My friends and I travelled to Cleveland for blog research purposes. Also to attend Indians and Browns games. We stayed at a historic hotel downtown, selected for its proximity to sporting events… ignorant of the fact that the city is anticipating some kind of downtown “renaissance” in the future.

Let’s put it this way: ghosts wander the streets outside weekday business hours without fear of being seen by eyewitnesses. Traffic lights are merely decorative as a single car doesn’t require directions on who should proceed first through an intersection. (To be fair: the streets were plugged with cars trying to leave after the football game.)

Making major waves in the media and in the halls of government lately is unemployment. The “land of opportunity” is sadly now more hypothetical than factual. Not to be overly dramatic but there in Cleveland, you could feel something suffocating downtown. Something like the opposite of inspiration.

But maybe I was just applying my preconceptions to a city that is still chugging hard and flashing grit in tough times. Then we came to the “Question of the Day.”

The four of us sought unsuccessfully to eat breakfast in the popular Warehouse district before leaving town. On our retreat back to the historic Renaissance hotel, we identified a Starbucks, which we were familiar with as an establishment that serves coffee.

Inside on the counter was a sheet of foolscap entitled Question of the Day. I don’t know if I can extrapolate what we saw throughout the entire nation, but the various pen scrawls of Average Joes and Janes made an impression on us. The words seemed to breathe from the page:

Do you know where can I find a job?

Where are all the jobs?

Are you hiring?

What’s wrong with America?

There were only six or seven questions, and four were these. This wasn’t Burger King, this was Starbucks – where customers can presumably afford to buy $5 venti lattes. The Question of the Day seemed starkly out of place inside the coffee conglomerate, which is maybe why it resonated.

In the lonely strip of downtown we left with our coffees and abandoned Cleveland on the interstate. Staring blandly at passing trees I remembered that back in Starbucks something was missing.

Usually questions of the day come with answers.