According to Case Western Reserve University's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Moses Cleaveland and his survey party arrived on the North Coast in July of 1796. Counting that event as the birth of the city, Cleveland celebrates its 208th birthday this year. Compared age-wise to cities around that world, Cleveland is a teeny little baby of a city. But compared to other cities in the US, like St. Augustine, Florida, (439), or Santa Fe, New Mexico (397), you could say that Cleveland is middle-aged. And like guys of a certain age, Cleveland is up to its thinning hair in a mid-life crisis.
Mid-life, according to the proverb, “is the old age of youth and the youth of old age.” A mid-life crisis manifests itself in difficulties dealing with the inevitability of aging, feelings of regret over lost youth and missed opportunities, and the increasing importance in one's life of pants with elastic “comfort panels” in the waistband. This is not the stuff one thinks about at twenty-five.
But two decades and change later you wake up one morning and realize that your personal frame of cultural reference is represented by the programming on TV Land and the playlist on Magic 105 FM. Your waistline now exceeds your inseam. And these days you take a lot more drugs, but they are prescribed by your doctor, paid for by your HMO, and aren't likely to help you pick up chicks (“Hey baby, want to come back to my place and do some Lipitor?”).
So what do you do? Several strategies (more like symptoms, really) have emerged for dealing with mid-life crisis. Chief among these are the Comb-over, the Corvette, and the urge to blow off your marriage and start dating waitresses from Hooters. While widely practiced, these strategies don't solve the mid-life crisis so much as they reveal the asshole within.
The Comb-over is one of the flagship events in the Denial Olympics, and is practiced by middle-aged men in crisis who have fooled themselves into thinking that they can camouflage the ravages of male pattern baldness under an intricately engineered hairstyle that, in a marvel of supply chain management, redirects existing hair inventory to areas where follicle supplies have fallen below established minimums. (“Hairpiece? No way, honey, that's all me” -- and four cans of super-mousse.)
The Corvette is a kind of very expensive, self-propelled fashion accessory, and is believed by many to radiate an anti-aging force field that repels the ravages of time while simultaneously attracting Hooters waitresses. Kind of like Botox, but with lousy mileage and no traction if there's more than an eighth of an inch of snow on the ground.
Of course, the Comb-over and the Corvette and the rest are indications of a powerful desire to relive the past. Memories are fine and wonderful things, but memory can blind you to the fact that in the years between twenty-five and your first set of bifocals, you gain wisdom and experience, which can then be applied to things like not repeating decades worth of bad judgment and spectacularly stupid mistakes.
And this is what Cleveland must avoid. Cleveland has certainly seen better days, when downtown retail thrived, when the steel mills and auto plants employed thousands and hummed with activity. When you could coast through high school, land a job at one of the big plants, make a decent buck, and retire in thirty years. That city disappeared, along with trolley cars, the '48 Indians, the '64 Browns, Euclid Avenue department stores, the Theatrical, and...you get the idea.
But that doesn't mean the city is doomed. Having reached middle age, Cleveland must accept that the world has changed, muster up its blue collar work ethic, act on the wisdom and experience it has accumulated, and get busy kicking ass and taking names. It's not about trying to turn back the clock – that's a comb-over. It's about seeing the world as it is now, and putting in the necessary work to take advantage of the opportunities this new world presents.
When Moses Cleaveland and his crew arrived there was nothing. Well, OK, they had better access to the lake. But other than that, a few years later there was a city. Cleveland grew out of the wilderness, and 208 years later it's still here. Cleveland has survived economic change, wars, a flammable river, an equally flammable mayor, the theft of a football team, and perhaps the worst of all, that awful “Cleveland's a plum” campaign. It’ll get through this -- but there’s a big “if.”
Guys go through mid-life crisis because they are human, and because human beings have only so many birthdays. That's not necessarily the case for a city. The great cities of the old world have been around for millennia, and wear their bifocals, wrinkles, comfy trousers, and hair loss with pride -- and maybe a jaunty beret -- because they know they're going to be around for a while. They survive by evolving with the times, using wisdom and experience to build on history rather than trying to relive it or revive it. If Cleveland can deal with its mid-life crisis without resorting to comb-overs and Corvettes, it can do the same. from Cool Cleveland contributor Bob Rhubart
Research on Moses Cleaveland can be found at Case's website: http://ech.cwru.edu/index.html
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