Around the Neighborhood

The town that I live in, Painesville, doesn't exactly have the best reputation around these parts.  "Economically Depressed" would probably be a euphemistic way of describing it, while "ghetto" might be more appropriate for some of it.  And yet, it has it's charms.  If you find your self in the right corner of the town, you'll see some of the nicest neighborhoods in the area.  Not "nice" in the sense of million dollar houses and upscale living necessarily, but nice in the sense of charming old houses and some beautifully landscaped lawns.

And that's what appeals to me most around here.  In Eastlake, where we used to live, there were many post-war suburban neighborhoods where there was street after street lined with the same nondescript bungalows and the same plain square yards.  Elsewhere you'll find housing developments that are a bit more attractive, but they suffer from that same cookie cutter regularity, house after house looking exactly the same.  Here there's something different, something interesting and appealing, something...well, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

I call this place the "ship house", because somehow I think that if I lived there, I would constantly be imagining it as a ship on the water, that balcony on the top being the main deck.  A placard out front tells me the place is called "Four Oaks", probably because of the huge oak trees that line the front yard (even though I only see three of them.)  Still, there's something neat about the fact that they named their property.  Who does that?

And of course, you guys remember my daughter's school, which was there...

...and then it wasn't.

This picture has always made me think of the kind of neighborhood I think of when I think of home.  If that makes any sense.

Here's our local chapter of the YMCA.  It's just around the block from us.  We thought about getting a membership here.  We went down and took a tour, but everyone was packed in there like sardines, and my wife was practically hyper-ventilating by the time we got home.

A shot of Orchard Grove in the morning.

...and the same spot in the afternoon.  A lot of difference the light makes, huh?

Orchard Grove is a street, by the way.

Here was another fine morning.  This one over on Newell Street.

...and another from Newell.

Speaking of Newell Street.  There's a big creepy-looking mansion behind a brick wall over there.  Tell me that doesn't look like the start of a horror movie.

So, there you go folks.  Hope you enjoyed the little tour.     

The Factory

Those are what we call "caps".  You've probably have seen them atop one of those plastic tubs of baby wipes or wet naps, the kind that you pull through the cross-hairs like Kleenex.  We only make the lid.  We make 16,000 of these suckers per shift!  I have no idea who makes the plastic tubs.  Probably someone on the other side of the world.

Anyway, since I made my momentous decision to make this blog primarily a photo blog, or phlog, or pho-log, or whatever the heck they call it, and since I finally got a phone with a half-way decent camera on it, I figured that a good place to start would be with pictures of my work.  I'm sure you're all dying to see what the inside of plastic factory looks like.  No?  Well, I guess that's just too bad.

This is where the magic happens.  The plastic pellets are fed into the big hopper at the top, then they funnel down into the machine where some ferrets or wizards or something munch on them, turning them into liquid.  Then it gets injected into the mold and voila'.

This is my forklift, or "tow motor" as we call it for some reason.  Those boxes are packed with the caps you see at the top.  I was in the process taking them off the skid and putting them on the shrink wrap machine which is out of the frame to the right.  (I didn't plan these pictures very well.)

This is the warehouse, where I house the shrink-wrapped bundles after I'm done with them.  That's pretty much then end of the line for me.  The shipping guy loads them onto a truck and from there they get disseminated to the world like a bad disease.

Once in a while, you can find some nice looking sunrises out back.  All that much closer to quitting time!  Halleluiah!!   

Eulogy for My Father

I was there with my father the morning he died.  I had spent the night sleeping in a chair beside the bed.  It was very early still when I woke up, and somehow I was up before everyone else.  One of the nurses on the staff there at the hospice showed me where I could get a cup of coffee.  I got my coffee, and went back to my father's room, trying not to make too much noise out of respect to the people still sleeping.  As I stood at the window, sipping my coffee and staring out at the open desert, the contemplative hour put me in mind of all the times my dad used to take us over to my grandfather's place.  My grandfather wasn't especially good with kids, and he and his wife kept a nice neat apartment, so we weren't really allowed to touch much of anything when we were there.  We had to sit, and calm down, and be bored.  The stillness of the morning, and the stress of the days leading up to it, somehow reminded me of all that.  For a brief moment, I almost felt alright.

But then I began to notice that something was missing in the sounds of the room, which had become all too familiar over the past three days.  My father's labored and raspy breathing had stopped.  I stared at him for a long time.  He wasn't moving at all.  My brother was sleeping on a cot in the corner.  I went over and shook him awake and told him that our father was gone.  We went and got someone from the hospice staff.  They came in and confirmed it.  And like that, the whole thing was over.  My father, who had never done a quiet thing in his life, had died without anyone noticing.

I had traveled to Phoenix, gone through the white-knuckled ordeal of flying for the first time in 16 years, more on his behalf, than for my own benefit.  It was important to say goodbye, to see him one last time, and I had known that this day had been coming from the past 10 years, since the day he'd first called me up and told me that he had cancer.  But I was there, my brother was there, we were all there, primarily because he didn't want to go through this alone.  He had surfaced coherently a few times in those couple of days, but he spent most of his time in the heavily sedated state that they euphemistically describe as "making them comfortable" in those situations.  Still, he knew we were there with him, and that was the main thing.

God knows he had been there enough for me, even if my parents had gotten divorced when I was young, and even if he had eventually settled on the other side of the country.  He had always come through in a pinch.  He had always made it clear to my brother and I that he cared about us.  In the hours and days that followed his death in that haze of relatives pouring in, silhouetted in doorways, people I hadn't seen in years, and the little practical matters that have to be dealt with in these cases, like finding an appropriate pair of dress shoes for the service, it became clear that I was going to have to stand up in front of everyone and say something about my father.

I thought about that crazy trip we had made, the day after Christmas 1994, from Phoenix to Cleveland in a car with no heat.  We had made it as far as Missouri before getting caught in a snow storm with nothing but a tape case to scrape the windows with.  My father had made up his mind to get the heat fixed in Lebanon the next day, but the trip was insane to begin with.  But he did it anyway, just because he knew I wanted to go home.  I thought about that day I stepped off a bus with girl he'd never met before, who was pregnant and who was technically an underage runaway.  He was there to meet us with a smile.

So I got up in front of everyone and just told them about these things.  And there was one more story that I saved until the end.  When I was five years, I was a few months late starting kindergarten because of a skin rash that I'd had on my hands and feet.  So, I was a little nervous on my first day of school, feeling like I was already behind.  My father took me to school that morning, checked me in at the principal's office, and took me to my classroom.  A few hours later, my class was being led down the hall to the gym.  As we passed a connecting hallway, that led down to two sets of double doors that led outside, I saw my father sitting on a bench out in the foyer between the sets of doors.  He had been waiting there all that time.  He had his head down, and he didn't see me, and I never asked him about it.  I guess he was just there to make sure I was okay, looking out for me, even if I didn't know he was there.  I don't why I never told him.  I just went on to gym class, feeling a lot better about my first day of school.        

Snow Days

It's early March and winter is beginning to loosen its cold grip on Northeast Ohio.  I can't really complain too much, though.  It's actually been a pretty mild winter as winters go around here.  There have been a few modestly impressive snow storms, but it's been mostly a lot of bark with very little bite.  Back in September when someone told me that they had heard that we were supposed to have a bad winter, I had a feeling even then that the weather would probably end up proving them wrong.  Nature has a real knack for making fools out of people who get carried away with their assumptions.

Back when I was in school, winter always meant the possibility of a snow day.  More exciting than a normal holiday, or a vacation even, the snow day had the virtue of being serendipitous, the element of surprise.  Late into the night I would keep my hopeful vigil at the front window, watching the steady snowfall through the streetlight, and the heavy accumulation on the roads.  In the morning we'd gather around the radio, wrapped in our blankets, listening as they rattled off the roll call of the schools that were closed that day.  There was nothing sweeter than hearing them call the name of our school, and nothing quite as disappointing as having them slip by that part of the alphabet without a word.

On days when we did get a snow day, the deep snow outside seemed like a thick blanket insulating us from our responsibilities in the world.  We could stay inside and goof off or we could get together and build a snow fort or head out to go sledding with the other neighborhood kids.  The roads were always quiet, and the snow softened the sound in the air.  It was easy to pretend that you were the last person left on Earth wandering the frozen wasteland or just lost in some Arctic wilderness, far from civilization...well, at least until someone smacked you upside the head with a snow ball.  

By the time I was in high school, a snow day mostly meant laying around and listening to music in my room and scribbling in my notebooks and calling my girlfriend who lived in the next town over.  So much was decided and settled on those days, alone in the house.  I remember standing at the window wiggling my toes against the heating vent as we talked.  I remember the sun had come up in the afternoon and the glare off the fresh snow was blindingly bright.  I remember the icicles that hung from the roof dripping.

I still have a snow day now and then, but like everything else these days, it comes with it's share of caveats and frustrations.  Nothing is ever simple in this adult world.  There's a long stretch of dark highway that I have to take to get to work, and when it's snowing heavy it's not really advisable to travel this road, which is never cleared at night anyway.  But it's a judgment call, and either way I have to face that fact that I won't get paid and that I'll be leaving them short handed at work if I call off.  Sometimes I've regretted calling off when the weather didn't end up as bad as I had anticipated.  Sometime I've regretted trying to make a run for it and getting caught out in the mess.  I almost got myself killed twice this past winter, when I should have kept my ass at home.  And like I said, this has been a mild winter.  

But there are still those days when the decision is clear, and I watch the snow fall through the streetlight with that same hopeful excitement that I had as a kid.  I trust that anyone who lives in a northern climate knows what I mean by that streetlight, that trusty illuminator of snowfall, that old reliable gauge of the blizzard.  There's even a streetlight that I pass on my way to work.  It stands in front of a storefront, long since closed for the evening, and shines its lonely light.  I always glance up at it to check to see if the snow fall is worse than I'd noticed, before I get out onto the highway and get myself into deeper trouble.

Some years Lake Erie freezes over and some years it doesn't.  I suspect that this was one of the years that it didn't, but I haven't been up there to see for myself.  In fact, I couldn't tell you whether it's frozen over for the past ten years or so.  I never seem to find the opportunity to get up there.  It's quite a sight when it's frozen over.  Crystallized undulations along the shore, and then a calm white sheet that stretches out as far as they eye can see, so perfectly still.  They say that someone could walk clear to Canada, if they were fool enough to do it.  I ventured out once on a snow day hand in hand with a girl I knew, but I never got farther than a few feet.  One of these days, I'm going to have to make the time to go up there and see it all again.  

Courtesy of Gandz

   

Closing Thoughts

I saw the sunrise this morning.  I caught it in that brief period when the eastward sky had a lemon glow, hinting at the sun which the Earth had not yet rolled around to meet on the horizon like comfortable friends keeping a long held appointment for morning coffee.  The stratus clouds trailed off above this light, layer upon layer, tipped with orange, lavender, and rose colored hues, the cumulus clouds mingling among them forming sand castles on the shores of a vast ocean of sky.  Against this backdrop, the tree out front was richly silhouetted, as glistening and new as fresh paint on the incredible canvas of creation.

I started this blog because I wanted a chance to write about life, its sentiments and its sorrows, its joys and its tribulations.  I wrote about my own life, because it was the closest one at hand, and I happen to know the subject fairly well.  Plus, I had the added benefit of his full legal consent.  Well, perhaps not "full" consent.  After all, we all hold a little something back.  My point is that I took this not as an opportunity to promote my self, but rather I took my self as an opportunity to have material to write about.

Nevertheless, regardless of what road I took to get here, I still end up arriving at the same place.  It's been a strange experience finding myself and my ego under the scrutinizing spotlight.  It's been a learning experience.  You look at your life in a different light when considering what is and what is not fit to share on a venue open to the public.  You catch yourself analyzing the things you do share, how you come off in the material, what you imply about how you see yourself by the presentation, and what it implies about you that you chose to share what you did in the first place.  Even if my motives weren't mere self-indulgence, I suffered all the same consequences.  I was quite surprised by this fact.

Still, it's been fun, and I don't regret a thing.  I hope at least, that I managed to keep you all entertained.  I found more to write about my life than I would have thought, and I still have plenty more stories to tell.  For now, though, the time has come to set this blog aside.  On August 1st I will be resuming my nuclearheadache blog, and I don't think I can keep both of the blogs going at once.  Besides, a break is a good thing.  Taking a break from that blog has given me a chance to amass some fresh ideas.  Hopefully the same thing will happen here.  I definitely hope to get back here at some point.

So the time has come to trade one hat for the other, to put away the moonbeams and rocking horses in exchange for the protractor and calculator...metaphorically speaking.  So, enough about me.  Let's get back to the interesting stuff.

My Artistic Side

Naturally, I've had my differences with my mother over the years, but I do have to give her some credit.  She was always willing to encourage me in my creative endeavors.  When I first took an interest in writing stories, she ended up buying me my own typewriter.  Granted, it was a little plastic typewriter that only typed capital letters and I quickly put it aside and continued to use her real typewriter, but she meant well.  Or maybe she was just tired of me messing with her things.

Before the writing though, came an interest in drawing.  I started off drawing cartoon characters like Snoopy and Garfield, and eventually I moved on to drawing portraits of people.  I wasn't exactly Rembrandt, but I suppose that my skill must have been a little better than average for a nine year old.  At least people acted like they were impressed.  My mother bought me a drawing kit with special shading pencils, little blocks of charcoal, and a work book on drawing techniques.  I spend hours working through the examples, step by step.  I made piles of pictures, but I only have a couple that I've managed to save.  They're the images you see decorating this post.  You can judge my degree of talent or lack thereof for yourself.

It's obvious to me now that the reason this drawing thing never went anywhere, was because I demonstrated no real creativity with it.  When I got the kit, I only drew pictures from the examples given in the book.  I never extrapolated the techniques I was learning for use with my own subjects.  I don't think it even occurred to me to do that.  I just followed along, comparing my efforts to the finished pictures in the book.  Maybe if I had stuck with it and developed some actual skill, I might have developed some creativity with it as well.  But I doubt it.  I don't spent much time second guessing the past, because I believe things tend to turn out the way they do for a reason.  If there's a chance something might have happened, it would have.  There's a reason it didn't.  So you move on.

In this case, I think I moved on to other things precisely because my creativity lay elsewhere.  The drawing actually led to my writing, in fact.  Somehow I had gotten the idea of making an illustrated book of The Clash of the Titans with Peanuts characters in all the main roles.  I finished the book and I fashioned a cover for it out of a paper garbage bag.  Soon I was making more of these garbage bag books with my own stories and illustrations. Eventually the stories overshadowed the illustrations, and finally this led me to the typewriter.

So the drawing, just like every other hope my family had for me, gave way to the writing.  At one point they even thought I was going to be a computer programmer.  I used to write long programs and design my own games when I was around 11 or 12.  I gave that up for writing.  Whatever it's been, I've always reached a point where I've felt limited by the possibilities.  Only with writing have I never found myself facing a wall.  The possibilities seemed limitless.   You can created places, lives, whole worlds.

But ultimately, it's always been about wanting to write something that will move people.  There's that moment when a movie ends with a dramatic swelling of the soundtrack, or that last paragraph of a book that leaves a lump in your throat.  I've always walked away from those experiences thinking, "I want to be able to do that."  Beyond everything else, that's still my simple, basic goal.     

Somnus Diem

When I was very little I remember seeing this illustration in a book where this kid had all kinds of piles of stuff all over his bed.  There were toys, food, pets, ect.  His bed was overflowing with junk and there was barely even enough room for himself.  Like many things when I was that age, this idea had an inexplicable appeal for me.  I tried to recreate this picture on my own bed a couple of times, but my mother always drew the line before I was able to achieve a completely faithful reproduction.

I slept for a good ten or twelve hours yesterday.  Every so often I have a day like this.  Something grey settles over everything, and I just feel completely worn out, and I spent almost the entire day in a state of hibernation.  I almost feel guilty for wasting the day, but I have to remind myself how rarely this happens, and how little sleep I usually get.  I'll go for weeks on end sometimes getting only three or four hours of sleep a day, and sooner or later it all catches up with me.  

The summer is especially rough on me when it comes to getting sleep.  I toss and turn in the heat.  I have a hard time falling asleep anyway.  I'm definitely not one of these head-hits-the-pillow types.  It takes a deliberate effort for me to shut off, and sometimes the effort is more successful than others.  I find that it helps to focus my mind on something colorful and inconsequential, something that doesn't stress me out or require too much mental energy.  Despite the name of a certain blog, I don't actually count sheep, though.  That's never worked for me.  I get restless with the sheer boredom of it.  I like something easy, but not quite that dull.  Maybe a bird society in a tree.

And then those days come along, when I just can't get out of bed.  I'll stir a few times, surfacing to the reality of the hushed room, only to find myself chasing a dream back into the void moments later.  A quick glance at the clock tells me it's getting later, but I don't care.  I'm wound up in the blankets, hiding from the world.  I have somewhere else I need to be.  I'm exploring the dim corridors of a house I've never seen, or feeling my way through the woods at night.  There's a dark and dismal quality to my dreams on these days, and for some reason there's often some stale body of water, an uncleaned pool or a moss covered pond.  Still, these dreams are compelling enough to keep me asleep.  Maybe I was just exhausted.

It's all for the best though, I think, those days when I get an extra dose of sand over my eyes.  I need those days.  The hands of the clock go round and round and my bed tumbles away into the dark, and I'm dreaming that I'm in a cubbyhole somewhere buried under a pile of dirty clothes and there's just a little crack of light under the door.  Some days even dismal dreams are preferable to reality.  They don't demand too much from you, and they let you get your rest.