we are here’....”

Shore’s gone digital and since 2003 has been using Apple’s iPhoto photo-book service, in which the company will professionally print a hardcover book of a digital photo album. There was one at the exhibit that included photos he had taken in New York City a few years ago of pedestrians, signs and cars, and sure enough, I found it dull. But how about in 35 years?

The exhibit didn’t mention whether Shore ever revived his postcard project, but it amuses me to think he may have, just as it amuses me to imagine that Shore’s postcards from the ’70s could lie pressed and yellowing in family scrapbooks, depicting places the senders never were.

¹ Until she married, my mom lived in a tiny farm village just outside of Delphos, which is sort of why I selected it for this anecdote. [back]

Due to a plane bedeviled by mechanical troubles, I was stuck late this afternoon at the Toledo Express Airport for two hours and 25 minutes. At one point, I was literally the only person in the main gate area, which leant an otherworldly, 28 Days Later atmosphere. As I eventually did, I learned the other three people on my flight back to Cleveland had retreated through security to the check-in area to await further updates. Realizing I’d miss my connecting flight in Cleveland, I phoned Continental, but they weren’t much help in booking another flight tonight, instead temporarily signing me up for a crack-of-dawn flight in to Newark tomorrow. I was fully prepared to stay overnight at my parents’ house in Cleveland.

By remarkable coincidence, as I deplaned in Cleveland, I overheard that the flight right next door was nearly finished boarding for LaGuardia. Without comment, I handed my now-invalid boarding pass to the check-in woman there, just to see what would happen.

“This isn’t for this flight,” she said after glancing at it.

“Can it be?” I replied, exuding all the charm I could muster through my weariness.

After a flurry of typing at a computer, she printed me a boarding pass and rushed me on board to take one of two remaining seats. I got to be that jerk who boards late and inevitably has a seat at the rear so the other passengers can form a gauntlet of annoyed glances and frowns. I don’t know what sort of strange magic that gate lady cast to get me on board so quickly, but I later noticed the stub of my boarding pass listed my first name as Abraham.

I’ve been friends with Joe since junior high and for a while there in the late-’80s and the ’90s, we’d go to Cedar Point every year. As we left the park at the end of the day, elated and with that compressed-muscle feeling that we were still aboard the coasters, my tradition would be to buy a souvenir map of the park. We enjoyed unfolding it and considering where among the sparse or forested plots of lakefront property the next great ride would be built.

With work and distance, Joe and I don’t hang out as often as we used to, but in the interim, those maps grew fuller, as did Joe, when he met a remarkable woman, Andrea. I realize now that it’d be trivial yet interesting to chart the parallel progress, matching additions to those maps with milestones of their relationship. For instance, the year they saw Gosford Park together, Wicked Twister appeared. I’m sure that means something.

But to the point, Andrea liked roller coasters as much as Joe. More improbably, she shared his passion for reality television, odd eBay purchases, Broadway musicals and their soundtracks, obscure facts of American history and geography, and the sort of murder-mystery parties where at least one guest ends up “dead” on the floor in the kitchen. Both Joe and Andrea are funny, smart and sensible people, yet assuredly not the same person. She provides the brassy counterpoint to his lower register, and I don’t think I have to worry about them buying matching embroidered jean jackets anytime soon.

A guy can make questionable choices in girlfriends. The friends who know him best may find her annoying or inappropriate but remain silent because of their loyalty to him. It happens. But that’s not at all the case with Andrea and Joe and it’s my impression his friends suspected she was The One before he fully reached that conclusion himself. When he called to let me know of the engagement, I said something like, “I was wondering when this would happen, by which I mean all of us were wondering.” This much I didn’t expect: he proposed to her on the Magnum XL-200, which didn’t shock her as much as the fact he’d been carrying the ring in his pocket all day, including aboard rides that went upside-down.

“It’s insured!” he was quick to point out.

At Joe and Andrea’s wedding today, the metaphor of marriage and roller coasters was a theme. It’s true: both are thrilling, with twists and turns, unexpected or otherwise, with dizzying highs and lows. And in this metaphor, friends and family are there, too, because everyone has season passes. We’re “along for the ride,” you might say, and at the end of the day, everyone gets funnel cakes.

Bonus mp3: “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players (1975).

I’m in Toledo for the wedding of my friends Joe and Andrea and I must say, there are many errands to run. I accompanied Joe on many a trip out for random last-minute things, everything from purchasing pink wrapping paper to picking up the rings. I also helped fold programs for the ceremony, cut the dinner menus for the reception and ate a bunch of the salt-water taffy that will be part of the amusement-park-themed amuses-bouche. It’s shaping up to be the blockbuster event of the summer.

Before today I hadn’t been to Cedar Point in probably 10 years, so it was a thrill to go there with my friend Joe. I will admit there was a moment when I wondered if I was too old for the lines and lurches of amusement park rides and I’m pleased to report the answer is “not just yet.”

Although I had catching-up to do on the newer rides, we started with the Blue Streak, the oldest coaster at the park and one my Mom rode once when she was pregnant with me, which may explain a few things. Afterwards we churned around washing-machine style on maXair. Up to 50 people sit, feet dangling, on the perimeter of a giant wheel which rotates as it swings back and forth on a giant pendulum. Great hang time!

Shaped like a “U,” the Wicked Twister sports 215-foot-tall vertical posts resembling helixes. With riders secured in seats suspended from the track, the thing whooshes backwards and forwards a few times like a demented half-pipe, sans skateboard. Although we didn’t take a front seat, Joe reports that sitting there gives one the sensation that the ride will wing right off the tip of the “U,” visible at the top of my photo below.

For old-times sake, we took the front seats of the first car of the Magnum XL-200, which commands an impressive line despite its age. (I was in junior high and rode it the year it opened!) Its stark, 205-foot first hill, which features the most effectively ominous click-track in the park, affords chilly breezes and grand views of nearby Lake Erie. It remains breathtaking even if it has been rendered surprisingly quaint; the first hill of the Millennium Force, which opened in 2000, is more than 100 feet taller.

I felt as if I was setting a new land-speed record on Top Thrill Dragster, which hurls down a straightway, twists up, over and down the equivalent of a 42-story skyscraper (or phallus, as some insist), then beats a retreat straight back to the station. The whole thing takes about 15 seconds, most of which I spent wondering if my viscera would return to their original, uncompressed positions.

Taking over the real estate and part of the Frontiertown-style mill building of the late, great White Water Landing (“The Log Ride”), the park’s newest coaster, Maverick, is a low-slung, twisty bugger with periodic jet propulsion. We waited the longest for this one as storm reports halted the queue for about 45 minutes. Afterwards, we refreshed ourselves with overpriced Chik-Fil-A lemonade, waffle fries and chicken sandwiches, then took a digestion-aiding ride down memory lane on the Gemini and, almost, the Mine Ride, which shut down due to mechanical difficulties just as we were ready to board.

Closing the day, we queued up for what turned out to be my all-around favorite coaster, Millennium Force, the aforementioned first hill of which felt even more thrilling in the dark. Combining pleasing proportions of hills, banks, twists and tunnels, the ride boasts a super-smooth speed (a maximum of 93 mph!) with none of the head-boxing or vertebrae misalignment resulting from certain other big-‘n’-tall coasters. A DJ in the pre-ride queue spun goofy pop songs while we waited. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” really is more fun when several hundred sweaty people are singing along.

I flew in to Cleveland yesterday evening to visit my family and was struck by the differences between the Midwest and New York City. All of these differences of course have been around all the other times I've visited home since living in New York, but they seemed more crisply in focus this time. Must’ve been the weather.

First off, people in Cleveland really are kind of porky. I remember being surprised, as I think some other Clevelanders were, that the city was ranked the unhealthiest in the nation awhile back, probably because everyone thought the same thing, "Really? What about [fill-in name of hillbilly-infested city]?" But, no, it's pretty bad, and you notice it more once you've been in a sea of harried, comparatively more trim people.

There are also many flat, wide open spaces here, and those that aren't wide open seem to have been clogged by strip malls. I've noticed before how when I walk on sidewalks in Cleveland now I get a weird sort of apprehension because there will typically be no one else walking on the sidewalk as far as the eye can see. (Perhaps this is related to the above point about Clevelanders being so porky.) Whereas in New York, the sidewalks are streams of surly humanity and if you were ever to find yourself the only person on a sidewalk there, it would be because: a.) you are in a horror movie and unknowingly about to be eaten by a zombie, or b.) a neutron bomb went off, but apparently you were in the can at the time.

On the plus side for Cleveland, there is a lot of green, which is pleasing to see this time of year: verdant lawns, explosions of flowers (mostly dandelions, I’m afraid), budding trees, etc. It's all over the place whereas in New York such bounty is confined to the parks and sad little patches.

The buttons on my winter coat have a name. They’re four-hole corozo buttons, named, I think, after the tropical palm that bears corozo nuts, which were once used to fashion buttons, though I suspect mine are plastic. I learned this when I bought a few of them at M & J Trimming, purveyor of beads, braids, buckles, buttons and such, and brought them home to Cleveland so my sister could sew them back onto my coat where two had fallen off.

I’d been walking around these past months with the buttonless top of the coat unfastened, which looked rakish in autumn but now allows frigid air to mug my neck. Dana sewed them on in no time. I probably should have had her teach me how to sew in case other button-related emergencies arise. After all, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But teach him to sew and he can repair his own damn coat.

It’s a time-honored tradition to rearrange Mom’s holiday décor.

A portion of the menu-board above the counter at an Arabica Coffeehouse in Parma Heights, Ohio.

Flight into Cleveland. Family liquor nook check: A-OK.

(The beer, nog and margarita mix were in the fridge, the wine in the wine nook.)

My previous hometown, Cleveland, is the poorest big city in the country according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but it still seems to have a scrappy sense of pride.

Then I read an Associated Press article today about how Cleveland-based American Greetings test-marketed a card there based on those “Greetings From” tourist postcards. It showed a man in a black-and-white photo walking past an urban landscape and the message was “Season’s Greetings from Cleveland ... America’s Poorest City!” Inside, it read “Happy Holidays.” An American Greetings spokesperson explained:

Obviously, our intent is not to make light of the issue. It’s just a satirical form of humor that plays well with a certain segment of the population. We realize it’s not for everyone.

Ha ha! I guess. Although I’m unsure what segment of the population would find this funny. If you’re well off, you’re spending your money on tastefully expensive cards with a nice heavy paper stock and bland statements of cheer. And I don’t know if the poor are frittering away their money on Christmas cards but if they are, I’d think they’d want to concentrate on the positive aspects of the holidays instead of making light of their economic situation.

While waiting to be seated for a traditional Cleveland Heights lunch at Tommy’s, Dana and I moseyed over to Ohio’s best toy store, Big Fun, to see how their new digs have been faring.

Sometime over the last 12 months, the store moved from a shack-sized location across the street, crammed literally floor to ceiling with antique and retro toys and novelties, to a store at least three times as large on the other side. We were curious to see if the proprietors had been able to maintain the feel of coziness and wonder the original location had, while allowing freedom of movement; space issues in the original store dictated frequent pressing up against cabinets of Smurfs or vintage lunchboxes in otder to let other customers pass. High Tide/Rock Bottom, the business that used to be located in the larger space, was a bland sort of Spencer’s Gifts, selling saucy cards, posters and knickknacks: maybe ironically, the sort of store that dreams of being a store like Big Fun. But the ceilings there were high and dropped, of the white acoustic tile variety found in soul-sucking corporate office environments, and the hard floors were covered in that thin gray carpeting, also on loan from the land of Aeron chairs and fluorescent tube lighting. In short, not the atmosphere anyone wants in a toy store billed not only as big but fun.

Happily, they’ve been able to sort it out. They’ve ripped up the carpeting in part of the back, revealing unpolished but pleasing-to-the-feet hardwood flooring. Other major swaths of the floor have been expertly covered in sturdy plywood painted caution yellow, which makes sense somehow. And the ceilings: well, there was apparently no option to jettison those acoustic tiles, so the storeowners hired some artists or hooligans or artistic hooligans to plaster-tag the thing with vibrant spray-painted graffiti of psychedelic bursts, mischievous cartoons and the name of the store in explosive typefaces. It’s now the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ghetto-fabulousized. Why I didn’t take a photo of this for your elucidation, I’m unsure, but believe me when I tell you the overall effect is like the hermit crab getting all comfy in its roomy new shell.

Decor aside, the practical benefit of the bigger Big Fun is of course more display space. Mouth-watering to those of us born in the ’70s and early-’80s are the tall glass cases crammed with seemingly every Transformer ever transformed, every G.I. Joe figurine ever posed with Action Accessories (or, if Zartan, placed in the freezer), even every Strawberry Shortcake, all artfully posed, all for sale. The centerpiece in the back corner, at least for those of us who gain instant fond memories upon hearing the phrase “and knowing is half the battle,” is a cheesy display (covered in “Do Not Touch!” signs) of the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, as big as Gary Coleman and a premium item surely only that dick from Silver Spoons could afford. For scale, the G.I. Joe Hovercraft I once owned and painstakingly applied approximately 100 decals to, is floating indistinctly nearby in the poorly painted styrofoam sea. I couldn’t help but notice the depth charges were missing and that it’s an awful lot smaller than I remembered it being during intensive battle missions in the bathtub.

What a great store. It’s a challenge still to avoid exclaiming “Whoah!” like Keanu or asking your shopping companion every five minutes “Hey, remember this?” (or just telling her, “You gotta see this!”) while pointing at some near-forgotten plaything.

We drove back to Cleveland from Thanksgiving at Grandma’s and lazed around in the typical post-gorging stupor. We watched the ABC Movie of the Week, Shrek 2, which I don’t think any of us had previously seen. It was laugh-out-loud funny for all of us. Definitely worth a rental if you haven’t seen it.

It’s Thanksgiving at Grandma’s! We ordered a ready-to-heat-up dinner from Meijer, an easy and thrifty option, and it was better than I would have expected. Good turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, although the stuffing boasted the consistency and flavor of mortar and the gravy left us wanting Dad’s giblet-based secret recipe. Mom rounded out the meal with that famous green bean casserole made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and topped with French’s French Fried Onions that brown up all nice and crispy.

Later, in a strange echo of the mouse issue at the homestead in Cleveland, we followed Grandma around the house from cellar to attic, cardboard feed-boxes of d-CON pellets in hand, to place strategically for maximum death tolls. Lke many grandmas, Grandma is very old and somewhat fragile, so for safety’s sake, she prefers to climb backwards down the steep set of stairs from the second story. The best bit was when she hurled her cane down the stairs ahead of her, not wanting to have to clamber down with it. The catastrophic sound of something heavy tumbling down the stairs alarmed folks on the ground floor although Dana and I found it funny.

T’was the day before Thanksgiving and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, especially this mouse.

The backstory: A few days ago, Mom and Dad had spotted a mouse (this one?) in the kitchen and had recently placed two traps along the baseboards beneath the cabinets. My Mom runs a militantly clean house and she’s never had a vermin problem previously, so we surmise this one snuck in from the garage, perhaps where he’d parked his motorcycle.

It was early and I wanted breakfast but I figured I’d better empty the trap before the ladies rose. Talk about bad timing: I was out in the garage, grabbing a garbage bag and suiting up with a yellow Playtex dishwashing glove, when I heard Mom’s “Aaaaah!” from the kitchen. Ironically, if I wouldn’t have wasted time photographing the corpse, I probably could have bagged it before her discovery, its cute little arm hanging limply out of the side of the trap like that.

I left work an hour early today to catch my flight out of La Guardia back home to Cleveland for Thanksgiving vacation. Why is it all hell breaks loose at work the day I try to leave on vacation? It was in preparation for the last four real estate networking events my division is planning, which someone scheduled in four corners of the U.S. within a nine-day period following Thanksgiving. I imagine you’ll be reading about those.

The flight, meanwhile, was non-eventful for a La Guardia flight, which is to say 15 minutes late boarding, an hour late taking off and crowded. For dinner, my Mom, Dad and sister got some pizza, other finger food and wine at a place in downtown Akron. It’s always good to see the family, especially with my sister Dana done with her multiyear stay in Ireland and temporarily living with my folks.

I caught the Ohio State/Michigan game at Andie and Eric’s tonight. What a corker and what a sweet victory for my homestate Buckeyes. All I ask for in football games is closely scored excitement, which this match provided abundantly: turnarounds, close scores (for a time), spectacular passes, catches and rushes and other associated thrills seldom associated with the NFL games that have given the sport a bad name for me, bogged down with their blowouts, conservative play and penalties aplenty.

My mom mailed me some brittle pages from the Sunday Magazine of the Toledo Blade dated August 18, 1974 that she found in a dresser drawer. Check out these Holly Hill summer fashions in Easy-Care Polyester available at Lion, a local department store chain. For only $16 apiece, you could sashay among Ohio society in the Skimmer with self-flip-tie on the left or the “Fit and Flare” princess dress on the right.

Like Welcome to Collinwood, The OH in Ohio is a well-meaning but stilted movie taking place in my old hometown of Cleveland.

Parker Posey, the Queen of the Independent Pictures, plays a economic development executive for the city who’s so repressed, she’s never had an orgasm, although she’s memorized the number of times she’s had sex with her hangdog high-school bio teacher husband (Paul Rudd, who was Alicia Silverstone’s stepbrother Josh in Clueless).

She blames herself, though, for her orgasm-free life, and takes a new-agey sex-ed class taught by Liza Minnelli, who encourages the women, clad in white robes and standing at easels, to write down a pet name for their vaginas. In a cutesy script, Parker writes down “Vagina.” After careful consideration, she adds “My” above it. Later, with hesitation, she buys a vibrator at a sex shop staffed by an uncredited Heather Graham and before you know it, she’s a masturbation addict, and after nights on the town with various random men, a full-fledged sex addict.

The pinnacle of her satisfaction comes from a fling with local swimming pool magnate Danny DeVito, whose cheesy TV commercials she grew up watching and whose own pool has a waterslide so high, you can see the entire downtown Cleveland skyline standing atop it.

Meanwhile, Parker’s husband moves into the garage, then into an apartment building on what appears to be Euclid Heights Boulevard called the Manly Arms (that’s this movie’s type of humor, if you haven’t already guessed). There he has a fling with an overeducated student of his, played by Mischa Barton, who looks a lot older than her 20-year-old self. His midlife affair inspires him to clean up his act, as he gets in shape, trims his beard and dresses more sharply, but both his character and his storyline disappear mysteriously by the film’s conclusion.

I liked that one of his last scenes takes place in Vidstar Video, the tiny independent video store on Coventry Road that I used to visit nearly nightly when I lived in Cleveland Heights. There are many other great Cleveland locations in The OH in Ohio: another scene on Coventry by the parking garage, exteriors and interiors at Jacobs Field and the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building, and Cleveland Heights High School, which Jimi attended. These scenic touches revived memories both fond and pained among the Cleveland expatriates in our group, but the movie as a whole left us disappointed.

I just know Joe or perhaps my brother will be able to shed some light on this. I was walking from Penn Station to work this morning, at ease and minding my own business, when a song popped into my head, a jingle from my youth in Toledo, Ohio.

Whether this song was from a radio ad or TV commercial, I don’t remember, but at its core was this bombastic choral arrangement about Toledo being alive. I would have originally heard this in the mid-’80s and it may have been tied into the attempted rejuvenation of the city’s downtown, which at the time featured a new riverfront market/park/entertainment complex called Portside. As you know, my memory is poor, so for all I know the song was a jingle for a gentlemen’s club named Alive. But these subconscious, therefore highly suspect lyrics point to a civic promotion:

A city growing in its pride
A people taking it in stride
Yes, we’re becoming a new city...
[practically shouting] TO-LE-DO...A-LIVE!

or maybe those first two lines were:

A ciy growing with great strides
A people glowing in their pride

I recall that the verses, which alternated between groups of male and female singers, were inexpertly written because the singers rushed to cram all the words into the melody at its already brisk tempo. The song made sense to me at the time, as did the songs of Def Leppard, because it was catchy. Now I’m not sure. Wouldn’t one hope Toledo and its inhabitants are already “alive,” in both literal and metaphorical senses? It’s like the bomb dropped on the Midwest and the President’s on the red phone saying “Get me Toledo. Is anyone there still alive?” Hell yes, Mr. President, and they’re singing about it.

I didn’t think a song this obnoxious could be obscure, but a hasty search of the internet revealed nothing. I’m hoping more knowledge about this song will help me dilute it, but for the time being I will suppress its echo in my head with sleep and/or liquor.

A girl I know who lives in Jersey near the Passaic Falls had never heard of William Carlos Williams’ poetic ode to the city they’re in, Paterson, so I offered to lend her my copy. Tonight, while paging through it, I found this bookmark.

What an awesome bookstore that was. It was located in my college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, on Main Street, sandwiched between a bar frequented by underclassmen and the 24-hour diner they’d stumble to afterhours for alcohol-absorbing hamburgers. As a creative writing and journalism major at BGSU in the early-’90s, and because the Wood County Public Library was located conveniently just across the street, I spent entirely too much time at Pauper’s. I was surprised to learn years later that the place was still whisperingly referred to as an anarchist shop. I’ve been in anarchist bookstores before; they need an anarchist name (“Viva la Books!”), prints of Che hanging all over the place, and a battered card table in the back where subversives can meet, drink too much coffee and write manifestos. Now maybe Pauper’s sold a few rabble-rousing rags, but it had no additional anarchic features other than a sense of organization. We’re talking literally piles of books. That “drive you simply nuts” slogan on the Pauper’s bookmark isn’t only a cheesy clipart pun. Far in the back of the store, there was stack upon toppling stack of boxes and those flat boxes grapes are wholesold in, filled with books and reaching the ceiling.

You can get a small sense of this disarray looking at these photos I took during a trip back to Bowling Green in September 2002, although they don’t represent the store as packed as it once was. That day, as you can see from a sign in one of the photos, the merchandise was 50% off. The store was struggling to stay open then and was to close for good a year later.

For a journalism class assignment, I had to write a business-related article and I chose to interview Pauper’s owner, Leo Schifferli, a skinny, gray-bearded fellow with Le Corbusier-like spectacles. He spoke slowly and with care and seemed to know everything about any book. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t have an inventory management system for his thousands of books. Not only that, he had only recently upgraded to the computerized version of Books in Print from microfilm, although I frequently saw his 386 on but unused and him still squinting at projected pieces of film that he shifted expertly under glass. But he didn’t need an inventory management system. He remembered where everything was in the store and he was willing to go the extra yard to seal a deal. When I asked him for that copy of Paterson he knew there wasn’t one in the store but offered to bring in the spare copy from his home collection, a handsome New Directions paperback edition from 1963.

He’s the one who told me about Amazons, the infamous faux-memoir Don DeLillo wrote pretending to be the first female NHL player. He offered to sell me a hardcover copy for a reasonable sum and I wish now I would have bought it, if not only because it’s been wholly out of print since its original run in 1980 and is considered one of the great contemporary books written under a pseudonym—in fact, Keith Gessen wrote an article about it in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Leo was a well-read gentleman who could make recommendations of new writers or classics books based solely on the last few books you had read. Learning what I liked, he introduced me to Richard Yates, selling me Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for $4.75. It remains one of my favorite short story collections.

My college roommate Scott and I were surprised to find Leo at the door of our apartment late one night, moonlighting as a deliveryman for our favorite pizza parlor, Pisanello’s. He was wearing the same gray knit watchman’s cap he always wore in his unheated store and was making his way across town for his deliveries on his beat-up 10-speed. Was he delivering pizzas because his store wasn’t making enough money or because he wanted to get out and about more? With Leo, it was probably a bit of both; he had a weird, absent-minded sense of humor. He’s the one who told me, “Pocket Books are called that for a reason” and would sometimes have fire-sales of moldy pulp-fiction paperbacks from a tall metal spinner rack he’d put out on the sidewalk on sunny days. He was kind of hoping people entranced by the cool retro covers would steal them and he wouldn’t have to regret throwing them in the trash.

I went out for a short spell with my mom to see if we could capitalize on any post-holiday sale specials. We drove out to Beachwood Place and Golden Gate Plaza in Mayfield Heights. True to my fashion, I only ended up buying some used CDs at the Half Price Books at the Plaza, where everything in the store was 20% off.

For dinner, my mom made meatloaf using one of the KitchenAid silicone loaf pans I got her for Christmas. They’re the consistency and comical red color of a clown’s rubber nose, but the time-tested recipe turned out great. I’ve seen and heard that a lot of kitchen utensils and wares are now made from silicone, but I read a level-headed mini-report in Consumer Reports that mentioned there really aren’t all that many true benefits to using silicone. I suppose you get easier release on your muffins if you bake them in silicone trays, but you still have the usual prep time, cooking time and cleanup.

After dinner, we retreated to the living room, where I built a cheery fire, we uncorked some wine, and watched a terrible episode of CSI: Miami. The wine helped dull that pain a bit, but not too much.

Dana called to tell us that in honor of St. Stephen’s Day, she willingly ran into the ocean. There’s no telling what those crazy Irish people will do next.

Merry Christmas! As I had expected and hoped, Grandma’s gift to me, as well as to my parents, was a generous check. I’ll be putting mine into the Sickles Street Furniture Fund, established last month to rid my apartment of the scourge of end tables constructed solely of empty corrugated cardboard boxes, and a complete lack of chairs. Later, my mom’s brother, John, stopped by to start arguments and lecture us on a variety of topics, including the railroad industrialist Jay Gould, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his DSL service, and Köblentz, Germany.

For dinner, we had some tasty Cornish game hens my mom prepared with rice stuffing and cranberry sauce.

As always, I got way too many gifts: food, books, music, DVDs. There was the usual passing around of the phone among us to talk with absent family members, Dana in Ireland, and Andrew and Jess in Wyoming.

We drove back home in the afternoon. At dusk, the landscape through the window of a car hurtling through lonesome country resembles a dark, tranquil sea.

We drove down to Grandma’s late this morning for our Christmas celebrations. We hung out at her new place, gorging ourselves on heavily salted snack treats and cookies, Black Velvet and It’s a Wonderful Life, which I realized I’d never seen all the way through.

I hung around with Dad today as he conducted his last minute Christmas shopping, a time-honored tradition for him. As he explains it, it’s less stressful to purchase gifts a day or two before Christmas because he’s more or less stuck with whatever’s left in stock at the store, so there’s not a lot of aimless fretting about to find particular items. We went to Best Buy, Borders and the local mall, where he was able to knock off the majority of his purchases.

Back home, I made a batch of cookies from a recipe I’d saved from the December 4 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The recipe is standard for ginger cookies with one major difference—instead of oil, butter or margarine, you use bacon fat, three-quarters of a cup. No, the cookies did not taste like meat. They were in fact savory in their rich scrumptiousness. I think the kosher salt may have even made a difference, pleasantly offsetting the sharp tang of the ginger.

Here’s a sample plate of Christmas cookies: the ginger ones are in the foreground; the rest are new varieties and traditional favorites Mom made.

I met the rosy-fingered dawn to get another overpriced livery cab, this time to LaGuardia Airport for my flight home to Cleveland for Christmas. (Later in the day, I learn that as of 3 p.m., the strike has ended, which will make for a much easier and cheaper trip home and a resumption of normalcy to my transit life.)

I went out on one of my usual used CD expeditions in Rocky River and Lakewood, and while I was in the area, stopped by the offices of my previous employers, ProPress.

My ex-boss Steve regalled me with stories of the airplane model-maker clubs he’s joined, and provided commentary while showing me a video he produced on his and Teresa’s trip to Thailand.

After many valiant attempts by Jess’ Mom to snap a family photo featuring each of us with his or her eyes open and looking moderately sober, a feat as of today unperformed in a few years, the Young children took off for lunch at Tommy’s in Cleveland Heights.

Along the way, we pointed out buildings that were new or gone, businesses that managed to remain and those that had disappeared. We stopped by Mac’s Backs bookstore, peered in the windows at the late, great Centrum movie theater, which appears to be under renovation as an improv comedy theater involving robots, and checked out the expanded Big Fun toy store (for those familiar with the Coventry area of the past 10 years, it’s still in its original space but has opened a large satellite location just across the street where High Tide Rock Bottom used to be).

Wonders do never cease: the Akron-Canton Airport, the same age and size of a Young Mens department at a Montgomery Ward, now has free wireless internet access. Note to self: bring laptop next trip. It will come in handy for passing time waiting, as I had to do today when a suspicious parcel threat shut down LaGuardia temporarily and delayed all flights an hour.

In a sad conclusion to an otherwise fine holiday, when I arrived back at my apartment, I watched Bewitched, a terrible, terrible movie during which I laughed not once.

With a day full ahead of visiting the grandparents, Andrew, Jess, Dana and I set out by fueling both the Taurus (with petrol) and ourselves (with Starbucks coffee and Def Leppard’s Hysteria), then headed south on I-71. There was much chatter and more fine music (They Might Be Giants, Violent Femmes, Weezer) as we cut a path diagonally across the state, over a river or two, through woods, with a brief stop in Bucyrus at Wal-Mart for a restroom break and the purchase of a small bouquet of yellow roses for Grandma, which was totally the ladies’ idea, but a good one.

Grandma recently moved into an assisted living facility and I was imagining something depressing, with the scent of urine. But the place is quite fine. We agreed it’s nicer than our own apartments: she has two bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, balcony, and all of her comforts of home, as most of the decor and furniture was moved over from her house.

Lunch was served in a cozy common area downstairs with wood tables and chairs, a fireplace, and there were friendly staff members stringing lights on a Christmas tree. The fare was served up cafeteria style and nothing fabulous (the pizza I had whisked me back momentarily to high school), but at $3 per guest meal, I could hardly complain; plus, the price included tapioca pudding. Importantly, Grandma knows many of the other residents, whether because they’re friends or relatives (it’s a small town) or just because she’s a cordial lady. She was saying hello to many, and showing off us kids, which is a top duty of any grandparent. Back at her place, we caught up on our lives and Dana showcased her photos from Ireland on her laptop.

One of my uncles and his family stopped by and it would have been nice to speak with them longer, particularly to find out what my cousins have been up to lately, but it was time to bid farewell and head up north to Toledo.

Grandpa’s doing well for a 92-year-old. He’s unsteady when walking now and uses a cane, which inspired some of his oft-made grumbles about not being able to do all the stuff he used to, like rebuild transmissions and saw down trees and stuff. But he’s got a house full of youth to rub off on him. Living with Grandpa are my uncle Doug and his lady Sandy, who recently added another child to the group, Mason. He’s quite the cute tot, depicted here curious as to how my camera works. I let him play around with it but he was more interested in poking the lens than taking any snapshots.

Like his two-year-old brother, Dustin, it took Mason a spell to warm up to us strangers, but once he did, he was in high spirits, all smiles as he rotated around on the floor (he hasn’t yet mastered crawling), performed an amusing jig while seated and generally acted like World’s Best Baby.

Doug, who was spraying cellulose attic insulation all over the upper floor of the house and himself, stopped by the living room for a few guest appearances, often wearing a gas mask to prevent too much shredded newspaper from entering his respiratory system. We got a tour of another cost-saving energy invention of his: heating the house using a wood burning stove outside, which is connected by underground pipes to a heat-dispersion system in his basement that was crafted of complicated piping, a modified window fan and what appeared to be some car parts.

Thanksgiving! The usual embarrassingly hearty bounty of food was consumed. This year’s spread featured the requisite turkey with Dad’s secret-recipe giblet gravy (the package of organs stored in the turkey’s orifice revealed a random assortment of two livers but no gizzard, though I noticed no difference in the resulting gravy’s succulent taste), mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

There were also homemade crescent rolls, fruit compote (the new dish this year), sweet potatoes (a special recipe that last appeared in 2003, reprised this year in a giant 13x9-inch pan), green bean casserole (that suburban favorite, topped with French’s fried onions), and pumpkin pie. Oh, and stuffing, which we discovered afterwards in the kitchen, settled grumpily in its serving bowl and totally forgotten. Lots of scotch, wine and beer, including the eight-pack of Guinness that Dana lugged all the way from Ireland just for the Young lads.

After watching lots of bad TV, we kids played some rousing rounds of that game that’s a hot-potato speed-round of trying to get your teammate to say the secret word or phrase without you saying it.

I rose at 5 a.m. to catch my early flight to Cleveland for the holidays. The plane departed 45 minutes “late” yet managed to land at the Akron-Canton Airport on time. Dana picked me up there and after the sad realization that it was too late for me to purchase an Egg McMuffin, we carried-out soup and sandwiches from Panera for lunch at home with our parents.

Afterwards, Dana and I drove around Lakewood and Rocky River to visit some of my favorite used CD shops, stopping for a caffeine break at Phoenix Coffee, marveling how such a comfortably bohemian little shop could still exist in a city rife with Starbucks, Caribou and another local chain, Arabica. On our way to pick up Andrew and Jess from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, we conducted some Christmas window shopping at Great Northern Mall, stopping at Best Buy for a chatty mp3 player overview by an overly helpful young sales clerk. We perused the sweets at a Malley’s store and Dana bought some amusing socks at Marshall’s.

Hell’s bells, what was going on in my old hometown of Toledo yesterday?

A group of neo-nazis decide that a fine way to spread their message would be to march against “black criminal behavior” through a predominantly black neighborhood. The march gets cancelled at the last minute but a group of nazis shows up anyway with some chanting and signs along the lines of “White People Unite!” Crowds of at least 500, “mainly male gang members in their 20s,” according to Toledo mayor Jack Ford, turn out to protest. They end up skirmishing with cops, pelting them with bottles and rocks, while setting some buildings and cars on fire for good measure. Police counter with tear gas, rubber bullets and more than 60 arrests.

I found out yesterday that the girl I’m working with who’s also from Ohio is moving on to a new job in San Francisco, leaving me the only admitted Ohio native at my company. I’ll make do, somehow. She points out that although she’ll be distancing herself from the terror-rich environment of NYC, she’ll be introducing herself to the seismic activity-rich environment of California.

Most of the office knows that me and this other girl that I work with are originally from Ohio, so we get plenty of cracks about that, especially when there’s some idiot news from the state and we’re grilled like we’re the official spokespeople, exotic specimens from that strange uncharted fairyland between Manhattan and Los Angeles called the “Midwest” known only by the notation on ancient maps, “Here there be tractors.”

So it didn’t come as much as a surprise when one of the office jokesters emailed us this image on Friday.

It’s silly, though I don’t harbor much ill will toward Ohio. I at least spent most of my adult life in Cleveland, which, as noted in this space before, isn’t as bad as you may have been led to believe and is certainly one of the more happenin’ parts of the state. The girl I work with who’s also from Ohio, hates the state with a vengeance, in a large part because she grew up in some yokel community like Findlay or something where there is nothing to do but harvest soybeans and vote republican. Although to her credit, she notes: “Just remember one thing...Chrissie Hynde was born in Ohio. ’nuff said.”

Today is National Teacher Day, so I thought I'd attempt to remember Mrs. Hartman, who taught me programming and how to use computers.

True to fashion, I don’t remember much about Mrs. Hartman other than she was one of the few and perhaps only non-nun people at my Catholic grade school. She had a gravelly voice from chain smoking and I seem to recall her hair was rather 1950s-bouffanty. Such technology still being a relatively new thing at the time, the computer room, located just off the lobby of the school’s front entrance, was the size of a largish coat closet, which it may very well have been.

Mrs. Hartman taught me Applesoft BASIC on one of the later-model Apple II systems, circa 1984 or 1985. I remember enjoying learning about the Apple II’s amazing graphical capabilities and how I could create crazy patterns using FOR/NEXT loops and the RND() random number generator. In a more orderly fashion, I could plot a counted cross stitch-like pattern on graph paper then translate it into a BASIC program to make it appear onscreen.

We’re talking crazy oldskool graphics. The Apple II’s low-res graphics mode was 40 by 48 pixels with a whopping 16 color choices. You used the GR command to turn on the low-res goodness, COLOR to define the color, then PLOT (to lay down a single chubby pixel) or HLIN and VLIN (to draw a horizontal or vertical line of pixels) to build Lego-like images.

Learning BASIC from Mrs. Hartman was responsible for starting a string of computer milestones in my life: convincing my parents to buy me a Commodore 128, using money saved from my Toledo Blade paper route to buy my own Amiga 2000, taking a PASCAL course in college, buying a series of Macs in my adult life, and culminating in programming this web site.

Back to that fondly remembered Apple II, I also recall playing lots of Oregon Trail and frequently dying of dysentery.

Thanks, Mrs. Hartman, for getting me started on the right foot by using Apple computers. Who knows what evil I would now be perpetrating upon the world had I learned BASIC on a Windows machine.

I’ve been reading Eric Meyer on CSS, the author of which is enshrined in the nerdy known-by-last-name pantheon of CSS/Web Design Gods that includes, among others, Jeffrey Zeldman and Tantek Çelik. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a language which defines how web pages look. It’s better seen than described: here’s what the current front-page of Jason’s Journal looks like without any CSS.

I rate my CSS knowledge at a mid-intermediate level, so I didn’t learn many new things from Meyer’s book. But his coding examples made me reconsider how I’d built portions of my site and led me to make some hopefully transparent optimizations as well as some alterations for increased cross-browser compatibility. Unlike a lot of books of this sort, Meyer’s got a down-to-earth writing style and uses plenty of detailed and practical examples, showing, for example, how to convert an existing table-based web site to use CSS and how to create pages such as press releases from scratch using a pure-CSS method. He is also standards-based and learned enough that even though the book was originally published in 2002 (eons ago in Computer Book Terms), his material hasn’t dated and holds strong as an accurate reference.

It’s trivial, but I found it interesting is that Meyer is a CWRU graduate who still lives in Cleveland, which, as his bio points out, “is a much nicer city than you’ve been led to believe.” As a proponent, he even has a handful of Cleveland shout-outs on his blog; I got wistful reading his Ten Things To Do In Cleveland Before You’re Dead. Hey, I’ve done all ten of those things!

Sad news from Joe—Our driver’s ed teacher from high school, Fred Beier, died yesterday. The only details provided were that he had heart problems and was scheduled for surgery tomorrow, but there were complications. From what I remember of him, he wasn’t exactly a paragon of health. In addition to being the driver’s ed teacher at St. John’s, he was the football coach, so there was the stress from that. And my memory of him is always wearing a white short-sleeved button-down shirt that revealed two things: an omnipresent box of Marlboro Reds in the breast pocket, and his gut, over which would rest an ill-fitting tie.

He had no patience for a bunch of smartass pimply punks such as ourselves, who delighted in calling the class “Driver’s Fred.” It was held before our regular classes, very early in the morning, so many of us ensured our hyperactivity by breakfasting solely on items from the cafeteria vending machines. Little Debbie powdered mini-donuts and large cups of fountain Mountain Dew were a popular combo.

But Mr. Beier did his best at shaking us down and making us pay attention, threatening to crack skulls if we didn’t knock it off and can the chatter. He taught on a foundation of “defensive driving” with hastily drawn diagrams on the chalkboard and cheesy educational filmstrips. I distinctly recall him calling the horn a “bitching device,” to be used only under the gravest of circumstances. I also remember his useful advice to keep the lug nuts in the wheel cover when you’re changing a tire so you don’t lose them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t retain any of his wise teachings about actually changing a tire, as Dad and Jimi will attest. It’s also questionable how much skill I actually gathered from Fred’s classes, seeing as how I repeatedly failed my driver’s test, culminating in a tearful moment wherein I completed the maneuverability test, expertly weaving the car through the traffic cones, then proceeded to back it into a flowerbed where it got irrecoverably stuck.

But I think what’s important was Mr. Beier was a great, crusty character, and an all-around good guy, never condescending, always direct. I’d be hard pressed to remember most of my teachers from high-school, much less their names, but Mr. Beier definitely falls into the “greatest hits” category of teachers you don’t forget.

Godspeed, Fred.

After homemade blueberry pancakes for breakfast, Dad drove me to the airport for my 1:00 p.m. flight back to NYC. In retribution for my smooth flight in on Wednesday, I was punished with a 2.5 hour delay—the wind and rain in New York caused air traffic control at LaGuardia to cancel all inbound flights until at least 3:00 p.m. By the time I arrived, the place was a mass of crowds, screaming babies and people sitting and sleeping on every available semi-flat surface.

On the flight, I sat next to a version of myself from an alternate universe: my age, my height, and like me, hadn’t shaved all week, was wearing a ballcap, jeans, long-sleeve dress shirt and wool winter coat; chewing gum obnoxiously; looking out the window a lot; completely silent; and reading a book, although his choice was Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy, which I think trumped my Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams.

After deplaning, I had some voicemails from Andie about meeting up for dinner, so I dropped off my luggage at home (the elevator was broken, naturally, so I got to lug it up to the sixth floor) and we went to the Hi-Life Bar and Grill again for multiple martinis and turkey burgers. Afterwards, I busted out the cookies Grandma gave me for an early Christmas present, a greatest-hits medley of old-time favorites: chocolate chip, gingersnaps, snickerdoodles and oatmeal cookies.

Mom, Dad and I drove over to Toledo this morning to visit my Dad’s Dad, Nort. He’s doing well for a 90-something-year-old. We went out to Bob Evans for lunch, a time-honored tradition for which he orders coffee, a salad with blue cheese dressing and the bean soup. I showed him some of my crazy New York photos and for some reason ended up talking a lot about how the subway works, based on several questions from Uncle Doug, who wondered why I’d ever want to live in a city so dense with people and buildings. Hopefully I explained my case clearly enough. After the visit, the parents and I drove to Maumee to visit Andersons, an Ohio-based chain of general stores. Mom bought some Christmas gifts and raw peanuts for her famous holiday peanut brittle. I bought a new winter hat. It rained most of the way back and Mom, Dad and I had dinner at their favorite wine bar in North Royalton. I had a flight of red wine and some tasty blue cheese pizza.

John and Grandma left this morning after breakfast and I proceeded to enjoy a lazy day. Got some reading done, listened to some tunes, agreed on some stuff Mom and Dad would like to do during their Christmas visit to New York, worked out a bunch Christmas gift ideas for friends and family, and helped Mom order some gifts off Amazon. I briefly entertained the idea of Christmas shopping (the traditional kind, not online), but decided I didn’t feel like lugging a bunch of stuff back to NYC with me on the plane, bus and subway.

I restocked the wood for the fireplace and then spent a chunk of the afternoon sorting and throwing out a lot of the stuff that I moved from my Cleveland Heights apartment, then just left lying around Mom & Dad’s basement and computer room. I’ve pledged that if I ever move again to merely throw away half my stuff because otherwise it’ll just end up in cardboard boxes in a closet somewhere.

For Christmas, Mom used to regularly make these holiday nut loaves I really liked. She hasn’t made them in awhile so I talked her into making some this year. We had to go to two stores to track down the pesky pecans and the candied pineapple. I mainly helped by stirring the mixture of fruit (dates, with candied pineapple and cherries) and two pounds of pecans, mixed with eggs, flour and some other dry ingredients that create a cement-like paste to hold all the stuff together. It’s an easy recipe, although that stirring can be taxing if you don’t have Popeye-like forearms.

We built another fire, watched a CSI rerun and sampled one of the nut loaves. It was mighty good.

It snowed for Thanksgiving last night and this morning, squally wet snow that accumulated on the lawns but merely left the roads wet. Out the back window, we noticed the neighbor shoveling his grass. Dad stuck his head out the back door and after some friendly shouting back and forth determined that he wasn’t crazy, merely collecting a load of snow so his kids could build a fort out back.

Thanksgiving lunch was a delicious spread. Paula and Dale came over, bringing green beans and the famous cranberry Jell-O salad. John brought rolls and his sassy, rabble-rousing, finger-pointing attitude. Mom and Dad cooked up the turkey with stuffing and giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, and, for dessert, homemade pumpkin pie. And we drank lots of beer, wine and scotch.

We got holiday greeting calls from Andrew and Jess, Dave, and Dana, who said the folks in her house got her and a guy from the U.S. a “happy Thanksgiving” cake.

We played a game of Pictionary but it was difficult to say which team won because people kept leaving to talk on the phone, returning and switching sides. Also, Grandma was content to play on both teams simultaneously. It was a spirited bout. The easiest word was “carrot.” The hardest was “vowel,” with “Riviera” a close second. Shrieking, alternating with wordless, frantic gesturing at key parts of indescribable scribbles. Ah, Pictionary.

For dinner, we ate chocolate mousse Mom made and beef barley soup Grandma made. Later, Dad built the first fire of the season and we watched one of Grandma’s favorite shows (Everybody Loves Raymond) and Spider-Man.

Greetings from Cleveland! Despite having to get up at 5:15 a.m. to catch my flight out of LaGuardia, it was non-eventful and there was no craziness either at the airport or during the flight. Crowds were nowhere to be seen, the plane departed on-time and arrived 10 minutes early and although there were about six babies on the flight, they had all apparently agreed beforehand to behave quietly and save their demonic wailing for later. My seatmate was likewise quiet the whole flight, which was just fine by me. I nodded off listening to Madonna’s Ray Of Light album on my iPod, snapping awake as I nearly whomped my lolling head on the seatback in front of me.

Soon after arriving at the Akron/Canton airport, I used the restroom and, while washing my hands, noticed I had somehow managed to not only put on my T-shirt backwards, but inside-out, so I had been strolling around all morning wearing an Old Navy-Medium tag like some sort of idiot bow tie. After Dad retrieved me from the airport, we picked up the turkey for tomorrow and got some lunch with Mom at Panera.

I then took off to conduct some used CD shopping at two of my old-time favorite spots: the Half Price Books in Rocky River and the CD/Record Exchange in Lakewood. I got lots of great stuff, including albums by Beck, Cat Power, The Pixies, The Stooges and Fairport Convention that had been on my want-list so long that I was nearly ready to throw in the towel and pay retail for them. I also picked up another Bill Bryson book (African Diaries) and a set of Chinese propaganda posters from the Mao era, which are colorful and strangely mesmerizing. But any day now I will get it through my thick skull that I need to start buying Christmas gifts for friends and family instead of more useless crap for myself.

Later in the afternoon, Grandma and John showed up for the festivities. We drank lots of beer and talked fondly about absent family members—I think you know who you are. I showed Grandma some photos from New York that I had ordered from ofoto.com just for the occasion. I tried to choose a representative variety, including most of the Coney Island, High Line and subway photos I took when Dana visited a few months back, as well as photos of Joe from his recent visit. I also threw in a few shots of the NYC Friends Posse, although it was challenging to find one where everyone didn’t look crazed or alcohol-addled or both.

Fasting in anticipation of turkey day tomorrow was out of the question as Mom served up a delicious dinner of meatloaf, baked potatoes and broccoli. For desert, we had baked apples stuffed with raisins and walnuts. Mmm. Perfect food for the miserable weather here—constant, cold rain all day, which may turn to snow tomorrow.