I took a long, enjoyable walk down Memory Lane earlier this week. I dropped Sheila off at her BarBri Ohio Bar Review class and proceeded to head westward to my mom’s house. She has really blessed us a lot lately—anyone who went to Sheila’s graduation party saw how generous and helpful she was—and since I had the day free, I wanted to go over and throw away my old belongings and help her get the house clean. I saved SO much from undergrad—every letter my mom wrote me, various InterVarsity stuff, and random other flotsam and jetsam from my 5.5 years at Case Western. However, saving it all just isn’t practical, and I have been chipping away at it little by little.
I spent the morning reading through various letters from my freshman year. My mom’s side of the family, who played a gigantic role in leading me to Christ, sent me a lot of letters encouraging me and telling me they were praying for me. Looking back at that time helps me realize the ways in which God answered those prayers—I got involved with a great Christian fellowship that still affects my life on a daily basis more than 10 years later, I had some amazing professors who changed my life, and I adjusted relatively well to college life and living on my own. Furthermore, my mom’s advice in some of those letters still rings true to this day. I did terribly in computer programming during my spring semester of my freshman year, and my mom wrote something like, “Don’t be discouraged by computer programming—you have been around the academic game long enough to know that you are a smart young man who has the ability to be successful, and one thing shouldn’t overly discourage you.” She said the same things to me during my first year of law school, and it is funny how her advice still rings true—my first year was rough, but I didn’t let it discourage me, and my second year was amazing!
My mom needed money to tip the refrigerator deliverymen, so I headed off to the local Giant Eagle. I don’t know what it is, but even after all this time, I still feel more comfortable on the west side of Cleveland than on the east side. Maybe it’s the fact that I have realized that there are near-constant traffic jams throughout the east side, which destroys my claim that one advantage of living in Cleveland is that it is easy to navigate, or maybe it’s that the west side is more middle class and down-to-Earth. Anyhow, even though the local grocery store and bank have changed layouts and names several times over the years, I never feel out-of-place or disoriented when I enter either of them. The plaza at which the grocery store is located has changed too, but it still is familiar to me; I am particularly sad that Geppetto’s Pizza down and was replaced with another restaurant. This place is particularly notable because it was where Michael Symon got his first cooking job before moving onto bigger and better things! My grandparents, my mom, and I often dined there after we attended Mass at St. Mark’s Church; when I dined there while campaigning during the 2005 Cleveland mayoral primary, it seemed like the place hadn’t changed at all and I hadn’t been away for very long. My last memory of Geppetto’s is from June 14, 2007. I took my mom there for her birthday; unfortunately, I forgot my money, so she had to pay. Furthermore, when I told her that we should play some Scrabble (her favorite board game) afterwards, she insisted that I return home and watch Game 4 of the NBA Finals—this was the year the Cavs were in it, mind you—because “it might be the last game” and told me that there would always be time to play Scrabble in the future. Despite the fact that I vehemently told her several times that it would be OK for me to miss it, she still insisted to the point where I knew if I stayed at her house she wouldn’t play! So I returned to Mike and Ken’s place on Overlook and Kenilworth (where I was staying at the time) and watched the Cavs play their hearts out, only to lose.
I found my copy of Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony’s first EP in my room, and while I threw away many other CDs that I know I’ll never listen to again, this is not one of them. I remember when they became popular during my 8th grade year and being very proud that they were from Cleveland. I also remember negotiating with someone (who, unfortunately, is now deceased) in my before school early morning Algebra class to make me a copy of their tape of this in exchange for something else that I can’t remember now. Anyhow, I was overjoyed at this discovery, and I threw it on while driving back to pick Sheila up from BarBri. I listened to Thuggish Ruggish Bone once and decided that it had just been too long since I heard it and hit the back button to hear it again! I couldn’t believe that I remembered a significant part of the lyrics despite not hearing the song for a few years. The song ended just as I was coming up the ramp onto the Innerbelt and as I saw Cleveland’s beautiful skyline emerge onto the horizon from behind the concrete highway ramp, the female vocalist on the track sang, “Cleveland’s…definitely…in the house” and I felt prouder than ever of my hometown.
