March/April 2019

Adult squirrels are the worst.

They tend to get a bit nutty in close quarters, says Colleen Bumba, a volunteer at Lake Erie Nature &  Science Center, the home of Cuyahoga County’s only wildlife rehabilitation facility.

“They’re aggressive adult squirrels, they’re fast and they bite a lot,” Bumba says. She should know. The retired veterinarian has been a volunteer at the center since 2015, treating songbirds, turtles, rabbits and other creatures brought in by tender-hearted animal lovers.

The Bay Village center offers wildlife education and programs year ’round, but it’s probably best known for its assortment of birds and other mammals on display behind the sprawling facility. The animals have recovered from their injuries but are unable to survive in the wild. Instead, they help educate the public and give visitors an up-close look at creatures usually only seen in quick glimpses.

The center handles many hundreds of animals annually, ranging from stressed-out rescued baby bunnies to turtles with cracked carapaces.

Spring is prime season for the center. Pets uncover rabbit nests, baby birds and squirrels tumble out of nests, birds run into windows, amphibians encounter cars. The intersection of wildlife and humans often ends disastrously, with the animals coming up on the short end.

The staff has swim tanks for waterfowl rehab and covered cages for flying squirrels and birds that need a quiet place to recuperate.

Bumba enjoys the work and says her experience as a veterinarian gives her a chance to serve her community and the animals that live there. Every wildlife encounter is different.

When people find baby animals they assume they’re abandoned, but that’s rarely true, Bumba says. “Mom may have been scared away. Deer and rabbits only come back periodically (to their babies) so they don’t attract predators. A lot of times, the best, the highest survival rate is to be with their mother.

I’ll be up front with you; I was part of the first TV generation, hooked on the electronic babysitter when I was a kid. I can even tell you what a test pattern is.
I still watch a lot of TV, though I dropped cable for streaming and new channels have popped up with occasional surprises. One is called “Decades” that has a wide variety of pre-cable programming. Remember Dick Cavett? I was watching one of his shows and there was something that seemed really out of place.
Then it hit me. His guests, all of them, were smoking.
The show was taped when most Americans smoked, and I mean REALLY smoked. It was so much a part of our culture that you rarely saw someone without a “ciggie.” My dad was one of them. Four packs a day. He had an ashtray next to his dinner plate. When I was a kid, he would send me to the neighborhood deli for a pack of Luckies. No filters, either. Filters are for girls.
We used to say Dad had “a heart of gold and fingers to match.” When I went to college, you could smoke in class if you brought an ashtray. Think about that. Does anyone even have an ashtray in their house today?

Hall Hits
That leads me to my next point. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame welcomes its 2019 class this spring and, I know I’m courting controversy here, I think they got it right. How do you deny The Zombies, Roxy Music with Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, Radiohead and the rest?
I don’t envy the folks who make the final decisions. Just about everyone on the outside has an opinion, usually based on acts that didn’t get in or they complain about some who did.

By Danny Smith

Remember back in the 1960s when folk rock was big? One of my favorite tunes from that era is Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”  He was inspired to write it after reading passages from the Old Testament.

According to Pete, he came up with the melody in about 15 minutes, then added the slightly altered biblical words and recorded it. The rest is history. The Byrds covered Seeger’s version, making it the group’s second number one hit. (“Mr. Tambourine Man” was their first.)

The tune lyrically speaks to the fact that to everything there is a season. I believe that life’s lessons prove those words to be true. I further believe that when it comes to planning for a successful retirement, there is a time to take risk and a time to take risk off the table.

What do You Need, What’s Guaranteed?

When people engage me as their advisor, after helping them estimate how much income they will need to retire, one of the first questions I ask is, “How much of that income do you want guaranteed?” The answer is usually, “Well, all of it, or as much as we possibly can.”  

One way to do this is to allocate a portion of your retirement assets to a certain type of annuity contract called a Single Premium Immediate Annuity, or SPIA for short. SPIAs are issued by insurance companies and are designed for people with a guaranteed income objective for a certain number of years or for the remainder of their life, or joint-lives in the case of couples.

Some SPIAs have an inflation option that increases the annual payout every year. With this option, payments in the early years of the SPIA will be less than they would have been without the inflation option, but go up every year over the selected payout period.

By John Selick IV

There is a lot of truth to the old adage “it takes a village to raise a child.”

My wife and I welcomed a daughter to our already full house of children, a fourth child to a blended family of preteen siblings. We may have been running out of room in our home, but we had plenty of room in our hearts to welcome this little girl into our lives. She is surrounded by a loving family of parents, sisters and a brother, and her grandparents. The grandparents are important members of this village.

You’ve probably heard how hard the chef career is: they’re rarely home, they work long weekends, they miss holidays. It’s all true. It’s a tough career where I’ve had to make family sacrifices. To make it more complicated, my wife is in this business, too.

We couldn’t be successful in our careers if it wasn’t for our parents, who are able to help with the children. The kids are lucky to have grandma and grandpa be there for them while we are at work. They genuinely care about how the kids are doing in school and what they want to eat. The grandparents spoil them with foods they love, but of course we have some preferences we want for them, as well.

A Gentle Clash

I’m into fresh ingredients when I cook at work and at home. I also prefer organic for some ingredients. She won’t say it, but I could see the look in my mother-in-law’s eyes when I loaded the fridge with homemade baby food – she thought I was nuts. She raised her own children with store-bought baby food and they turned out just fine. Who does this guy think he is with his sweet potato-spinach-apple concoction?

By John Horton

Cuyahoga Community College culinary instructor Giovanna Mingrone has “rescued” more than 135,000 pounds of food through Stone Soup CLE, a nonprofit she established in 2015 to help the hungry. The organization stocks local soup kitchens with excess food from restaurants, grocery stores and vendors.

“By limiting waste, we’re limiting hunger,” says Mingrone, who collects the food with the help of a small group of volunteers. “It’s just a matter of delivering the right food to the right place at the right time.”

The name of her organization grew from an old folk tale in which people share small amounts of food to create a delicious meal for the masses. She said it reflects the power of a community coming together for the benefit of many. For more information, visit stonesoupcle.org.