"Make it be spring"

Natasha

     Margaret Atwood didn't just write "The Handmaid's Tale," you know. She's also a poet — 18 volumes published, as many collections of poetry as she has novels. So today being the 1st of February, I feel permitted to dig out her poem "February," which begins:

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed

    We'll leave the watching hockey to her — Atwood is Canadian, after all, she doesn't have much choice in the matter. The poem — I can't print it in full, but you can read it here, on the Poetry Foundation site — is mostly about the cat, on its surface. Lounging in bed, on her chest,"breathing his breath/of burped-up meat and musty sofas."
    Perfect, right? But of course the poem is much more than that. The cat is a metaphor — plainly stated — for the male aggressiveness that is such a leitmotif through Atwood's writing. 

It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run.

     Can't argue that, not with President Grab-'Em-By-the-Pussy turning impotent geriatric rage into the driver of American policy, foreign and domestic. 
     The poem made me miss our Natasha, who we lost in June, an absence deeply felt — she was 16, and to this day I'll hear a purr-like-sound, or a certain kind of rustle, and look up, expectant, then disappointed. It was the very end, and mercy demanded we put her down. But also a sort of foreshadowing that would look trite in literature, but life has no problem grinding in your face. Natasha's parting was so quickly replaced by other, greater losses — my mother died two days later — that I never even bothered to write about it here before. "My cat died and then my mother and then my cousin Harry and a couple cherished friends" seems straying into bathos. We all got woes. Suck it up, buttercup.

    Atwood ends by beautifully capturing a situation very familiar to all cat owners, though none of us would think to express it so beautifully, or at all, followed by a directive I plan to repeat daily until April.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Atop blog: "February," by Hendrik Meijer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Quite beautiful

     So Friday morning, busy with research, emails and even a quick nip out to the Bean Bar for coffee with a colleague, slowed toward lunchtime.
     And I thought, "Something for Saturday..."
    At that precise moment, I looked up from my computer screen, at the snow just cascading down, the sky filled with big fat falling flakes. 
    Wonderstruck, I stood up, went downstairs, and walked outside, to take a few pictures on the front porch. 
    "Have you looked outside?" I asked my wife. "It's quite beautiful."
    "Oh my God!" she cried, looking up from her computer, noticing it for the first time. 
     Then I went to the back porch, shot more photos — none seemed to capture the magnificence of the sky, filled with slow. Maybe you needed the motion, or the shockingly cold air, despite which, I had the presence of mind to tip my head back and catch a few snowflakes on my tongue. I'd hate to let a winter pass and not do that. 
     The magic of nature is, it resets us. Snow squalled majestically from the sky for 100 million years before people showed up and deemed it majestic. It cares nothing for our social media or our would-be king. It will fall long after we are done making a hash of things, and go to our final resting places. A good thing to notice it, and appreciate it, while we can, before then.

Minneapolis ICE killings the latest shocks in a haystack of last straws

Still four rings to go. Virgil and Dante being rowed across the River Styx (Gustave Dore)

     Oh honey.
     You think this is going to be easy?
     That's so cute. Have a seat. Let's talk.
     Yes, President Donald Trump had a bad couple of weeks. Two of the courageous Minnesotans confronting masked ICE thugs were shot dead. On video. From several angles. A 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat was photographed, rigid with terror, being hauled away. ("The worst of the worst..." they said). He's being held at a detention center in Texas now.
     Some portion of the American public, which has been — what? Distracted over the past decade? In a coma for 11 years? — stirred. Suddenly Democratic leaders are talking about shutting down the government until... wait for it... a few more rules are put in place for ICE. They must wear body cameras! And uncover their faces!
     Oh sweetie ... we have rules already. They're called "laws." Once upon a time these laws applied to everyone. Now they're mere tinder used by Trump to set American traditions on fire. Rules and laws don't help if they aren't being enforced. Asking for more is like rushing into a burning house and installing smoke detectors in the blazing rooms.
     Put it this way: the two ICE agents who shot Alex Pretti, they're still not charged with any crime, right? Because last time I checked, murdering a man in cold blood because he's recording you with his iPhone is already a crime. Even if you're a member of a paramilitary goon squad.
     Save the high fives for when that day comes.
     Until then, yes, positive signs. These latest abuses were so blatant that even the Lord of the Lies, rather than doubling down, seemed to pause, go all soft focus. He said something dismissive about guns. Greg Bovino, he of the Peaky Blinders haircut and gruppenfuhrer great coat, was dispatched back to whatever banality-of-evil clerk post he occupied before fate gave him a stage to strut upon.
     The liberal sigh of relief rolled across the land like a spring zephyr. Social media crackled with talk of corners turned. Bless our bleeding hearts, we see the sun rise and imagine the world born anew.
     It's so tempting to speculate: could killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti be the last straw?
     Spoiler alert: no, it's not.
     To believe otherwise, you have to ignore a giant haystack of previous last straws.
     Let's work backward.
     Insisting we must invade Greenland in an opera buffa aping of Vladimir Putin, alienating our closest allies, wasn't the last straw. Tearing down the East Wing of the White House without telling anybody wasn't the last straw. Selling the nation's personal data to Elon Musk wasn't the last straw.
     Do I have to walk you all the way back to "Gulf of America"? And beyond. We watched an insurrection. Live on television. A mob, goaded by the president, storming the Capitol, searching for the vice president to hang, assaulting police officers. Jan. 6 wasn't the last straw. We re-elected him anyway. We bought this. Sending it back is no simple task. Totalitarianism isn't an Amazon sweatshirt you can decide doesn't fit. A little snug around the neck. You can't just stop by Kohl's and return the fascism you rashly bought. Nor is this a one-time purchase; it's a subscription.

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My top ten

 

The Sun-Times took this shot for some kind of promotional campaign that never happened. Yes, I
worried it was affected to take it at the Newberry Library. But one of my rules is: "Be who you are."

     I've written nine books. None of them is a collection of columns. A disappointment to me since, having assembled this list, such a volume would be fun (and easy) to put together. Heck, readers might even enjoy it. But whenever the subject is brought up (always by me) my agent, or whatever editor or publishing type I'm afflicting with my ideas, looks grim, shakes their head, and says the same thing: "Column collections don't sell." Particularly when they're never published. That was true when titans like Mike Royko and Steve Neal walked the earth. It's true now, I suppose. I don't know. I've never had one.

    Oh well, here online, we can do as we please. To mark my 30th anniversary (and yes, this has gone on — well, indulge me. There won't be a 40th) I've put together 10 of my all-time favorite columns over the years. It should really be 30 columns, given the 30th anniversary. But that would be a lot of work, and I can't imagine anyone actually looking at 30. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone looking at 20. Or 10. Or five. Or three. But I do hope you grab one and read it. Such as the one about Eugene O'Neill. My personal pipe dream, that prods me to perhaps work a little harder on these than the average newspaper fodder, is the hope that they might bear re-reading down the line. I like to think I'm right. Though I might be deluded. Like everybody else. Anyway, if you're new to the column, and want to see what pieces I'm most proud of, over the years, these stand out:

1. A great trumpet is 'a thing of beauty, an extension of you' — This is my favorite kind of story, where I pull a thread and see where it leads. In this case, I was visiting my son in Phoenix, and we went to the Museum of Musical Instruments. A fabulous place; think, the Louvre, but for instruments. I went back two more times, eventually noticing that a lot of brass instruments were made in Elkhart, Indiana. Home Conn Selmer. Only 90 miles away. It could have just been a factory visit, but I thought: this story should really begin with somebody playing a trumpet. And who should that person be, ideally? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Esteban Batallan. Facts make a story, and the fact about a silver bridge from the mouth of previous lead CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth becoming a plate affixed to the bottom of his horn's bell, well, when he told me, I actually turned to look for the studio audience so I could gesture in his direction, raise my eyebrows, and say, "Can you believe that?"

2. ‘Code yellow: Trauma in the emergency room’ Even before I was a columnist, I was interested in medical stories. I remember seeing the photo of a little boy kicking a balloon at a picnic for transplant recipients and thinking, "How do they transplant those kidneys?" I would watch a kidney transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant. Watch autopsies at the morgue and faces being rebuilt. I'm still at it — right now I'm slated to watch brain surgery because, really, how often do you get the chance? Such stories were never dull. Like any other aspect of this job, contacts are important, and for this story, I had to force my way in. Mount Sinai's initial response when I approached was, in essence. "No. No. HIPAA. No. Again no." But I persisted. By the time I was done with them, their CEO was asking me to be her interlocutor at the City Club. And when COVID struck the next year, Ashlee and I could hit the ground running at Mount Sinai because the door had already been kicked open.

3. You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat: The story you set out after isn't always the story you write, and it's important to be ready to turn on a dime, scrap your expectations, and go with something else.  Top chef Sarah Stegner, whom I'd been writing about since she headed the Ritz Carlton dining room, is one of the most socially-conscious people I know, and she views coleslaw as an entry drug for salad, and was going to go to my kid's junior high school and teach the cooks there how to make it properly.

      I went expecting a culture clash between the Polish lunch ladies and the James-Beard-award-winning chef. What I didn't realize was a) they'd worked together before and b) I'd meet Lily Jaeger and her friends, the sort of real life that seldom gets into the newspapers. I was so nervous, falling out of the sky to capture quite intimate moments, that I did something I never do — I called her mother, after the fact, to get her permission to run the column. I didn't want her feeling wronged, and wrecking the joy I felt writing it. She went along. My only regret is not assigning a photographer, though, if I had, I might have been fussing over a picture of some sorts, and missed the details caught in this column. 

4. "A wild roller coaster ride through a dark tunnel" — Asking a question, then acting on it are two key skills to being a columnist. Plus thinking of people other than yourself. Three qualities that went into this column, after I sealed up a Cologuard colon cancer detection kit, containing, well, you know, and then had this thought: "Who opens the jar?" Answering the question involved lots of calls and driving 300 miles to Madison and back. But everyone at the paper instantly got what I was doing, and they gave it great play. 

5. "Abandoning our kids, then and now" — Being on the night shift for seven years meant I was working when most of the staff was not, and I became expert at, for instance, rifling through the library and the morgue, where the old newspaper clippings were kept, a place most reporters seldom entered. This column came from a manilla envelope I glimpsed while flipping through the As, "ABANDONED BABIES, 1940s." How could you not look at that? And notice how it isn't just a deep dive into the past — what's the point? — but I bring it up to date, using the past to illuminate the present. Which is what it's for.

6. "Crawl across the floor to me." This column was one of those experiences that gets branded into memory, so to speak. From first hearing about this dominatrix at a family Thanksgiving dinner, and saying, "Now there's a profession you just don't see in the paper much," to standing in front of her dungeon door on Lake Street, hesitating before going in, wondering whether this would break my fragile bond of connection with readers. I decided that I wasn't doing anything I was ashamed of, and if I wrote it correctly, that would be conveyed. I later heard afterward that Lilith felt ill-used, somehow, and I'm sorry for that, as I felt I treated her openly and honestly. I did quiz her mother — an extra step I was proud to take. Maybe she was mad about that.

7. Non-Native-American Guide — Imagine having a skilled journalist and storyteller documenting your kids' lives, from birth. How great would that be? Another columnist would ignore his family completely — not newsworthy — but sharing news was never my goal. Telling a story was.  Though news had a way of creeping in. Notice how this column on my older son's participation in Indian Guide's also captures a moment when the YMCA scrapped the "Indian Guides" name. They're now called the "Adventure Guides."

8. Why restrict child porn but not guns? "The trouble with you Len," Paddy Bauler once said to Hyde Park do-gooder Leon Despres, "is that you think it's on the up-and-up." In a sense, that's my problem too — I think I'm crafting reasoned arguments for reasonable people, not throwing chunks of raw chum into a seething mass of piranha. Which is more or less what I'm doing. This was written as a calm argument about gun control based on the First and Second Amendments. The headline, which I wrote, blandly restates the premise of the piece. What I didn't realize was that a) putting the word "child porn" in your headline makes the algorithms go crazy. b) to people for whom it is impossible to even conceptualize any sort of rational restriction of guns, it's easy to invert that thought into an argument for legalizing child porn. It became one of my most ... I almost said, "read" but that overstates the case ... reacted to columns, by legions of people who never bothered to read it, or anything else, as far as I can tell. 

9. O'Neill's 'Palace of Pipe Dreams'  A newspaper column is a literary form, like Haiku, that demands certain qualities. An element of personality — I write a lot of obituaries, for instance, but they're not about me. My picture isn't generally on them Because they're not columns. A column also should be a certain length — say 500 to 1,000 words. Over the years I've managed to play with the form, now and then. I've written columns in the form of poems, or dialogues, or transcripts. This one I'm particularly proud of — it's an interview with actor Brian Dennehy, written in the form of a play that is also a parody of Eugene O'Neill. 

10. Girl X's mute testimony speaks to heart of agony: Here is another example of playing with the form — in this case, using assistant state's attorney Anita Alvarez reciting. the alphabet as a way to structure the column. If you read it, you'll notice I posted it for my anniversary joining the staff of the paper — anniversaries are big in the journalism world, a peg to hang information that otherwise might seem out-of-left field, and pointless. Which I hope this exercise in nostalgia doesn't seem. Tomorrow we got back to the daily grind of reacting to headlines, assuming they print the column I turned in. I know I've done my job when I worry they won't.

Coping with the grief of a loved one lost to COVID

Sandra Wittman

     A black-and-white cat paused in the doorway, giving me the once-over.
     "There's Oscar," said Sandra Wittman, sitting on a bentwood rocking chair in her Carpentersville home. "When he hears a male voice, he comes. Just in case it's Norm, his daddy."
     It's not, and never will be, as Wittman outlined in an email:
     "You wrote a column about my husband, Norm Kopp, who died of Covid five years ago today. That article meant a lot to me and put a face on the more than a million Covid victims in our country. I am 82 now. It has been a difficult five years and, since we never had children, I am alone with my cat Oscar and sometimes lonely. I miss him every day. I am still living in the home we shared which is filled with memories."
     Is it ever. Art from trips to Venice and Spain. Sculptures of cats. Grief is not easily told or understood. But given how completely the 1 million victims of COVID and their millions of immediate survivors have been swept under the rug, I felt obligated to try.
     Wittman had a photo waiting on the coffee table.
     "That was our 15th anniversary of living in sin," she said. "You know, we were never married. I call him my husband. What else should I call him? 'My boyfriend?' We were 70-something years old."
     They met over 40 years ago, in a singles bar in Schaumburg.
     "He was so bright, so funny," she said. "I learned to eat Mexican. We really enhanced each other's lives. We did exciting things together. We didn't have a lot in common at the beginning. At the end, I didn't think we were joined at the hip ..."
     She paused, as if realizing anew.
     "Yeah. We were."
     Becoming unjoined was excruciating.
     "I have to tell you how he died," she said. "We were so careful, all those months. Then in December, it was announced, they were going to release the vaccine. His doctor said he would be on the list for high risk. Then the Trump administration cut the vaccine numbers to Illinois because we're a blue state. So he didn't get the vaccine."
     Instead he got COVID. From her, she believes.
     "I hurt my foot and had to go for an MRI. ... I'm pretty sure that's where I got it. There was 
horrendous guilt that I brought it home."
     They Zoomed, so he could see Oscar. "You need to come home," she said.

     Instead, Kopp got worse in mid-January.  
     "The nurse said, if he makes it through the night you can come over here and be with him when he dies. Which was a real gift, because most people didn't get to do that. I watched him die through glass. It took three minutes. I don't even remember how I got home. I was completely alone. Nobody was here."

     Alone took getting used to.

     "What are the five years like?" she mused. "I hardly remember the first two. I kept hitting my head. When you're grieving, you lose connection with your body. You're not yourself. You've lost control, and this horrible thing has happened. I was constantly banging my head on something, or falling down."

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Flashback 1992: High voltage

On the west communications mast of the John Hancock Building in 1992. (Photo by Robert A. Davis)

     Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of my regular column first appearing in the Sun-Times, and I prepared a list of all-time favorite columns to post today. Looking for something to illustrate it, I came across this photo — from before I was a columnist, true, but reflecting a certain spirit. And I realized, much as I like to paint the years beforehand as being spent slumped in the corner of a late night newsroom, waiting for something to burn down, that wasn't entirely the situation. There was fun and adventure too, such as this story — which I somehow never posted before. The list can wait until Thursday.

     A hundred and thirty floors above downtown Chicago, the city is utterly quiet. No car horns, no grinding truck gears, no sirens. Only the endless howling of the wind.
     And, of course, the voices of the workmen, as they scramble over the twin communications masts of the John Hancock Building, which are receiving a rare refurbishing after years of exposure to the brutal elements.
     To hear the workmen's voices, before the wind carries their words away, you must climb up onto the masts, higher than most people care to go.
     "We don't get many visitors," says a paint-spattered Greg Teeters, coming down from a night spent on the towers.
     They work mostly at night because the television and radio antennas lining the masts have power going through them. Those antennas could cook somebody. But shutting off the power is not always easy. During ratings sweeps week, one TV station refused to cut transmission and work had to be suspended.
     The antennas are shaped strangely — a pair of interlocking, curved sausages; a batwing grill; several giant snare drums; a few clusters of boxes. Some stick out at right angles. They act like vocal cords for the wind.
     "You hear it singing," said Phil Elliot, one of the workmen on the site. "Boy, it's pretty wild."
     About two dozen workers are taking part in some aspect of the project. Most are ironworkers, familiar with working where a misstep means instant death. All say that focusing your attention on safety and work, and ignoring the height and danger, is key.
     "You don't think about it, that's the thing. You just do it," said William "Bud" Mudd. "You start thinking about it, you screw up."
     The work, which began in early August, was divided into three stages. First, the red beacons atop the masts were replaced. The 2 1/2 foot-tall aviation beacons, 1,455 feet, 6 inches above the street, had been untouched since the building was dedicated in July, 1968. They had not burned out, but 24 years of weather faded their glow and corroded their circuits.
     Next, the tops of the towers were painted, for the first time in 14 years, by workers wearing lifelines, with plastic half-gallon jugs of paint hanging off their belts. This was the phase where winds caused delays. The project was to have wrapped up about now, but will continue for several more weeks.
      The last phase of work is being done now on scaffolding at the base of the masts. The bases are more accessible than the tops, so have been painted several times. Old layers of paint are scraped off before the new can be applied.
     Here came more delay, as the scaffolding crews, unused to the height and the winds, stopped work under conditions ironworkers didn't blink at.
     For a layman setting out to climb the towers, the journey is both fearsome and incredible. The Hancock elevator makes its final stop at the 98th floor, which is jammed with pumps and wild electrical gear, such as 3,000-amp fuses the size of tomato juice cans. Their elements are packed in sand to reduce the damage when they blow up.
     A stairway to the 99th floor reveals television equipment — big steel cases, marked with network logos. Another stair leads to the 100th floor — the roof — where air-conditioner steam floats out of giant, 10-foot-wide horizontal fans, slowly turning. Atop the boxlike "penthouse," a grove of white pole antennas, faintly visible from the ground, waves like bamboo in the strong wind.
     To go further, you must climb. Hand over hand, up a ladder, about 400 feet from the roof to the top beacon. At first you are inside a roomy metal cylinder — the white solid base of the mast, as seen from the ground. Inside, it is hot, and you are surrounded by conduits and naked copper pipes.
     After about 100 feet, you clear the cylinder, exit a hatch, and are outside, surrounded by the triangular structure of the middle section of the tower. Even in summer, the metal chills your hands.
     The climb through the triangular structure seems frightening only until the final ascent: a free-climb scramble up a narrow set of metal pegs jutting out of the thin pipe that tops each mast. It is not for the faint at heart.
     "Tower people have to be a unique kind of person," says Seth Elliot, president of Communications Site Management, the company overseeing the project. "Not totally insane — if you got crazy people, you've got a problem. They need to be calm, cool and collected, but with a certain degree of bravado. It's hard to find people to do that kind of thing."

            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 4, 1992

  

Chicago Restaurant Week, a time to enjoy good food, served well in nice places

 

     "Remind me," I told my wife, as a pair of luscious pork chops were slid under my nose at Psistaria Greek Taverna on Touhy, "Why do we go other places?"
     That moment, the only-restaurant-in-the-world flash, is a peak dining experience. You can eat food at home. But restaurants are a joy of life, each as awash with unique personality as a good stage play.
     Since Chicago Restaurant Week began Friday (and runs until Feb. 8; actually two weeks), when dining establishments across the city entice patrons with special deals, I thought I would explore what makes a restaurant shine.
     A great dining experience is a tripod, standing on three legs: food, service and atmosphere. I don't need to ponder at all to pinpoint the best meal I've eaten this past year — the grilled chicken in a garlic honey marinade with vegetables at 5 Rabanitos in Pilsen. It's such a massive plate of food, as I start in, I assume I'll take half home. But that would require me to stop eating at some point, and I always fail. The room is gorgeous, too, busy with art, reminding the National Museum of Mexican Art is a block away.
     The media loves to focus on recently opened restaurants. They're news, I suppose. But in my dotage, I prefer old favorites, though am glad when the boys, true foodies, steer us to unfamiliar places that prove worthwhile.
     We met the younger lad after work at a small Loop spot he'd found, Bereket Turkish Mediterranean Restaurant, 333 S. Franklin. An inviting room, with saffron walls. Delicious, juicy kabobs. But it was the warm service at the family-owned restaurant that really stood out.
     Something happened at dessert on our first visit I believe has never happened to me in a restaurant before. My wife and I ordered a square of flan and a chocolate baklava, to share, and the waitress brought the flan and three baklavas.
     Oh no, we protested, just the one. We just want to taste it. We tried to make her take the extra two back. That's OK, she said, they're on the house. We tried our baklava: fresh and fantastic — not too sweet. Guilt set in. I called the waitress over and insisted: we must pay for the three pieces — they were so good, we enjoyed them so much, it was a revelation.
     "No, it's impossible," she said. "The bill is already made up." We yielded; I tipped 30% and left wondering if that were enough. We returned next before a show at the Lyric — Bereket is the perfect pre-opera spot.
     Another problem with the mania for the new is that old standbys get overlooked. Every time I eat at Lou Mitchell's on Jackson, it's always crowded. But I still feel the century-old icon doesn't get enough attention. The food obviously — thick slices of Greek toast, gorgeous club sandwiches, all sorts of little free extras: donut holes, cups of ice cream. The skilled, honey-let-me-fill-that-up waitstaff. But the room — a pure, beating heart of Chicago vibe as befits a century-old restaurant, second only to Harry Caray's.
     The downside to Lou Mitchell's — and even the best restaurant has a downside — is enormous and must be emphasized: IT'S CLOSED MONDAYS AND TUESDAYS. It took me several disappointed visits, waiting in front of the locked doors to meet someone, for that to sink in. Their right, of course. Still. Tuesdays? C'mon guys, COVID's over.

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