We’ll be direct. We are asking you to donate to Justin Bibb’s campaign for Mayor of Cleveland.

You may not live and vote in Cleveland, but if you live in Northeast Ohio, or even if you don’t, you have a vested interest in helping to put progressive, compassionate and energetic leadership in charge of our great city.

Justin Bibb is the kind of leader that we need in all our cities. He is smart, capable, honest and a tireless worker for society’s most vulnerable people.

For residents and voters in Cleveland this is an easy choice. Justin Bibb will put…

It’s a good thing we had the Feast of the Assumption celebration again this year here in Little Italy. It was looking pretty sketchy with the constant thunder boomers we’ve been having and their deluges of torrential tropical rain.

Two of four festival days were indeed wet, but I’m sure the restaurants and other merchants were pretty pleased after how bad the weather had looked and having to scrub the event last year due to COVID.

Nonetheless, the mess left behind where we live is substantial each year, so my wife and I do our part when we head out…

Dear Cousin Carol,

I know exactly what you’re thinking, and I have a pretty good idea what you will have to say about this letter. You’ll have a sparkle in your eye and say something cute and dry like, “Well, better late than never, eh?” That’s just the way you are, Carol, always the funny and good-natured, intelligent optimist.

But especially now I want to articulate exactly what you mean to me as a cousin, from the time I was a little boy and the whole time you knew me and insisted on calling me “Artie,” which I never minded…

Tick…tick…tick…tick…tick.

I was never a clock watcher, but that afternoon I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the plastic Elvis wall clock, his hips and legs swinging back and forth as the clock’s hands moved sluggishly around his guitar and mildly smirking face. I was a rabid Elvis fan, and one of the ladies at work saw the clock in Vegas and grabbed it for me. It was a perfect clock for me in every possible way, the one concession to frivolity in my otherwise quintessentially drab office.

But today Elvis’s gyrating hips just would not move fast enough.

I’d…

Summer 1970. 51 years ago.

Recently jettisoned from an agonizing four-year sentence of boarding school, the joyous pardon and release from purgatory birthed a spate of graduation debauchery. Then a summer of painting houses followed to gather cash, readying myself for college in the fall.

Southampton Beach was a getaway place to first recover from the revelry and then escape on weekends after work without worry. A friend knew about the oceanside sanctuary and told me about it, but shared the information as if it were a profound secret.

You could sleep out on the least accessible public beach there…

Stepping out onto the sidewalk along St. Honore, I pull shut the heavy tall green door to the courtyard where the entrance to our simple fourth floor walk-up hides from the street. We’ve been here so many times now; it feels like a second home. There is no pressure now to see or do anything but experience and explore the city as if we simply had a weekend off and were curious about what was happening here.

Even early in the day with not many people stirring, the air retains the familiar city scents, not entirely unpleasant either. Faint hints…

Great teachers have told us that you become what you think about most. You believe what you tell yourself, so it’s important to be very thoughtful about what it is that you are saying with your self-talk. That voice in your head is powerful.

As a musician I’ve been instructed that mental practice can be as effective as actual physical practice in learning a piece of music, so at roughly 2500 thoughts per hour, that’s a lot of practice time you can use to your advantage. But you need to be mindful and disciplined about it to do so. …

Original art by Joan E. Hargate

This is a good choice of name for our baseball team here in Cleveland. The art deco statues on the Hope Memorial (aka Lorain-Carnegie) bridge are iconic, and symbolic of the role we all need to play right now. We all need to be guardians of our democracy, that’s for sure.

A lot is under attack, so Guardian is an excellent choice of name and the logo is smart, as well. Now, if they could do something about the indescribably weird Slider cavorting around the ballpark, that would be really glorious.

It will take…