Category Archives: toledo

Rainbows of Youth

personal, toledo Leave a comment

As this year’s Australian Football League season reaches its conclusion, and my beloved Essendon Bombers look all too likely to miss out on a finals appearance yet again, I’m reminded of one of the reasons why I chose Essendon as my team when ESPN started airing VFL highlights shows on Saturday mornings (just before my cartoons came on) in the eighties, and I became so fascinated with this strange sport unlike anything I’d ever seen in America. I had basically no knowledge of Australian geography…

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Storm Junkie

mom, personal, toledo, weather Leave a comment

A love of thunderstorms runs in my family, or at least on Mom’s side of the family. From my earliest days, before we even had cable so the Weather Channel could let us know what to expect and when (as much as weather forecasts are ever accurate), the arrival of a thunderstorm at our house often meant gathering in the living room, so we could look out the big windows as the clouds darkened and then flashed with lightning. Especially in the years before the…

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The Air Up Here

food, mom, personal, toledo Leave a comment

Mom was, by anyone’s standards, extremely devoted to those of us in her blood family. Although her parents were hoping that she could turn her musical talents into a full-time career when she was in her teenage years, that never really came to pass, especially after she became pregnant at nineteen. I can’t speak much to the first ten years she was a mother, because I hadn’t been born yet, but she often did everything she could, and usually more than she should have, to…

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I’ll Always Be a Toys “R” Us Kid

politics, shopping, toledo, videogames Leave a comment

As Toys ‘R’ Us Closes Up Shop, Small Business Are Left to Fend for Themselves (inc.com) How vulture capitalists ate Toys ‘R’ Us (theweek.com) I was part of the generation that was the prime target of one of the first regulation repeals of the Reagan Administration. For a long time, the FCC had a policy stating that cartoons couldn’t serve to just advertise toys, and although many skirmishes had been fought between the FCC and corporate America over this policy — most notably with ABC’s Hot…

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Object Permanence

family, mom, personal, toledo Leave a comment

After one of the warmest winters in recent memory, trees are just now beginning to take leaf here in Toledo. That event is normally a happy one for me, as I can finally relax about the perils of winter driving, hang my heavy coat up and get ready for the most tolerable of all the seasons in this part of the country. (I’m still a summer child, but great googly moogly, have they been getting too hot around here lately.) This year, though, the reminder of…

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