An odd couple sat on the boardwalk behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland looking out over Lake Erie. An older white man with a white beard who looked like he could start fiddling “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” at any moment was sitting on the top step. He was with a black woman who had a bicycle with a boom box mounted on the handlebars. The boom box was playing “Keep on a rockin’ me baby” by the Steve Miller Band.
After Alyssa and I had left the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame, we had walked around behind the Hall toward the boardwalk next to Lake Erie, but as we got closer to the couple I got a better look at the woman and decided she was actually a man in some kind of spandex outfit. His bicycle had been modified with Harley-like upright handlebars and a place for mounting the boom box. Charlie Daniels and spandex Harley boom-box bicycle man rode off together on their bicycles toward downtown Cleveland. I would image they will return tomorrow, and each beautiful summer day, hoping LeBron will stay with the Cavaliers and bring a championship to Cleveland.
I imagine the lakefront to be a place where Walt Whitman would have landed if he had ended up in Cleveland instead of New York. Nature’s best meets man’s mighty works at the lakefronts of America, and Cleveland is no different. The backdrop of skyscrapers surround Browns Stadium. Thankfully the stadium is not named after some corporation that will merge with another and make the CEO rich while the union workers risk their lives to change the nameplate high atop the stadium exterior, not far from where the common people peer down on the field with binoculars in the cheap seats. No, Cleveland showed some integrity with the simple name, “Browns Stadium,” and also by not putting a domed stadium right there on the water’s edge, even though come December the winds will swirl in off of Lake Erie and bring on that lake-effect snow. But without Brian Sipe, Bernie Kosar, or Jim Brown to lead the way in this new lakeside stadium, December’s blizzards will only obscure the ghosts of playoffs past who hover in air waiting for the Browns to rise again while Earnest Byner wonders what might have been and the odd couple keeps peddling through downtown Cleveland.