Downtown Dog

2010-03-01 Downtown Dog

Enzo barks noisily at the grey squirrels whose tails wag amidst the bare cottonwood trunks to tease him. I try to think of Enzo in new surroundings. Could he make the transition to downtown dog?

Enzo is now one year old. He weighs a hefty 15 pounds and sheds moderately. His freckles remain part of his personality that joins in with the Irish part of our family (Mark’s side), and certainly his ability to pout and use his deep brown eyes can only come from the Italian side of the family, not withstanding the fact that he is an English breed.

Given his size and his “cute” factor, I have to wonder how he might survive if Mark and I were to move downtown in several years. Enzo would be 6 or 7 by then. Maybe he wouldn’t survive, so I imagine Enzo in present day living in a home in future time.

Washington Park would be complete, women in tank shirts, walking dogs of all sizes. Enzo would strut into the fray, as he did in puppy class, and knowing of his good looks and charm, simply bat his long eyelashes and wait for the women to come and scratch behind his ears, while he simply whiled away in the sunshine. It happens so often now, young girls argue over who “gets to walk Enzo” and who get to pet him first, and who Enzo likes best. I shy away from telling any of them the truth.

Then the SCPA would let out, and Enzo would anxiously await the steady stream of students pouring out the school doors. He would be perturbed by trombones and trumpets playing when the windows were open in Spring. He would be fascinated by the girls whose giggles carry them to their cars.

The groomer down the street would have opened up shop next to the old Post office, which would now be a bar with white washed exterior appropriately called the Post Office. Such that, when I tired of my long summer afternoons of writing, I would scoot out of the house with the excuse of “having to go to the post office.” The groomer would let Enzo take shade inside her facilities while I took comfort in a cold beer.

And while Fountain Square is off limits to dogs (the Lady doth protest too much through her spray of water), Findlay Market would welcome Enzo with open sausage casings. He would bask in the sunshine outside of Madison’s Produce, catch droppings outside of the Eckerlin’s butcher shop, from those who choose to eat their city chicken or goetta on site, and certainly lick up a few drops of fig-orange gelato just outside the doors of Dojo Gelato. He would even be known to sniff out a few good vintages at Market Wines. I did originally consider calling him “Pinot” after my favorite wine.

He would saunter with me over to Grammer’s, the once venerable and now resurrected beer hall, and scoop up remnants of popcorn on the floor from the night’s previous improve show. We had been calling him the Hoov-dog for his abilities to transform himself into a vacuum cleaner, sans the filter, so Grammar’s might be open to Enzo working part-time, like Dr. Seuss’s Robert the Race Horse, who went to work for the police force.

And because Enzo is a literary-minded pup (he was named after a character in a book), we would spend many hours at the Mercantile Library. Of course, I would have had to purchase a membership there. It had always been on my to-do list, I was just waiting until they offered me an honorary membership after I published a few more books.

Enzo, a healing dog in our family, would certainly do the same. Perhaps provide a respite for the homeless man, with a lost job, lost children, but somehow able to connect with his inner spirit and feel the love that Enzo could give. Its been said that dogs are a mirror of their owners, and if this is true, then I would certainly follow in Enzo’s paws to learn compassion in way that one does not practice in the suburbs.

His soft fur would warm even the coldest hearts, yet his escape from the backyard at anytime might prove to be injurious to such a dog as ours. We have domesticated him so that he can function in this crazy household. Of course, if he survived a house full of teenagers, for a dog that is akin to surviving the streets.

At evening’s end, as we strode home from a day around downtown, Enzo would protect me from any perceived danger. I would hope to do the same.

Lewis and Clark

Last night, I was reclining in what I refer to as my “Queen’s chair.” Mark was out with a friend at a college basketball game. Kaitlyn had gone to bed long ago and Davis more recently. Shannon had just returned home from work, and quickly headed upstairs to the loft to puzzle over her government books and calc notes. The family room was eerily quiet, despite Bob Costas gushing over Shaun White at the Olympic games, in what appeared to be a fake fire and a false living room.

I thought of my time living alone, as a single gal in her twenties, and again, as a single mom, in her thirties, with a toddler. Nights used to frighten me when I was little. I would make my sisters come to the bathroom with me, even though they were in my care. Even as a babysitter, alone, in strange home, with children entrusted to my care, I would let the boogie man get the best of me.

When I turned 10, my family’s home had been burglarized the night of the showing after my grandfather passed away. The police told us later, that crooks actually scrutinize the obits for instances where they can make a quick score, knowing that no one would be home. I had been the first one to pass through the breezeway door, with our neighbor, Aunt Kay, behind me. As I approached the heavy oak door leading to the house, I found it ajar, with several chunks of wood removed in beaver-like fashion. Aunt Kay came up quickly behind me, understood what had happened and quickly shooed me away. We could hear someone opening a window in a back bedroom (it was a small ranch), and voices trailing out across the back yard.

Luckily, we never came face to face with these crooks, but the incident stuck with me in my later years. Each time I would return home from somewhere, the prospect of the front door being pried open always crossed my mind.

During college, young women hear warnings everyday about rape, violence, break-ins. I felt like my entire college career was spent with eyes in the back of my head at night. Of course, there were plenty of times when I should not have been out at night, or at least that late, and therefore, I had every reason to be looking over my shoulders.

We lived a few blocks off campus my junior and senior year, in a four unit brownstone. I lived on the bottom floor and was alone that summer until a roommate would join me in the fall. Next door, two girls I knew from the nursing program, took up living quarters. We used to peer out the window to speak to each other, that’s how close the brownstones were. But one night, as I was strolling through my apartment, I caught a glimpse of someone peeking into my window from the ground level. My heart raced. I called my girlfriends next door. We kept each other on the phone, ensured that each of us had locked our doors and windows and another roommate ran upstairs to use the neighbor’s phone to call the police. Even when the police arrived, I was still shaking, challenged in opening the door.

Incidents such as these were floating in my mind that night in the Queens chair, as Mark and I had recently toured Over the Rhine, looking at single family homes that would soon be on the market, available for rehab. A builder we knew of from Loveland had taken us on a tour of a four block radius surrounding Washington Park. For anyone who did not follow the news, that area had been and continued to be a problem area with blighted buildings and homeless. There was so much effort in resurrecting what was once a glorious past in that part of town, and Mark and I had been considering being a part of a glorious, if long awaited future.

But I wondered, if I was sitting home, alone, at night, in downtown’s Over the Rhine, waiting for Mark to come home, would I feel safe? Would the popping of the popcorn in the microwave cause me to think gunshots? Would the wind’s rattling of old windows cause me to think, some one is at the door. And if someone really was at the door, how would I respond? Living in a building of condos versus a single family home, I could wrap myself in a blanket of security, with alarms, other neighbors and the height of the buildings. But the blanket itself would also turn into a barrier that would keep us from crossing the divide between living for myself, as Meriwether Lewis once wrote, or living for mankind. If we are going to be pioneers, then we should blaze the trail ourselves.

"I had in all human probability existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world ... I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended ... I resolved in future, to redouble my exertions ... to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."

- Meriwether Lewis, August 18, 1805, on occasion of his 31st birthday

Welcome to Generation U

Friday, January 22, is my birthday. On my birthday, I try to write something profound, prolific, pertinent or poetic. I have covered Roe v. Wade, as well as widowhood, grief, parenting and aging. As I have aged (read “grown wiser”), I have railed more against perceived injustices in this world, or in my life. My topic today has been stewing for quite some time as I read an article in the newspaper about downtown and Cincinnati leaders attracting a new creative class of young professionals to live and work in the urban core.

Recently, Agenda 360 made headlines through a grant they were awarded. Agenda 360 has a mission to “transform Cincinnati USA, by the year 2020, into a leading metropolitan region for talent, jobs and economic opportunity for all who call our region home.” I can’t believe they have given themselves ten years, by then, I may have moved elsewhere. Anyhow, their recent grant was won for the purpose of, amongst other job and living creations and additions, to “add 150,000 20-34 yr olds to the workforce.”

Next, I am researching a few volunteer opportunities, for myself and family and stumble across Give Back Cincinnati, whose mission is to enhance our communities through engaging young volunteers and developing leaders by providing unique community engagement opportunities. Give Back Cincinnati is designed to attract members ages 18-35 that live and/or work in the Cincinnati and surrounding communities.

My point here is that while I live in the suburbs, in a few years time, I want to live and work downtown. But somehow we don’t figure into too many plans to do so. My husband and I are part of the U Generation. We have resigned from our membership in the Me Generation, Generation X and Gen Y. Based on the year I was born, I lost out on the opportunity to be a part of the baby boomer generation, for which I am grateful to my parents for holding off on sex for a while. That I would be considered a “baby boomer” when I am fifty is really abhorrent. And I never felt like a part of the Generation X either, as they were considered the “slackers.” Ask my kids. Our household motto is “no slacking.” This may have originated from my Army father, or my willingness to work at McDonald’s in my youth where I was taught, you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” Finally, we are not Generation Y or Next or Echo Boomers or Millennium babies. Just know that we are not.

Generation U encompasses three major points: The first was brought to my attention by a Ralph Smith, when quoting Psychology Today, wrote about federal employees who took retirement and then were hired back. He was not supportive of this policy, but made a point in calling them Generation U for unretired. In this current economic climate, we find that not so startling. But unretired is also part of our plan by the time we hit 50. To be considered unretired would be the utmost complement. My father was forced into retirement from the family business, but he went on to work in real estate and for 20 years has been the chairman for the local housing authority. We did that generation (the greatest) a disservice by calling their post-children lives “retirement”. They, and others in our grandparenting family trees, did anything but.

The second point is that Generation U is an about face from the Me Generation. We find fulfillment in serving others, alongside of serving ourselves. We intend to rise above racism, class warfare and the age gap to reach out into other areas in need. That reaching out to helps prop up ourselves as well. We do this with a clear conscience of having raised conscientious children (we hope) and no longer having to be home for when the boyfriend comes to visit or the kid needs a ride to basketball.

And finally, we are the U because we will be in position to want more from our communities demanding they take on a more urban nature. Sidewalks, locally owned businesses, a mixed-income level neighborhoods. Such surroundings our parents founded or grew up with, such environments we eschewed. We wanted new, shiny, bright, big backyards. Some wanted to buy toilet paper in bulk. According to Bill McKibben, “Parasociologists followed shoppers first through the supermarket, then through the farmers' market…When they followed people around the farmers' market, they were having, on average, 10 times as many conversations per visit.” I have always adhered to my civic duty by not shopping at Sam’s. Those settings never created for me a feeling of home and connection. We had to host Euchre parties to do that, and even then, we still would not have known our neighbors anymore than we would have known the cards in their hand.

Moving downtown after living in the suburbs will, for both of us, be a lot like our second marriage. We are older, wiser and bring to the atmosphere a new set of experiences. We will risk more, and share more. Our love is deeper, stronger and our connection to whatever will call home will be passionate because we understand how fleeting life is. We will be looking to downsize, downtown, where neighbors are shopkeepers, and business owners are friends.

Perhaps the number of Generation U hoping/choosing to relocate to the urban core is relatively small. But recently, after a night of drinking and dancing with our close friends, we had them nearly convinced. What if there were more parties and organizations that hosted events designed to attract Generation U (us)? Softening up the hardliners that hold fast to their fences with a little booze just might get Generation U to see that life does not end at the turnaround of the "U", there is a whole upside to explore.

What Would You Call It?

It is new year again. It seems every January I try to reimagine my life. Though the details continue to elude me, the dream stays alive. I am writing. We are traveling. We live downtown. We call it home, only because I have grown up enough to know that wherever I have been in my life, I have called it thus. Amherst, Akron, Cincinnati, Oceanside, Portland, Seattle, Loveland. Home.

I sit at Panera, trying to conjure up images of walking the streets in my winter boots, stadium coat, hats that I didn’t use to be fond of wearing, but now wear them everywhere because I finally have a haircut that can withstand hathead.

I text my husband, “Can you stop in on your way to work at the hospital?” If we lived downtown, he’d be at work in minutes. But we are suburbanites. How we got here, is the one story. How we arrive at another place, will be another.

Anyhow, he asks, “How long will you be there?”

“I’ll wait for you,” or until a new idea takes hold of me and my fingers begin to fly across the keyboard, in which case I will be here all day, or until the next kid pickup.

While on the Internet, I note too that I am “just checking in on the Quarter (The Gateway Quarter)”. This has become our pastime. While most people dream about the next golf course they will pursue or next beach they will inhabit, we dream of downtown. Actually, given our past experiences of life cutting short, we have already done the golf courses, the beaches. They offer no stretch for us, unless we are trying to achieve scratch scores or sunburns. I recall telling my son that his now deceased father would want him to go to the high school where he can best grow.

I can think of no better example of this, than to tell our kids, we want to move back downtown someday. Of course, for us it is back, only in the sense that we would be moving back into the city limits, which we both lived in off and on during our twenties and thirties (ok, maybe not thirties).

After a few phones calls, Mark realizes that he cannot meet me at Panera, not even for coffee, which I have already poured, part caffeinated and part decaf, for fear my mind could not keep up with my fingers. We decide to call it quits on the rendezvous and see each other in the morning. He is on call at Christ. If we lived downtown, I could see him for dinner. If we lived downtown, I would not be here at Panera.

He texts back a reply to my original message. “Is that what we are calling it now (the Quarter)?”

I reply, “Not sure…should we just call it home?”


Our lives crossed paths after our first spouses died, both of cancer, Mark’s wife Susan, courageously lived with lung cancer (though not a smoker) for five years. He has three girls, who were teenagers when they became mine, Cheryl, now 21, Shannon, now 18, and Kaitlyn, now 16. Devin, my husband endured a battled with leukemia and a BMT for three years. I have one son, by Devin. His name is Davis, and he was ten when he was blended into the mix. Now, he showers twice a day, like the rest of them. And we are in a position to reconsider the places we call home.

I wrote a book about my first husband, our life separate and together, his cancer fight, my reluctance to becoming a single mother and widow. No one wants to be called a widow, especially when you are 35. Three years later, Mark and I met. Three years after that we married. Three years later I am writing again.

I rather tired from my readers and friends and family who were always asking about when the next book was coming out. I contemplated the same, always frustrated that I could not respond quick enough to think that I was going with my gut feeling. I felt like I had to keep thinking about it. And if I had to keep thinking about it, then that topic was probably not the best option for me.

There was so much to consider, so much rich material when you grow up in a large Italian Catholic family. There is religion. There is ethnicity. There was my father’s family shoe store. There were my mother’s cookies. There were mental health issues. There is my mother’s dementia and my father’s Parkinson’s. Through it all, I could write another “cause” book, one that promotes understanding of cancer, caregiving, leukemia, death, grief, widowhood. But honestly, it would not differ too much from a Sunday Night Lifetime Movie. And honest to God, given the events of the past two months (see previous journal entry (sundowning), I could not imagine giving of myself to a cause that would consume my energy in any negative fashion.

I grew up in small town in northern Ohio. I love Amherst, but only now. It small town nature could not contain my wanderings or my attention deficit disorder, or my need to plod on a path separate from “Are you another Januzzi? Geez how many more are there of you at home?” or responding to the incessant berating by classmates, “Get your shoozies at Januzzi’s”. And while I now treasure those lines, they are forever etched in my lifeline, as a teen, my first and only reaction was to cut and run.

Amherst was then, by no means suburban. It has its own small town charm, the sandstone Capital of the world. A few Easters back, the kids, Mark and I walked uptown from my parents home, with our new puppy in tow. I snapped a picture of the kids standing in front of town hall, made entirely out of sandstone, in front of a millstone made of the material for which the town was famous for. My kids still dispute the fact and think that the town then was famous enough with the exploits of my siblings and I, but I will leave that to the general public and the retired principals of schools we attended.

They have heard stories of daring rooftop escapes by my sisters, hanging out the pool at the neighbor’s house, whose pool was in full view of my parents’ upstairs bedroom, skinny dipping at Andy’s dad’s beach house, despite the fact that my dad’s friend lived next door and was often complaining about the kids who partied there late at night. There are rumors of bus barn painting, and singing something about Vermillion and their donkeys, following a tough ninth grade football team loss and a suspension of cheerleading privileges for a time. There are also rumors of skipping lunch room for maple crème sticks from Kudrowskis bakery. The list is endless.

I often thought my kids missed out on the opportunity to grow up in a small town and I hope they read this with the intention to do so, to stay out of any areas which do not have a community feel to them. To be on the lookout for towns that are connected by sidewalks and families and family businesses.

During the month of December, I spoke only twice to my neighbors. Despite the many family hardships we were enduring underneath our roof, the only two women that I would have reached out to, had moved away. We all busied ourselves with the holidays, prided ourselves on getting up our Christmas lights, waving to the neighbors who were doing so at the same time as we, and congratulated ourselves on making the Christmas card list of people we hardly knew anymore.

Inside our home we were dealing with some of the more serious teenager issues and neighbors who didn’t know how to respond the first time let alone again. We were dealing with my mother who’s dementia had caused her some depression, lack of eating, too much sleeping and how would we handle encouraging my father and she to move somewhere where they could get the care they need. Mark had shoulder surgery, and I had pulled every muscle in my back. The roof was caving in on the place I had called home.

I had lived in that home for ten years. Devin and I had purchased the home, following his diagnosis and subsequent return to Cincinnati for his job. We were grateful at the time to be in the place where relatives and friends could lift us up. New to the neighborhood, we all bonded, as our children were of the same age, each new family became our family too. We had grown up that way, my mother always welcoming us to bring new friends and boyfirneds home, mostly they came because of the Sunday brunch. We had a lot more friends because of mom’s cooking. I suspect mom did too.

The home sat on a .5 acre lot. It was beautiful, with lots of sunlight. Over the years, decks were removed to open up to backyard living space of putting greens and fireplaces. And it was always home, for the kids, as they became one family. I took offense when kids chose to spend the day at someone’s else’s home thinking they were forsaking this place I called home for the comfort of someone else’s.

Mark and I met through my neighbors Mary Kay and Mike. Their children were the same ages as Mark’s girls, and they enjoyed a friendship was the fruits of the crossover of grades at school, lunch room duties, fundraisers, etc.

Mark and I were never the conventional couple. When we married, we had a wedding weekend, because we could never quite settle on a single approach to the ceremony, the party, the setting. We had one ceremony, two parties, three cakes and a lot of potatoes leftover from lobsterbake, potatoes which are still sprouting at our home on the lake.

What, you ask, you have a home on a lake? And you are considering moving downtown where the crime rate continues to rise at the same level of the smog on an August day downtown?

And I answer, “Well, yes.”