Tag Archives: Cleveland

Cuyahoga Falls

Cuyahoga Falls: (n) a city in Northeast Ohio, near Akron

 The reason essays are often long is because the author feels compelled to place the reader in the exact moment and space of a given time.

Suffice it to say, today I am talking about a season in our history when boys were dying in Vietnam, hippies were walking the streets and young lads and lasses from the Midwest were desperately trying to be neither.

I grew up in Ohio.

Ohio insists it’s a single state, but anyone who lives there knows differently.

If you lived in Columbus, you might as well be from Iowa, or any other Midwest hold-out to social progress.

If you lived in Cincinnati, you were more like Dixie, with grits in your teeth.

And to the far north was Cleveland, which desperately tried to imitate New York City, complete with crime and a filthy Lake Erie to mirror the polluted Hudson.

I lived right in the center.

No, it’s true. My hometown was exactly ten miles from the geographical center of Ohio. That in itself should have afforded me great honor, but I was stuck, like everyone else, trying to prove myself and do the best with the talent shoveled in my direction.

Mine was music.

But my music was not quite suited to the genre that was rattling and reeling in the time capsule of hippies and soldiers.

So one day, I wiggled my way into scheduling a coffee house in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio—very near Akron. I didn’t know much about the place and they didn’t know much about me.

So my little band, excited about actually going somewhere to play a road gig, dressed up.

For the guys, that was pants and a long-sleeved shirt with a tie.

And for the ladies—well, they basically wore their prom dresses.

We arrived at the coffee house, which was called Avalon, and everybody there was in bell-bottom blue jeans, t-shirts, with long hair and sneers.

It was a long night.

Every song we tried was met with chuckles and everything we said was ignored, as they turned to one another and carried on conversations.

I became angry, mainly because I was young, foolish and felt it was my right to be offended.

I told them they were a bunch of snobs. I also told them they didn’t have the wardrobe for it.

This was my first and only laugh of the night.

The proprietor of the coffeehouse stood to his feet and said, “Be cool, fool. You just don’t fit in here.”

He was right—while simultaneously being wrong.

Because if we’re waiting for everyone to mature or expand to be welcomed into our little utopia, we’ve missed the whole point of having one.

A utopia is meant to be a place where anyone is welcome without fear.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Cowtown

Cowtown: (n) a small town, especially one in a cattle-raising district in the western U.S.

 As a boy growing up in Ohio, the pecking order was very obvious.funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Cleveland was a city that was so metropolitan that it had pollution. Nobody talked much about Cleveland—it didn’t even really seem like it was part of Ohio. It was more like a piece of New York City, stuck up next to Lake Erie.

So for the people of Cleveland, coming down to Columbus was journeying to a Cowtown.

Now, to the folks in Columbus, there was a city just to the north, which was smaller and perceived itself to be intellectual. But for those who lived in the Capital, it was their Cowtown.

Westerville. Westerville looked ten miles to its north to find a village that was mostly farmers and a few people who commuted to the capital city for employment, called Sunbury, and considered it a Cowtown.

That was the Cowtown I lived in.

But Sunbury wasn’t going to put up with that, so we decided to pick on a little town called Centerburg, which we believed had barely emerged from the caves to discover fire.

Centerburg was our Cowtown.

Now, poor Centerburg had trouble. It needed some community to be its Cowtown, but most of the areas around them were the same size. So because a nearby burg, Johnstown, had an occasional murder, Centerburg decided to make it Cowtown.

Just outside Johnstown was a little spot in the road that had a couple of antique shops and a bait store.

Alexandria. It was the Cowtown of all Ohio Cowtowns.

The goal, I assume, was to make sure that even though you were going to be overwhelmed and disregarded by some larger metropolis, there had to be a less robust region that you could feel free to look down on due to their lack of sophistication.

Now, I thought it was something that just went on in Ohio, until many years later, I was sitting in a restaurant in Manhattan of New York City, and heard a waiter refer to Philadelphia as a Cowtown.


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Across

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practixdirtied by bigotry.

dictionary with letter A

Across: (adj.) 1.the motion of moving back and forth; e.g. I moved across the table  2. an expression of location; e.g. the store is across town.

I was trying to count it in my mind.

I think it’s about twenty-five. Yes, I have gone across this nation of the United States about twenty-five times in my life. Somebody asked me if I did all of this “jaunting” because I enjoy traveling.

Absolutely not.

I hate long drives. My butt gets tired sittin’ in my van–and how to stay regular on an irregular schedule has yet to be discovered by any mortal.

I was just never satisfied to believe what I hear.

Case in point: growing up in Ohio, I was taught that people in the south hated blacks. I was informed that folks who lived in California were all hippies. And New York City moved along so fast that if you stopped to catch your breath, you would probably get hit by a bus.

It’s just easy to sit at home and listen to all the tales about humanity and start thinking they’re part of your own experience instead of just rumors floating your way. That’s why we get the notion that “Asian people are good at math” and “Europeans make the best wine.”

Prejudice is not the by-product of an experience. It is the absence of one.

I wasn’t satisfied to listen to the tales of travelers who brought back THEIR rendition of the human race. I guess this is why I like the statement in the Bible where it says that “Jesus passed by.”

After all, you can’t sit your butt down in a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth and spout what you think about the world without going across the land to meet real people in their real situations. If Jesus hadn’t been itinerant, he would have been just another Jewish prophet instead of a friend to the world.

So when I went across this land to the south, I found out that people there didn’t hate blacks any more than folks in Cleveland.

  • Citizens of New York actually DO slow down–because honestly, there’s a lot of traffic jams.
  • And Bakersfield, California, has fewer hippies in it than any place in the world.

But you have to go there to find out. You won’t learn it on CNN or Fox News.

So perhaps my most joyous achievement is that I’ve gone across America, met her people and can truthfully tell you that I love them.

I can recommend getting your information from the horse’s mouth, instead of having it handed down to you from paws that just might be dirtied … by bigotry.