Letter to Ohio (Part Two) or Erm, What the Scallop?
You remind me of plankton that is carried by tides and currents–unable to swim on its own. Despite my previously delivered bon mots (see Letter to Ohio) that offered you purchase and newfound strength, you’re still adrift. I mean, you’ve managed to become Gen Alpha slang for “weird, cringey or random.” Bravo you lunk-head! Today, consider me your stern school marm with a ruler in my hand; I’m about to slap your wrists silly!
During my recent visit, I spotted (at one of your moderately chic Downtown Cleveland clothing boutiques), an eye-bulgingly overpriced navy blue sweatshirt that had the wordsTravis Kelce is from Cleveland printed in stark white lettering. I wanted to tell the young store owner/manager that this odd, dorky propaganda, was so skibidi Ohio, but I kindly spared my kids the humiliation. (Even if this message was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and not a flex, I shake my head.)
Last week when my kids and I visited you, we took an Uber from the airport to my mom’s building complex off the highway and hoped for a quiet moment before facing my lonely, increasingly surly, 89-year-old mother who lives largely on her own. I prayed for a non-invasive, normal driver who’d read the room/car, which given our past experiences visiting you, would be unusual. I’m not sure what it is, but you breed one-of-a -kind Uber drivers–mostly wrecks. The minute we entered our Uber, our middle-aged, male driver sung out, Good Morning Vietnam!
I gave the kids concerned side-eye and waited a beat too long to formulate a response. (I was caught off guard because (1) people rarely mistake me for Vietnamese and (2) the Robin Williams movie with that title is pretty old and to my limited knowledge, irrelevant to current pop culture.)
Where are you from? our driver asked, smiling at us in the front mirror.
South Korea.
Well, then Good Morning Korea!
I buckled my seatbelt as I watched his reflection in the front mirror. I decided, it was best to play his game. Where are you from?
Palestine. Heard of it?
Though our driver spoke to me without discernible contempt or sarcasm, I felt mildly challenged. Yes, I have. I smiled curtly in his direction and aggressively busied myself with my straw tote bag on my lap—at once grateful that I’m a maximalist when it comes to packing airplane carry-on bags and thus had plenty materials to ruffle. Pretending to search for my phone,I contemplated providing the driver a pithy but heartfelt statement of sympathy for Gaza’s Palestinians that would gracefully end the conversation but I felt a flush of panic because my spoken words are never as eloquent as my written words. I didn’t want to have to share my thoughts on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a stranger in control of my carriage and certainly didn’t want our driver to mistakenly brand me a “balmy Zionist”*– indifferent or even openly hostile to Palestinian struggles.
While I avoided conflict with our Uber driver, I didn’t fare as well with mom. (I’d last seen her four months prior and mom and I always need a little time to acclimate to each other). The minute she greeted us at her apartment door, I perused the wear and tear of old age and social isolation–from mom’s straggly gray hair in need of a haircut to the haggard-looking cellphone pouch around her neck. Instead of focusing on mom’s continued independence – the fact she does her own grocery shopping and cleaning in large part and pays her bills- in my ADHD hyper-fixated way, I oddly perseverated on the frayed, carpet-like fabric of her cellphone pouch and her all-around disheveled vibe.
When my offer to replace the cellphone pouch that her crafty friend in the building sewed for her seven years ago, was met with mom’s growly defiance, I am not proud to admit, I muttered too loudly, homeless delight! (I’m sure this odd, bitchy comment is confounding. In my defense, my comment most likely references the fact that during my childhood, mom and I, from time to time, lived with friends and family (and were thereby occasionally homeless). This comment may have also reflected the fact I’ve got residual shame about my past dalliances with poverty and guilt about my relative present-day affluence. How divine when one utterance evokes so much!)
Later when the kids sat at mom’s dining room table patiently teaching her the rules of a lively card game called Anomia that my family enjoys, I stood aside and hyper-focused on the sight of mom’s graying sneakers that felt to me like purposeful provocation (particularly when the new Mephistos I bought her remained unopened in their Amazon box). Far from a minimalist myself, I was surprised by the overwhelming feeling of vertigo that overcame me when perusing the rampant clutter –from the old Columbia University alum magazines piled high in one corner and the Lego Friends sets that my daughter constructs each visit (which mom refuses to box) to the rattling perfume bottles and toiletries that encircled her bathroom sink. Indeed, her stuffed closets, much like the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s displays of musicians’ rock garb over the decades, could serve as a timeline of my fashion sensibilities from the sixth grade onwards, e.g. the floral patterned bubble skirt and matching top I bought from Fiorucci’s in the sixth grade; the sight of such desperate, unedited nostalgia made my breath shallow.
During this visit, our moments of joy and familial bliss were often punctuated with brief spats and piqued emotions. When the two of us isolated ourselves in her bedroom–the kids in the living room– mom sternly instructed that I always pick up my phone when she called; I explained that with her calling sometimes fifteen times a day, I needed to have some boundaries. (I also should have told her not to be personally insulted. My friends can attest I’m not good at picking up the phone). Her response:
Soomee, fuck your boundaries!
Fortunately, before I could respond–indeed, cross–I heard my nine-year-old daughter tinkering on mom’s upright piano in the living room. (Unschooled in piano, my daughter has a limited repertoire: Happy Birthday on repeat and the first lines of Taylor Swift’s Love Story as learned on YouTube.) Regardless, throughout our visit, her plunky notes (mostly) kept me in check—intoning me to remain calm.
But even with her soundtrack, some days, I struggled to be even-keeled. My attempts at being kind/complimentary to mom were met with anger, e.g., the moment I interrupted her dreary, repetitive monologue about her phone woes to remark on her beautiful, largely unlined complexion, her only response was Soomee, you are so always being irrelevant. (Okay, she’s not wrong. I have a tendency to bust into conversations with irrelevant non-sequiturs. It’s called ADHD).
Some days, mom (usually guarded about her everyday struggles) would reveal something about her mobility issues, loneliness and chronic untreated anxiety/depression; on those days, she was easier to be around. At some point, she ushered me into her bedroom to show me a letter she’d received from Verizon that, in a surprisingly long-winded manner, informed mom they would need to potentially cut off her phone service because she calls them with questions about her phone too often. They noted she has called 60, yes 60 times in the past two months about simple fixes that do not warrant agent time.
I watched her lean her whole weight onto her walker as she read me the letter and then—quite unexpectedly—completely unfurl. First the shame: I can’t figure out my phone; confusion: I told you I need a land line now; denial: I don’t call them that much and finally, sheer panic: I need to communicate with everyone!
In that moment, I more fully understood what old age had wrought for mom and it silenced me. When I reached down to hug her, I felt her curved back beneath her thin floral dress and—quite unexpectedly–pulled her into the kind of desperate, unyielding hug that can only be called a death hold. The kind where she was bound to me completely-her only choice: to let me sob into her hair. And to my relief, mom who’s become physically defensive in her old age, let me hold her in silence for minutes. So present and warm. (The idea of her being so confused and/or hungry for human interaction that she had a roster of Verizon agents on dial, left me with a terrible, profound empathy for my opinionated, eccentric, loyal, intellectual, loving, combative, child-like mother — the person I’ve known the longest in life–who sometimes makes me want to bang my head against a wall/gauge my eyes out.)
On a lighter note: Verizon, I deeply sympathize as surely you are losing money on mom since she hasn’t bought a new phone in an eternity and a flock of your agents spend a disproportionate amount of their waking hours teaching her to make sure her ringer is on. But steady on! Please take pity on her and on me, as if she loses her service, my new part-time job will be finding her a new provider from where I am out of state and assuaging her anxieties about the change.
Most days, the kids and I had all meals at mom’s delivered, courtesy of Uber Eats, because I sought to avoid cooking in mom’s small, cluttered kitchen with its slow-to- heat stove she refuses to complain about, her unruly mix of vintage cutlery sets (some a bit rusty) and my bad high school still-life on display–the one with the flat, mottled, barely identifiable grapes that would cause any art teacher shame. Most days, mom would quite oddly, affectionally call my nine-year-old daughter a “yutch”, which according to Urban Dictionary means “An old out of touch person who can be a complete Biotch and is lacking in the mental capacity to hold a clear, coherent conversation.” Though we repeatedly told her the unflattering meaning of theYiddish word, she continued to use it. (Because it is cute-sounding and my daughter thinks it’s funny, we’ve leaned in).
Most days, mom ranted about Nancy**, her rental building’s insidiously chipper leasing agent who takes midwestern phoniness to new levels. On more than one occasion, this gossipy white woman has drawn me into her on-site office to complain that mom has on one occasion called her to ask her about her apartment lease, even showing me the transcription of mom’s voicemail but then says “but your mom is such a dear“–her eyes narrowing.
Perhaps most indicative of Nancy’s shrill, snively character is what she once did after the kids and I rented the very modestly appointed guest suite in mom’s building for a ten day visit–the suite with the impossibly springy pull-out sofa and one Queen sized bed that we three have to rock, paper, scissors over to determine who gets to suffer.
When we returned to visit mom many months later, Nancy, her face full of scorn, handed me a printed, official-looking memorandum with the heading “Guest Suite Policy Change.” As she explained, after our last visit, she’d found chocolate stains on the bed sheets so they had to change their guest suite policy so that food is no longer allowed outside the kitchen of the guest suite. (For what it’s worth, I resolutely deny the existence of a large enough mess to warrant a policy change as the three of us shared one small chocolate bar and are chocolate fiends, which means: no morsels left behind! And for the record, chocolate is not blood; it should come out! But zowee – I’m a wee bit impressed that for the first time in our lives, we’re policy changers!)
During my most recent trip to Cleveland, I told mom about Nancy’s rude way of expressing discontent with our alleged chocolate mess, her response was: ” some people have too much power, like Nancy and Netanyahu.”( I like your affirmation ma, and I’m no Netanyahu fan but erm, what the scallop***?)
Similarly, other Ohioans have too much power, e.g. your junior senator and Republican V.P nominee. J.D Vance. You best be distancing yourself from this wrangler****! To your credit, I have recently been told that he’s not so popular even in your neck of the woods–that he’s (quite astutely) seen as a fake and a traitor to the rural poor. He’s certainly thrown himself into the fire with his PR missteps, e.g, his July 2021 interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that recently resurfaced in which Mr. Vance whined that the country was run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” You gotta hand it to him for the impressive feat of offending a large swath of potential voters in one comment: fans of Aniston, unmarried woman, the infertile/IVF users, and/or cat aficionados. And Vance’s response to Aniston’s social media callout was no better. Give this man a muzzle! (Then again, I’d love for Vance to implode, like past Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin did, in the weeks to come–thereby derailing Trump’s campaign. Though, as your unasked for critic and advisor, I’m thinking, that’d do nothing positive for your drifting reputation!)
Living in a Liberal Democrat bubble (NYC), I consider my trips to your fulsome state as my opportunity to understand the other America. While visiting you this trip, I met a spectrum of Trump supporters who differed mostly in presentation and demeanor (rather than content).
The least bearable included an Uber driver whom, unsolicited, began our ride complaining about his sixteen-year old teenage daughter who had a seventeen-year old trans boyfriend. He explained that the two of them exchanged sexually explicit photos over Discord and when he found out, he told them he was going to go to the police and have them come to their house. As he elaborated, In our small town [in Lorain County], police will do that for you. Come over and scare the shit out your kids. (As we later learned, Lorain County is one of Ohio’s bastions of Trump fanaticism.)
As my kids, including my 15-year-old trans son, listened on, our driver went on to say, her girlfriend thinks she’s a boy but that’s just today.
Against my better judgment, I felt I had chime in for my son’s sake, so I added, well, some teenagers do know their gender identities.
Serving me right for engaging in this type of conversation with him, our driver said, she switches gender day by day. Trans? No. Confused, young and brainwashed?Absolutely.
At this point indignant, I muttered, these days, some people are much more fluid with their identities.
I don’t identify as a gender, he shot back. I identify as a dad and a damn good one at that! After a brief pause and check in the front mirror to make eye contact with me, he said, If you don’t want to burn your kids alive, you aren’t spending enough time with your kids.
I chuckled nervously and my kids and I exchanged glances because even though his tone was light, one thing had become abundantly clear–he was a wacko. (I later assured my kids, unnecessarily of course, that I have never even once wanted to burn them alive).
Though my political curiosity was indeed quelled and I wished to recede from further discussion, our driver persisted. As he explained, he used to drive trucks out East and he’d always wanted to avoid the Bronx because in his own words, I’m too white for the Bronx. He also let it be known that he loved your governor for his open carry laws. His deranged solution for terrorism was to arm everyone on the plane so when Mr. Muslim guy comes on a plane, everyone will just annihilate him. As he went on to say, studies have shown that one bullet is not enough to take down a plane. Oh they figured out that in Israel and that’s why they are so strong.
His jovial delivery made it clear he was just showboating and wasn’t a real threat to us. However, I did cringe when my son asked quite sincerely, are you joking?
Our driver’s response: I’m dead serious.
Another time, we met a relatively sane, hopefully more representative example of a modern Conservative. I point-blank asked our young, starch-collared driver who told me he was from a small rural town of Ohio if he was a Trump supporter. Evidencing a measure of relative sanity, he seemed hesitant to respond. Encouraged by his sensitivity to us passengers and appropriately friendly vibe, I told him it was a safe space and I just wanted to hear different perspectives. He said his number one issue was his opposition to abortion and second was his belief that government should have a limited role. Though he wasn’t Catholic, he explained he was marrying into a Catholic family and had always been anti-abortion. As he perhaps unnecessarily elaborated, he was socially conservative. Perhaps observing the lot of us in his backseat, he made it clear that he didn’t agree with everything Trump says. I just take what I like. Though I wanted to unpack this difficult-to-understand statement and I was curious what parts of Trump he rejected, I let it go to ensure a stress-free ride. I left his car faintly relieved that he wasn’t (at first blush), a bombastic reactionary like Uber Driver One; his cogs were in fact turning, despite what many Liberals say about all Trump supporters.
My last encounter with a Trump supporter was my mom’s spritely elderly neighbor, Sam**, an Evangelical white man who routinely checks in on my mom, agrees to disagree with her about politics and recently popped into mom’s apartment with a birthday cake and card for her 89th birthday. A tall, bony guy with white tufts of hair behind his ears and a gentle, pastor-like manner, he speaks in jokey sing-song as if that renders everything he says to be inoffensive. He never went to college and is married to a relatively reticent Black woman with a patient, schoolteacher vibe and the same weakness for Donald J. Trump.
During our trip, I overheard him telling mom at the tail-end of a friendly neighbor visit (his wife behind him) that he didn’t think Kamala could hack it as President and that she’s not even really Black! Later, my son and I heard him joking with my mom that Democrats are not perfect and it was the Democrats who were the original slave owners. Anytime we tried to interject, he’d duck out. I don’t really like to get into politics because you New Yorkers are going to disagree with me. At one point, he devolved into a goofy spectacle; with one raised fist pumping the air, he chanted, Trump, Trump, Trump! Do ya wanna fight? (How hard to reconcile the kindness and empathy that this man routinely shows mom and the ease with which he utters racist, xenophobic and/or other garbled thoughts).
Given these conversations I’ve had with your residents (and others during prior visits), I feel a strange, unexpected empathy for these folk–even the most deranged ones. They reek of neglect. For why are they (particularly the Uber drivers) so eagerly spilling their guts out to this meddling, middle-aged Korean-American lady? Because, in the words of one driver, they are dead serious about their opinions/ feelings just as we are in New York and beyond [and I’ll add, you have been a downright shitty listener, e.g., watching manufacturing jobs leave and doing little to replace them with other industries. Oh and please stop relying on the Cleveland Clinic monolith and the health care industry, you need to expand and think creatively.]
Excuse me if I sound pedantic, but It’s your time to clap those erasers together, wipe away the mediocrity and start again. (I recently saw a baseball cap at an Atlanta, Georgia maker’s market with the following words embossed on its front: The mid still sellin‘. Of course, I did embarrass myself and ask the good-natured young designer who was standing behind his tabled goods, what the expression meant; he confirmed what I assumed, it’s a motivational statement like “even if you do it mediocre, it’s enough.” Please don’t adopt that motto. That’s for a real gunner state that’s thriving and needs to take it easy. Not you.)
Though I may have insulted you earlier in calling you plankton, I’ll note that some plankton grow large enough to break free and swim on their own. (Though yes, some drift forever). You have so much potential as a state. For one, you’ve got some good colleges and universities. Take our tour of Case Western Reserve University, which was a trip highlight. Though my son is just beginning his junior year in high school (so he hasn’t made any college lists) and is unlikely to apply to CWRU, we figured why not see what you have to offer college wise.
As someone who went to Carleton College, an intimate but secluded liberal arts college set amidst farms and the Malt O Meal cereal factory, CWRU’s urban campus is unfamiliar territory. I marveled at the fact that the Cleveland Museum of Art, which houses The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) by Albert Pinkham Ryder (one of my favorite paintings ever), the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the Cleveland Orchestra, The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Science Museum, the Art Institute and more all sit directly on CWRU’s campus. (Just think, Columbia University is physically much further away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Botanical Garden and any renown symphony hall).
The tour also showed me how colleges are in some ways so different, with better facilities and offerings than I had in my day, e.g. CWRU has a whole building that is a maker space for making things (heavenly!), and in other ways exactly the same, e.g., CWRU’s poorly ventilated first year dorm rooms are comically claustrophobic and guarantee instant intimacy with roommates—for better or worse. As it was undergraduate orientation day when we visited, I had a chance to see teams of delightfully geeky, seemingly racially diverse students meandering through campus and this sight in your state that, now more than ever, is easy to associate with a bleak rural whiteness, gave me joy.
The low point of our tour was the introductory presentation by an Admissions officer who narrated a slide show without an iota of the dramatic flair necessary to keep a room of adolescents and weary parents with 15-20 college applications, awake for an August mid-afternoon slot. His presentation skated past any discussion of teaching, campus life, and the student body and cut to a series of photo bios of successful graduates who were all in tech, finance or nursing. Indeed, the entire presentation and certainly these alumni profiles could have been scrapped and replaced by the following line from the Meghan the Stallion rap song Mamushi that lately pays rent in my head: I make money, I’m a sta, sta, sta. (Sta is short for star). Though, this school didn’t seem like a good match for my son who seeks a cozier school with more of a Humanities bent, after completing the walking tour — lead by an informative, suitably ebullient English major–it’s clear you’ve got a vibrant, expansive school full of opportunities (and so many other good schools!)
Perhaps what I appreciate most about you is that whenever we visit, my kids and I channel our pent up energy, into zany, spontaneous creativity. Near our downtown Cleveland hotel that we chose to stay at this time to avoid Nancy’s creepy judgment and also to feel like true tourists, we discovered a miraculous candy emporium called Rocket Fizz whose baskets we filled high.
On the way to our room, we borrowed the complimentary, appealingly glossy acoustic guitar the hotel lent guests. In our room, fueled by sugar, the three of us—gooney-eyed—stayed up until early morning to half-watch the Democratic Convention, eat candy in bed in honor of Nancy (who is really getting pummeled in this post), strum our guitar, and plan the tourist parts of our vacation; my son discovered the small but potentially alluring Buckland Museum of Witchcraft in Old Brooklyn, Cleveland and looked up reviews of it on Reddit. To his delight, one commenter went totally rogue in a long, ill-supported diatribe against Old Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is, by all other accounts, a pretty regular neighborhood.
Next thing I knew, my son–his voice comically measured–started reading aloud this hysteric, deeply unreliable rant while my nine-year-old daughter jumped in to do an impromptu, sleepy lyrical dance to Don’t come here. Carjackings, robbings and homicides happen in that neighborhood. I hear sirens everyday…I live here and fear for my life daily. If you come to Old Brooklyn beware… It’s home to all the freaks, pervs and sickos who like to prey on children, the elderly and the developmentally disabled for fun. (The joy of having a family with a similar sense of humor cannot be overstated).
So a curtsy to you for hosting us and allowing us our precious midnight mayhem.
(And if you wouldn’t mind checking in on that 89-year-old woman off the highway with the unraveling tapestry cellphone pouch from time to time, I wouldn’t hate you).
Keeping with my rather sporadically-applied plankton theme: grow little plankton! Grow so you can swim free!
xoxo CMCA
*I recently noted that some Japanese Instagram commenters decried the fact that Japanese rapper Yuki Chiba who recent rapped with Meghan the Stallion on the supremely catchy track Mamushi was photographed shaking the hand of Rahm Emanuel (the U.S. Ambassador to Japan) whom one comment translated from Japanese to English described as “a balmy Zionist*.” (In my typical fashion of focusing on silly minutiae, I am amused by the word balmy in this context. I discovered the word has two meanings: the more commonly known one (“pleasantly warm”) and the less well trod ( “extremely foolish, eccentric”). I love a word with two very opposite/distinct definitions. I’m assuming since his overall comment was anti Zionist, the Japanese commentator didn’t write pleasantly warm Zionists. I like the fact that Google or a.i. used this less-tread definition of balmy in its translation.
**Not their true names.
***My son told me about this slang, which means “what the fuck?” and I’m delighted by it.
****The use of this word doesn’t make sense so much but I decided I would use it anyway because I like the sound of it.