36 Hours with a Native: Family-Style with Holly Rosby

Holly Rosby, author of Craving Cleveland, is 31 years old and currently lives in Old Brooklyn. She's been married for 5 years and has a 17-month old son (who, I can attest, looks brilliant covered in hummos). She works part-time as a reference librarian and does chat reference from home. Says Holly: "I've lived in Cleveland for my entire life and honestly doubt I’ll ever leave."

When I asked her to describe what Cleveland was about in 50 words or less, this is what Holly replied:

Cleveland is about not taking the easy route. It’s about making an effort to find the local eatery or place to shop. It’s about taking advantage of what we have, not complaining about what we don’t.

Holly begins her 36-hour itinerary with a caveat:

Christine, this was more difficult than I expected! As I started thinking about an itinerary I realized that there would be way different ones for the different times of the year and if I had my family with me or if there were no babies involved. I decided to go with this....September with family in tow. Since my in-laws have a few empty bedrooms we would stay with them.

So here is Holly Rosby's family-friendly fall itinerary:

FRIDAY
Rosby's Greenhouse and Rosby Resource Recycling [editor's note: yes, Holly is part of the Rosby Raspberry Empire. Mmmm. Raspberries.]
Take a tour of the recycling and composting facilities. Everyone likes taking a ride on the Gator and looking at the big machines. It’s pretty interesting to see how all the debris is sorted and composted. Afterwards visit the greenhouse and go raspberry picking. [editor's note: did you know you can take your yard waste to Rosby's for recycling?]

Dinner - Siam Café
It's a great place for a large group to get dinner and very kid friendly. We actually had our rehearsal dinner here so it has some sentimental value for us too.

Honey Hut Ice Cream
I highly recommend Chocolate Pecan!

SATURDAY
West Side Market - Walk around market and purchase items for dinner which would definitely include ravioli from Ohio City Pasta & steaks from Pinzone's.

Lunch - Nate's Deli
Shish kabob sandwich, hummus and fatoosh.

Afternoon – Coffee at Gypsy Beans. Take a walk around the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood & visit Edgewater.

Dinner – Cook at home our market purchases and enjoy a homemade raspberry dessert. Hang out in the yard, roast marshmallows around a fire and have some beers.

SUNDAY
Tremont - Stop for a coffee at Civilization and a treat from A Cookie and A Cupcake. Take kids to the park to play and go for a walk around the neighborhood. Stop at Banyan Tree and point out all the cool places that we used to go to before we had a baby. End tour with a quick drink at Lincoln Park Pub's patio.

36 Hours with a Native

Apart from the four years I spent living in Montana, New Jersey, and then New York, I've lived all of my life in Cleveland.

While I was living elsewhere, I always had a certain routine when I came home to visit. There were things I had to see, feel, touch, pay homage to as the icons of my own personal memory.

(Now, I'm no dummy. I know that you have to be suspect of other people's nostalgia. For example, Lead Paint Cookbook probably doesn't realize that when I finally drag her to New York, she's going to spend much less time at Bloomie's or in Central Park than she is riding the F-train to Jamaica and gawping at the empty space where the Manhattan Mall Arby's used to be.)

But I feel it's equally important to get a handle on what the people who have been with a place through thick and thin really treasure. What they would miss if they found themselves far, far from home. These are the things that bind us, our common ground, how we would recognize each other out in the lonely, unfamiliar world.

So, in the spirit of the recent New York Times 36 Hours Cleveland article, I've asked a few of my favorite native-Cleveland friends to imagine they were living someplace else, and bringing a friend home to visit Cleveland for a 3-day weekend. What would they do? Where would they go first? How would they convey the essence of their Cleveland?

I'll be posting these over the next few weeks. And if you're a native Clevelander living here or elsewhere and want to tell me about your Cleveland -- please do email me at christine [at] christineborne [dot] net.

Impromptu blog break

Last Tuesday I felt a pressing need to take a break from writing. I'll return to the theme, Cleveland in Five Senses, in a couple of weeks.

What did I do last week? Well, I tried to spend as little time online as possible. I remembered what it was like before I had TV or Internet -- what did I use to distract myself? And the answer was ... nothing. I didn't distract myself. I just did stuff.

So last week I just did stuff, and I read. I went into the basement where there are no clocks and I read from dawn until dark.

It felt wonderful.

There are only two things in life that have ever made me deeply, soul-thrillingly excited to be alive. Those things are reading and writing. But somewhere between the ages of 14 and 28 I developed a complicated relationship with both. I went from being a kid who read voraciously and wrote with abandon to a sullen adolescent with an inflated ego who reluctantly read only what was assigned and who wrote nothing.

I'm trying to fix this but it's slow going. It's been much easier to learn to love reading, unsurprisingly. Writing is the hard one. Writing is what I'm in charge of, and even when I'm delighted by my own story ideas I find them exhausting to be around, like children.

Cleveland in Five Senses: Smell

This week's theme is Cleveland in Five Senses.

Everything starts with the lake. It doesn't smell like the sea -- it is colder, fishier, more sinister. It isn't the primordial soup from which all life sprang. Only ghosts are born there.

You come inland and move through neighborhoods that smell like burning garbage, leaves, pipe smoke, onions and cabbage. Somebody somewhere is always grilling some small, delicious creature. Maybe Cleveland used to smell like engine exhaust but it doesn't anymore, really, because it is so empty. I am not nostalgic for the smells of the past - not even my own past, not the crowded #23 bus on a humid summer day when the A/C is busted, for sure.

You can go through the scent maze at the West Side Market, where Concord grapes, raw meat, coffee, and spices mingle with Maha's Falafil, with fish from saltier waters. The scent particular to the Mediterranean Import Store is something I would recognize anywhere, though I'm not sure what it is.

Cleveland never smells like flowers, not even in the spring. It smells like wet grass and hot concrete after a rainstorm. In the fall, everything is leaves and apples and ash. Even at Christmas Cleveland does not pretend to be part of Ye Quainte Old Heartland -- no country Christmas here, just the flat white scent of snow rolling ominously off the lake.

Because everything ends with the lake, too.

Hummos Mustache

The West Side Market is full of tourists.

The Market is much busier now than it was two years ago when we moved back from New York. There’s still a lot of mystery meat parts, but there’s also a lot more prepared food than there used to be, and a boutique place that only sells cupcakes. Are cupcakes an economic indicator?

West 25th is busier too -- I note only one empty storefront. And although Nate’s Deli is nearly empty this morning it’s full of the spirit of the place, the hordes of familiar diners who don’t even need the menu.

Night Falls Fast

This is the first night of hot chocolate weather in Cleveland. The first night that I can sit on the front porch of a home that I own, wrapped in hooded sweatshirt and blanket, reading Agatha Christie. The street is quiet, except for a few scattered cars and dogs. The wind blows through the old-growth trees. There are a lot of things we don’t like about this house but the trees for Jim and the front porch for me are the best things. This neighborhood gets dark. I can always feel the lake nearby, and across it, Canada’s reassuring presence.

Full Circle

I live in the neighborhood where I lived ten years ago. Since then I’ve moved nine times between four different states.

It is emptier here now. Drivers treat Clifton like a freeway, rarely stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk. Was it like this before, or was I just resigned to it? The bus runs once an hour, instead of every ten minutes. I see people on the bus that I did back then. Have they been going through the same patterns all this time? Are there young people on the bus now who will eventually think the same about me?

Just Looking

Our feet tramp the fallen ceiling tiles and lightbulbs into muck. How long did it take for the place to fall into precisely this amount of decay? When I get home, I’ll look it up.

Tetanus looms everywhere, baiting me.

Next to the rusted cash register, I spy a newspaper dated 1993. I marvel at its condition -- supernatural, or just luck? On the front page is a photo of my fourth grade teacher’s two children, sifting through the rubble of a demolished church. I do what you are not supposed to do and pocket a keepsake for my Christmas tree.

Bells

Every day this week, I'm going to paint a picture of the Cleveland I know in exactly 100 words.

One of my favorite things about our neighborhood is hearing the bells of St. Rose of Lima, which chime every six hours. They’ve been a real comfort to me, being out of work, because they give my otherwise formless day parameters.

On Sunday evening I was kneading bread dough when the bells started to chime. It made me wonder what it was like to live during a time when Cleveland was dense with Catholic immigrants, schoolchildren running up and down the street, old grandmothers shouting in a half-dozen Eastern European languages that it was time to come in for dinner.

Cleveland Dreams, One

I have dreams about Cleveland a lot. Whether you like it or not, I'm going to start telling you about them.

After a trip to Buffalo ReUse, where I slavered over a $1,200 white oak mantle, scored a sweet $5 end table, and pawed through the remnants of other people’s broken American Dreams, I came home, read some ghost stories and promptly collapsed into a deep sleep.

And then the dreams came.

The first was a long, involved dream about the merits of various glass doorknobs.

The second was different. In the second dream, I was driving in a car with Bridget Callahan. We were driving through Old Brooklyn, but a dream Old Brooklyn, a landscape I’ve visited many times in my sleep, a place close to where my mom grew up. We were at an intersection - the street was totally empty of cars - the shops were boarded up, chicory and pokeweed sticking out of cracked sidewalks. There were three people around - two black people, walking away from us on the sidewalk, and one white man who was walking toward us in the middle of the empty street.

I remember the white man very clearly. He was middle-aged, had scraggly grey hair and an untrimmed beard. He was wearing a baseball cap, unkempt clothes, and a sneer. He was yelling racial insults at the black people on the sidewalk, who paid him no attention. He swaggered in the middle of the street, like he owned it.

Then as we pulled through the intersection and made to turn left, in the direction where the black people were walking, the white man approached our car and, as polite and as charming as could be, offered to fix the passenger-side mirror, which was falling off. It was a bizarre, abrupt, and unsettling personality change.

We paid him little attention, and drove on.

Constraints

It struck me while I was reading Lisa Goldstein’s Walking the Labyrinth this weekend that I could look at being stuck in Cleveland with a house and no job as an opportunity to be creative within constraints, like writing a sonnet or a sestina. And then, poof, yesterday this quote from The Freelance Writer’s Bible:

“...it only stands to reason that writers will be most creative when no constraints or restrictions are placed on their writing. Right? Wrong. Constraints cultivate creativity. What is disagreeable to the artist is intrusion from the inner critic, but outside parameters are just the challenge the right brain relishes. Restrictions are inspiring.”

If I say so on the Internet, then it's true

I am starting a small writing, editing, and researching business.

I am telling you this so it will be real, and not just something I'm daydreaming about. This way, when you hear my name bandied about in the most exclusive Cleveland locales, you can swirl your gin rickey and say, “Ahh, yes. The writer.” Rather than, “Oh, that pitiful out-of-work librarian. What a perfect bore.” (You will likely be wearing a straw skimmer and monocle, like some kind of evil gin-swilling Barnaby.)

So this week I will be spending my days researching writing markets, generating ideas, and hunting down a disparate array of credited and uncredited clips. (Note: if you ever think you might turn out to be a writer, keep copies of stuff you’ve published. I am ashamed to admit I’ve never even seen some of my published clips in print.)

I can't stop reading the Obama brainwashing stories

I would like to tell you a story about an incident when I was in first grade.

It was fall 1984. We had just finished discussing our Weekly Reader, the cover of which featured a smiling President Reagan and a frowning Walter Mondale. My teacher, apparently wishing to teach us the virtues of anonymous voting, said, "OK class. Everyone who would vote for President Reagan, stand up."

Everyone stood up but me. I believe there was some clapping.

When all the little model Republicans sat down, my teacher said, "Now everyone who would vote for Walter Mondale, stand up." So I did. While I was standing my teacher asked, "Why would you vote for Walter Mondale?" and I replied, "Because the other guy looks like he's trying to trick you."

My point in telling this story is that even if a classroom teacher decided to use the nefarious original Department of Education materials asking, "What is President Obama inspiring YOU to do for your community?", the kid could always say, "Nothing" or "He's inspiring me to picket Planned Parenthood because I don't agree with his pro-choice standpoint."

And that should be every kid's right.

Dear Ohio

Despite your stinginess on the job front, I can't thank you enough for your generosity in providing bounteous opportunities for satire:

Schools to skip Obama's speech: Callers get Dublin, Hilliard to shun TV talk to students

*I am such a lucky girl!*

Unemployment: Month Two

I will always associate Michael Jackson dying with getting laid off, because that was the news of the day. Now, two months later, he's been buried. So I guess I should be expecting that One Magic Call today, right?

When you are on unemployment, you are required to contact two employers a week and keep a list -- they can ask for it at any time. I don't keep my list all in one place, because looking at it would be depressing. A job search wears on you, especially since applying for jobs has started to resemble a contentious eBay auction. But the slow, dawning realization that you may have to just chuck all of your education and professional experiences and start over -- well, that's just mortifying. Especially when your resume is four pages long.

Americans are supposed to like to start over. Thing is, I've already started over something like eleven times since I turned 18. I know its appeal. When a friend of mine left to study abroad last fall, I told her she should relish that wonderful between feeling of no longer having a permanent address, of sitting on the train and then the plane knowing that you have left something behind and are entering into a whole different world. But now, my starting over options are more limited. I can't seem to get that between feeling back.

The other thing Americans are supposed to like is working for themselves. I told my mother-in-law this weekend, half-jokingly, that I'm probably never going to find another job and that I was just going to angle for a six-figure book advance. I don't like it, but I may have to try writing for a living. It's what everyone always assumed I was going to do, including me, since I was about 5.

Except ... I don't really want to work for myself. I like going to a job and having coworkers to laugh with and commiserate with. Frankly, I like being told what to do. If that somehow makes me a communist, then I guess call me Olga and hand me a scythe. Oh, I've got the confidence to manage projects all right, but I am not the right person to be running the whole show. Especially not my own show. My God, I can't even manage to get a floor installed!

So ... there's month two. What do I do all day? I read, I write, I read about writing, I contributed a lot of research to the Got City Game project, I think about continuing education, I sit on my front porch and peer at suspicious people. I try and stave off that worried feeling -- that I'm never going to have an income again -- but it sneaks in, usually early in the morning and late at night, when I'm too tired to fend it off. On the plus side, I don't use up a lot of resources! But sometimes, that means I feel like a waste of space.

**update: I've realized, not without amusement, that I've returned to the same dilemma that troubled me when I was working at Shaker, looking for my second job: I could either live someplace I like, or do the kind of work that I'm trained to do and am good at, but probably not both. Boy am I a dummy for not being able to figure out a solution to this one sometime during the last six years.

Slowly, slowly

Largely thanks to Liz Burns and her aggressive use of Facebook, I am getting back into the world of YA and children's books, a place that I once loved and now miss terribly. I don't think I ever want to be a youth services librarian again though. I want to be on the other side this time - the author's side. So if you feel like talking YA books and YA publishing trends, drop me a line!