Opinion

Open the window of your heart

“It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday. The regular crowd shuffles in.” Those are the first lines of Billy Joel’s, “Piano Man,” a song that always transports me back to my college days. To help pay for school, I was the pianist at a small Italian restaurant. Even in the 80s, it was old-fashioned, with one large room outlined by raised booths along the walls and a few floor tables in the middle. The decor was, what’s the word, beige. Yep, a lot of beige. Or was it brown? It’s tough to be sure because the lighting was pretty low.

I hate thunderstorms.

Who makes up those ridiculous job interview questions?

If you tracked your life with points, would reading this column add or subtract from your total?

In traveling across the Buckeye State, the topic of housing continues to be top of mind for our fellow Ohioans.

Brrr-r-r-r! It’s cold out there!

I’m not much of a sports fan, nor was I ever a competitive athlete in school.

When it comes to what must be done to sustain life, eating really does head the list. Like so many, including my lovely daughters Shannon and Katie, I’ve developed over time a growing fascination with cooking. I think a part of the intrigue comes from the exposure cooking has gotten both in social media outlets and on television. And while I’m surely not interested in engaging in any cooking competitions against the likes of superstar foodies like Bobby Flay and Gordon Ramsay, whose culinary talents have allowed them to bank millions, I do like, especially on weekends, to see what I can do knocking out a recipe. Back in a former life when there was someone else here to do the cooking, to me, the kitchen merely was a shortcut to get from the living room to the family room.

You’ve probably seen those commercials from an insurance provider where someone throws a challenge flag, and an instant replay crew comes running in to show what really happened.