A good story for Christmas

The insightful blogger behind Cleveland Love recounts the story of a volunteer:

He also showed up to volunteer and help build a playground on West 89th. We shoveled mulch and nailed boards together, hung out and enjoyed the beautiful day and the sun when they ran out of work for us to do. I never saw him again after that and then saw the listing for a vigil his family was having because he got murdered.

And sure, he probably wasn't a totally innocent guy, and I had that feeling at the time as I watched him get stoned on the corner and noticed that he was pretty cryptic about his personal life, but none of us really are when it comes down to it. The idiot commenters on Cleveland.com celebrate that another "thug" is off the streets, but what if that was your brother or sister or neighbor or cousin? What if he left behind two kids?

Click through for the rest.

What I really like about this blogger is that she's got an open heart without a trace of naivete. I think that's really rare (but sorely needed) in this society. If I had to sum her up in a verse of song, I'd choose this one from Susan Werner's "The Pilgrim Song," based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling:

"As we come, and as we go
And very soon go we
The people, Lord, Thy people
Are good enough for me."

What I Want for Christmas

I want Cleveland to learn to laugh at itself.
I want everyone in Cleveland to pick one little corner of it to save.
I want all of the jobless to find jobs. Or at least realize their potential as professional citizens.

Filling the Well

For the last few years, I've been trying to figure out just what January was for.

I realized the other day that I've been asking the wrong question. I found myself telling the girls I work with that my absence of Christmas cheer this year was especially alarming because an overflow of cheer is what usually gets me through January and February.

So the question is: what is December for? And the answer is -- it's for what Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, calls filling the well so that you can survive the bleak, spiritual desert ahead. By the end of December, you should be so sated with songs and gatherings and lovely pine-and-holly decorations and Christmas breads and sausages that the emptiness of January is a welcome respite.

The authors of Unplug the Christmas Machine suggest that we've lost two important aspects of the Christmas season: Advent and Epiphany. The celebration of Christmas used to last for weeks -- from December 1 to the "twelfth night." Now, they lament, we've got one mad shopping frenzy that ends abruptly on December 25, and heaven help you if you leave your Christmas lights up one minute past New Year's.

This long celebration fits nicely with the idea of filling the well, and I'm going to keep this in mind for next year. But meanwhile, I'm going to spend today joyfully cramming in the cheer. Here's what I've got in mind:

• Listening to Ornaments and Icing
• Hanging out at the West Side Market
• Buying some last-minute gifts at Hansa Import Haus, Athens Pastries, and Something Different
• Knocking back a few Christmas ales with friends, perhaps
• Making a few more charitable donations
• Writing, writing, writing

Christmas Cheer III: Otters in Appalachia

Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas is one of my favorite Christmas specials ever. I saw it this weekend at the Cleveland Cinematheque and it brought me so much cheer that I bought myself and Jim each a Cinematheque membership for the upcoming year.

Enjoy!

Home for the Holidays

Just dug an email out of my spam filter from the Emerging Cleveland folks -- I'd asked if they were doing the tours this year, and they're not. I'm really bummed about this. It's a great tour, and I'd hate to see it fall into obscurity. Please email them and tell them how much the tour would be missed if they quit doing it.

In the same vein, here's a list of places you're supposed to take wayward Clevelanders who have come home for the holidays, courtesy of Friday Magazine.

I like that they included Steve's Hot Dog Lunch, and I'm going to have to check out this selection of Cleveland t-shirts at Big Fun. I'd add Sokolowski's (of course), Gene's Place, and Loganberry Books' not-so-new-anymore location (which I was sure I'd hate, but actually like much better).

What would you add?

Christmas Cheer II: The Zucker Hut

We're going to my parents' house tomorrow to put up the Christmas tree, so I went out in search of a German zucker hut ("sugar hat") to make things more festive. I thought they'd have some at Hansa Import Haus (I'd seen them there before), but no luck.

What is a zucker hut, you ask? And what do I do with it? Well, this informative video should explain:



(Incidentally, they do have lots of fantastic gifts at Hansa Haus, including marzipan pigs, Schlenkerla smoked beer, whiskey beans, salty licorice, bier steins, and a small selection of German board games and crossword puzzles.)

A plea from Cleveland's pedestrians

I sent this message to the Ohio City neighborhood listserv this afternoon (after taking a particularly perilous walk to the library), and thought it appropriate to rebroadcast it here:

If you are able, please take the time to shovel and/or salt your sidewalks this winter. I know everyone is very busy, but the sidewalks can become very treacherous when they're covered with ice.

In these hard times, please find it in your hearts to especially consider the economic impact that slipping and falling on the ice might have on an uninsured (or underinsured) person, who may not have paid time off from their jobs to recuperate from a broken arm or sprained ankle.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas!

Manly men love purple, especially at Christmas

I know I just got done dissing the uber-commercialism of Christmas, so it's pretty ironic that in my search for Christmas cheer the first thing I found is a cartoon designed to sell toys.

But dig the muscle-bound dude in the cape and the peacock-tailed lady.

From A He-Man and She-Ra Christmas.

Christmas Desperation

I'm having a really hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Partly because I've been sick since Thanksgiving -- today is the first time I've felt almost OK in nearly a month -- but partly because there's just something missing this year. It's taken me a while to figure out what it is, but I think I've got it: there's a real absence of Christmas cheer in the air.

On one hand, this should hardly be surprising. Even the lame-duck President has finally admitted that the economy is in the toilet (I heard someone on NPR yesterday note the irony that the first MBA in the White House presided over the worst economic situation since the Great Depression).

But on the other hand, when I listen to Jim's grandmother talk about the Christmases of her childhood, I don't think we've got many good excuses for feeling sorry for ourselves.

Grandma was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants -- her father worked in the coal mines in eastern Pennsylvania. He died when she was very young, leaving her mother the sole guardian of 11 children.

This is the sort of poverty that really proves what kind of character you've got. It could turn you into something awful, or it could teach you the value of relying on each other and spreading the resources as thin as possible so everyone gets a little.

Grandma tells stories about how her older brothers would scour the neighborhood for discarded Christmas trees and cast-off broken toys after "regular Christmas" (Ukrainian Christmas is in January). "We didn't have much, but we had each other. And if someone else from the neighborhood showed up, my mother would always find something to feed them," she says.

So this year as I'm watching TV and seeing all the commercials that are all but screaming, "look at these deep discounts!! Buy as much stuff as you can or else the whole economy is going to implode!!", something doesn't sit well with me. This Christmas desperation is what's deflating the cheer for me, I guess. Like Charlie Brown, I've never been too cool with the idea with an overly commercial Christmas. But it seems to me we've gotten to the point where we're basing our whole economy on this one "shopping event", to use the current lingo. That seems...precarious.

I think we should try out the spirit of Grandma's poor immigrant Christmas for a while. What do you think?

A wonderful life

Today I was going to write about It's a Wonderful Life -- my favorite movie of all time -- and how the sentiment behind that movie is the only thing that keeps me from becoming untethered some days.

But instead I'll just leave you with this quote from "Wonderful? Sorry, George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life" in today's New York Times:

Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.

On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.

If only we had passed Issue 6.

No water

The water main break happened this morning before I could take a shower, brush my teeth, or give my cat fresh water. She's now got a choice between Gatorade, Canada Dry, and beer.

At times like this, I think about how complicated civilization has become and how it's pretty much all held together by a thread.

Technical difficulties

I'm having a problem with Blogger not speaking to my web host again. This is just a test.

Jobs, II

On Friday they did a round of layoffs where I work. It was awful. All day I kept thinking about what's going to happen to these people. One guy is paying for grad school right now. Another guy was the sole breadwinner for his family - he was the source of health insurance. What if one of his kids is sick? What if his wife's got a preexisting condition? What happens to these people?

By some cruel irony most of what I did at work yesterday afternoon involved going through old news clippings about Cleveland's manufacturing heyday. Pictures of a brand new gleaming Republic Steel building. Cheery articles about industries that were booming. And that kind of thing.

Bottom line is: if you're doing well, please consider making a donation -- or a bigger donation than usual -- to your favorite Cleveland cultural institution. Even the big ones - the ones that you think can't just go under because they've been around forever.

They might be doing worse than you think.

Walking distance

I just wrote this in a comment on my househunting: part one post, and I think it bears repeating.

In order for a neighborhood to be really walkable, it's got to have more than just sidewalks and pretty houses to look at. It's got to have all of those things that people without cars need to access or to buy.

Here's what I want to have within walking distance:

a grocery store,

a drugstore with a pharmacy,

someplace to get a drink,

preferably a selection of dentists and doctors,

a couple of restaurants of varying price-range,

a place to get my hair cut,

a place to buy newspapers, magazines, stamps, and greeting cards,

a pet supply place (or at least a drugstore with more than 2 brands of cat food),

a library,

a POST OFFICE (which is someplace I really don't want to have to take the bus to, particularly when I've got packages),

a branch of my bank,

AND easy access to the RTA routes I use most

Alas, no such neighborhood seems to exist in Cleveland or environs, so I'm having to prioritize. Am I willing to get on the bus laden with grocery bags? How far am I willing to go to get library books? Would it be prudent to switch banks? (Asking me to switch banks is sort of like asking me to pull out my own eyelashes).

Favorite Books of 2008

Looking over my Goodreads profile, I read a lot of books this year that I wasn't crazy about. I went through the Dark is Rising sequence, which I'd been meaning to since about age 10. I went on a Madeleine L'Engle jag during the summer, thanks in large part to my friend Kate. I read a lot of forgettable young adult books, confirming my suspicion that I don't want to go back into YA services. And it seems that I read a fair number of talked-about books that didn't make it past "meh" on my enthusiasmometer -- e.g., Water for Elephants, The Abstinence Teacher, Heart-Shaped Box.

(I have yet to read my own manuscript from NaNoWriMo, which is going to be hi-lariously awful.)

So here are my ten favorites from this year, in no particular order.

1. 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land by Daniel Wolff
I used to hang out in Asbury Park, the broken-down beach town immortalized by Bruce Springsteen, when I lived in New Jersey. I loved it because it reminded me of Cleveland.

2. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is one of the few authors who makes me feel glad to be alive. That's part of the reason why I've never finished the Sandman series -- I just want to meter it out over the course of the next fifty years.

3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
I watched this on PBS and immediately smacked myself for never having read it. When I worked at Facts on File, I had an assignment that required reading a number of author biographies. I remember this line: "Charlotte Bronte celebrated her 30th birthday full of discouragement, feeling as if she had accomplished nothing with her life." And then she wrote Jane Eyre.

4. Bed of Roses by Daisy Waugh
Sometimes British chick-lit is just a lot of fun.

5. Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? by Ted Rall
With his ability to describe the multitudinous types of intestinal difficulty a human could endure, Ted Rall has pretty much skyrocketed to my top ten favorite authors of all time.

6. Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
The last book in the Dark is Rising sequence. It was absolutely beautiful.

7. Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert Reich
If I were some kind of super-teacher, I'd make every high-school kid in the country read this book.

8. Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle
If I had a family, I'd want it to be the Austin family. The kids are polite and inquisitive and they live in a big old farmhouse in New England and they sing songs and talk about science and politics over the dinner table.

9. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
I read this book thinking about Cleveland -- how it could either collapse or succeed. It seemed to me at the time that Cleveland was heading toward the same fate as the Greenland Norse, who refused to let go of values that had outlived their usefulness and were unwilling to learn from those who had adapted to the inhospitable climate.

10. It by Stephen King
I just read this book for the second time (the first time was in 2000). This is a brilliant masterwork of character development and setting, and I am twice as blown away by it as I was when I read it the first time.

What were your favorite books this year?

Househunting, Part I: The Neighborhood Grocery Store

For the last three months, Jim and I have been looking for a house. This is the self-appointed foreclosure capital of America, so I thought this would be a piece of dobos torte.

It hasn't been.

It's been really difficult, because it turns out there aren't a lot of places that suit our needs. As it turns out, we have a lot of needs.

For example, we need to walk to a grocery store but it can't just be any grocery store, it has to be a locally-owned grocery store that's a) got a good produce section and b) not Marc's. We're sort of willing to take public transit to this locally-owned-non-Marc's grocery store, but (I kid you not) the formula goes something like this:

time spent walking (t) must be lesser than or equal to the weight of the grocery bags (w) times the number of transfers (n) squared.

Yeah.

We found one house we loved out in western Lakewood which was great because we could've walked to Nature's Bin, but it was just too far out and too inconvenient for Jim to get to work (he works in Valley View, which is probably the LEAST best place to work when you're trying to go car-free). And besides Nature's Bin, there wasn't too much else to walk to.

So at least in terms of the grocery store, what I seem to want is either to plop Nature's Bin down into downtown Lakewood OR to plop a cheap Lakewood house down in Ohio City between the West Side Market and Dave's.

But that gets into the price of houses, and I'm saving that for Part II.

Jobs

Every evening I watch people getting on the train at Tower City and I wonder, where do they work? How stable are their jobs? Do they like their jobs, or do they just stay because they've got kids or a mortgage or just because they wouldn't be able to find a new job?

Are they working up to their full potential, or are they sighing wistfully over the tops of their cubicles around 2 in the afternoon, wishing they'd become a rock star or a surgeon or a robot-cowboy-astronaut?

I wonder if they're thinking the same things about me. I wonder what they'd say if they knew how much education I had. If they knew that despite my long and varied resume, what I craved most now was stability. That I was working a temporary grant-funded job with no benefits. Would they say, "why did you leave New York, dumbass?" or would they say, "I like Cleveland, too."

A ringing endorsement for RTA's airport service

Clevelanders, you need to know how lucky you are to have direct public transit service to the aiport.

For nearly three years, I lived in central Queens, about equidistant from JFK and Laguardia. During that time, I took a shit-ton of plane trips.

So please believe me when I say this: trying to get to any of New York's three airports via public transportation was always a nightmare of epic proportions. (I remember a bus trip back from JFK at 11 pm that would've sent Stephen King running for cover.)

I mean, you'd think that "hey, this is New York, I should be able to take a train directly to the airport of my choice." Not so! You can't take a train directly to any of the airports, in fact. At Newark, you have to get off NJ Transit at the Newark Airport station, then pay an additional $5 to get on the monorail. At JFK, you've got to take the E train to Jamaica Center, get off, and then pay an additional fare to get on the AirTrain. And oh, Laguardia! You can't even get to Laguardia on the train because there are no trains that go there. Good luck sitting on the bus for an hour and a half.

In fact, I remember sitting on that bus once thinking, my god, I can't believe there's something that Cleveland does better than New York!