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Here We Are, On The Brink Of What Comes Next

Here We Are, On The Brink Of What Comes Next

For 45 minutes on Christmas Eve, I watched love, in all of its diversity, play out in front of me.

Thanks, 2016. I needed that.

I was parked in the arrivals lane at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, nearly an hour early for my daughter and her family. It is not my habit to arrive so ridiculously early to pick up relatives or friends, but some things one doesn’t leave to chance. Laying eyes on my one year-old grandson the very second the revolving doors release him ranks way up there.

The police officer who would normally order us drivers to circle the airport like pilots waiting for permission to land was in a jolly enough mood to let a number of us linger. I didn’t know this was his plan as he approached my car, so I rolled down my window and launched into the usual please-sir-just-a-minute-more round of begging, which he promptly cut off with a wave of his hand.

“Just pull closer to the curb,” he said, “and don’t make any noise.”

Aside from laying on my horn (an unthinkable act for a born-and-bred Midwesterner), I’m not sure what racket our good officer thought I could conjure from the seat of my hermetically sealed car — beyond blasting Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka,” I mean, which is my habit under normal circumstances. However, there is nothing normal about post-election 2016, so I nodded at the officer like a toddler who’s just been asked whether she wants more chocolate and wished him a very merry Christmas.

“If you celebrate,” I quickly added.

He nodded and waved me closer to the curb. “I’ll celebrate as soon as we get all you people out of here.”

Ho-ho-ho.

In the ensuing 45 minutes, I sat behind the wheel and watched strangers of every size and shade embrace fellow humans. The smallest children shouted as they ran, their arms poised for the scoop skyward. Young adults greeted loved ones with older versions of the same faces. Reunited couples kissed like no one was watching, including two people who were surely my age or older, bless their determined hearts.

I rolled down my window to listen to the joy unfolding in front of me, ignoring the blast of cold air and basking instead in the sense of relief. Too often since Election Day, I’ve been one of the despondent millions openly bemoaning what 2016 has wrought and wanting it over. Watching so much love unfolding in front of me caught me up short and reminded me that I’ve never been the sort to wish away my days. Especially now, when I’m months away from turning 60 and feeling the steady march toward 62, which was my mother’s age when she died.

So, between chipper smiles at the ever-so-patient officer, I started to make a mental list of reasons to be grateful for 2016. I’m a Clevelander, so of course I thought of the Cavaliers’ NBA championship and how the Cleveland Indians made it to the World Series. You might think the latter is an odd thing to appreciate, considering the outcome, but after 54 years without a national championship, I wasn’t sure we were even up to dealing with so much good luck in one year. Go, Tribe!

On a larger scale, I take heart that more than 20 million Americans now have health care coverage because of Obamacare — and that number is growing daily during this current enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31. If Republicans plan to repeal it, they must name their victims. Those with pre-existing conditions, for example? Young adults under the age of 26, for another? Maybe preventive care for senior citizens?

Speaking of transformative moments, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be a major party’s nominee for president. Am I disappointed that she didn’t win? Shaken to the marrow of my bones is a more accurate description, but that neither negates the milestone nor diminishes my will to call out the dangerous deeds of the next president every chance I get.

You may disagree.

But for now, for just this moment, let’s celebrate that here we are, you and I, on the brink of another year. May we cherish those who keep us human and acknowledge our incredible luck that we’re still here.

We all know at least one person who didn’t make it. That alone should keep us trying.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama waves from the door of Air Force One as he ends his visit to Cuba, at Havana’s international airport, March 22, 2016.  REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Here In Cleveland, You Gotta Respect The Scars

Here In Cleveland, You Gotta Respect The Scars

We all have things we try to avoid in life. My top three are large sports crowds (frightening), long waits (infuriating) and standing in the hot sun (dehydrating).

On Wednesday, I joined an estimated 1 million sports fans in downtown Cleveland to stand in the hot sun and wait five hours to welcome home our NBA champions, the Cleveland Cavaliers.

I didn’t care that I couldn’t even see the stage at the rally. I didn’t care that the sun turned my face into an animated version of a beefsteak tomato. I didn’t even care, much, that the team took so long to wind its way through the streets of Cleveland that it was more than two hours late for its own rally.

I’ve waited since second grade for a sports championship in Cleveland. I could wait a little longer.

Besides, there’s something about living in a suspended state of pinch-me astonishment that makes the time fly.

Right now, we are an entire region of people whose toes haven’t touched the ground since that final buzzer in Sunday’s game against the Golden State Warriors. “Everybody’s friendly, no matter where you go,” the air conditioner repairman told me yesterday as he stood in my kitchen writing out the receipt. “It’s like no one can stop smiling.”

On Wednesday, as the crowd gathered for the rally, I spent much of the first three hours interviewing strangers wearing Cavs gear. Alesia Pelly’s wine-and-gold-colored T-shirt read:

KEEP 

CALM

THE KING

DELIVERED

THE RING 

“I cried when LeBron left,” she said, “and I cried when he came home. This is almost as good as having a child. Look around. Every nationality. Period. Everybody is here. That’s everything.”

It’s a wonderful thing to be here in Cleveland right now. Overnight, at the sound of the final buzzer in Sunday night’s game with the Golden State Warriors — have I mentioned that? — we turned into an urban Mayberry. If you don’t recognize my reference to that long-ago TV show, it means you’re too young to understand the emotional toll of spending decades refusing to give up hope on your teams, plural, while the rest of the world mocks you for your optimism. I’m not big on leading with one’s injuries, but let’s respect the scars.

In 1973, a reader on the verge of hopelessness reached out to E. B. White, the New Yorker essayist and author of the beloved children’s book “Charlotte’s Web.” The man confessed that he was running out of faith for the human race.

White’s response is a message for the ages, certainly, but it also speaks for the multiple generations of Cleveland sports fans who never gave up believing in something bigger than a lost cause.

“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate,” White wrote. “Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.”

We have been winding the clock here in Cleveland since 1964, ever hopeful that it was only a matter of time before the curse was broken. Then, at the sound of that final buzzer — never mind.

At Wednesday’s rally, my friend Sue Klein, who is 50, stood next to me as we waited, and waited. And waited some more. At one point she frowned and waved her arm toward the many young adults who had summoned the energy and the will to leap onto granite benches in front of us, thus further blocking our view of the stage.

“I’ve turned into my father,” she said.

She was referring to the late, great Ralph G. Klein, who was sitting in Municipal Stadium when the Cleveland Indians won the World Series. In 1948.

“When I used to complain about not having seen a championship in my lifetime, he used to say, ‘You don’t know suffering,'” she said. She gestured again toward our millennial view-blocking fans. “They don’t know suffering. They have no idea.”

Like I said. You gotta respect the scars.

 

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Jun 5, 2016; Oakland, CA, USA; Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James (23) shoots the ball against Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green (23) during the first quarter in game two of the NBA Finals at Oracle Arena. Mandatory Credit: Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

Cleveland Will Champion Our Cavaliers

Cleveland Will Champion Our Cavaliers

For most of my life, I could not understand why anyone would hitch his or her identity to the win-loss record of a professional sports team.

Sports fans, you’d call them.

Fanatics, I’d say. Lunatics, I’d say after a glass of wine, but only if my dad wasn’t within earshot.

“Those players don’t care about us,” I’d tell friends and relatives. “They don’t know our names. They don’t care how much money we have to spend on tickets to see them. And even if they win everything, we will get up the next morning to the same old life we had before we cheered them on to victory.”

I was so superior. So above it all.

So beside the point, my husband likes to say. A lifelong Cleveland Indians fan, he has a personal email address that begins with “damnyankees.” Make of that what you will.

I grew up in northeast Ohio, and I live in Cleveland. No one was going to catch me sobbing in my beer as we racked up decade after decade without a single professional sports championship.

Then I lost my mind.

I can give you the exact date: July 11, 2014. That’s when LeBron James announced his decision to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. You would have thought I was personally welcoming home the prodigal son.

Two days later, the Republicans announced that they would be bringing their 2016 national convention to Cleveland. Overnight, news coverage across the country was all about Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland…

And it was: All. Good. News.

We weren’t used to this, but there were plenty of us who thought it was way past time for it.

Most every city in a major metropolitan area is struggling to define itself as something other than what it used to be. Cleveland is no different, and our five decades without a professional championship — basketball, baseball, or football — had come to define us. Sports are everything in this country, and we could lay claim to nothing but heartache.

In November, we made national news again after a white Cleveland police officer killed a 12-year-old black boy carrying an air gun. In December, more headlines after then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visited our city just long enough to roll out a report chronicling a pattern of excessive force by Cleveland police.

“The trust between the Cleveland Division of Police and many of the communities it serves is broken,” the report read.

This weighs on us, as do multiple other bad-news stories illustrating the racial tensions we’ve tried for too long to ignore. The rooster is crowing at our door.

No sports team can fix these problems. We know that. The Cavs’ glorious season was not so much a distraction as it was an affirmation that there’s a lot more to us than what’s broken.

On Tuesday night, we lost the championship to the Golden State Warriors. Heartbreaking, yes, but we are so proud of this team, which suffered injury after injury and still made it to Game 6 of the NBA Finals.

Minutes before the final game ended, my friend Jackie turned to me and said, “My God, they just never give up.”

She’s right. We never do.

The following morning, The Plain Dealer‘s front page ran a full-length photo of an exhausted LeBron James under an unfortunate headline, “NOT ENOUGH GRIT.”

If you had seen me in the moments after I first laid eyes on that, you might have thought, “Hmm. I wonder what’s up with that woman who has storm clouds around her head and is firing lightning bolts from her fingertips.”

Fans’ tempers exploded. If there was one thing our Cleveland Cavaliers had demonstrated, it was grit.

A little past noon, Plain Dealer Editor George Rodrigue demonstrated another version of Cleveland grit by posting a column online agreeing with us.

“I wish we had said, ‘Grit was not enough,'” he wrote. “That’s what the editor who wrote the headline meant to say.”

This Clevelander — this fellow human — is ready to forgive.

We are a city like so many other cities, full of problems that were years in the making and will take many more years to solve. We are on the brink of something big or something irreversibly bad, depending on where we go from here. We are living the question of what comes next.

We’re all that. But we are also the city with a basketball team that only a year ago was so bad it got the No. 1 draft pick. A team that lost three of its star players this season to injuries. A team that just six months ago most thought would barely survive the regular season.

In the final series, we came this close to winning it all.

And on Wednesday, we couldn’t wait to welcome them home.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Keith Allison via Flickr

Go, Cavs, And Pass The Confetti

Go, Cavs, And Pass The Confetti

Now listen. We’re not going to work ourselves into a tizzy here in Cleveland because a columnist in Boston decided to launch his fiction writing career with a hit job on us.

OK, maybe we are, but let’s keep this meltdown brief, shall we? I love Boston and a few Boston sports fans, too, especially the one who is the father to two of our beautiful grandchildren. I’ve got the family peace to keep here. So go, Celtics — any time except right now.

After the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Boston Celtics in Game One of the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy made fun of us. A lot.

Our confetti-drop at the end of the game struck him as “a little needy.” We do this after every game, which I guess makes us really, really needy. To someone who thinks confetti is a window into the soul, I mean. That’s deep, man.

Shaughnessy also called us “a hungry place, peppered with people with hungry faces.” I’m trying to imagine what a hungry face looks like. I keep seeing Joe McKenzie’s hound dog eyes as he tried to talk me into a kiss in the summer between sixth and seventh grades. I’m going with that one.

On and on Shaughnessy went, describing us as a “sad” and “quiet” town that is either “dead or dying.” Remind me never to count on him to call 911.

The “quiet” thing I don’t get. My husband and I are still popping our ears after Saturday’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. The partying was so raucous and loud that we kept misunderstanding each other. During Green Day’s performance, for example, I thought he turned to me and yelled, “Ice your fat hair.” Turns out he said, “This is so great.” If we were a quiet people, I would have known that.

Now, I imagine some of you readers who don’t live in Cleveland might wonder why you should care about yet another out-of-town journalist’s trash-talking our town.

This isn’t just about Cleveland. This is about every misunderstood city in America that’s had three professional sports teams without a national championship for more than 50 years.

Granted, that narrows the pool somewhat — to exactly one, maybe — but we’re Midwesterners, and to make it all about us would suggest we’re sports fans in Boston.

OK, I winced as I wrote that because I’m breaking rule No. 1 of the Manual of Midwestern Manners, which instructs us to smile on the outside even when our hearts are curdling with revenge fantasies on the inside. To assuage my guilt, I’m going to go bake a casserole for a potluck somewhere.

On Tuesday, Shaughnessy told Cleveland’s WKYC-TV that he was sorry if we were offended. “There’s no new ground in there,” he said, referring to his column. “Nothing that hasn’t been said before.”

That’s some standard you got going there, Dan.

What this is really about is what it means to be a columnist these days. We are so needy.

There was a time when we wrote our opinions and they were published for a single day in the print newspaper and that was that. We’d get some angry calls and maybe some mean mail, but no one posted the worst picture of us ever online for a caption contest.

And we’re just not special anymore. These days, anyone with an opinion and a keyboard is a “columnist.” Our job performance is now measured not by the depth of our intellect or the breadth of our brilliance but by the number of online clicks, comments, and “unique visitors.”

By the way, dear readers, I want you to know I have always thought that each and every one of you is unique.

For most editors, any attention is better than being ignored. So we’re supposed to celebrate whenever the comments sections under our columns explode with stuff you wouldn’t say to a dog that has just lifted his leg over the toe of your Uggs. The new boots, the ones without the salt stains.

That stuff can play with your head. You might start to wonder: Maybe I do resemble my pug when I write about workers’ rights. Maybe my politics really have earned me the nickname Commie Connie. Maybe it’s true that I am a man-hating broom-flier with a closetful of sensible shoes.

Or not. Maybe you only worry about that if you’re a columnist in Boston.

Which brings us back to Shaughnessy for the most fleeting of moments. How time flies. As I write, the Cavs are now up 2-0 against Boston and are headed to the fine city that spawned our just-this-side-of-perfect son-in-law.

Grandma’s got her game on.

Go, Cavs.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Cleveland Cavaliers via Facebook