Q: Why do all the trees in Michigan lean south?

A: Ohio Sucks

You’re my favorite punching bag. I’ve spent a lifetime mocking you and other states I’ve respectfully disowned. Sorry, l’m a regionalist and a bit of a tool. I like to say the word “Boca” for Boca Raton, Florida. (It has a funny ring to it and more than ever now Florida deserves a good ribbing). I roll my eyes when folks in far-flung states claim their bagels are superior to New York’s when really theirs are nothing but glorified Ciabatta rolls. I sometimes (maybe often) go places and think “we New Yorkers do it better”, e.g. our human rights laws, our Chinatowns and the taste of our tap water. (Yours tastes like chlorine to me).

It’s true you are widely dismissed as the loser, hell-in-the-hand basket- state. I’m sure that smarts. Or maybe you can laugh it off. After all, Ohioans, by necessity, are self-deprecating. Take TikTok’s viral #onlyinohio memes ( see example below) that celebrate your eccentricities. In another’s words, “{t}hese memes ask the viewer. What really goes on in the place that represents America’s epitome of capitalist, wasteland culture?”

The flurry of Ohio jokes/memes I found online (see examples below) imply you and your residents lack a certain je ne sais quois–that is, base-line intelligence. What rot! I know plenty of top minds (family friends Susan, Bob, Ben, Rachel) in your environ and of course we mustn’t forget your astronauts and eight U.S. Presidents.

Q. How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Ohio?

A. If it was invented anywhere else, it would have been called a teethbrush.

A: Drool.

Though, looking at your still crinkly, baby Republican senator, J.D. Vance, its best to note that intelligence and moral fortitude are two distinct things; Vance telling Ohioans that Mexican immigrants come to the U.S. for the free government benefits and that securing the Mexican-U.S. border should be American’s highest priority is not just wrong and stupid; it’s amoral. I’m no fan of any populist but an intelligent one who’s got some insight into the white working class (as he revealed in his autobiographical book Hillbilly Elegy) and throws it away to spew tiresome, class-warfare rhetoric, e.g. dumb Tweets about fearing for his safety in visiting New York City, fuels my fire. (Thanks to Mitt Romney, my favorite modern-day prophet, for calling out Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Vance as particularly pungent and wicked. (He didn’t say that exactly but same idea)).

I know you claim well-loved celebrities like actor Paul Newman whom I could watch eating hard boiled eggs forever, and I’ll grant you him but you can’t sweep under the rug that some of the most disturbing serial killers of all time hail from your region, e.g. Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and The Zodiac Killer.

What’s with the Ohioan accent? Some find it disarming and guileless. They are wrong. Take this sentence: “Will it be a merry day when Mary agrees to marry John.” Your people pronounce the words merry, Mary and marry the same. What foolery! My eight-year old daughter is making me binge-watch the guilty-pleasure show Dance Moms featuring Cathy, the squeaky-voiced dance instructor from Ohio who applies grotesque layers of bright, matte eye shadow on her young performers, defaults to hokey jazz-hand-choreography and busts out of her saccharine, mid-western facade to try(usually unsuccessfully) to unseat her nemesis Abbey Lee and her dance troop at various competitions. Truth, Cathy wouldn’t be one of the reality show’s main villains without that unique Ohio accent that is just shy of Southern twang. Forget the trope of the villainous German accent. Yours is creepier.

Consider that the city of Cleveland is your piece de resistence. The Mistake on the Lake. It’s no beacon. (Though its waters –at least at one time so murky and clouded by industrial waste–did inspire a sex act called the Cleveland Steamer that apparently involves crapping on someone’s body and then steam rolling your body over the fresh “steamy” poop.)

My eight-year-old daughter plays a Roblox video game where she’s the mayor of a fictional city and she delights in following me around our home with my laptop in tow to update me on her reign: “I’m not very good at my job. I can’t afford a fire station and all my buildings are burning down. Ah, there goes another. But, funny, my approval ratings are good!” I think she’s ready to rule. (After all, a bunch of real life teenage gamers became professional race drivers according to a preview I saw for the film Gran Torino). She’d be no worse than mayor Dennis Kucinich (whom you may recall bankrupted Cleveland during his tenure).

I’m no urban planning guru (save for one CUNY urban planning class I took years ago when I pondered a career change), but if I were in charge of Cleveland, I’d unleash a wrecking ball and rid it of all those drab, lonely building complexes off the highway (the kind my mother now calls home). Is it too much to expect a modest grocery store/coffee shop/ bookstore next to her building complex? Then my elderly mom could take a morning constitutional (albeit a slug-paced one with her walker) and socialize instead of festering in suburbia. (P.S. I’ve seen exactly no one loitering on the tuft of grass with the lone iron bench between the two identical buildings of my mom’s complex that was no doubt plotted by some Frederick Law Olmstead hack. Nice try). Welcome to the world of mixed-use urban planning! Jane Jacobs would roll in her grave if she saw my mother’s little cement balcony that only allows her to take in the clotted highway in the horizon and the identical tan-bricked building that faces hers.

My case in point: downtown Cleveland. Though it’s always allegedly in the midst of a “revival,”it appears through my car window each time I visit as a garishly demolished, charred city like the Descendants‘ Isle of the Lost. Yes, I’ve been regaled with tales of downtown Cleveland’s gilded past, e.g., the Halle Brothers department store (namesake of actress Halle Berry) that sold wares like fine plumed hats and promised a trail of perfume instead of a blast of black smoke when strolling downtown. Over the years, I’ve shaken my head at many failed attempts at revitalization; hard to forget Bill Clinton’s 1990’s donation of a few freshly cemented blocks of boxy, low income apartment buildings and not much else–a tawdry attempt to gentrify the bleak stretch of ghosted buildings and lots that surrounded the monolithic Cleveland Clinic.

Your city’s strategy of building stadiums or other costly tourist attractions and dropping them somewhere dreary and isolated to save the day seems Old Fogie to me. See the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sure, I like music but I’m no fan of this once hooplah-ed tourist destination. Somehow against the gray Lake Erie backdrop and no Louvre in shadow, architect I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid building has a sad, pedestrian vibe, akin to the glass-fronted Jimmy Buffet Times Square Margaritaville bar/cafe. (Plus, I can’t get excited about many of the classic rock inductees, e.g. the Doobie Brothers).

Can we crack open Cleveland’s East/West Side divide? I’ve often marveled how those East of the Cuyohoga river (where my mother lives) rarely go West and vice versa. The divide has been explained in terms of class: “The East Side is old money! The West Side is new money! The East Side is snooty! The West Side is tacky! The East Side likes Fritos! The West Side likes Doritos!” One writer explained the divide crudely in terms of race and class;”East dwelt Jews, Italians, and African Americans; the West Side was foreign territory full, in my imagination, of Eastern European goyim… and toothless white trash from West Virginia.” This hesitancy to regularly cross sides even for a bounty of food, art and shopping, is real and puzzling for inhabitants of a city where driving is regular and expected. Apologies for my second Disney Descendants‘ reference, but it’s time to “Break-It-Down!” (the song that is sung at end of Descendants 3 when the divide between the Disney princesses and the Disney villain islands is broken down and a bridge connects the residents).

I can hardly throw shade at you for I live in Manhattan where folks are always drawing fault lines—East v. West Side, uptown and downtown or Manhattan v. Brooklyn/Queens. A friend used to joke he gets a nosebleed going North of 23rd street and a friend’s husband once earnestly explained why he’d never move from his UES townhome to a downtown one: “downtowners have a totally different mentality.” Even at my small Northfield, MN college, there was a “downtown” for the cool kids and an “uptown” for the less cool (more conventional, less artsy, less druggy), which simply meant walking down or up a small grassy hill. People are ridiculous everywhere!

Perhaps the key to East-West unity is fixing your threadbare, rickety public transportation system. Cleveland is particularly gruesome for those Mr. Magoo/driving-challenged dolts like me and those who can’t afford a car. The bus routes and the quirky trolley that takes commuters to and from downtown Cleveland have limited reach and sometimes the routes get discontinued with only same day notice, which devastated me the year I lived in Ohio after college and took the bus from my job in downtown Cleveland to the suburbs where I lived with my mother. More than any other American city I know, the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) was (at least when I rode it regularly), the almost exclusive domain of Black low-wage workers. This fact lead to one white Clevelander I once had the displeasure to meet, to refer to the RTA as Return to Africa.

Cleveland’s neighborhoods seem uniquely segregated. Once my bus driver (before my route was discontinued) almost refused to open the doors to let me out when I alerted him of my stop. He blinked at me confused, looked out his front window at the tan brick building complex where mom lived and asked “you really live here?” For my mom and grandmother were living together in a East Side Cleveland suburb with a large Italian population and nary an Asian or other minority in sight. I smiled and shrugged–my sheepish confirmation that I was indeed a resident (though temporary) of the white enclave. As I descended the bus steps to the small strip of cement sidewalk on the busy main road that was allotted to us scamps without cars, no doubt, the driver’s jaw dropped. This Asian was charting new waters!

But I didn’t much like being Asian the year I lived within your borders. I always dreaded the walk from the bus stop to the long driveway of my mother’s building. It was a different type of walk of shame. No shoes in hand and tousled hair but my steps were similarly hurried. For few people at the time walked the narrow sidewalk strip along the heavily trafficked main road and it was dark outside after work. In the winter, I would tuck my long hair in my hood and wrap my bottom half of my face in a scarf but men still sensed my vulnerabilities: I was a young Asian woman who was unaccompanied. They would pull up in their cars and say daft things e.g. “me so horny” or “you like licky lick?” When the weather was warm and my Asian-ness was hard to conceal, things escalated. Once a jock of a college student pulled up in a bright red convertible and said “hey pretty, how many inches can you fit ?” When I looked at my shoes–panicked–and increased the length of my strides, he drove slowly along me and yelled something along the lines of “I love you Chinagirls. Bet you’re so tight! Hop in. I’ll get you mad wet and come on your titties so hard. ” (This type of fervent anti-Asian harassment had never happened to me to this extent in any other American city).

I had little respite once I reached home. My two roomies-mom and my 85-year old grandma were the type I’d have done anything to avoid at college, e.g. made a flurry of complaints to College Housing and slept with all my worldly possessions in a vinyl tent on the the Bald Spot (a field) until someone took pity and let me in. (My mom had moved from New York City to live with my widowed grandma after I’d left for college and after mom had been abruptly laid off from a job).

I will never understand mom’s choice of bunkmates. For grandma had an unyielding and mysterious grudge against my mom–her youngest of two daughters. Once when mom was a child, grandma made her chug a glass of milk and when she regurgitated it into the glass, grandma demanded she drink it up. Another time, grandma made her sit beneath their hot, wrought-iron stove and sweat as punishment for some minor infraction.

With little or no provocation, grandma would narrow her eyes and slice mom to the core. Sometimes she’d sweeten the deal with one shaking fist–raised in my mother’s direction. On the other hand, grandma Libby pined for her eldest daughter Minna * who lived in an adjacent suburb but had, cold turkey, stopped talking to her and my mom more than 20 years ago. No matter, grandma couldn’t help but extoll the accomplishments of her long lost daughter from her enduring marriage and her four ambitious children (including one doctor) to her spacious, colonial house in an affluent Cleveland suburb that she owned–all things mom lacked.

My mom has often explained that Grandma Libby was singularly beautiful. She was a Polish-American Jew with high cheek bones, pale blue eyes and bow lips—carefully painted red. Mom would follow this by lamenting that she and her sister looked like her father with his bulbous nose, and then tap her long, flat bridge to remind me of the plastic surgery she’d had done as a teenager. Because of grandma, mom equates physical beauty with cruelty. (I learned this as a teenager and young woman because on more than one occasion, if the two of us had a heated argument, she’d say “the prettier you get, the meaner you are.”)

Given this background, it was no surprise that my roomies were euphemistically, at odds. I’d often wake up in the morning to the two of them working out their familial dysfunction–mom yelling and slamming doors, grandma slinging insults in her quiet, haughty way. My Huis Clos alarm clock that I could not shut off.

I was mom’s chief defender that year. Her private squadron of one. My special skill was disarming the enemy (grandma) with my sweet, head-in-the-clouds facade and then when mom was in distress, unleash my angry, fighting words. I’d deploy myself to stand near mom in the midst of one of these arguments—-my face red, my arms flailing–and shout something louder than anyone else. “Shut up Grandma! You should be grateful mom’s here caring for you. Nobody else is here. You’re completely alone.”

This usually silenced them–the two of them oddly surprised I had thrown down the gauntlet. Grandma, who was a more capable grandparent than mom, might look down at her lap and mumble “I can’t believe that’s the way the kid talks to me,” and then gracefully bow out of the fight–her gaze out the window.

I’d like to say, at least mom and I were compadres that year. But mom and I fought in a hazy, residual way. She yelled–burdened by my post-grad-malaise–and I yelled back–furiously inert. My sad form of defiance: living in a madhouse and doing little to escape.

It’s no wonder, I spoke of you in expletives that year. Fuck your stuttering electrical outages that left us fumbling in the dark. Fuck your easy-to-raize strip-malls and your main-stage art museum tucked far away (at last for a non-driver). Fuck my older coworkers at the nonprofit I worked at who found out I was a New Yorker that didn’t know how to drive and gasped in judgy unison. And Fuckity-Fuck the rotten yentas in grandma’s lobby whom I overheard giggling about mom’s gold-capped, coffee-stained teeth earned from years of neglect and financial instability. You, the Fuckeye (Buckeye) State.

I’d often feel remorseful for yelling at grandma. At night, I’d slink next to her when she was asleep in her chair–her head tilted backwards on a small gray pillow–and I’d pat her thin white hair. I knew she loved me, despite the spiked, copy-cat words I uttered. She’d knicknamed me “Soom-e-lah” as a young child and had always shown her love though cooking and baking. Once a month, as a child living in New York City, I’d tear open an unwieldy package–inside a slab of fatty lox wings wrapped in wax paper, a comically large salami, grandma’s lush homemade rugelach and meat-filled kreplach–all miraculously preserved.

The year we were roomies, grandma would sometimes rub my back as we watched evening news and say she wished I’d have come along earlier when she was younger and owned Vera’s bakery (a successful bakery inside Cleveland’s historic West Side Market). She’d describe how her four other grandchildren (my unknown older cousins) had helped her behind the counter and benefited from knowing her and grandpa in the years they made money for the first time. And I, a Korean adoptee who long ago lost her birth family in South Korea, liked to imagine myself with this gaggle of cousins at the bakery counter–sugar-fueled and lit with joy. (But I’ll never meet them in real life because of mom and her sister’s estrangement).

I once found grandma in her sunken, plaid armchair reading her hardcopy of the Cleveland Jewish News. She sometimes scoured it, hoping to find a morsel about Minna, a longtime director of a synagogue Hebrew School who sometimes appeared in an article. That day, grandma was a flutter. “Minna’s being honored with a luncheon by her synagogue!”

Seated at the opposite end of the living room at the long dining room table and reading a novel, I looked up at her but said nothing–unclear if she’d meant to address me.

Mom appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a genie on a cloud and stood over grandma–her arms crossed. She grabbed grandma’s flimsy newspaper with both hands and shook it as if was wet. I watched her eyes hungrily search for the offending blurb. “I don’t get why you are so impressed. Anyone can be a Hebrew school teacher.”

As often was the case, there was a long pause before grandma responded, for she believed in an economy of words and liked to win arguments.

“But not anyone can be unemployed.” She looked up at mom and then folded her hands on her lap–quite satisfied.

I got up from the table–my shoulders clenched in anticipation. I knew their mild, clunky banter would quickly erupt into mom shouting at the top of the lungs and cursing her wretched sister who had left mom to do all the caregiving of grandma. That day, I did what I rarely did; I pressed my hands over my ears and slipped into the bedroom–vowing to leave you–foulest of states–forever. (A year later, I fled to go to law school in NYC and I stayed for good. I heeded the words of my wise therapist: “you are an autonomous person, distinct from your mother. Her woes are not yours.” I moved away from you, or shall I say slunk away–embarrassed by my late -in-life epiphany.)

But with mom inextricably bound to you, I have been forced to return. You’ve given me little cause to applaud you. Recall the Spring day of grandma’s funeral. A huddle of loved ones–including mom and I– stood through an unreasonably wet graveside service at a Jewish cemetary. It started with a light drizzle and mom at my side covering us with an umbrella. We faced a soft-spoken rabbi who seemed to only coo at us. (I heard not a word). When he called me to the plate (the spot in front of a high mound of dirt and the large ditch where grandma lay in her closed casket below), I performed my solemn duty. Rather, I went above and beyond. Stuck my hefty shovel in the mound of dirt to my right and dug the shit out of that mound. No one else had a chance. When the rain doubled down, I didn’t mind once. I liked not hearing the thud of dirt as it dropped on grandma’s coffin. (I’d done this before at a family friend’s funeral and that sound unhinged me). Long strands of my black hair clung to my neck.

Looking down, I noted a thin layer of soil on grandma’s coffin. No escaping now. I sniveled back the start of warm tears, then let them pool. How’d I love that bitch? There were tears in my nostrils and ears. (Or was that the rain). I see Grandma and I baking in her narrow kitchen. I am six, standing below her fleshy, pale arms as she pounds sugary dough for her famous jelly roll cake. Those grand arms (disproportionate to her petite frame)mapped with raised, sea-colored veins that she proudly displayed in cotton, short sleeved dresses.

Someone lets out a gutteral groan that would have raised eyebrows in a different context (It was me, tired from digging). My mother from behind, steps to my side and loops her arm around my waist. The umbrella above us is comically impotent–flapping and twisting in a fit of seizures. I stare down at my feet. The soil on the ground is darkening. If you love someone, you love them completely. Grandma is wilting in her easy chair-replaying all she has lost or it’s her fierce self– lashing out at mom like Audrey II (the blood-thirsty plant in Little Shop of Horrors). There’s a puddle in my collar bone but I continue to dig.

I imagine you want to throw your brethren–Indiana, Alabama, the Dakotas and that ilk–under the bus and yell “check out these pariahs and leave me be!” But you alone have brazenly toyed with me. Take the Thanksgiving my two kids and I visited mom during break–eager for the HITS: grueling late-night Monopoly games, browsing the sale racks at Nordstroms, counting a lengthy visit to the gift shop at the Cleveland art museum as a “cultural excursion” and eating Grandma’s stash of Trader Joe cat-shaped cookies.

For a change, you greeted us with a still blue sky and obedient white clouds that seemed to follow our cab on the highway from the Cleveland airport to Grandma’s driveway. No snow or ice on the road to amplify the stretch of boxy hotels and industrial gloom. When we arrived at mom’s place, the kids and l lept out of the cab–our suitcases quickly lined up on the sidewalk in front of mom’s lobby. From where we stood, a pane of window glass separating us, we could see mom in the lobby waving at us and walking briskly towards the door. She wore her Ralph Lauren floral blouse with the tie (so lovingly preserved for decades) that morphs her into an eager 1970’s secretary. On her face–the sort of relieved smile that takes over when one reunites with loved ones.

Pulling our suitcases towards the lobby door, we watched her take a step forward and trip on something (a thin rubber mat). Then, awfully, she was out of view. When we burst inside the lobby and surrounded her, her body was still and twisted on the floor. Her face up. How terrible to see her grimace, cry in silence and look past all of us–perhaps aware her life would never be the same. (Later we’d learn she’d broken some ribs, her hips, and had fractures on her back and legs. She would never walk on her own again).

I failed in that moment as I artlessly (and unsuccessfully) fumbled through my bag for my phone while talking to her to see what hurt. Nor could I comfort her by holding her; no limbs could be moved. If only she’d been a small bird, not frustratingly human and messy. I’d have eased her into my palms and kept her warm in a blanket of her own folded wings.

With no thanks to me, but to a neighbor’s home attendant who chanced to drive by the lobby when mom fell, screech to a halt and call 911, an ambulance arrived. (Long live the good samaritan!)

What came next: me accompanying mom through the long hallways of hospitals and rehab centers with their untouched pots of cold, watery coffee, activity sign-up sheets with a few stuttery signatures written on a slant, the companionship of televisions blaring 24/7 and a few seniors speaking in hushed tones at the cafeteria’s white-clothed tables. On each table was a squat round vase that was filled with wilted, short-stemmed tulips. Their stems were so shorn, all you could see were the crowded yellow bulbs at the rim– fighting for air.

I’ve had some affection for you. Remember how I’d fly from NYC to poll monitor every Presidential election in downtown Cleveland with my college friends–such earnest liberals. I’d endure a day of torrential, chilled rain and jaunty boredom because I liked your fickle, golden retriever way of licking everyone (regardless of political party) in equal measure. Now, you are like the nutty muzzled doberman in my old apartment building who used to rear at me in the lobby–perhaps sensing my political leanings. Is there a breed in-between?

I returned to you on my own when mom fell again. Without my husband or kids at my side, I felt puny and drained. Mom was once again in rehab–this time for urinary tract infections that wreaked havoc with her memory and made her particularly anxious. When she asked me to sleep over in her one bedroom rehab apartment–fearful of the flashes of forgetfulness that plagued her–I was concerned. For I, an almost fifty-year-old married mother of two was about to share a bed with my 87 year old mother for the first time in decades. And I’d already learned an unpleasant truth about myself–I get taxed and sordid when caring for those who are sick–even family. In other words, I greeted mom fearful of two things: that mom would have nothing more to give and everything to take.

That night, sleep wasn’t the point; moms’s restless feet were cold under the sheets. She made me watch hours of Channel 13 news, discuss local politics and some favorite memories in drabs as we scarfed down the micro-portions of styrophomed meatloaf and mashed potatoes that satiated neither of our growling stomachs all night. By early morning, mom, in a confident voice told me she lived on York Avenue (my longtime childhood address in NYC). With a patience I didn’t know I had, I quietly corrected her over and over by reciting her current Cleveland home address. There was a peaceful rhythm to the sound of our voices. A call and response. Then eventually, silence. Turning my head, I felt a wave of appreciation– her small mouth gaped open. Asleep on my pillow.

This past summer, my kids and I visited mom who is back in her own apartment with some home attendant help, for a week. On this trip, we reveled! Though grandma was slower than ever, pushing her roller chair, she laughed often. The kids took a video of themselves running in slow motion alongside her as she did her mollusk-paced shuffle and filmed a funny race with some Kentucky Derby-style narration. My kids also unearthed an old play I had written as a tween for my mother’s 50th birthday that dramatized our life in sometimes unflattering ways—our mother-daughter arguments front and center. The two of them acted out all parts with perfect mimicry–my mother over-emphasizing the second part of my name (the Mee of Soo-Mee) when she is annoyed and my own flailing, hysteric fighting style. (This is our family’s idea of fun).

The kids and I also engaged in more typical vacation activities—traversing via Uber from the East Side (Coventry)to the West Side (Lakewood) in order to explore niched Millenial neighborhoods. What a delight to find shops with kawaii wares, art galleries, vintage clothing stores, Asian street food and the delightful Cleveland Curiosities store that sold quirky goods like stuffed animal brains of each possible mental illness/disorder, creepy animal taxidermy and so much more. (Yes, us taking one small step towards repairing the East-West schism).

En route, the kids and I conversed with a medley of unique Uber drivers. One notable driver greeted us in a red Chevy, its passenger door punctured with large dents and long deep horizontal scratches. There was a strong scent of alcohol in the car and our driver, unprovoked, blasted a Kids Bop CD and sang along without irony or our request. (His driving was thankfully on point but he confessed he’d just side-swiped someone’s car and was worried about his insurance rate). Another driver, with great conviction, asserted Trump would win 2024 because Christians would vote for him because he killed less people (via wars etc) during his presidency than Obama and as he explained, body count matters to them.

It’s time for your rebrand. You’d do well with a glitzy PR ad like Saudi Arabia and other countries have made. Let’s wipe out these viral memes that poke fun/demean you.

Sure, include your picturesque Amish countryside-the buggies, the cheese shops, the capped children smiling bright. (Since it’s the young TikTok crowd not the grown populists you are appealing to, show the Amish sewing and donating COVID face masks as they did during the height of COVID). Pan in only briefly on the horsey estates and waterfalls of Chagrin Falls and by all means avoid exclusive country clubs. (It is said TikTok is where the revolution will start ). Go light on your team sports; everyone knows Clevelanders enjoy team sports but your reputation persists. Might you add a spattering of Insta-worthy cafes and vintage clothing boutiques as cleverly laid out in a row of cute aluminum domes downtown? Show us the faces of students at successful Cleveland public schools that look more appealingly diverse than some New York City public schools I know. (Perhaps don’t show us the odd vision of an all white band playing next to the all black cheerleading squad I once noticed at a thriving Cleveland high school’s football game). Give us some leafy Fall-scapes of Oberlin’s campus and its quaint college town with the same name. (But gamely avoid a shot of the family owned eatery that settled and won a lawsuit against the same college that made national news). End with one of your stately East Cleveland mansions with good acreage and its Zillow sale price–side by side with the NYC Lower East Side fourth floor walkup facing a brick wall that recently sold for a comparable price. (Yes, I exaggerate. A little).

Consider this an olive branch.

*not her real name