How donating a kidney fixed Jim Sollisch's jump shot

Cleveland Heights author and ad man Jim Sollisch.

You know Jim Sollisch. Or somebody like him. He’s that “gray-haired, middle-aged man in jeans and tennis shoes” (his words) in the Heights. “If you ran into me on the street,” he noted, “you might guess that I was a father or a husband. You might think I was a Democrat or the owner of a foreign car.”

Sollisch has just published a collection of his personal essays, How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot. He is a copywriter at the Marcus Thomas ad agency and has written two Super Bowl commercials. His side hustle is getting op-eds published in newspapers like the Plain Dealer, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

His book contains 74 essays. Sollisch knows how to write; he’s not writing treacly nostalgia about Rocky Colavito. He has a wide-ranging sensibility, and to boot, he likes Cleveland. He is feminine, marvelous and tough (to steal a phrase from poet Ted Berrigan).

The feminine Sollisch: At Heights High, in 1972, he badgered the administration into letting him take home economics instead of shop. He writes that he goes to various grocery stores up to four times a day to shop for fresh food. “And I was the only guy in my dorm [at Kent State] of 400 guys who ever used the kitchen. I became as powerful as the inmate with cigarettes.”

The marvelous Sollisch: He donated a kidney to a co-worker. A co-worker, not a relative. After giving up the kidney, his doctors told Sollisch he couldn’t take ibuprofen—which he had used regularly to treat his sore hip—ever again. The hip—minus ibuprofen—started hurting so badly he got a new hip, and that improved his jump shot.

The tough Sollisch: In high school he played the main sports: football, basketball and baseball. He played basketball into his 60s.

The best part, though, is Sollisch is a major-league complainer. He writes: “I hate bike riding . . . I hate fall, and there’s a fall phrase I detest: sweater weather.” And, he doesn’t like bucket lists. “It’s not that I don’t like new experiences, I just like routine more. I like knowing where I’m going to have my coffee in the morning. I like not letting the grass grow too long.”

Sollisch’s essays have appeared in publications from Anchorage, Alaska, to Japan, and yet he’s Full Cleveland. He sticks entirely to the unglamorous, to the quotidian. He writes, “I don’t dine at pricey restaurants. But I’ll tell you one extravagance I’m not willing to give up: yawning. I like to get up in the morning and yawn, really stretch my arms.” 

Sollisch ponders what might have happened if he hadn’t gone into the ad biz: “I wonder what I might have written, what ideas I might not have censored, what risky paths I might have taken.”

Sollisch’s book is a 166-page collection of concise, well-written essays about a Heights man who likes to cook and hang out with his wife, children and grandchildren, and who hates certain things. He’s writing about life. Make that “life in the Heights"—although there is one essay about North Carolina, which he didn’t like.

If you want to know what your neighbor is up to, read this book, available at local bookstores and online.

On Sunday, June 22, Sollisch will give a reading at Township Hall in Chagrin Falls, 83 Main Street, 3-5 p.m., sponsored by Fireside Books.