Blog

Last week I was unable to write due to my drill weekend.  Originally, I intended to put together some (hopefully) insightful thoughts on the 77^th anniversary of the D-day invasion, those will wait for the 78^th Anniversary.  However, I did come home Sunday and watched Saving Private Ryan.  One note of caution: do not begin watching that moving at 10:00 in the evening.  It’s a much longer movie than I remembered, and when it finished, it was no longer June 6^th.

This week I’m going to share some thoughts about baseball.  Why?  Sydney and I are going to watch the Indians host the Mariners this afternoon.  Plus, a few weeks ago, the movie “A League of their Own” was on TV.  Sydney asked, “Women can play baseball?”  So began another history lesson in our house.

It is Memorial Day 2021.  For some reason, I have found it difficult to write this weekend and I’m not particularly certain as to why.  Last Memorial Day I wrote about reflection and reaching out. 

May is my birthday month, and I really loved having a May birthday when I was growing up.  It broke up my year of receiving gifts into a nice triad: August – new school clothes (gifts); Christmas – obvious gift-receiving time; and pre-summer – my birthday! 

May is also a time of year I fondly recall some of the silliness connected to my maternal grandmother, Rosemary.  For as long as I can remember, she had a different view on how “old” someone was.  According to Rosemary, when you had a birthday, say it was your 10^th birthday, she would say that “you completed 10 years around the sun, and you are now in your 11^th year.”  To her, this meant that you were now 11.  This conversation continued every year, and she would repeat her viewpoint to everyone in the family.  We, the family, carried on Rosemary’s tradition after she passed away until, one day, the tradition ended abruptly.

When you were a kid, roughly between the ages of 4-10, did you and your friends compare one another by how tall you were in inches?  Among my daughters and their friends, this seemed to be their only concern until they reached the all-important 54” mark.  That’s the height one is officially tall enough to ride everything that Cedar Point has to offer.

For those of you who are either not from the Mid-West or an amusement park enthusiast, Cedar Point is located on the southern shores of Lake Erie.  When asked where I live, I often just tell people “near Cedar Point” instead of my actual town.  A simple internet search of “top amusement parks in the world” will have Cedar Point ranked in the top 10.  (I did find one search that did not include Cedar Point in their top ten.  I immediately dismissed the search results as “fake”).  Between the years 1997 – 2013 Cedar Point held the title of “Best Amusement Park in the World” by Amusement Today.

This weekend is Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day has had many different iterations throughout history.  Oddly enough the woman, Anna Jarvis, who organized the first observance of today’s version of Mother’s Day in the United States (1908), ended up petitioning against Mother’s Day for the latter portion of her life.  Interestingly, Anna Jarvis wasn’t a mother herself.  https://www.rd.com/list/history-of-mothers-day/

Do you like sports?  I do!  I remember when ESPN (and cable) first came to our area.  I was spending the night at my Grandparents’ house and they had this channel that would show sports 24 hours a day.  I recall my mother picking me up the next day and my Grandfather relaying my behavior “I heard a noise at 1:00, came out into the living room and he was watching racing!”  Now, it was Formula One racing which I’ve never seen before nor even knew it existed.  It was a race in some foreign land I couldn’t pronounce and to this day can’t even remember.  However, it was a sport and I loved it! 

In the area where I live, generally, a “house divided” refers to a residence that inhabits those that are fans of The Ohio State University Buckeyes and some that cheer on a team geographically north of Ohio.  I do not have that issue in my house – although my wife, who is sport agnostic, does like to push my buttons when she speaks of universities as only institutions of higher learning.  However, I do live in a divided house: half are extroverts, half are introverts.  This revelation, although not new to me, hit me especially hard this morning as I was continuously interrupted making breakfast.

Last weekend we laid my mother in-law, Connie Link, to rest in her final resting place.  Connie wasn’t just my mother in-law; she is someone I had the privileged to be part of my life since childhood – she was my Junior High Health and Reading teacher.  Being a teach for nearly 30 years, she touched the lives of many, many people.  A lot of them were able to express their memories of how Connie impacted their life and shared them with us, through the modern convenience of Facebook in this pandemic new world.  I must give a special shout out to my mother for collecting everyone’s comments and compiling them into the booklet she put together (yes, my mother reads my weekend writings every week).  My wife, Heather, read some of the comments at the grave side service we held.  Even as the rain fell (GREAT Ohio weather) I could hear some chuckles from under the umbrellas as Heather shared some of the memories and special descriptions former students had for Connie.

I began writing my weekly thoughts to you last Easter, nearly one year ago.  My initial purpose was to share information, be a resource if you will, to help us all not feel isolated.  My purpose quickly morphed into three tenets that I still try to achieve:  Can I provide something that is helpful?  Can I find something interesting to share?  And at the very least, can I make it entertaining?  I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, “Why do you write that stuff?  Why don’t you send out stuff on the markets?”  Honestly, you can get “stuff on the markets” nearly anyplace you want.  That being said, we are going to begin providing (compliance approved, of course) investment related material very soon.  We’re still trying to determine the best way to implement that process.  When I sit down to write to you for the time being though, I want to write about things in our lives, and get the focus off of investments.  To me, living a better life is not dependent on the investment markets.  We have some control over how we live our lives; we don’t have the same control over the markets.

Personally, I cannot believe it is nearly the end of March.  To me it seems like only “a couple of days ago” it was February and I was trying to find something really good for my wife’s birthday (which I didn’t find by the way).  Now – poof – in less than a week it will be April, Easter weekend and, of course, April Fools’ Day.  As a man raising two daughters, I will not let March past without touching upon Women’s History Month.