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

Going out in a pink casket

My nana went out in a pink casket. She lived the rest of her life in primary colors, mainly. She wore white orthopedic shoes, drably-colored coats and navy cardigan sweaters. She drove a powder blue Buick Skylark. She preferred sturdy things, and, having soldiered through the Great Depression, she covered everything in several layers of plastic--to preserve the already sturdy condition, of course.

But every so often she would betray the practical farm girl from New Castle, Pennsylvania that she was and indulge in the pink Cadillac of lipsticks. She cherished several pastel floral dishes. She loved an old fancy songstress like Edyie Gourme. She stopped to gawk at a poinsettia plant in a retail store window--so big and robust was the plant that it distracted Nana from the smartly-outfitted mannequins.

I was closest to my nana, much more than maybe anybody I've been closest to since she went out in a pink casket. In retrospect, I didn't spend very much time with her, hours logged and years counted. But I was known and adored by her in a way that was more overwhelming than any child could or should ever be loved by anyone other than their nana.

I have not felt the loss of my nana as acutely as I have felt other losses in life. Her mind unspooled and then went cascading off at the end of her 90+ years. She suffered and caused belabored suffering and I did not talk to her much after I got married, because I couldn't. She didn't remember me.

Still, I have since felt the ways that she has enriched my life and they reach me and affirm me in my blue station wagon, which she financed and of which she would have approved, reliable vehicle that I bought. My nana reaches me when I am singing off-key with my children, of which she would not have approved, gifted singer that she was.

She had taken care of all the business of her own funeral and burial, ten years prior to her death. She left notes, signed documents, filed them with the appropriate parties. She had chosen that particular vessel into which she would spend her time in rest eternal. She went out in a box with little roset accents and pearly touches.

I want to tell my Nana right now: I am fighting the battles she fought for all over again. I am slugging toward the finish line of this semester. I am pushing my Tempera-paint covered babies into the parts of their childhoods that they will remember vividly. I am entering another decade of marriage with a man she met before her memories faded. I am trying so mightily to do the practical, helpful thing and to wear the navy cardigan like a good soldier, but I know the fight that is in me. I am, after all, cut from the same cloth as my nana. I don't want to go out now. I just want the things that I undertake to finish with a flourish. I want to go out, always, in everything I do, in a pink casket.

Things I have pondered while watching "A Different World" on #netflix

- The women of Gilbert Hall did not have landlines in their room. Merely a payphone for the entire hall. I believed that this was the case for my parents but that this was still happening in the late 80s seems ridiculous.

- Sinbad has reddish hair.

- The students appear to have infinite time and an endless appetite for dancing, such that in broad daylight, there are consistently a handful of students dancing for no reason, around other patrons eating at The Pit.

- Julissa is 26 years-old and living in a dorm. Nope.

- Maggie (Marissa Tomei) is the inexplicably white girl at a Historically Black College. I know students who are not black attend HBCs. But she transferred to their journalism program. Really? Cosby was down with this?

- The character of Whitley Gilbert seemed so overblown and unfathomable when I watched this show as an 8 year-old. As a 34 year-old, I have known many a Whitley Gilbert.

- Architectural wedge haircuts were some pretty gnarly 'dos.

- Maggie didn't know if her law school boyfriend was going to visit; he hadn't called OR sent a letter (which she would have found in an open slot in her dorm lounge). So meta 1988.

- The Debate Club met on a Friday afternoon. Wrong again, people who wrote about fictitious college life. Fridays are for napping/laundry/napping while you forget about your laundry.

- Dwayne Wayne really immortalized those flip-ups.

- Lisa Bonet is such an extraordinary beauty and not a bad actress. I would like to see her in more movies. I really loved her in "High Fidelity."

- I actually remember watching the episode where Rudy Huxtable visits Denise and takes a shine to Whitley. I believe I reenacted the Vaseline-on-teeth scene with my sister, multiple times.

-I wish I could have been a student like Denise -- skating by on my matchless beauty and always befit of the flyest fashions. But then that would have been boring after, like, a day.

- Skirt/pants waistbands are literally inches from armpits.