LIVING IN LAYERS

 
“[Cleveland:] . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go on living.” – R. Crumb, cartoonist.

“Are you going to Florida?”

That’s what I hear this time of year. My tennis partner is in Fort Lauderdale. My real estate broker is in Sarasota. My lawyer is in Jupiter, Florida.

And I’m in Cleveland, freezing. I have a box of disposable hand warmers, flannel-lined jeans and a Patagonia parka. The first snow of the winter is nice, but the 15th snow — not so nice. And this winter — it started way too early, around Thanksgiving. The temperature was 12 degrees lower on average, per day, in Cleveland through Christmas.

Am I complaining? Just a bit. I like it here. My mantra is that bad weather is no excuse for bad attitude. If you don’t like gray, move or get a sun lamp. We accomplish more in gray weather. The Scots and New Englanders didn’t invent stuff sitting at the beach.

I’m a landlord, and a tenant recently called City Hall because the heat was too low in her apartment. The city of Lakewood — where my buildings are — mandates 70 degrees. That seems high to me. I keep my own house at 68. At my tenant’s apartment, the boiler’s flame sensor was going out. When I got the city’s low-heat call, I thought about Florida.

For one thing, Florida runs in my family. My late father said the best years of his life were his final years, in Florida. My wife and I — and our then-young children — went to Florida every winter. It was a good deal; my parents paid for the airplane and watched the grandkids for a week, and the only thing my wife and I had watch out for were the golf-cart crossings.

The minute the plane landed in Florida, my dad would bug me about real estate opportunities down south. Florida bedazzled my dad: how it was growing so fast. We weren’t in the Rust Belt anymore, Son. On the drive from the Fort Lauderdale airport, my dad said, “This was a two-lane dirt road when we got here. Now it’s six-lane.” Glades Road, Boca Raton. “And there’s a bagel store on every other block.”

“We have bagel shops in Cleveland, too,” I said.

The Snowbelt . . . Is this the worst winter we’ve had since the 1960s — when I was shoveling driveways for a buck? It feels like it. Lakewood reinspected my (formerly) cold building. We got the boiler cranking and the thermostat up to 80 degrees. The tenants were hot. That was better than another no-heat citation. I’m not looking forward to my next gas bills, which will be record-breakers.

I haven’t been in Florida for more than a decade, but I remember an ex-pat Clevelander down there accosting me in a restaurant with, “Why are you still in Cleveland?”

That meant: “Are you nuts? Do you like snow, gray skies, slush and potholes?”

I do. As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. A second ex-pat Clevelander said, “The day I hit 62 years old, I had to leave Cleveland.” She was considering Arizona, too. “But Arizona doesn’t have an ocean, and I like water,” she said.

Lake Erie is water. Look it up. Cleveland is doable.

One last word: layers.

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This essay appeared in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.