What #ALLinCLE means to me

I've been digging deep trying to figure out why this NBA championship means so much to me, why every floor seat of my heart seems sold out to the Cavs. It's an odd condition, this late b-ball season fever. Especially now, when I've lived the better part of my life away from Cleveland, Ohio. My reason is, superficially, one that many who grew up in Cleveland share--few of us have ever seen a pro sports championship for our hometown in our lifetimes. But I think this particular championship speaks to a larger narrative, the bigger story that kids from the rust belt know well. When you grow up in a place (think: Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh) where the industry has been steadily leaving since WWII, where the white flight epidemic has been dismantling the rich cultural vestiges of a city, where the uniform offered to the majority of black men is an orange jumpsuit or a suit for his funeral, the hope that Lebron James has offered to Cleveland is a hope of a certain resurrection. His story, the son of a single mother who was given a remarkable athletic gift, inspires us to remember not to buy the lie. The lie that steel was our only export when we know that we manufacture more heart, more resilience on any given day as gritty Mid-westerners than Steph Curry pops out his mouthguard. The lie that bombed-out neighborhoods preyed upon by subprime lenders cannot recover when we know our incredible power to hold Wall Street accountable and to do right by our neighbors. The lie that young people are all bound for destruction, corruption, or death when we know that Gina deJesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight survived the worst kind of evil and haven't moved elsewhere--they've remained in the city that loved them and will continue to honor their matchless courage. No man or woman, not Lebron James, not Amanda Berry, not Moses Cleveland (the guy who "invented Cleveland"), can single-handedly lay claim to the renaissance of a city or its industries. It is by our hope -- an illogical, irrational, indefatiguable hope--by which we will be known.

It hurt when Lebron James made his Decision to "take his talents to Miami." At the time, it seemed like an impossibly arrogant statement. (The man never runs the risk of being humble.) In retrospect, I hear the echo of a different chorus, though. He may have taken his talents to Florida, but he stored his beating heart in the Ohio that raised him, a state whose monicker was once "the heart of it all." To me, "All in CLE" is more than a clever hashtag that will earmark a certain set of games in history. It's not just the condition that we fans are "all completely invested." It's that we all, we in every zipcode and every exurb and every far-removed pocket from Cleveland, are actually all IN Cleveland. Because that is where our hearts live and from where our exhaustless hope derives.

Back to Believeland Tuesday. I'll hear you there. #ALLINCLE

Photos by Fr. Patrick Anderson

On being a one car family

We are a family of four with one car. Before I go further, I want to be clear: this is not a thing. This is not a slow cooking movement. This is not the capsule wardrobe gimmick. You will likely not find a One Car Family Ideas board on Pinterest.

This is also not a ponzi scheme or some other elitist scam for the 1%. This is written with full awareness that to own even ONE car is a privilege not enjoyed by a great majority of the world's population, nevermind an ability to fuel one's car on a regular basis plus the Nationwide Auto Transportation fees, etc.

This is, however, something of a lifestyle choice in an overprivileged overconsumptive sovereign nation and one I would choose over and over again. Do you like how I just cleared my throat for three straight paragraphs?

I've been asked by several people about being a one-car family, which appears to be something of a distinction in the carpool lanes in which I idle. I've thought quite a bit about this and what this says about me: that people would assume this would pose difficulty for us. Fair enough, I say. Because both adults in our family work outside the home in a geography where public transportation is not accessible/reliable for our purposes. Because we send our kids to a school that is not serviced by big yellow schoolbuses. Because we live in an age where 3-car garages are becoming standard in newly constructed homes.

So, I'll claim it as a thing--our thing. We are a one-car family. We have only ever been a one-car family. I brought no car to the relationship. My hubby inherited a green Honda CRV from his parents when we married, but she has since died (RIP Green Bus) and now we drive what I am told is the official car of the New England lesbian: a Subaru Outback. And we love her.

I'll also fully disclose that my hubby and I also own a mo-ped which he is crazy kind enough to drive much of the year to work and back.

There are many obvious perks to being a one-car fam. We pay less in auto insurance than if we owned, operated more vehicles. We only ever have to gas up one vehicle (the mo-ped uses less than $3/week in gas). When we lived in the city, I took the train everywhere, even when I had a double stroller for which I apologize to all who had to make room for me and my Hummer on the T. Now that we don't live near public trans, we work hard to economize our trips instead of just going out whenever we feel like it.

There are some less obvious perks, though, and these are the ones I value most. After speaking with another family who enjoys being a one-car fam, we agreed that there is a heightened communication system that is necessary with owning one car. Simply put: you have to share more. You have to share where you're going, what time you'll be home. I'm sure folks with multiple vehicles do this, but, in the case when my hubby drives the mo-ped to work, I have to stay mindful of the weather patterns. If it sleets, rains, or heaven forbid snows, I know we'll be packing up the kids in their jammies and schlepping downtown in the car to pick up Daddy. I love this about being a one-car family. We spend a lot of time catching up in the car. We work together as a family to keep it clean, inside and out.

Because of Loverpants' and my disparate schedules, we don't often share meals. Instead, we share the wide open road, sharing pieces of our day as we both gaze in the same direction, with our little backseat drivers chiming in and driving us absolutely nuts. And I would not have it any other way.

On siblings, neck strangles, and advantages

"That was nice, Baby Girl," I said after I saw her putting her brother into an affectionate neck strangle. "I gave [Little Man] a hug and told him he did a good job," she said.

It wasn't that she knew he did a good job; she spent the entirety of the T-ball game sifting through the nearby stream for minnows.

It wasn't that this was our routine after games: hugs and attaboys.

I think it was that she knew he needed it. Siblings can sense these unspoken needs in a way that is hard to qualify or quantify but which seems as true and clear as a car emerging from the car wash. Perhaps that is what siblings are: people who have come through the same wash cycle, people who've been scrubbed by the same soap, buffed by the same brushes, people who entered and exited from the same places. And sometimes they're not even biological.

My friend Haddy says she loves "to see siblings becoming." I think this is perfectly put. After just a week at home with my kids on summer vacation, I love to see them becoming so much more than the girl and boy who were knit together in the same pouch. Their identities as singular punks are evolving just as surely as the identity they share as a sibling set: they are whole people and they are part of a whole greater than themselves. They share a horizontal relationship that will be recognized with confirmations, like, "Ah, of course, you are his sister," and, at times, with incredulity "Oh! He's your brother?!"  that I'm sure will follow them well into their adulthood.

I am grateful to have witnessed their early moments of gelling and the inevitable moments where they beat the tar out of one another. I am overcome sometimes how two people who didn't get to choose one another for five years continue to choose one another: as playmates, as best frenemies.  I think about the disadvantages they have, living so many hundreds of miles removed from any family. How they don't know many of their grands and aunties and uncles and cousins in anything more than monochrome, in one dimension.

But then I think about the great, immeasurable advantage of just having a sibling with whom to suffer these really weird parents. Even if they have nothing in common, have disparate life goals, have no abiding interest in pursuing a meaningful relationship with one another--siblings have the goods on one another. They understand how each other came to be, far better than their parents could ever fathom. They will know the ticking of each other's hearts, not just the steady rhythmic beats but the wild, erratic hiccups and dips and the soul-thirst for a hug after a T-ball game, where upon a little brother, aka "Little Bother" asked the snack provider for an extra juicebox. "For my sister."