The summer vacation. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the Basement Songs, during my childhood, when school let out for the summer, my parents would pack up the family and take us on long voyages around the country. We’d explore the great tourist attractions each state had to offer, camp in an Apache pop-up trailer at KOAs, and spend endless hours on the open road. While my dad drove and my mom worked on her current latch hook rug in the front of the van, my siblings and I would go off into our own worlds. As a young boy I invested hours in the lives of the Hardy Boys or Henry Huggins, then moved on to the supernatural tales of Poe and Stephen King as I got older.
One year, after pestering my parents for a comic book, they surprised me with the oversized “graphic novel,” Superman vs. Wonder Woman. I read that book so many times, it’s in tatters. Eventually I traded some kid from grade school my copy of X-Men #137, “Phoenix Must Die!” for a better copy of Superman vs. Wonder Woman. The X-Men comic is worth a lot of money now while Superman vs. Wonder Woman is a quaint novelty from a bygone era. I don’t regret the trade one bit.
Occasionally, while my brother Budd was stretched out in one of the seats and my older sister Beth read her own books and magazines, I would hang out in the back of the van with my younger sister, Heidi, creating stories with her Barbie dolls while the wheels of the van whirled underneath us on hot black asphalt. The time spent staring out the window as the countryside of the U.S. passed by me developed a yearning in me. To this day, I love to get in my car and just drive. The seed to become a writer was also planted in those summer road trips. (more…)
I’m running through the streets of industrial Los Angeles cursing to myself. My eyes are searching, desperately scanning the sidewalk and disintegrating asphalt for a coat hanger. The sun beats down on me, I’m sweating profusely, and behind me my car is parked with the engine running and the keys locked inside it. Welcome to L.A., baby.
I awoke with a knee in my back and a song in my head. Crammed into a bed with Julie and Jacob, I teetered on the edge hanging over a gap between the mattress and the wall. I never expected to have Roger Daltrey screaming in my skull at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. Alas, there he was and there he has stayed all week singing 
Who could have imagined that sunny California would be overcast and chilly the entire week my family traveled to Ohio without me? The gloomy weather seems to fuel the grayness of my spirit this week. I miss my family terribly; I don’t do well on my own. Luckily I’ll be joining them by week’s end. The last I saw them, curbside at LAX, Julie and I kissed as she collected the multiple bags she had to wheel inside. Sophie gave me the grandest hug, not wanting to say goodbye. With mixed emotions she let go. Jacob, wearing his crushed and crooked Dodgers cap, asked, “Daddy, will you tell me if the Indians won?” I replied, “Jake, you’ll be in Cleveland. You can tell me if the Indians won.” Earlier that morning he asked me to wear my baseball hat when I flew into Northeast Ohio. “My Indians hat?” “No, Daddy, your Dodgers hat.”
While perusing the excellent selection of music stocked at the Burbank Public Library, I happened upon Sugarland’s 
My bags sat on the floor waiting to be unpacked while I looked around my bedroom — the same bedroom where I’d grown up, the same bedroom I’d escaped when I went off to Bowling Green, and the same bedroom I would now live in as a college graduate trying to save up money to move out west. Nothing had changed in that room for 15years; the wallpaper that my mother had put up herself still hung on the walls, the newspaper clippings and magazine pictures tacked to the corkboard were still there, and the clown portrait that hovered over the bunk beds my brother and I had shared still looked on, unable to manage a smile. As the smell of fresh cut grass filled the air and a breeze came in through the window, I felt lost. Four years spent in pursuit of a dream seemed to have stalled while I waited out the summer. To top things off, a bad hair dye attempt had left my hair orange.
Sitting on the patio at my brother’s house, as Sophie and her cousins laughed, splashing in the pool and Jacob glided though the air on the swing set, something unexpected happened. While I sat with Budd and Karyn discussing the hardships we all faced and the year ahead, Alicia Keys brilliant album, 
My first couple years in college, after school let out for the summer in early May, I would climb inside my parents’ red GM van and drive down to Athens, OH to visit Matt. Ohio University, where he went to school, was on a different schedule than Bowling Green State University, and Matt’s classes didn’t end until June. There was always one weekend I could drive down and hang out with my childhood friend.
I’d like to pay tribute to my mother-in-law, Judie, a woman whose perseverance has set an example not only for all of her kids, but for all of us to follow. In the summer of ’92, before I began dating Julie, I knew her mother as a customer at the Bin, the natural foods store where I worked. Back then she was just Mrs. Flynn, and once a week she stopped in to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, bringing a ray of positive energy into the store. I first took notice of her kindness when my dad went in for open heart surgery. Judie expressed great empathy, even though she hardly knew me. Her kind words and prayers gave me some peace of mind during a turbulent time.
The other night I let Sophie stay up past her bedtime to listen to the last inning of the game between the Red Sox and Indians. One of the things I love about the Internet is the ability to listen to every Indians game with the Cleveland radio play-by-play announcers making the calls — it’s really kept me in touch with my hometown. Ironically, baseball was not a huge part of childhood in northeast Ohio; during the ’80s, there was little to root for when the Indians took the field. Oh, each year there was a glimmer of hope for the home team that lasted until the end of April, by which time the Tribe was usually in the basement of their division. In addition to the woes of the Indians, baseball was just never a presence in our house, which is strange, because if you ask my dad about the ’48 and ’54 championship Indians teams, he can rattle off players and some of their accomplishments. The radio was always tuned to music in our house, though, and I found televised games a bore. I took in the occasional game, but the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a dungeon: cold, damp and cavernous. It wasn’t a lot of fun to sit in the stands.