Category — Miscellaneous

 
[This essay, in abbreviated form, was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.]

In 2019 I walked over to Horseshoe Lake – which straddles Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights — to see a bit of nature. The lake was gone. It was missing. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District had drained it.

And NEORSD hasn’t refilled it.

I’ve seen “missing dog” signs on neighborhood phone poles, but I’ve never seen a “missing lake” sign. Maybe I should put one up! Our family’s dog went missing last week. She ran away. And then she was found. Unlike my lake.

Horseshoe Lake (and adjacent Lower Shaker Lake) are like Central Park for many East Side residents. The lakes are refuges — our lungs. The lakes are a blue space. Residents from throughout Cleveland come to Shaker Lakes for fresh air and to clear their heads. We hike, meditate, see birds, see blue water, and talk to neighbors who are walking dogs.

At the latest Cleveland Heights city council meeting, approximately 80 citizens showed up to protest NEORSD’s removal of Horseshoe Lake and the sewer district’s proposed gutting of Lower Shaker Lake. Twenty residents spoke. Each had two minutes. What particularly ticked off many of the speakers was NEORSD’s plan to chain-saw about a thousand trees, and plant saplings, plus add riprap (small rocks). The end result will be “re-meandered” streams where Horseshoe Lake was.

This was news to many locals. Shaker Lakes news does not bump off Trump/Iran-level headlines. For instance, Paul Springstubb, a Cleveland Heights resident, didn’t realize what’s in store for Shaker Lakes. He does now. He just texted me, “Just read about the packed Cleveland Heights council meeting. I can’t believe residents of Shaker and Cleveland Heights won’t vigorously work to stop a clear-cut of the lakes’ trees! What I’ve begun to fear is the natural feel of a lake — with its surrounding mature trees – turns into a totally over-planned, neatly groomed, ‘just so’ park.”

Springstubb, who is a retired Shaker Heights High English teacher, continued: “All these saplings that the NEORSD plans to plant. That’s not nature. That’s upscale mall/commercial planning, like Legacy Village, Lyndhurst. Maybe we’ll have loudspeakers in the scattered ‘rocks’ located along the redirected, but perfectly serpentine, streams. Maybe the speakers will play songs of the various birds that lost their homes at Horseshoe Lake.”

NEORSD and saplings. Spare us the sunburn due to the lack of shade for the next 10 or 20 years while the saplings mature.

If any Shaker Heights or Cleveland Heights elected officials acquiesce to the destruction of Horseshoe Lake and Lower Shaker Lake, their names should be registered in the imaginary Albert Porter Hall of Shame. (Porter was a county engineer who tried to run a freeway through the Shaker Lakes in the 1960s and was stopped by citizens civic groups.)

Cleveland Heights’ new mayor, Jim Petras, said at the council meeting that the City/ NEORSD deal to eliminate Horseshoe Lake was made before his time. That’s not a good excuse, Mr. Mayor. The cities of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights can rectify this monumental screw up.

In the public-discussion portion of the council meeting, Cleveland Heights resident Kevin Charnas nailed the situation in one sentence: “The sewer district just bulldozes stuff, pun intended.”

Erin Flanagan, a Cleveland Heights lawyer, has filed a federal suit to slow down the sewer people. Amy Weinfurtner of Shaker Heights has led citizen opposition to the lakes’ destruction. She administrates the website shakerlakesconservancy.org.

If Horseshoe Lake or Lower Shaker Lake go away, they’re not coming back. Dogs come back. Lakes don’t.

Horseshoe Lake when it was a lake.

 
I’ve spent many hours on Lee Road, and I’m going to spend another hour and half there on Saturday, May 2, when the Klezmer Guy Trio performs at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road. We’ll play klezmer, Motown and swing, interspersed with spoken word.

Here’s a “spoken word” (in writing) . . .

Boomer Boulevard: Lee Road. I attended Fairfax School’s Grandparents Day and told everybody my grandchild was “Jim,” as in Gym. I didn’t have a grandchild back then, in 2012. I watched my wife, Alice, then a phys-ed teacher, lead a class. She wore a mic like Madonna. Alice was not a roll-out-the-ball gym teacher.

After the grandparents’ event, I walked by the Lee Road library and wondered if I should submit an application for the library’s board of trustees. I had already filled out the application but was worried it might have been too flippant, so I hadn’t submitted it. I had used the word “libe.” (Later, I did submit the application and got rejected.)

Classical music blared outside the Subway at Lee and Meadowbrook Boulevard. Must have been a crowd-control thing.

At the Lusty Wrench, Sam Bell, the owner and chief mechanic, told me he drove less than 1,000 miles a year. I asked, “When did you start hating cars?”

Sam said he used to like cars; he said he once drove 160 mph from Baltimore to Chicago in college. Apparently Sam liked the idea of cars, but not actual cars.

Tim Burdick, a woodwind repairman, worked next door to the Lusty Wrench, on the second floor of the Douglas Building. Tim had a $350 mouthpiece lying around. “It’s Frank’s,” Tim said. “Frank” as in “Franklin Cohen” — the then-principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra. I tried the extra mouthpiece and took it home and ran it by the musicians in Yiddishe Cup. They couldn’t hear any difference between Frank’s mouthpiece and my own. Keyboardist Alan Douglass said I didn’t sound in control with Frank’s mouthpiece.

I planned to meet Carlo Wolff for dinner at Marotta’s. Carlo was a jazz critic who had become a reporter for the Cleveland Jewish News. I wondered how Carlo was fitting in at the paper; he’s Jewish but “not very Jewish,” he told me. At the dinner he reported he was doing fine at the paper.

The epicenter of Lee Road is — you know this — Stone Oven. Yes, I go there; it’s my obligation as a baby boomer. I got in line in back of Ray Lesser, the editor of the Funny Times. Ray had recently turned down some of my funny stories. I didn’t bring that up. I took the high road!

Carl Goldstein — a Cleveland Heights landlord – went to the Stone Oven every morning. I promised I would start hanging out there with him. But I never did. Every morning? I’m just not that social.

The “Lee” in “Lee Road” comes from a farmer named Lee. I learned that fact on a local-history walking tour. Other farmers included Silsby, Taylor, and Dille.

Here’s a bit of immaterial Lee Road music history: the first time I saw a live professional band was at the Stardust Ballroom, which was in back of the Cedar Lee Theatre. I was in junior high, at a bar mitzvah party, and the bandleader was Morrey Seaman. Maybe he was playing “Stardust” at the Stardust.

Have you ever noticed how Cleveland Heights High grads like to reminisce about the Cedar-Lee neighborhood? Even more than I do. That’s their nexus — the Cedar Lee Theatre and what used to be around there: Mawby’s, Meyer Miller shoe store, Earth by April. A Heights High grad, Jimmy Sollisch, once told me he learned almost everything in life by selling shoes at Meyer Miller as a teenager. Meyer Miller’s co-owner was Cuppy Cohen.

There was a pool hall next to the Cedar Lee Theatre: Wally’s. Who cares about Wally’s? Not me. People who grew up in the Heights care about Wally’s. I grew up in South Euclid and don’t care about Wally’s. Let’s talk about Mayfield Road in South Euclid . . . the Cream-O-Freeze, Warehouse Beverage, Alesci’s. (No, different story.)

If you stand on the glass-enclosed Heights Library walkway over Lee Road, you’ll see a fair amount of life pass by. Nothing too monumental–- no gigantic moving vans or rock-star buses, like you might see at the New York Thruway overpass at Angola, New York. But give Lee Road some leeway. It’s got some life.

—
CONCERT INFO:

The Klezmer Guy Trio performs 7 p.m Saturday, May 2, at Heights Arts. Admission is free with ticket(s). Tix are available here. Donations are accepted. Seating is limited. The Klezmer Guy Trio is Tamar Gray (vocalist and Fairfax Elementary School music teacher), Alan Douglass (keyboards) and Bert Stratton (clarinet and spoken word). The show is a mix of klezmer, Motown and spoken word. A variety show, sort of.

 
My last cousin left Cleveland in 2001. My relatives went to warmer places or died. Cleveland was not hopping. (Still isn’t.) I’m in about two traffic jams a year in Cleveland. I would prefer five. I don’t relish the horrible traffic of Chicago or Washington, but just a few more traffic jams in Cleveland would be nice.

I’ve got mishpocha in Chicago, and that’s where I’ll be for Seder tonight My daughter and family live in Chi, plus my wife also has a slew of first cousins there. They all moved to Chicago decades ago from Clarksburg, West Virginia. Just upped and left Appalachia for pancake-flat Chi. (The West Virginia exodus makes Cleveland’s population-loss look like nothing.)

I remember, in the 1970s Clevelanders first began imagining the whole town could go under. A musician in Milwaukee even wrote a song called “Thank God This Isn’t Cleveland.”

Some Clevelanders never got over the trauma of the 1970s. I know Clevelanders who vacation on Cape Cod because they’re instructed by the national media to vacation on the East Coast. They wait an hour for ice cream on Cape Cod. Why?

Some of the best scenery in America is the bike path from Gambier to Coshocton, Ohio. Rolling farm country, horses, sheep, cows, pigs and Amish buggies.

But some Midwesterners need to see the ocean. They drive all day to the Carolina shore. Hey, Lake Erie has beaches, waves and miniature golf. Check out Geneva on-the-Lake or Put-in-Bay.

Willie Sklar,1920s. Louise, Miss.

After my relatives bailed, I looked for distant relatives elsewhere. I found them via the media. My son Teddy found a Mississippi connection on a PBS documentary, “Delta Jews,” about the Jews of the Mississippi Delta. The mayor of Louise, Miss., had been my mother’s cousin. (My mother grew up in Yazoo City, Miss.) Teddy called a Mississippi relative who had been in the documentary. We eventually met the Mississippi clan and have gotten together with them several times. Most are lawyers. They have Southern accents. That’s what you want from Southerners — an accent. So often an educated Southerner will disappoint you on that front.

My West-by-Gawd Vuh-gin-yuh relatives don’t have accents. Maybe I can induce them with wine and afikommen money to fake accents tonight.

—
I’m part of a kosher-style, David Sedaris-ripoff reading / music gig  7 pm. Sat., May 2, at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Hts. It’ll be klezmer, spoken word and Motown. The trio is Tamar Gray (vocals), Alan Douglass (keys), and me on clarinet and spoken word. The event is free but get a TICKET prior because the gallery will probably “sell out.”

 
I had a neighbor who frequently offered me Beck’s beer. I could only drink so much. This guy could drink. His name was Weinberg and he wore a huge cross. (I once met a Jew in New York who wore a cross, too; he said he wore it to keep away the Chabadniks.)

My neighbor — or maybe it was his father — was a heavy-duty convert to Christianity. They all belonged to a Romanian Orthodox Church on the West Side.

My neighbor was quiet — no dogs, no loud music. Perfect. Just one small negative: he had a big Mercedes box truck (against city code). But I was OK with that.

Also, I didn’t like his snow blowing. It was too loud; I offered to hire a plow for his drive, but he turned me down. A very quiet guy.

Except one night in July 2012 around midnight . . .

I had my earplugs in; nevertheless, I could hear screaming. I thought it was from across the street, where teenage boys sometimes partied late. I tried to sleep through it. But then the cops showed up.

This was right next door. The convert was chasing his wife around with a butcher’s knife, and the couple’s kids were screaming. Four cop cars pulled up. My neighbor, in handcuffs, said through the bushes, “What’s going on, Bert?”

I didn’t know.

The family disbanded shortly after that. The wife said she was going to Phoenix with the kids, and she mentioned the convert had had extramarital affairs, and the kids talked about drunkenness, like “Daddy drove on the sidewalk.”

There were four pianos in the living room — three uprights and a baby grand. The convert said he fixed pianos for a living. About a month after the knife-chase, he came back for the pianos, with a police escort. I think he was charged with domestic violence. Maybe there was a restraining order, too.

Then a private detective showed up at my house; he wanted info on Weinberg. I didn’t know much except his preference for Beck’s.

—

Historical-accuracy footnote: The house was on the northern front, not western, but “western” makes for a better title.

—

THE KLEZMER GUY TRIO:

(L) Alan Douglass, Bert Stratton, Tamar Gray

I’m part of a kosher-style, David Sedaris-ripoff reading / music gig  7 pm. Sat., May 2, at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Hts. It’ll be klezmer, spoken word and Motown. The trio is Tamar Gray (vocals), Alan Douglass (keys), and me on clarinet and spoken word. The event is free but get a TICKET prior because the gallery will probably “sell out.”

 
I have some troubled relatives. One of my siblings thinks I’m his personal ATM. He’s always going in and out of jail. Small stuff, but I have to bail him out. And then there’s my cousin Shelly, who is a doofus; he used to steal my car from my driveway and just drive it around and smash it somewhere. I finally got a video cam on my house.

Next, I wound up in jail. Everybody’s minds were blown; “Bert wound up in jail!” I’m 75 and the last guy you’d expect in jail, right?  I mean, you read this blog. My relatives gloated.

Here’s  the story. One night I took a Valium, which I’m wont to do on occasion, and got in my car. I know, “Don’t handle heavy machinery or operate a fork lift.” I wasn’t going to chain-saw any trees. I was driving to Fairmount Circle for some ibuprofen. I smashed into a mailbox.

A United States mailbox costs $5,000. I know, believe me.

The cop made me walk a line, which I couldn’t. He handcuffed me and took me to the Shaker Heights jail. Going into the cell at the police station, I said, “You got any espresso?” I was trying to lighten the mood. No go.

I sat in the cell for six hours — me, a toilet and a sink. Finally my brother — the one who is always hitting me up for money — bailed me out for $176, cash.

Now I’m on a year’s probation. And don’t forget the 5K for the mailbox. And there was another 4K for the lawyer.

Was it worth it? Yes. I’m no longer an embarrassment to my family. I’ve been to jail!

[fiction]

 
I’ve probably been to eviction court 100 times in Lakewood, Ohio. In the old days I actually stood in a real courtroom with a judge with a gavel. But nowadays I meet up in a conference room with a magistrate. The guy knows me. Believe me. We sometimes exchange pleasantries post-hearing. But not usually. The guy is in a hurry. The other day I faced off with a deadbeat tenant — nothing unusual here — except he announced to the magistrate and me, “I probably shouldn’t even be here. I have a contagious disease.”

That got our attention. He said he couldn’t go to work because of the disease. The magistrate shut him down and gave him the eviction notice — the red tag — right then.

The magistrate

Post-adjournment, the tenant explained he was “skin-to-skin contagious.” So you have to touch him to get what he had. That made us all feel better.

—
And please read my essay “Rolling the Dice” in the latest Forum magazine. Author Jim Sollisch says it’s one of my better outings.

 
Alice told me to read a Wall Street Journal article on how everybody is ADHD or a variant on that. I fit a couple of the traits; I don’t like scratchy labels or noise. But then I didn’t fit into the “always late” and “loses things” categories.

I’m on time and don’t lose stuff. I told Alice, “I’ve had the same gloves for years,” In fact, I have three types of gloves: liners, regular gloves and mittens. Baby, it’s cold outside.

I went to a concert and took the mittens and liners. I wore some of that stuff indoors, at the concert, which was in my former temple, where I had grown up. A drafty, big place. The Maltz Performing Arts Center.

The concert was a tribute to Hoagy Carmichael by the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. Very well done. Alice didn’t want to go. I sat by myself. Ninety minutes later: done. No glove liners. What?

I went up into the balcony, where I had visited some friends during intermission. No gloves liners. I went to the men’s room. No liners. I got home and told my wife I now fit the profile in the WSJ story.

Then I found my glove liners. They were balled up inside my ski cap, which was on my head. In other words, I had been wearing the glove liners on my head.

What’s that disorder called?

—
Yiddishe Cup plays on Purim at Park Synagogue (Pepper Pipes, Ohio) on Monday (March 2). Free.  7:15 pm.

 
“[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 to 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.

—

This essay appeared in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

 
Mike, an old friend from high school, found me on the internet and pummeled me with questions about  Cleveland real estate. He lived in Minneapolis. He ended by mentioning a few high school buddies’ names. He said, “I haven’t thought about high school in decades!”

Was he bragging — as in I’ve moved on? I think about high school fairly often. Maybe because I live five miles from Charles F. Brush High. I also think about elementary school and preschool. And I didn’t even go to preschool! News: “Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety,” John Tierney, New York Times.

I go to class reunions even when they’re not mine — like Cleveland Heights High’s 50th. I was playing a klezmer gig at a massive, multi-room party center and went into an adjacent room for the reunion, just for the atmospherics: Go Heights Tigers.

I wish teachers were invited to reunions. In the 1990s, my 12th-grade English teacher walked his dog by my house almost daily in Cleveland Heights. One day I got up the nerve to say hello. And he didn’t remember me.

“I had so many students,” he said.

“I’ll bet you remember Ann Wightman!” I said.

Yes, he remembered Ann, the salutatorian. Ann got all As and one B. I think she purposefully got the B to let a boy be valedictorian. That’s how it worked back then (1968). Some smart girls didn’t want to stick out academically.

I haven’t been back to Brush High in a while. It’s off my flowchart. If I entered Brush, I would probably feel very young or very old. I think “very old” would win. Not worth it.

—

A guy named Mel called. He was considering my band for his daughter’s wedding. Right off he asked where I had gone to high school. That’s the go-to question here in Cleveland. Mel himself had graduated from Cleveland Heights. I answered and then segued into the main topic: “It doesn’t matter what you want musically. What about your daughter? She’s calling the shots for the wedding band.”

“Did you play sports at Brush?”

“Tennis.”

“Do you know Joel Schackne?” Mel asked. (Schackne had been a champion tennis player at Cleveland Heights High.)

“I knew of him. He’s older than me. Whose idea is klezmer music for the wedding, yours or your daughter’s?”

“Schackne is in Florida. He’s still playing tennis.”

“What does your daughter think?”

“What AZA were you in?” (AZA is a national fraternal organization for Jewish boys.)

“I wasn’t in AZA.”

“Who do you see?”

“A guy named Mickey — a goy,” I said. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Most of my high school friends left Cleveland decades ago. The guys remaining are, for the most part, entrepreneurs and family-business owners. A few made serious money here. The intellectuals hit the road.

Do I have any kind of post–high school life?

Maybe.

 
Here’s my latest essay from the Cleveland Plain Dealer  . . .

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on Saturday. That’s no big deal — in my world. Last month my klezmer band played a 100th birthday party — our fourth in three years. There was a chair placed prominently in the middle of the dance floor, to lift the birthday “girl” for “Hava Nagila.”

I said to myself, “No way.”

Correct: No way. We did not lift the celebrant on a chair. But the birthday “girl,” Etty Hoffman of Beachwood, did dance. She was out there on the dance floor. She boogied. And she gave a moving speech afterward, touching on more than five generations of her family, including “mommy and daddy.”

Nearly 10,000 Americans turn 100 each year, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States has the second-most number of centenarians in the world. Japan is first.

After the hora, I asked a dancer — Ms. Hoffman’s niece Joyce — if she was going to live forever. “What do you mean?” Joyce said. “Me or my aunt?”

“You. Do you assume you’re going to make it 100, too?”

“I’m planning on it!” she said. Joyce is in her 70s and plays flute, does yoga, lifts weights, walks a lot, and is skinny. Bonus: Joyce’s mom is 103. She’s Etty’s older sister. (Joyce’s mother was at the party, too.)

My dad made it to 68. Shvak. (Yiddish for weak). My mom died at 83. Better. A year before my father died, I interviewed him; I said, “You don’t talk much about your mother. Do you ever think about your mother?” I annoyed my dad. He said, “Of course I think about my mother!” My dad’s mother had single-handedly run the family’s candy store on Kinsman Road at East 151st Street. My dad’s father had been hit by a May Company truck in 1924 and spent most of his time hanging out at the pool hall after the accident.

At Julia Stratton’s gravesite in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. (Julia Stratton, 1920-2004.) From left: Lucy, Bert, Jack, Ted Stratton

At Ms. Hoffman’s birthday party, my band played: “My Girl” by the Temptations; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by the Beatles; Tin Pan Alley classics; klezmer instrumentals; and some Yiddish songs. The partygoers applauded our wide-ranging set list. At a 100th birthday party, everybody is 100% mellow. A 100th birthday party is not a wedding — no anxious bride. It is not a bar mitzvah — no sullen 13-year-olds. There is no kvetching, period.

In the 1920s, Ohio-born vaudeville clarinetist Ted Lewis popularized the phrase, “Is everybody happy?” And yes, everybody was happy at Ms. Hoffman’s party. She was born in 1925 and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and attended synagogue at the Cleveland Jewish Center (now Cory United Methodist Church) on East 105th Street. Etty was in the temple’s Confirmation class of 1941.

Her 100th birthday celebration was at Park Synagogue in Pepper Pike. Park Synagogue is a direct outgrowth of the Cleveland Jewish Center. Same congregation, different building. Ms. Hoffman has been a member of Park Synagogue since 1930. I wonder how many relatives at Ms. Hoffman’s party think they’ve inherited the family’s longevity gene.

They’ll find out.

Mary Tyler Moore died at 80. Keep that in mind.

And happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke, Etty Hoffman, and everybody trying to emulate them.

—

Link to Plain Dealer article here.

 
Why don’t columnists write about pet peeves anymore? That bugs me.

Why do nursing-home administrators insist on peppy tunes? Oldsters sometimes want to hear contemplative tunes.

Why do eyeglass adjusters have so much power over us? Did they all go to I.U.?

Why do “highly sensitive” people insist on telling us they’re bothered by the labels on their shirts? That’s irritating.

My wife took our electric toothbrush on her trip to Columbus. The electric toothbrush is a “permanent attachments to the dwelling,” ma’am.

What about those phone calls from my kids’ alma maters? I already give zero to my own alma mater.

When my computer messes up, why I do I feel like my arm broke? Why can’t I feel like a mosquito bit my ankle?

What about friends who grow arugula and offer you some? Why don’t they grow dates or figs?

Why do symphony-goers applaud wildly after every single piece? These people nap for 54 minutes during Mahler, then give the conductor multiple curtain calls. Applaud this!

Don’t get worked up over house address signs like “The Smith’s.”

I am worked up!

If you want to discuss cars, first ask: “Do you mind if I talk to you about cars?” Yes, I do mind.

Which is preferable: (1.) “He passed away” or (2.) “He passed.” Both stink. He passed what — Wendy’s?

Who’s nostalgic for mimeo machines? Somebody should be.

 
I came down with a bad case of Anglophilia. This happened decades ago. Via the Cleveland Press, I got a pen pal from Blackpool, England.

Bleak name –Blackpool. Then my Blackpool pen pal moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and that ended our correspondence. He lived several hours away. He was of no use to me any longer.

With no English pen pal, I decided to turn myself into a Limey.

And I’ve been a Brit-by-choice ever since. Everything about Limeyland fascinates me — in an off-kilter way: shandies, tyres with a “y,” cricket, venison faggots, regattas, even the bathroom graffiti. Bear with me. Check this out:

“This is not the place to sit and slumber but the place to fart and thunder.”

“The wall painter’s work was all in vain, the shithouse poet strikes again.”

These lines were on a pub wall in Bath. The year — 1980. You had to be there, and I was. I’ve didn’t visit the grittier parts of England. I didn’t need to see that.

Oh, to be in England.

I frequently go to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to see films about England. My favorite  flicks are England-in-the-1950s films, like An Education and Nowhere Boy.

Clevelanders often complain about gray skies, but do Limeys? No, they don’t. They don’t get all cheesed off about rain and clouds.

Snow? I don’t think Limeys even have snow. But they would like it. I certainly do.

 
John Cermak installed a pool table, gun rack and shower in his parents’ basement. He lived down there his entire adult life. In his twenties, John drove a humpy Saab. Had to be a Saab. He showed me how to do oil changes on my car (a Plymouth Valiant) and helped me build a coffee table from pine 2x4s. We grew up across the street from each other.

John especially liked motors, fishing and woodworking, but that’s not the whole picture; he went to St. Ignatius High and graduated John Carroll University as an English major.

When I got into the landlord biz (thanks, Dad), I called John for advice on boilers, blown fuses, leaks and everything else. John was my guru of the physical world.

When John was in elementary school, he mounted a lawnmower engine on a tricycle. The guy knew everything.

John died in 1992 at age 41 from complications of mental illness and alcoholism. He could put away a case of Wiedemann’s in a day. Schizophrenia ran in his family.

A repairman called me and said, “The voltage at the cap is good.”

What’s that mean? If the voltage was good, why didn’t we have power in four suites? The man said, “The inside line, outside, is yours.”

John, you there?

 
I was at the Fuji Rock music festival, where I hung out with British lads — guys in their twenties. I was at Fuji Rock, in Japan, to see Vulfpeck. The lads were from Leeds.  Japan was so hot, the lads went bare-chested and drank a lot, and were amusingly, obnoxiously inebriated. Jimmy, on meeting a genuine VulfDad — me —  bear-hugged me and said, “I’m the stickiest man you ever met!” It was 95 degrees. The sweat.

Booze, Brits and heat.

No sane tourist visits Japan in July, when Fuji Rock is. The lads repeatedly mentioned how “warm” it was. (Leeds people say “warm” to mean “hot.”) Jimmy said, “There’s moisture everywhere.” He schlepped around a four-pack beer caddy. The humidity was Houston-level.

The Japanese — they can handle it. They don’t drink much in public (except at salaryman bars) and don’t complain about the weather. Air conditioning is generally “low” in Japan, on purpose, to save energy. Another thing, off subject: Japanese restaurants play quality background music — sometimes even Coltrane — on low volume. And everybody talks quietly in public places.

The Brits: total aliens.

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The above is autobiographical fiction. Yes,  I was at Fuji Rock but I didn’t hang out with Brits. However, I later watched a video about Brits at Fuji Rock. The vid is cued up below. Check out a few minutes.

 
I had an op-ed, “To Life, Marriage and Wine,” in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Here’s the essay:

I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell. My come-on was the wine. The first Saturday of the month, our synagogue passes out free bottles of Israeli kosher wine to married couples celebrating anniversaries that month.

Two friends recently called to say they were separating from their spouses. I look for reinforcement for the institution of marriage wherever I can find it. Alice and I stood on the bimah (altar) with eight other couples while congregants sang along to “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov” (good luck and congratulations). Rabbi Joshua Skoff announced the winner in the anniversary derby, a couple celebrating 55 years of matrimony.

Everybody read from the supplementary prayer booklet: “These couples have come to the synagogue to give thanks for the institution of marriage and for their mutual love and devotion.”

Bert and Alice, Oct. 22, 1978. Columbus, Ohio

One married man had a gray ponytail. There was an accountant in a suit and an obstetrician in a red pantsuit. The Torah portion was from Genesis. The rabbi noted that because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all going to die, which makes things interesting because if we lived forever we’d never get around to doing anything: “Why would you diet if you can put it off for 500 years?”

Our marriage-boosting interlude ended with: “May it be God’s will that these married couples continue to live to a ripe old age together in happiness, lightening each other’s burdens, and reaping a harvest of joy from the seeds of love they have sown in the hearts of their family.”

To life. And free wine.

 
My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he’s dead.

Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man — a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.

I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)

Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn’t have, money he had or didn’t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.

His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us “lived out of cans.”

Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house — and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn’t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven’t since). Ed didn’t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.

I didn’t see Ed’s obit in the Plain Dealer in 2006. But I googled him after I “saw” him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.

 
My cousin Brian Kent is a beast. He didn’t get his beastliness from me — or my side of the family. Brian’s dad (my uncle Bob) married into the family and was a brawler. Uncle Bob had a bashed-up nose from fighting. Uncle Bob used to crash weddings in the 1940s to pick up girls, like at the Cleveland Jewish Center on East 105th Street and the Temple on the Heights on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. Both high-class shuls. Bob, who was a proste yid from Kinsman Road, got around.

He joined the army. He claimed he wanted to fight for Israel in the Haganah after WWII, but that never happened. He wound up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1949, studying art. He ultimately became an art-education professor.

But we’re not here to talk about Bob. Brian the beast . . . Brian, his wife, Deborah, and I recently biked around Cleveland. On our bike trek, Brian biked down 12 steps at Case Western Reserve University. He biked down the steps, instead of walking the bike down the steps. Brian is no teenager. He’s 65. Later, Brian fell off his bike downtown and got right back up.

Brian Kent out west, 2025. (He lives in Connecticut)

I was the bike tour guide. Starting in Cleveland Heights, we headed toward Lake Erie, via the Cultural Gardens (East Boulevard). We planned on eating lunch at the Marina-at-55^th Street. We were going to get walleye. But the lakefront restaurant doesn’t exist. Ripped down. And I had checked the restaurant’s website, which said it was “open.” So we settled on the Siam Café at East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue. We saw the former mayor in there. (Had to google his name. Frank Jackson.)

We biked to League Park in the Hough neighborhood. The baseball museum was closed. Hough looked pretty good, actually. Babe Ruth hit his 511th home run at League Park.

We biked past John Hay High, where Brian’s mother (my aunt Celeste Zalk) had gone to high school in the 1940s. Secretarial track.

Returning to the Heights, we stopped at a secret waterfall, which I can’t tell you about, and went to Shaker Square to see how run-down it is.

Brian said the highlights of the trip were the waterfall and the tasty lunch at the Siam Café. For me, the highlight was watching Brian bike down 12 stairs.

Beast.

 
Tokyo had Houston-level humidity and was 96 degrees. The water at the Tokyo swimming pool was at 32C, the lifeguard told me. I googled 32C; that was 90F! It was like swimming in miso soup. Plus, I had to wear a bathing cap, which made the miso even warmer. (You have to wear a cap in Japan.)

Then I found an indoor Tokyo pool, which was cooler, temp-wise. My son the musician sneaked me into his hotel, and on floor 15 there was a three-lane lap pool. No kiddie area. Just lanes. That’s class. I had to wear a bathing cap there, too.

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I was visiting my daughter’s family in Chicago this summer. It was 93 degrees. No lockers at the Chicago pool. I changed into my swimsuit in the locker room, but I couldn’t store clothes or valuables. I had to take everything to the pool deck. I said to a lifeguard, “What — no lockers?” Alfred E. Neuman-style. The guard said nobody would steal anything.

A couple hundred people —  like in Tokyo — tried to chill in the heat. Nobody stole anything.

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Cumberland Pool

Cumberland Pool in Cleveland Heights has 14 lap lanes.  Name a pool with more lap lanes. The city adds lanes and reduces the kiddie area, probably because Cleveland Heights is boomer central, with many elderly lap swimmers and lap joggers.

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My go-to Cleveland swimming pool is the Cleveland Skating Club, which has six indoor lap lanes (and a skating rink). I never have to share a lane, year-round. That seclusion is worth the club dues. I don’t like playing rugby in the water.

Maybe I’ll install a one-person “endless” lap pool/tub where my dining room is. But I haven’t heard much, good or bad, about “endless” tubs.

One last thing . . . in Japan nobody wears flip-flops at pools. It’s all bare feet.

 
I got an email with Michael “Moon” Stevens in the subject line. Moon is, or was, 82, and not too healthy. His obit?

Nope. Moon still “is.” Moon is the original Flint, Michigan, hipster.

Michael “Moon” Stevens grew up with John Sinclair, the well-known jazz aficionado and political nut-job from Flint. One of Moon’s relatives just contacted me about Moon. I know Moon through his sister, who lives in Cleveland.

For decades Moon was a union painter at the Los Angeles airport. He still maintains a cozy pad in L.A., where he’ll spin records for you. You are instructed to sit on his living room couch — in just the right corner — to optimally hear his jazz LPs.

Moon has an almost photographic memory for jazz facts. He gets most of his information from reading jazz bios and LP liner notes. He told me Sun Ra was a “congenital eunuch.” I didn’t know that. He said Joe Maneri was really fat, and Pharaoh Sanders foamed at the mouth and pounded his chest when he played.

When Moon was healthier, he visited Cleveland. One visit Moon was talking to me and his brother-in-law Lewis about Albert Ayler, Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk and Bill Evans. Moon covered all bases. Lewis — Moon’s bro-in-law — said Bill Evans was Jewish.

“How do you know Evans is Jewish?” I said to Lewis. “Do you wake up in the morning and wonder who’s Jewish, and who isn’t?” I do. But why would Lewis — a gentile — think about Jews nonstop?

“I grew up in Greenwich Village,” Lewis said. “New York was a very Jewish town when I grew up.”

“If somebody shoots somebody,” I said, “or if somebody wins the Nobel Prize, I wonder if the guy is Jewish. That’s my M.O.”

Moon said, “Bill Evans wasn’t Jewish. His father was Welsh and his mother was Russian Orthodox.”

Lewis corroborated this on Google.

Impressive, Moon.

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Yiddishe Cup plays next Wednesday (Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

Was Dave Brubeck Jewish? Find out here  . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWvixN_a9Q

 
I have this mishegas, where I detach uncanceled postage stamps from envelopes and reuse the stamps. I get a ton of mail, and some of it has uncanceled stamps.

Deeper: some of the uncanceled stamps are actually my own  — stamps I put on envelopes and, for whatever reason, I don’t use the envelope. Maybe I put a check in an envelope and then notice I’ve put the wrong check in. I rip open the envelope. The stamp is still good. (The envelope isn’t.)

I’ve been around stamps a while. I collected UN stamps and first-day covers. Some plate blocks. When I was in junior high, I took the bus downtown to the Manger Hotel for stamp shows. I was probably the youngest guy in there by about 50 years.

I collected stamps until college. My mother sent first-day covers to my dorm, and I had to tell her to stop. It was too embarrassing.

My stamps

I made $28.47 today, in a half hour, by rescuing uncanceled stamps from envelopes in my office. [39 “forever” stamps X 73 cents =$28.47]

I once had a tenant who used uncanceled stamps from the 1960s to send in her rent. I got 4-centers up until 1992, when she died.

I had the first stamps from Malaysia.

There was a stamp dealer, Mr. Stern, on Superior Road in Cleveland Heights. Alfred Stern: not a Jew. That shocked me. He was a German with a Christmas tree. My mom occasionally drove me to his apartment. He got me the Malaysian stamps.

I subscribed to Linn’s Stamp News from Sidney, Ohio. I had a friend — named Stamps, of all things — who collected coins. He subscribed to Coin World — also from Sidney, Ohio. Stamps collected brilliant uncirculated rolls of coins. I think his dad was into it, too. The Stamps were more like speculators. I was a collector. Still am.