Darkness before light on Opening Day

My hometown of Cleveland will experience quite a day next week, when the Guardians play their Home Opener two hours after a rare total solar eclipse.

Cleveland is a city in an ideal path for the eclipse, and the Land will be totally dark for nearly four minutes, starting at 3:13 p.m. on Monday April 8. Two hours later ... "Play ball!"

With extra tourists expected to be in downtown Cleveland for the eclipse, this Opening Day could be one of the most memorable in Cleveland history. But for me, I got to go with Opening Day, 1991, as my most memorable. 

Back on April 16, 1991, a few hundred St. Ignatius students, myself included, trekked two miles to Cleveland Municipal Stadium for the Indians' Home Opener vs. the Texas Rangers.

We students bought $5 tickets for the bleachers and saw the Indians lose 3-1 in what turned out to be a 57-105 season — the worst season in Cleveland Indians history. But to cut school for the only time in my high school career and not get in trouble because so many kids did it — that was pretty darn cool.

The attendance for that 1991 Home Opener was 46,606, even though the baseball capacity of the stadium was 74,000. The next day attendance was a mere 6,023. Before you knew it, a scenario of walking up on Opening Day for $5 tickets would be long gone.  

In 1994, the Indians moved to Jacobs Field, where they became a powerhouse and were in the World Series in 1995. If you build it, they will win — apparently. The Jake soon had 455 consecutive sellouts from '95 to 2001.

Mimicking the darkness of this year's Opening Day followed by the light of play, the Tribe experienced A LOT of darkness before stepping into the light. That's a pretty common narrative. I think about the crucifixion then the resurrection, and I personally know many people who've had dark times only to commit to not revisiting those and are having bright lives. 

Reminiscing about Cleveland Municipal Stadium, it's kind of wild how long that dreary stadium hung around. It opened in 1931 as the largest open-air venue in the world. It was a multiple-purpose stadium, then housed the Tribe until 1993 and the Browns from 1946-1995. It was totally outdated for a long, long time.

Even though Jacobs Field — now called Progressive Field — is the 10th oldest facility in Major League Baseball, I think it's still one of the nicer ballparks in the league. 

The "new" Cleveland Browns Stadium, AKA the Factory of Sadness, is the 12th oldest NFL stadium, being built on the site of Municipal Stadium and opening in 1999. There is talk about either putting $1 billion into renovations for the Browns Stadium or possibly constructing a dome in Brook Park.

But baseball and football are much different animals. In baseball, we have 81 home games as opposed to about 10 in football (considering the preseason and playoffs). The United States goes bananas for the NFL, while Major League Baseball is practically an artisan affair by comparison.

TV-wise, the NFL boasted the top 50 watched sporting events in 2023. For the top non-NFL sporting events, Game 4 of the World Series came in at 42nd place. Look, popularity between the NFL and Major League Baseball just isn't comparable.

But for me, Opening Day garners more hope than the Super Bowl. It's a symbol of spring and newness, and I am a devoted Cleveland Guardians fan. Yeah, we could talk about the economic ridiculousness of pro sports and how corporate they are, but win or lose, I genuinely enjoy the Guardians and the process of the 162-game season.

While winning always is nice, World Series, total eclipses — you can have them, sure, but there is a certain comfort, love and brightness when the first pitch comes at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario.

We are not our accomplishments

Editor's Note: The Snooze Button Generation originally published "100 Nonfiction Books I Recommend" in 2019. As we read more books worthy of recommending, the list continually updates. Today, "Never Enough" by Jennifer Breheny Wallace enters the Education category.

With my alma mater Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland praised on pages 195-199 in Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — And What We Can Do About It, it made it easy to recommend Jennifer Breheny Wallace's 2023 book.

The harsh truth is that achievement culture in schools often is toxic. Kids stay up all hours doing their schoolwork. They have a difficult time staying healthy. Many are disconnected, and they have an unsustainable lifestyle that, I believe, is an accidental and involuntary response to our cruel, billionaire-led, wealth-gap system of economics.

As a mom of three teenagers, Wallace explores this toxic culture and offers solutions for parents and educators. As a dad of two teen daughters and as a high-school teacher, I must say that she nails the culture we've been facing, but the solutions aren't anything earth-shattering.

It's real easy for parents to get wrapped up in competition and comparison, and so kids follow suit. I respond most to Wallace's parenting tips because, although I agree wholeheartedly with separating self-worth from achievement and unconditionally loving my daughters, I admit that I've talked about the college-admissions process so much, it's absurd.

By focusing so much on college, I think I undermined how important character, connection, communication and community are — among other things — in comparison to academics. Because the college-admissions process often is a divisive, self-centered exercise in disconnection, students and parents take it too seriously, and their values often become obscured by the vacuous and vague idea of "success."

We parents and educators can change our own behavior and attitudes, but we can't change the toxic individualistic culture our kids find themselves. Heck, a lot of this is old news. You've likely heard the stories of how pregnant ladies in New York City often battle for placements on waiting lists for preschools before their kids are even born. The madness often starts before birth.

Perfectionist parenting leads to perfectionist youths, and both are illnesses. We need to strive for purpose, not perfection, and, sadly, too many parents and students find themselves derailed by a culture that I continue to assert is a byproduct of "our cruel, billionaire-led, wealth-gap system of economics."

Perhaps my favorite part of Never Enough is the sense of hope that we have through genuinely connecting with our children and with positive individuals in our children's lives. However, it might be easy for Wallace to say that because she is in a position of privilege as a cultural oligarch herself.

Harvard-educated Jennifer Breheny used to be an associate producer at 60 Minutes, and Mike Wallace set her up on a blind date with his grandson, Peter. So Chris Wallace is her father-in-law. Maybe this is irrelevant, or maybe it's uber-relevant because we're living in the influencer, oligarch world, and she figured out how to be one of sorts with an extremely important topic.

And, hey, Wallace found herself interviewing Coach Mike McLaughlin, a teacher and soccer coach at St. Ignatius. Mad props! Coach Mike explained that the goal of the school is to have students "balance their own personal needs and goals with a responsibility to help others meet their needs and reach their goals, too."

I have discovered that true service, which can only involve a symbiotic relationship with those being served, is difficult to find. It can occur under the right circumstances, and St. Ignatius does its best to put students in a path of true service by requiring it and urging them to develop relationships with those they're serving.

"You don't have to fly to Haiti and build a shelter to do meaningful volunteer work," Coach Mike tells Wallace. And so I wonder why so many elite students don't actually do volunteer work close to home, or if they do, why does it have to be something grandiose they put on their college transcripts?

Maybe some just never realized they actually have the ability to make an impact in others' and their own lives, and that only can start in the home and in their actual community. 

Accidental wisdom seeps in

Patience is the companion of wisdom. A wise person sees the big picture and recognizes that they are not God or the most important person in the world.

Kindness is wisdom. Wise people are also humble.

True wisdom comes from sifting through all the noise and finding simplicity at its core.

I've discovered that it's not effective to actively pursue wisdom. Rather, wisdom seeps in over time. Wisdom is more of a feeling than a thought.

At least that's what I'm feeling nowadays, in which I've had a pretty good stretch in life, realizing the phrase "accidental wisdom" probably is redundant. Perhaps wisdom only can be accidental.

While I've been accused of being a bit too woo-woo and partially agree with that, I've been a bit more relaxed of late and have reprioritized my activities and what's important to me. Quality time with my beautiful wife and daughters tops the list of my daily goals. And then, bike rides and walking around El Dorado Park's Nature Center or other worthwhile landscapes, whenever possible, have been my focus.

C'est la vie. Why concern myself with trivial things when I can be looking at the ocean, trees, lakes or turtles?

I had much different feelings for most of my life. Not only did I eschew nature, but I reveled in the glory of manmade constructions, such as The Rock (AKA New York City).

After getting a master's in journalism in The City and working in newspapers for 12 years in New York and L.A., I was an inevitable newshound for most of my life. While I stay abreast of the world's happenings just once daily on the AP News app and German's DW (Deutsche Welle), I think another source of the main sense of calm, and wisdom, I've been experiencing comes from my distinct lack of social media, TV news and scrolling.

So as we head into a presidential election in which I honestly believe is an embarrassing media-gross process and event for Americans, I simply refuse to follow it. Nope. Disregard. Dismiss. Not taking the click bait. I've got an actual life to lead here. I got trees to see.

I don't have any regrets having that 12-year career in newspaper journalism during a time when newspapers existed. I still vehemently argue that we need quality journalism as a part of our nation's checks and balances. Unfortunately, that journalistic ideal is a pipe dream, but it would be nice not to have the Washington Post owned by Amazon and The New York Times telling me the time length each article takes to read on its app.

Henry David Thoreau once said, "If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need to read of another."

So, yeah, I think Biden/Trump, again, is just the icing on the cake that shows the news cycle we witness in the United States is not only ridiculous, but toxic. It just feels so good to give myself permission to dismiss it and not get hung up on the painful news of the day.

It took me a while getting here, but I guess it's accidental wisdom. Like rings around trees, my wisdom has been sneaking up on me and helping me enjoy my days more and not wasting them on the dreadful news of steamboats blowing up.

Quick nunchi in Costco

If you can't beat 'em, join Costco.

After eschewing Costco for most of my life because it symbolized lame overconsumption in my mind, I finally succumbed and joined.

"Wait, you never had a membership," the clerk said as I signed up.

"No, never."

"Really?"

Do I look like a Costco member? What does that even look like? Why didn't he believe me?

I liken myself to an artiste of sorts, kind of like Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, downtown New York, East Village or Lower East Side. Why would I be in freaking Costco?

Is there some sort of spiritual connection happening in Costco as we revel in oversized pot pies, 3-pound bags of tortilla strips and 15 packs of coconut water? Is God speaking to us?

Eh, I'm not so sure that exists because it seems so mindless. Do we even notice each other as we grab our 40 packs of spring water and 10 packs of Kleenex? Are we supposed to notice each other? How do I blend in among these big-ass pumpkin pies and chocolate cakes?

In stark contrast to my foray into Costco, I just read a small book called The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success by Euny Hong. Nunchi has no true translation in English, but it's perhaps best described as "reading the room" or seeking first to understand or, for me, finding power in not speaking.

I suppose I take a lot of American culture for granted, such as self-promotion and the myth of individualism. On the other hand, I don't know if I can accept Costco. On some level, that big ole warehouse just ain't right!

Do we really need all of this stuff? Isn't it a bummer that so much of our culture is disposable? Do you think I will use three cans of Reddi-wip, or is that two and a half cans too much?

While rolling my supersized shopping cart in Costco, my mind drifts to the nunchi book and how nunchi differs from empathy. While I take it as a given that one should strive for empathy, Hong questions that.

Empathy puts the focus on one's self other than the actual person. We try to "put ourselves in their shoes." But shouldn't we really just listen, soak in what the person is saying and allow them to be seen and heard?

I've often chastised myself for overtalking. I am just so hilarious and insightful that it's best that I talk over as many people as possible so I can be beheld in all of my glory. ... Uh, not the best look.

So as I push my oversized shopping cart, I get out of my head and notice what I see. People appear jostling for space and time. Many do not, or cannot, consider the others around them. This is consumption. This is California. This is Costco.

I do not have any answers, but I'm developing questions. Are we just members of the consumption class? If it's disposable, does it have any worth?

Why do I rush so much? Why I am happiest when my mind is blank? Why must you get a three-pack of guacamole when I just want one?