The Key Lime Juice Episode

    "I saw my opportunities and I took 'em."
    A good prankster, like a corrupt Tammany Hall official—the quote above is from New York's notorious George Washington Plunkitt—must know when the moment is right. A good prank presents itself as a fleeting opportunity. The window opens, and you must leap.
     First, some background is in order: among my sons' many marvelous qualities is an enjoyment of baking, particularly the younger one. Breads, souffles, pies; a key lime pie at Thanksgiving with enough regularity—the past three, four years—that it has become a family tradition.
     It being November, and jumping the gun on the prodigals' holiday return, my wife went to buy a bottle of lime juice, a necessary ingredient for key lime pie (I suppose he could use actual key limes instead, but I try not to look a gift pie in the ... wherever you'd look a gift pie. The crust perhaps). 
     There was a hitch in her plan, however, because Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lemon Juice looks very much like Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice (can they both be famous? I sense some commercial puffery at work here). Unpacking a bag last week, she let out an oath. She had bought lemon juice. Oh well, she said, making the best of it. When life gives you lemon juice, make lemonade.
      Last Sunday she returned to Sunset to try again. I stayed at home, writing. When she returned, I heard the back door slam and went into the kitchen, as is my habit, to examine the haul, under the guise of helping put the groceries away. I started removing bags of fruit, cans of this and that. My wife went back to the car for more groceries. I reached into the bag and removed the bottle of lime juice.
    What would you do? Do you even see the prank there, shimmering, like a diamond in the dark? Waiting to be seized? Maybe not. Maybe you have to be of my frame of mind.  I hurried to the refrigerator, removed the lemon juice purchased the week before, replaced it with the lime juice, and put the lemon juice in the bag. It would have been better had I left it, but I was thinking on the fly. Assembling my face into a neutral mask of tedium, I continued removing food items—Cheerios, frozen vegetables—as she returned.
     She bustled a bit, I waited until the exact moment, as her attention swung in my direction, to remove the bottle and cast it an idle glance, then a second one, surprised this time.
    "I thought you were getting lime juice," I said, turning the label to her.
    The next three seconds I will shield from the public record. She was not happy, so vigorously irked that I immediately revealed the prank. And here is the second important skill for the prankster: know your audience. She laughed, sincerely, and admitted that I had gotten her, and this was in keeping with my fine tradition. Not every wife would feel that way. She wouldn't always feel that way. But my timing, again, was perfect, so much so that she brought up one of the foundational stories of our relationship.
      For a few years, while we were dating, I drove a cool white Volvo P1800. In the trunk was a steel thermos that had been rattling around there for as long as I knew my wife-to-be. Months, if not years. She eventually, in that female imperative toward rational living, urged me to take the thermos out of the trunk.
      One day, when she said that, I said, "Okay" and took the thermos into the kitchen to be cleaned. But first, I unscrewed the top, poured a steaming cup and took a sip, while she gawped in shock.
    "It's still hot!" I marveled. 
    Earlier that morning, unbeknownst to her, I had removed the thermos, cleaned it, poured in fresh coffee and returned it to the trunk. Worked like a charm. No column or book I've written impressed her as much as that prank. 
     Life doesn't always deliver the surprise and amazement we wish it would. Sometimes we have to help it along, seizing our opportunities as they present themselves.

The 2017 effort, middle pie, back row. 

‘They cannot relate’ — 40 years since Iran hostage crisis

Jacqueline Saper's engagement photo

     On Nov. 4, 1979, the United States Embassy in Iran was located on Tehran’s Takht-e-Jamshid Street in a neighborhood of upscale stores. Which is why Jacqueline Saper, now of Wilmette, happened to be a block away at the start of one of the epochal events of the past half century: the Iran hostage crisis.
     Saper was 18 “and a half,” a newlywed, shopping for cologne for her husband.
     ”The embassy was huge, with red brick walls and a dark green iron fence,” she said. “The American consulate always had long lines. I noticed the crowd was different. They were very angry, shouting ‘Death to America! Death to America!’”
     America, if you aren’t old enough to remember, had welcomed the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Rez Pahlavi, deposed that January, to be treated for cancer in New York. President Jimmy Carter allowed him in with reservations.

Saper at 21. 

     "What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” the president asked, with the half-foresight of those who see the pitfalls they will topple into.

     Young Iranian radicals scaled the walls and cut open the gate. The Marine guards, ordered not to fire, spread tear gas and fell back. The invaders initially planned to hold the embassy three days. Most of the hostages ended up being held 444 days.
     Saper sensed this wasn’t the usual street drama.
     ”Living through the Islamic Revolution earlier that year, I was used to seeing unusual things,” Saper said. “This seemed worse. I was afraid of stampede or tear gas. The embassy was guarded by armed Marines.”
     What did she do?

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Chicago Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe mural is almost done. No, really.

It should be done by next week.

     The Andy Warhol show is up. It opened Oct. 20 at The Art Institute of Chicago.
     The huge Warhol mural on North Michigan Avenue publicizing the show, though, is not quite up.
     Jeff Zimmerman is working as fast as he can.
     “Just a lot of moving parts,” he says. “The city, the alderman.”
     Plus: the weather. Pesky OSHA concerns. And the river of pedestrians walking directly underneath him. Care is required. 
     “Michigan Avenue is right there,” he says. “A million people walking by, and I have not dripped on anybody.” 
     Then again, Zimmerman is facing a much bigger challenge than Warhol tackled when he took a publicity still from the Monroe movie “Niagara” and silkscreened it.
     You can’t silkscreen a wall. The surface at 663 N. Michigan Ave. is 70 feet by 70 feet — nearly 5,000 square feet, a little bigger than an NBA basketball court. It’s also 150 feet in the air.  

     Working on scaffolding, Zimmerman and his team used a chalk line to create a grid of two-foot squares, a compromise between artistry and deadline.
     “The real way to do it is do it on paper. to scale, then transfer it to the wall, rather than the grid,” Zimmerman says. “Things float around on a grid. But there’s just no time. I wanted to do a one-foot grid, but we’d still be up there, snapping [chalk] lines. Something’s gotta give. That would have had us start painting in mid-November in Chicago, and even I don’t try to paint outside after mid-November in Chicago.”
     If you get the sense Zimmerman knows his way around the side of a building, you’re right. His murals have gone up across the city — from the Oak Street Beach pedestrian tunnel to along The 606 / Bloomingdale Trail. He’s been doing it for decades, unlike certain, ahem, underskilled newcomers.

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Jeff Zimmerman

The Saturday Snapshot: Leaves

     The snowstorm predicted for Thursday came, cutting down the number of wee cops and miniature firefighters who showed up at our house in the evening.
    "Take two," I'd say, extending my big bowl of Mounds and Paydays (my wife's favorites, selected with leftovers in mind). Thinking ahead, I put the car away to keep it from being encased in ice.
     By Friday, the snow was gone. But the blizzard blown leaves remained. Leaving the house, I was stunned by this expanse of leaves, uninterrupted by the car which normally would be there.
    Wait a sec. "Leaving the house ... this expanse of leaves..." I never juxtaposed those homonyms before. A good moment to play my favorite game (well, among my favorite games): Which came first? Leaves, the flappy plant appendages, or leaves, the third-person simple singular present verb that means, ironically, both going and allowing something to remain (in the sense of, "He leaves the book on the table")? And is there any connection? I can't believe that departure, or staying, was named after what happens to tree's plumage in the fall, or that that huge swath of botany was labeled by its fall from sky to ground. I mean, they don't really leave so much as relocate a few feet southward. They haven't left. They're still there.
     The short answer is neither. The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is a meaning that didn't leap to mind: "1. Permission asked for or granted to do something." As in "to take your leave" with a citation from 900 A.D. The root, the dictionary notes, is the same as "love," the Old English leaf meaning "pleasure, approval."
     Which explains belief, not to forget sick leave, military leaves, and "leave of absence" which the OED traces to 1771. Next we get "leave" as in "allowing to remain." To leave your soup untouched.
     Not until definition No. 7 do we get "To go away from, quit (a place, person, or thing); to deviate from (a lie of road, etc.)." The earliest citation is in 1225, but in a form of English so old it uses letters I can't reproduce. The earliest sharable use is 1557, "leif the toun,"
     Now onto "leaf," which the OED first defines, somewhat cryptically as "An expanded organ of a plant, produced laterally from a stem or branch, or springing from its root; one of the parts of a plant which collectively constitute its foliage."
   That showed up in 825 A.D., in the Vespers Psalter: "swe swe leaf wyrta hrede fallad."
   No, I couldn't translate that, though I did try. If you want to take a crack at it, be my guest.
   Before we take our ... ah, before we depart from this subject, I have to mention that leaf as in a sheet of paper in a book is almost as old, 900 A.D., meaning we've been calling the things on trees and the things in books the same name for more than a thousand years.
    Samuel Johnson, in his great 1755 dictionary, by the way, begins his definition with leaf, the foliage, illustrating it with some lovely lines from Shakespeare:

This is the state of man; today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, tomorrow blossoms.

    Then he moves on to pages from a book. Third, a definition fallen from popular usage, "One side of a double door," and then yet another definition that had slipped my mind: "Any thing foliated, or thinly beaten." As in gold leaf.
     Which seems a good place to stop and circle back, taking one more look at these golden leaves. They're a mingling of elm and ash leaves, and yes, I treat the ash tree, a cimarron ash I unwisely planted 20 years ago, against the ash borer. That's why it's still with us, dropping leaves mightily, this year all in a mighty storm-driven whoosh, all over the driveway.



 

Flashback 1986: Cross-country train rider won't let life pass by

      Not everything is online. This story was published 33 years ago, and came to mind—thanks to a wetware retrieval algorithm—when a friend introduced me to the local Amtrak spokesman. I wanted to show him this, one of my favorite stories, found while taking Amtrak to Alderson, West Virginia, to interview anti-nuclear activist Jean Gump in prison. I was sitting in bar car at midnight, chatting with a conductor, and he said, "If you want a story, that guy lives on the train." "On here a lot?" I replied. "No," he said. "He LIVES on the TRAIN." So I went over and talked with the man. If this story seems long—it's three times the length of a regular column today—that's how we rolled in those days. I was pleased with how it begins almost like a camp fire story.


     If you find yourself traveling on an Amtrak train, say the Empire Builder to Seattle, or the Cardinal to Washington, D.C., or the Crescent down to New Orleans, visit the club car.
     While there, look for a man with an eye patch and shaved head, an old man, but powerfully built. If you see someone fitting that description, go up and talk to him. For this is your chance to meet a real-life legend, Loren Chester "Beetle" Bailey.
     Beetle Bailey rides the rails. At almost any minute of almost every day, he is on an Amtrak train. His days are spent looking out the window of the club car, chatting with conductors, sipping tea or a beer, thinking his thoughts. The 73-year-old Bailey makes his home on Amtrak trains, and has for most of the last nine years.
     This is a man almost constantly in motion. On Christmas Eve he left Montreal, arriving in New York City on Christmas morning. That afternoon he departed New York, reaching Chicago the next day at 8:08 a.m.
     On that visit, he stopped in Chicago for nine hours—a long time, considering that in five earlier visits to Chicago this month, he spent a combined total of only 14 hours and 22 minutes here. At 5:15 p.m. he left Chicago for Los Angeles, arriving there three days later. Two hours and 20 minutes after pulling into Los Angeles, he was headed north toward Seattle.
     "Mr. Bailey is one of the most colorful characters I've met on the rails," said Mario Patti, an Amtrak supervisor and 12-year veteran of train work. "I haven't come across anyone like Mr. Bailey. He always has a story or a song or a little harmonica playing."
     Bailey—who Amtrak personnel refer to not by his nickname, but as "Mr. Bailey"—is the sort of person who's easy to notice. Besides the patch covering his left eye, he has a three-inch heel on his right boot, both reminders of an active life fraught with injuries. He sports a bit of a pot belly now, the downside of sitting on the trains. Yet his forearms remain muscular and developed from years of manual labor. He wears a watch on each wrist, the right one set to Pacific Time, the left to Eastern Standard Time. A third timepiece, a pocket watch, rests in the breast pocket of his denim vest.
     "When you're had three grips stolen, you keep your valuables with you," Bailey says in a voice so soft a stranger might have to lean forward to hear above the clanking of the train wheels. But listening to him is well worth the effort. Within minutes of striking up a conversation—with Bailey talking amiably, asking questions, gesturing with his hands, laughing—the man with the eye patch is a stranger no more.
     "I've tried my hand at everything," he says. "A friend of mine once said: `Bailey, to have had all the jobs that you've had, you'd have to be 2,000 years old.' "
     Asked his age, Bailey pulls out a dog-eared passport. "Best ID you can get, young man." Born in 1913 in Minneapolis, Bailey began delivering newspapers on three different routes when he was 8.
     As far back as he can remember, he always has loved trains. His first paycheck was spent on model trains.
     His childhood remembrances are razor sharp, whether in describing how to make a crystal radio set out of an oatmeal box, or explaining "shinny," a form of field hockey played in Minnesota 60 years ago.
     "We used a condensed milk can for a puck," he says. "They called it 'shinny' because you were always getting whacked in the shins. Of course, sometimes a kid would get carried away and hit somebody in the nose."
     Bailey dropped out of school in ninth grade to go to work as a blacksmith's helper. Then he became a welder. Bailey's love of trains led him to work as a roundhouse helper, preparing the giant steam locomotives to make their runs. More than 50 years later, Bailey recalls the routine exactly.
     "We'd clean out the ash, start fires in the engines, throw in greasy waste, then throw coal in," he says. "When the cast iron heated up, it started expanding. The ground would be shuddering a mile around, the whole roundhouse shaking."
     In 1933 Bailey was in a motorcycle accident that shattered his hip and leg and put him in a body cast for a year. It was the first of many injuries that would dog Bailey and twist his body, but not keep him from a life of physical work or dampen his spirits.
     While working as an engineer mechanic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, he learned to fly, taking newly repaired planes on shake-down flights with test pilots, even after another accident almost cost him his left eye.
     Bailey's love of planes and aviation joined his passion for trains. But in 1968, Bailey injured his back, and could no longer work. He retired on an Air Force disability pension, and was in and out of hospitals, for his back, his feet, his hip.
     In 1977 he got out of the hospital after a particular lengthy stay, and on an impulse he got aboard an Amtrak train, and except for another lengthy hospital stay in 1981 he has been riding ever since.
     Bailey travels light, with a small suitcase or "grip" tucked under his seat. Inside are a change of underclothes, a shirt, a razor and little else. He carries his medicines with him, to prevent theft, and keeps a trunk in the baggage compartment.
     When he set out on the rails, he discarded a lifetime's worth of possessions, except for two footlockers now in storage. He doesn't miss any of it—"I never used it; they were just memories," he says—though he does wish he had a particular photograph.
      "At Williams Field they wanted to take a picture of a P-80, and I was nearby, and they said: `Bailey, get in the picture.' So I posed in front of the plane. But I never asked for a copy of the picture."
     Using only an excursion pass, Bailey rides Amtrak nonstop. When asked about Bailey, an Amtrak official at first smugly explained that what Bailey was doing was impossible—the $250, 45-day excursion fare requires passengers to stop at no more than three destinations and cover no stretch of track twice in the same direction. Asked to check the computer, the official returned and said: "My jaw is hanging open. I've never seen anything like this before. This is incredible."
     Bailey circumvents the limits of the pass by planning his wanderings so he covers almost every route in the country, and being sure that whenever he arrives at a station, he leaves on the first train out, so it does not count as a "destination." After all this time on the rails, Bailey often knows the train schedules better than some Amtrak employees.
      Providing he always is on the next train out, Bailey can travel as long as he wants. He even has developed a game, where he tries to beat his own record of most miles in a 30-day period.
     "He's traveled 34,407 miles in 30 days," said Amtrak supervisor Patti, adding that most of that was done out West, where trains can average 90 miles an hour. With unlimited funds it would be easier, but he finds a way to do it for $250, which also is a feat. For him, this country's too small."
      Bailey thoroughly enjoys train travel—not only scenery, but also the people. Asked for his favorite memory, looking back over nine years of almost constant travel, he thinks of a time many people would have considered an inconvenience.
      "On the Sunset Limited to L.A.," he says. "We were halfway to El Rio when a freight was derailed in front of us. We got stuck behind it. We were supposed to get into L.A. at 4:30 in the morning. Now it was eight hours later. It was a train crowded with students. I played the harmonica, we played cards, we set out blankets on the shady side of the train and had a picnic. Sometimes a crowded train is a good train. At 4 in the afternoon, nine Greyhound buses were brought up to take us to L.A. Only 40 people went on the buses. I asked when (the train) would be able to go on, and they said about 7:30. I said I was staying on the train, and about 20 people got off the buses. They had to take eight buses back, empty. It turned out to be one the nicest trains I ever rode on because people got very well acquainted. It shows that sometimes under adverse circumstances, people's best sides come out."
      The same could be said about Bailey. While some might find his constant traveling sad, this is the solution to what could have been a painful, isolated retirement. Asked if he is ever tempted to get off and visit the cities he passes through, Bailey says, "Yeah, sure I do. But when you are on crutches, with a torn-up back, you just go to a hotel room and watch TV. I can't drive. I can't ride the bus. This I can enjoy."
     Bailey has a steady routine on the trains. He wakes early, sometimes takes a sponge bath in a restroom (not frequently enough for some passengers, according to conductors, who add that this is the only complaint ever heard about him). He spends most of the day in the club car, looking out the window, reading and talking to people. He'll be discussing President Reagan's most recent actions one minute, entertaining a small child, who asks if he's a pirate, another.
     At night, he has a few beers to help him sleep, then he goes back to his seat, reclines it all the way back and hooks his toes under the seat in front of him, making it "just like a traction bed."
     But perhaps the most amazing thing about Bailey is that, given his nomadic lifestyle, he is neither lonely nor sad. He has many friends among train employees and frequent train travelers, and keeps up with his three children and eight grandchildren. However, he and his wife split up in 1977 when he went on the rails.
      "He's a rather complex man," said his sister Fern Reeves, 65, who lives in Paso Robles, Calif. "Although he plays the harmonica for the children on the train, he's well versed in classical music and he was studying to become a concert pianist at one time.
      "I suppose (he gets lonely). Everyone who travels by himself must be lonely at one time or another, but he likes it and he knows all the train men. He gets letters - I get them here for him - and his friends will say: `Gee, Chet, we haven't heard from you in couple of years, are you still out there?'
      "I'm sure he was in a great deal of pain throughout his life. He comes from a family—we're all kind of stoic; Chet and I talk about this. My mother was kind of stoic. My father said only babies cry. We've learned to endure pain, and Chet certainly did. Sometimes people who encounter him have no idea the kind of pain he is in most of the time. He's a remarkable man.
      "He'd be perfectly happy if he dies there on the road. He is well-liked, helpful and keeps the children entertained, which always makes train men happy," said Reeves, a retired schoolteacher planning to join him for a stint before she begins traveling the rails in Europe.
      For Bailey, he looks back on his life with satisfaction.
     "I had a chance to go to Vienna, to Paris. I blew it all," he says. "That's life. I still like that music—Chopin, Mussorgsky - I used to have a Walkman and some tapes, but they were stolen in my last grip. I never made a lot of money; I just had a lot of fun."
      But despite Bailey's carefree attitude, or perhaps because of it, he often has a deep impact on the people he meets. Amtrak's Patti, whenever he has a moment or two free, likes to sit and chat with Bailey.
      "He reads the latest books. He has knowledge in all sorts of directions—music, literature, mechanics, gold panning," said Patti. "He seems to be a happy guy. He's happy doing this. It's not sad for him. I've always respected him, and never had any problems. He's always been very courteous—someone who deserves respect.
      "The thing is, in a few years, these kind of people will not be around anymore. He is one of the last of his generation. He's just that type of a person, who knows a lot because he has experienced a lot. I'm definitely glad I met him, and I'm glad that I probably will meet him again."
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 31, 1986

Facebook bans commercial fraud but welcome political lies

                             The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive by Richard Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 


    If I decide to sell faeries, and buy ads on Facebook, describing the delightful woodland nymphs that could be yours for only $19.99, plus shipping and handling, customers would complain after they received their empty jars, and Facebook will then take down my faerie ads and refuse my money in the future.
    Commercial fraud they understand.
    But when the Republican takes out deceptive ads, filled with distortions and outright lies, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is becoming second only to Rupert Murdoch as a media enabler of the GOP plot against America, has deemed this sort of chicanery to be free speech, and will not turn it away.
    That's wrong, and to show how wrong, another big social media company, Twitter, announced Wednesday that it will refuse all political ads leading up to the 2020 election, rather than try to sort through what is fact and what is fiction. You know you're in trouble when you don't have the high standards exhibited by Twitter.  If they kept to their own rules about hate speech, they'd deactivate the president's account tomorrow.
    As if to underline the ethical correctness of the move, Donald Trump immediately condemned it as "very bad." For him. Very bad for him. Trump knows anything that Twitter's action limits the ability of the Russians to spread deception on his behalf. That isn't good for his re-election chances, which, like his 2016 election, is based on falsehood passing for truth among those who no longer care about the distinction. 
    And in case you're confused, remember the First Amendment relates to the government suppressing speech. Businesses are free to conduct business as they like. When a TV station refuses a political ad because it is morally offensive, or deceptive, that is not a violation of free speech. And as with Twitter, when television has higher ethical standards than you do, you know something is wrong.
    Strange that Facebook would wink at political deception while policing the commercial version, because the former is far, far worse than the latter.
    Really, what is the harm of the faery scam? A bunch of gullible people are out $20, plus shipping and handling. They get an attractive jar, with holes punched in it so the supposed faeries can breath. They learn a lesson, maybe. The country is not harmed.
    Compare that to political fraud, which helps allow the once respected United States of American to be led by a reality TV show host and confirmed fraud. It gives a free hand to the Russians and any nation that cares to to meddle in our elections. Why should politicians be permitted to broadcast literally any lie on Facebook, if they have the bucks to meet the bill? It isn't right.

Loved or hated, candy corn is as Chicago as deep dish pizza

  
     This column was so much fun, I had trouble stopping—the first draft was twice as long as could fit into the paper. And still two essential aspects were left out: I had hoped to consider candy corn as an iconic design, an instantly recognizable image. And I wanted to point out that the hidden subtext of all the hate about candy corn online illustrates the frictionless, consequence-free toxicity of the internet. Next time.

     At least candy at Valentine’s Day makes sense. Love is sweet; you woo the object of your affection with a big heart-shaped box of chocolate.
     But what’s with Halloween? The ocean of candy ladled out Thursday to an army of children. Bribes? An echo of when Tom and Huck would soap your windows if you didn’t satisfy them after they rang your doorbell? Rewards? You did such a good job putting on that Spiderman mask that I’m giving you a Snickers?
     Controversies linger because they have depth, layers beneath the surface that sustain them over the years. For instance, I believe the whole you’re-not-a-Chicagoan-if-you-put-ketchup-on-your-hot-dog nonsense is not really about the mix of condiments atop a frank, but an unconscious parody of the get-off-my-block bigotry that Chicagoans used to casually exhibit. Can’t do that anymore but there are always hot dogs.
     Ditto for candy corn, the white, orange and yellow triangular treats that proliferate in October.
     For years the Internet has echoed with derision of candy corn. And not mild criticism. Full-throated condemnation.
     BuzzFeed’s 2013 list of “19 Things That Taste Better Than Candy Corn,” included chalk, urinal cakes and earwax.
     “Deodorant-flavored earwax nuggets,” Deadspin raged in 2014. “Wee little warhead-shaped misery pellets.”

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