I am in awe of Dan Chaon’s best-selling novel Await Your Reply—the complexity of the plot, his mastery of suspense, and a darkness he dwells in that speaks to modern life. For me, the book is larger than life.

Yet, across the table at Phoenix on Lee, having a cup of coffee and sharing a cookie, he is warm and smiling, an easy-to-talk-to, for-real kind of guy, with blue eyes and a boyish face. He laughs a lot and insists he’s a "pretty optimistic, upbeat person."

I’ve taken Lee Road going north at least a few thousand times on my way to almost everywhere. This day, as always, I try to peer into the garden at the Fairfax school, long a curiosity. Most gardens are hidden away; this one is out in the open on a busy road. In midsummer, like a sentinel, a single sunflower towers above all else, beckoning. Today, I answer its call.

It’s hot and breezy. School’s out. Two kids meander on a bicycle and teens play basketball.

I meet the barefoot garden manager, Samantha Provencio, and her two children who are joyously spraying themselves and each other with the hose.

Jacqueline Edelberg came to town to talk about innovation—a key word in education—but she actually put forth a surprisingly retro idea: the neighborhood school.

'Edelberg, with school principal Susan Kurland, wrote a book about their experience with a Chicago public elementary school. Theirs is a story about the energy and creativity that is unleashed when moms, whose bonds were forged on the play lot, connect with strong, capable school leadership.

 

When a group of women get together, pull out their knitting needles and begin working them, it’s likely that something more than what is on the needles will take shape.

If they are sitting in anything resembling a circle, a certain kind of intimacy and conversation will emerge. As that rhythmic wrapping of yarn gets underway, arms reaching up in the air every so often to unwind more, no subject, at least in my experience, is off limits; parents, children, work, men, news—and more. So it was at the knitting circle at Noble Neighborhood Library on a recent Thursday evening.

Driving the attractive residential streets in Noble, around Lee Road, or any Cleveland Heights neighborhood for that matter, is somewhat deceptive.

You see a sprinkling of signs: For Sale - New Price - Reduced Price - Sale by Owner, and some houses, if you look closely, are empty. But if you look at a map with dots of houses in foreclosure, it seems more like a pretty bad case of the chicken pox.

From 2006 through 2009, foreclosures proceeded steadily and briskly. According to the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court and Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, 2,203 Cleveland Heights homeowners have lost their houses. That’s about 550 a year or one and a half per day--for four years.

Around 10 a.m. one weekday, I sat at Starbucks on Cedar Road, taking the first sip of my ‘tall.’

Expecting to be enveloped by a warm coffee shop buzz, it took me a few minutes to get my bearings. It was so quiet, so study-hall quiet.

She has lived in the Coventry neighborhood for 32 years, since she arrived from what was then the Soviet Union. She is a friend of Tommy Fello, of Tommy’s, whom she calls the "unofficial mayor of Coventry," and has had her art exhibited at his restaurant. When she goes into Hunan Coventry, waiters greet her warmly and the chef makes a special dish for her, something that is not on the menu. Coventry is her stomping ground.

When I walked into the Heights Youth Club on Lee Road, something in the air was sharply reminiscent. I suddenly recalled the days when my own kids, growing up, spent time at a Boys Club.

Sunday mornings at On the Rise bakery, most people know what they want.  They have it down, they operate in here like some sticky-bun-seeking-device.

“I’ll take a baguette, a brownie and a chocolate chip.”

“I’ll take two scones and a cinnamon swirl loaf.”

You see a lot of this ‘now and later’ phenomenon. The croissant is for now, the organic multigrain, later.

Others less familiar inhale and gaze when they come in, dazed and intoxicated by what they see and smell. It is, after all, to enter an alternate universe, the luscious and magical way these bakers have of combining butter, sugar, flour, leavening and whatever else that fills the air with a seductive aroma.