Try as I might, I will likely never experience sweet summertime in quite the same way as I did when I was a kid. Growing up in University Heights made for a quintessential childhood thanks to young families, iconic block parties, homes mere feet from one another, and neighborhood amenities (Purvis Park, anybody?). By the time the temperature reached the 50s, my siblings and I would fill up our tiny inflatable pool with ice cold water from the hose, willing warm weather to come faster. The snowy east-side winters had us foaming at the mouth for a hint of heat.
A perfect summer day in University Heights began with the neighborhood crew dodging traffic on our bikes across Warrensville Center Road with our towels swinging around our necks. We would pull up to the pool and flash our passes as we strutted past the cute lifeguards and headed to the snack bar. Of course, we earned our sno-cone money by babysitting the even younger kids on our block. As John Mulaney once mused: “13 when I’m 10? That’s just like hiring a slightly bigger child. That would be like if you’re going out of town for a week and you paid a horse to watch your dog.” Times were a little different in the early 2000s.
Afterwards we would bike home, sunburns in tow, and head to our various evening activities (after putting up our AIM away messages, obviously). Looking back, summertime was a blur of high dive cannonballs and neighborhood games of kick the can. As a family we’d go to countless Tribe games, late night dinners at Pizzazz, baseball practice at Forest Hill and end-of-year team parties at Brennan’s Colony. It was a simple life.
The first time I ever boarded a plane was when I was fifteen years old. I didn’t know anything other than my own childhood because FOMO wasn’t a term in our cultural vernacular then. Maybe it was my lack of knowledge of the world combined with limited, early-stages internet that made it all seem so magical as a child. Later in life when the magic slowly started to fade away, it became obvious to me that a lot of Clevelanders (including myself at times) have a bad case of inferiority bias. It’s not easy to see our friends living in other cities that aren’t the butt of every joke. It’s also uncomfortable to try to defend our city because who wants to be the weirdo disagreeing with the majority? We can rattle off our parks and our theater district and whatever else we love about our city, but I think it’s time we take a look at who’s making the jokes at our expense and ask them why they are taking the time to mock a small city that’s deciding to take itself seriously. Yes, we will always be the classic amiable Midwesterners who can take a joke, but we can also occasionally tell the guy in his $6000 studio apartment in New York (likely from a “flyover state”) to stop thinking about us so much. We can choose to laugh at ourselves with the rest of the world as we so often do, or we can take a look back at a time when Cleveland was all we knew and life was simple and summer was bliss.
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