vacay and birthday

It's rare that I get out of Cleveland, but me and the roommate didn't get to Detroit so the islands were the next best thing. We slept, took walks around the island and into the creepy nature preserve woods, ate mulberries off of trees in people's front yards, sat on the rocks, played some Celtic music for the neighbors, and roasted marshmallows. Also discovered that long slices of banana mashed in with s'mores might be the best thing ever.



I love that the interior here is straight out of 1960 in the best way possible.



24 hours was perfect to rejuvenate us and we took the long way home down Route 2, stopping in Oberlin, driving through Lorain, and taking a walk through the Metroparks before heading back into Cleveland to get her viola fixed and so I could stop by my parents' to hang out on the back porch and give my dad his birthday gift of Jimi's "Valleys of Neptune."



We sat in his little room in the basement with the pictures of us kids and the posters on the wall listening to wailing guitar and that amazing voice from a man who never thought he could sing. He told me that his friends from high school had seen him open for Janis Joplin but that he found that Mercedes Benz song so annoying that he didn't go.

It's hard to think of him as being born halfway through the last century because he still seems frozen in time to me, with his love of playing basketball, watching Indians games, playing guitar and cranking up Led Zeppelin records in the basement, his hair still as black as it always was to the point where people ask him what dye he uses not knowing that he hardly ever combs it let alone does anything else...