One down, three to go.

    

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

     “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
                                                                  ― Haruki Murakami

    The optimist in me wants to point to one year, done and gone, as of today. The first year of Trump 2.0 in the bag! Yippee! We made it through. We're still here, sorta.

     Are we? Not everybody, of course. Renee Good is no longer with us. Plus hundreds of thousands of people who were living among us, neighbors and colleagues and employees, bosses and friends and relatives, working, raising families, snatched off the street by masked men, dispatched to unknown fates outside the purview of law. No celebration for them. Or their loved ones. Or anybody who cares about things such as the Constitution. And the dignity of human beings. And decency.

     Besides, even if we came off the first year, unscarred, or not all that scarred anyway, there are three more to go. Based on the damage being done, the standards eroded, the precedents set, the reputation soiled, even then, even if there is an election, and someone not committed to imposing a cult of personality fascist state wins, the foundation is cracked, the rot exposed. We will never be free of this. I am certain of that. We are changed or — to be negative — our true national self is revealed, undeniable. The Vietnam War. Jim Crow. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry. The war against labor. Racism and sexism, bigotry and cruelty, greed and indifference. Once you start looking for bad stuff in our past, there's a lot of it.

     That isn't defeatism. The starry eyed look toward some transformative miracle, that will make everything right, justice and decency showing up at the last moment, like the officer in white at the end of "Lord of the Flies." I don't think that. No bucket of water is going to melt the Wicked Witch and inspire the castle guard to take a knee and all hail Dorothy. Only in the movies. 

     But if there is one — and I hate to use the word — lesson in all this, it is that there is a darkness and a hardness and a meanness in all people, just waiting for the right pied piper to play the right tune and draw it out. That was true before the arrival of the current administration. And it will be true long after it is gone, replaced by ... God knows what. How can good hope to prevail if it doesn't even recognize the game being played?

     That is not a recipe for surrender. There is also goodness and fairness and decency. We see that too. Americans did not look away when their neighbors were being hauled off. They did not cringe. They stood up, and fought the fight that has always be fought. The centuries-old struggle to get to the state that our current leader has ripped apart so easily. It is a struggle that never ends, that never can end. Not a truth that makes anybody feel good but, another lesson many American can't seem to stomach: the truth doesn't exist to make you feel good.

It was also against the law for a Black person to sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter

 

     In a time of madness, people lose sight of the basics. So it is worthwhile to review the facts.
     For instance.
     Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A day when our nation — well, some of us anyway — honors the slain leader. I will fly the flag, as befits a patriotic holiday. Put my hand over my heart, say the Pledge of Allegiance and feel good about our country.
     How can I? With so much bad going on?
     Let me explain, as simply as possible.
     Who was Dr. King? He was a civil rights leader. And what is civil rights? It was — is — the process where people who are excluded from guaranteed American rights struggle peacefully to gain access to those rights.
     People such as?
     Black people, for starters. For about 200 years, Blacks were kept as slaves. And what had Black people done to deserve slavery? The answer is hidden in the question. Their skin was darker than those who enslaved them. Lighter-skinned people somehow considered themselves better, based on nothing. Nobody says, "I have a great accountant; his skin is very light." Nevertheless, they'd hire the white applicant over the Black, for that very reason. It wasn't written down. You just did it.
     Though there were laws written down, designed to deny the humanity of Black people and so facilitate their oppression. When Black people, inspired by Dr. King, tried to rise up and enjoy the freedoms guaranteed as American citizens, they often broke the law.
     The year I was born, a University of Illinois student named Jesse Jackson couldn't find a book he needed in the shabby and inadequate one-room McBee Avenue Colored Branch of the Greenville Public Library in Greenville, South Carolina. So he went downtown to the main branch to look for the book — on patriotism, ironically — and was met by the police, and turned away. Instead of accepting this humiliation, he returned with friends and was arrested.
     "Groups of Negroes have invaded the quiet of the public library," the News and Courier reported.
     Tradition, backed by law, kept a Black teenager from checking out a book. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2026, we ought to remember how unjust laws, brutally enforced, facilitate oppression. The Holocaust was legal. The Nazis kept meticulous records, never imagining humanity would return. Slavery was legal. A Black person eating at a Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 was not.
     Now our government is acting as if stories like that somehow hurt white people. Biographies of Black heroes are whitewashed from military websites. The idea that we should live in a country where Black people can go to college is being criminalized. Colleges are being shaken down for money by the government for the crime of trying to create diverse campuses.
     Anyone who ever took a college tour knows how admissions work. There are academic standards, sure. But universities also let in a football team of students based on athletic prowess. And if the school band needs a trombonist, then a few trombonists are admitted. Plus someone from Alaska, so they can brag about having students from all 50 states. To suggest that also wanting a diverse campus that reflects our nation is somehow out of bounds is absurd.
     Then again, this is an absurd time. The harassment of dark-skinned Americans on the streets of Democratic-run cities — Los Angeles and Chicago last year, now Minneapolis — is absurd. Again, laws are invoked. Immigration violations — misdemeanors, paperwork issues — become enormous crimes that justify widespread brutality, the way the crucifixion of Christ was used to rationalize a millennium of killing Jews. Renee Good was a woman whose crime was sitting in a car that began to roll. She was shot in the face and the government denounced her as a terrorist, then went after her widow. It's cruel.

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Flashback 1999: On the allure of `Xena'

 Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, left, shared adventures in a vague heroic past with her particular friend, Gabrielle, played by Renee O'Connor (Photo: ©Universal Television / Everett Collection)

     Rick Garcia, a key figure in the Chicago gay community, died last week. I've known him for decades — he's the reason my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," ends at the Chicago Gay Pride Parade: he invited me to ride on the float for his new organization, Civil Rights Agenda. Riding a float in the pride parade on a fine day in June is one of those peak Chicago experiences that you are lucky to do once in your life, like reciting at the Uptown Poetry Slam or watching a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, or climbing one of the television masts on the John Hancock Building, or going down the Deep Tunnel. 

     I spoke to Rick a few times over the summer. Like many, he was having a hard time after the death of Lori Cannon. I tried to help, but wish I'd done more. Rick was a big-hearted man, but even the largest of hearts can break, and give out from overuse.

     My colleague Mitch Dudek wrote a fine obituary for Rick, explaining how nuns helped crack calcified resistance against gay rights by Catholic aldermen. He also said how he "became the first person many news reporters would call for a quote on gay issues." I can vouch for that. Back in the 1990s, Rick served as a kind of Gay Everyman. He shows up in a number of columns of mine — this is from when the column appeared Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the latter two days being briefer, lighter efforts in the feature section. While the unapologetic male gaze in this might cause trouble today, we didn't think anything of it 26 years ago, and I believe I can repost it without getting in hot water. Besides, right about now people might appreciate reading a cheery trifle. I know I did. 

     Ever since "Northern Exposure" went off the air, I don't watch TV regularly anymore.
     Except when cleaning the kitchen. You need something to distract from the slop and the grind. This is easy in the evening, when you can count on something newsy.
     Weekends are different. Nothing's on. The choices are "Xena: Warrior Princess," auto racing or golf (who watches that? Anybody? I don't believe it. A whole round?).
     Of course I settle for "Xena." Not for the plots: tepid Dungeons & Dragons-type myth run through a food processor of squishy 1990s morality. But if you're going to look up from scouring the sink and see something, you might as well see a few heaving bosoms and battling babes.
     I have accidentally enamored our 3-year-old son with "Xena." Now it's his favorite show. I probably should be concerned because of the fighting. But I find it sweet.
     "Hey, your girlfriend Xena's on," I said Sunday afternoon, and he scampered upstairs. Wearying of the kitchen, I joined him, and the family, all camped out in front of "Xena."
     I must never have really paid attention to the show before, while cleaning, other than ogle whoever was on screen (it's like one of those Russ Meyer women's prison movies, but set in ancient times).
     About two minutes' worth of watching were enough to establish the, ummm, intense relationship between the Xena character and her petite blond sidekick, Gabrielle.
     "This makes `Ellen' seem like `Bonanza,'" I said to my wife.
     That raised a question.
     "It's huge among lesbians," said gay activist Rick Garcia. "I've only seen it a couple times, but that's all you need to catch the extremely heavy lesbian overtones. They talk about feelings. They're in tune to one another. It's almost a cliche."
     Rick put me in touch with a friend, who explained the appeal.
     "First of all, it's just a very feminist show," said Alicia Obando,* 35, a lesbian who is a legislative aide for Cook County Board Commissioner Mike Quigley. "She is a very strong person, physically, mentally, emotionally."
     I asked her if she thought the overtones were accidental, imposed on an innocent adventure show, or intentional.
     "They supposedly do it on purpose," said Obando. "She knows she has a strong lesbian following."
      Lucy Lawless, the New Zealand-born actress playing Xena, has admitted as much.
     "We are aware, and we're not afraid of it," she told a Scottish newspaper. "This is a love story between two people. What they do in their own time is none of our business."
     North Sider Melissa Stanley, 28, who dressed up as Xena for two of the past three Halloweens, pointed out that the implied relationship appeals to more than simply lesbians.
     "I'm not sure if it's for the women viewers or the men," she said.
     I wondered how, considering the big hoo-haw that erupted over "Ellen" two years ago, that "Xena," the most popular syndicated show on TV, could craft itself into a lesbian fantasy epic without public tumult. Stanley had an intriguing theory.
     "For one thing, they never made a political agenda out of it, like `Ellen' did," she said, pointing out that Ellen DeGeneres really is a lesbian, while Lawless merely plays one, maybe. "I think people have a better time with straight people playing gays than with gays playing gays."
     Now why would that be?
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 1999

* She would go on to become Ald. Tom Tunney's chief of staff in 2003, serving for almost five years.

Works in progress: Jack Clark

   

     Much is going on with Jack Clark, who needs no introduction — he's a periodic contributor to EGD. There is a new memoir, "HONEST LABOR: Writing & Moving Furniture" (good title). I read an earlier version of it, so know it's worth your while. You can find it on his good-looking new website, the aptly named Jack Clark Books. What's up, Jack?

     It was a month or so after my birthday, the dead of winter, and I was in my office writing when out of the blue I started thinking about my next birthday. It was going to be one of those big ones. Eighty, my own voice whispered in my head. That’s old. “I’m well aware of that.” I spoke in a normal tone. If you’re going to talk to yourself — and I’m probably not the only writer who does — there’s no point in whispering.
     In the past, I’d never really thought much about age. You’re as old as you are and there’s nothing you can do about it. My sister Michele thought her life was over when she turned 21. I warned her that this would just keep happening and it has, which I see as a good thing.
     But 80? I mean that’s old. You can’t kid yourself anymore. Very few people make it to 100--and do you really want to be one of them? — which means you don’t even have 20 years left. Forget about that, I told myself and tried to keep my focus on the writing.
     Twenty years ago, I was 60, and that still seems like yesterday to me. For some reason I started thinking about my 50th birthday. It was one of those great nights with the usual crew, including my friend Randy who was also celebrating a birthday. We went straight up Halsted Street from the Greek Islands to O’Rourke’s Pub. Mary had stayed home sick, which meant her husband Steve didn’t have to worry about how much she drank. He could relax, drink her drinks too, and have a really good time. Somehow I got home. The next morning I woke with a hangover and a smile.
     That really couldn’t have been almost 30 years ago? It sure didn’t feel that way.
     Well, this went on for a half hour or so as I kept writing. I was never going to actually win a Shamus Award if I let a little thing like old age stop me. But I kept glancing backward trying to understand how all those years had passed so quickly with me barely noticing. I was in the middle of a sentence when I stopped dead. “You idiot.” And this time I should have whispered. “You’re only going to be 70.”
     I gave up on the sentence. I was a young man again. There was no need to hurry, I could finish that sentence whenever I felt like it. Seventy never sounded so young.
      How did I make that leap, you might ask. I don’t really know the answer but I do have a theory. I think I spent so much time preparing myself for being 70 that I thought I’d already passed the big day. I knew I had a big birthday coming so my mind jumped to 80. (About now you might be wondering why you’ve bothered to read this far.)
     I went around whistling for weeks. My friends kept asking what I was so happy about. How could I explain without exposing myself as a total nincompoop?
     This happened several years back. I just turned 76 last month — so only 24 years to that not-so-magic number. I don’t expect to make it. But if I can just keep lying to myself now and then, it might make the journey — however abbreviated — a little more relaxing
     And 80? Hell, I’m not worried about that. I was already there once for a while, and it wasn’t so bad. Really. Just a couple of uncomfortable moments that soon passed.

Wrapping our heads around a trillion, now that Alphabet is worth $4,000,000,000,000

 

     One is easy. Look in the mirror. You are one.
     Or a single basketball, tossed onto a court.
     Ten, no trouble. Ten players on that basketball court, running and passing that orange ball, sneakers squeaking.
     A hundred ... picture a grid, 10 on a side. Easy to imagine that. Or the crowded hall outside the gym door. Or a box of Kleenex, 100 tissues to the box. The thin professional boxes.
     A thousand ... more challenging. Not a figure that had much practical value during 99% of the 300,000 years of human history, where counting was One, Two, Three and Many.
     A thousand people crowd that high school gym to watch the game. A thousand days are almost three years. With its broadcast antenna, the Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall.
     I like to do the math. To try to imagine numbers. So when the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, hit $4 trillion on Monday, after rising 65% in 2025, my first thought was "What's a trillion, anyway? Can that figure even be imagined?"
     The best approach seemed to work our way up slowly, by powers of 10.
     For 10,000, we can stick with basketball —about 10,000 spectators at an average WNBA game: 9,800 per game in 2024, over 11,000 in 2025. One week contains 10,800 minutes.
     For 100,000, we need to shift sports, and pack Soldier Field way past the 60,338 fan there last Saturday to see the Bears overcome Green Bay, to the crowd cheering the 1926 Army-Navy game — at least 100,000. Wall to wall fans, standing in the aisles, on the roof.
     A million? The population of Fort Worth, Texas. The center of the sun is about 1 million degrees, Celsius. Maybe your net worth — with the skyrocketing stock market, and inflation, there are some 24 million millionaires in the United States, the word no longer indicating extravagant wealth — no mansions, no yachts. Just some comforting ballast to keep your ship from flipping in the next storm.
     Ten million? Combine the area of the two largest countries in the world, Russia and Canada, and you have about 10,456,000 square miles.
     One hundred million? The distance from Earth to the sun is close, averaging about 93 million miles.
     One billion. Your heart pumps about a billion gallons over 25 years. And billionaires are the new millionaires. Those people are rich. If you spend $10,000 a day indulging your every whim, it would take you 2,730 years to burn through that cash. Which explains why the very rich, such as Elon Musk, tend to become unglued. The richest man in the world, he's worth $725 billion.
     Closing in on a trillion right there. How to conceive of a trillion? Light zips along very fast — taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. To travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
      A shame we aren't on the metric system. The Earth's volume is 1,083,208,840,000 cubic kilometers.
      I thought I'd cheat, and consult Google's Gemini AI, since its soaring market value raised this subject, asking, "How to visualize a trillion?"
     AI answered immediately:
     "One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once."
     See the problem with that? 

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"Combine" should suffice

    
      God bless the kids. They not only travel the world, but come back bearing all sorts of goodies: olive oil from Portugal, a ceramic jaguar head from Mexico.
     Or this attractive jar of Italian pistachio spread, bought because I am a notorious fan of all things pistachio. Kind of like a green Nutella. Festive on tea biscuits, but not what I would call delicious. I wouldn't bother writing about it, except for this, on the back.
      Take a quick read below. I'm sure what popped out at me will pop out at you. "Mix vigorously to amalgamate" — not a word that a native speaker would use. You'd think they could dragoon an American friend into checking their copy. Careless. Or maybe no Americans at hand. That's what social media is for.
      I see how it happened. The label writer must not have wanted to use the word "mix" twice — that's a value of mine, too, not to repeat words, except for effect. The fix is easy enough —"Mix vigorously to blend and bring out ...."

     But that left me wondering. When would you use "amalgamate"? To figure that out, we should know precisely what it means. "Combine or unite to form on organization or structure." That's why it clunks when applied to sweet spreads. I seem to remember "amalgamate" appearing in corporate names. There was an Amalgamated Bank of Chicago. I suppose the Sun-Times and WBEZ amalgamated into Chicago Public Media. 

Johnson's dictionary gives a step-by-step guide.

     "Amalgam" is an interesting word. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to "regular alchemical use in the 13th c. Usually taken as a perversion of L. malagma (in Pliny and the physicians) a mollifying poultice or plaster." Almalgamynge appears in Chaucer, and that opening "al" hints at Arabic origins. Al-jamca, "union, conjunction."
     The OED defines "amalgamate" as "To soften or dissolve (a metal) by combination with mercury" and, later, "combined, united into one body."

    Thomas Jefferson used it. "It remains to amalgamate the comptroller and auditor into one." Doing a quick check, I see it is a word never before used on EGD. Now it has.

     

Bears playoff telecast exposes dark truth of Navy Pier sign — glitchy bulbs

    

Photo by Kerry Reid

     In my 30 years — at the end of January — as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, I've been tasked by readers with many odd missions. One gave me an urn holding a lady's ashes that he had been entrusted with. I handed the urn to her loved ones. Another reader, a VA social worker, drew me into trying to track down the family of a Marine vet, found frozen to death in a West Side doorway and headed toward a pauper's grave in Homewood. My column helped locate his family in Alabama, who had been looking for him.
     An elderly reader once asked if I could arrange for the newspaper to be delivered closer to her front door, as her driveway was icy. She was worried about falling. I knew that would prove beyond my capabilities, so went over and scraped the ice off her driveway myself, to her surprise, and mine.
     I tend to take such situations seriously, because I appreciate people reading this stuff, and try to help them, when possible. Ditto for those who cooperate with being put in the paper. When I profiled a homeless man living in a van in the Glen of North Glenview train station parking lot, whose dream was to work in Appleton, Wisconsin, I phoned the mayor of Appleton to see what could be done. Nothing, as it turned out. But the call was made.
     I don't always. "I'm not a social service," as I sometimes testily snap, to my wife's consternation. But certain situations just demand action. Such as this email, which arrived Sunday afternoon from Cathryn of Burr Ridge:

     "Hi Neil. Watched Bear’s game last night & admired how beautiful Chicago presents on TV. Until the shot of Navy Pier — some lights on Chicago Children’s Museum are burned out which looked second rate on the national stage. I thought maybe you’d know who to contact so it could be corrected before next game. Thank you. Your long time reader..."

     I'd watched the same game — my wife's suggestion. "Let's join the zeitgeist!" she said, cheerily. (Zeitgeist, German: "the spirit or mood of a particular time." Shows what can happen to a person if she hangs around me for 40 years.) I'd admired the swooping shots of the glittering city and did not notice any balky Children's Museum sign. That could have been during the third quarter when, with the Bears on the ropes, we got bored and watched an episode of "Victoria."
     Something about Cathryn's request seemed irresistible. It was a trust drop. No AI aggregator is going to ask the Children's Museum about their sign. I reached out to their PR guy, who put me in touch with Peter Williams, the vice president of exhibits and building operations at the museum. I forwarded the email. Williams replied:
     "Chicago Children's Museum has an old school neon sign on the Navy Pier Head House. Sometimes when it rains, a neon transformer ground fault interrupter (GFI) will trip causing three letters to go out. Typically, the GFI will dry out and reset in less than a day. The part of the sign that went out on Saturday night was back on by noon on Sunday."

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