Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Moonrise Kingdom (is a brilliant movie...if you've seen it, you'll know how this title fits)

Curry Night ended forever last night.

It'd been about a year since I last made it to Curry Night.

Even so, I'm sad to see it go.

To say Curry Night changed my life would simply be the tip of a very large ice berg.

It's where I met Alexandra after all.  But it was more; so much more.

Curry Night entered my life during one of the darkest periods through which I've ever lived.

I was living at home, struggling to raise money to start at Hillsdale.  A friend from church invited me initially, and the rest is a sort of history.

What exactly was Curry Night and why did it matter so much?

From the looks of it, it was just a house full of people enjoying a lot of free Indian food, every Tuesday night.  That's all I knew about it when I went.  Ultimately, that's all it needed to be, and from there, the rest followed.

It was a place where truly, literally, always, everyone was welcome.  There was an inherent, tangible value attributed to each and every person who walked across the threshold.  If you had no friends and walked through the door, you'd leave with half a dozen and you'd feel like you knew them for your whole life.

It was just an open table-- all were welcome and the ball started rolling.

Curry Night entered my life just when I needed it-- it can't and hasn't been replaced.  Probably 10 of my top 25 memories from my lifetime are directly tied to Curry Night- and hundreds more indirectly.  It wasn't some kind of club- it was a place where everyone belonged.  To that extent, for a few hours every Tuesday, it was a sort of heaven on Earth.

It's all over now and there's a hole in the hearts of probably hundreds of Findlay residents (past and present) today.

But the memories will last forever, and, to bring the cliche home, the relationships will never end.

I can count at least 4 marriages from Curry Night and that's barely a drip on the barometer of the sorts of important relationships that started at Curry.  Heck- one of the driving forces behind my ultimate decision to go to law school was a conversations at- where else- Curry Night.  That was actually my last Curry Night.  Fitting really- forever and ever, Curry Night will have changed the course of my life- and I know I'm not alone.

I used to drive at least 8 hours per month so I could go to Curry night every other week.  It kept me sane during the harrowing Hillsdale months.

For the record, as soon as I got to Hillsdale, about 1.5 months after my first Curry Night, I never struggled with funding again and left staff with a monstrous surplus.  God knew what he was doing, to say the least.

Though I (and no one else) will ever attend another Curry Night, we've all got the picture of what life can be on this side of heaven- and if all 300 or so of us keep seeking and creating it- the world, too, is going to change because of it.

It was a fire we all built in our own little ways.  It's burned out now, through the unavoidable facts of life- but there's no reason we can't each go on to our own new place and start a new one with the kindling gleaned over the past 4 years.

-Zack

"I know I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love"
-Pearl Jam

Friday, June 22, 2012

Just a Mirror

Last night, though I was asleep when it happened, LeBron James won his first NBA title.  You'd need to be under a rock if you care about that fact but just learned it from me.  Sorry if you had it DVR'd and actually did manage to avoid the news thus far.

Though LeBron doesn't know I exist, he's one of the top 10 characters in my life, were my life a novel- at least in recurrences and impact.  I'm still processing the fact that a guy I saw and knew about while he was in high school just won an NBA title.  A guy my middle-of-nowhere, Putnam County, Ohio basketball team was beating by ten at half time in 2003.

Honestly, it's hard to believe he's the same guy.

Looking back though, it's hard to believe I'm the same guy either.

I've grown a lot, I've changed a lot.  To say the same has happened to LeBron is an understatement.

But as I sit here, still processing what it all means, trying to wrap my Cavaliers-obsessed brain around it and get past the bitterness that that ring could have been ours, I keep coming back to a fact that scares me and should make all of the vitriol around Cleveland toward LeBron take a step back, especially amongst people in my own generation.

I'll never be pleased with how LeBron left Cleveland.  I'll never be convinced that he, playing like he did this past month, would have been denied a title no matter the supporting cast.  He could have stayed in Cleveland and done the same.  I know it.  Deep down, from Avon to Mentor, we all know it.

But LeBron didn't do anything hundreds of kids who grew up in Ohio do every single year, maybe every day: grow up somewhere in the state, stay in Cleveland and love that it's close to home, then leave and experience great success.

It's the storyline of athletes for generations: The Ravens, Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Manny Ramirez, Brandon Phillips, etc.

But it's the story of our state and the story of the past 40 years or more.

People have been moving to Cleveland to get their life started, then leaving Cleveland when greater horizons beckon.  Indeed, that's what Scott Raab, author of the Lebron hate-piece "The Whore of Akron" did.  Raab couldn't make it as a writer in Cleveland so he had to move to New Jersey.  That's not even a real upgrade- it's just a proximity thing.  At least Miami has an ocean and 365 days of summer.

That's how Cleveland and Ohio have been for generations- a sort of minor leagues for life.

It is possible to stay in Cleveland and carve out a career- but it's easier to go somewhere bigger and better, that much is certain.  Yes, LeBron took the easy way out, but that's only infuriating because of Cleveland's sports history and the fact that media outlets write about what basketball players do.    At the end of the day, LeBron just made a move in his industry to be more successful than staying in Cleveland (at least in his mind) would allow.

If it weren't for the Cleveland Clinic, there'd be nothing holding the best and the brightest in northeast Ohio, and even less drawing them in.

It's just the way things work because there's an internalized perception that, staying in Cleveland, you'll never make it to the top.

I don't know; maybe it's true.  I'm not to the top yet.


I wonder if so much of the LeBron hate in Cleveland stems from a belief that he got out when so many of us wish we could.  It's certainly unfair to say that because so many people really do love Cleveland, but the fact remains that we don't have half the population we did in the sixties.  It's not just LeBron who's leaving Cleveland for the perceived bigger and better.

I'm not leaving Cleveland as a matter of principal.  It might be wholly irrational, but I'd rather forgo perceived success elsewhere in an effort to make progress in the city I love.  That's the attitude everyone wanted LeBron to have but never really required it of their own children.  Cleveland's never going to be what it could if we expect more out of our athletes than we do ourselves.

At the end of the day, LeBron's just like us, but his job gets media attention.  He's always been human and that's our biggest problem with him.  We wanted a savior and we got a 18 year old kid who grew up in Akron.  Why did we expect him to be anything more than all of the other 18 year old kids from Akron who moved to Cleveland in 2003?  Most of them have probably left in search of more success too.

-Zack

"Pair of forgivers let go before it's too late"
-The Naked and Famous