Misdirected wrenches

      About 65 million packages are delivered every day in the United States, and we know how the drill works. Today's load of brown cardboard is deposited on the front steps, if we have them, or the package room of a building. The UPS or Amazon guy snaps a picture. We look outside, think, "Goodies!" and go collect them.
     But what if they aren't yours? Some 2 or 3 percent — about a million packages a day — go astray. What do you do then? What is your responsibility for these goods you did not order and do not want? Call UPS? Open them? Keep them? If they're intended for a neighbor, the right and decent thing to do is walk them over — just last week, a magazine for someone living two blocks away ended up in our mail, and next time I walked Kitty, I took it with me and saw it to its proper recipient, feeling a little conspicuous when I walked up to his house and shoved it through the mail slot. People have been shot for less. 
     But a few days ago something strange happened. We got a long UPS box — at first I thought it was flowers, which sometimes come that way. But inside was a wooden play set for the new grandbabe and ... a separate UPS box, containing a 17 piece DeWalt combination wrench set. It was addressed to a tool shop in Mokena. 
      For a moment, I wondered if it was part of the gift — a play set for the babe, wrenches for grandpa. But that was daft. Nobody would do that. So what should I do? Having my own tools, plus tools inherited from my father-in-law, plus some from a neighbor moving far away, I am rich in hand tools, particularly wrenches, from tiny wrenches to big jobbies that look like they're for tightening bolts on an aircraft carrier. 
     I thought of gifting the wrenches — they were mine now, were they not? — perhaps bestowing them on the younger boy. But he has no need for them, now or in the foreseeable future. They would just be a burden, more crap from dad. The thing to do was send them on their way. Return them to UPS.
      My wife was dubious — I think she viewed me as somehow now responsible for these wrenches. Possession is 9/10 of the law. She wondered whether UPS would just take them — but I pointed out the mailing label, with the all-important bar code. They were on a journey. The thing to do would be to speed them on their way. We were heading to Red's anyway, to load up on herbs and flowers and such. The UPS store was on the way.
      When we pulled into the strip mall, I suggested she wait in the car. No, she said, she wanted to see how this goes down. Given my luck, she might have been worried that, without her cool head, some kind of Roger Thornhill chain of mistaken events would unfold, like in "North by Northwest." "He's here! The guy with the wrenches!" one of the UPS workers would cry, and I'd end up climbing down the face of Mount Rushmore with Eva Marie Saint.
     We walked in.
     "Can I help you?" the clerk said. 
     "You delivered these to me," I said, hefting the box onto the counter. "But I am not Pennsylvania Tools of Mokena." He took the box without a word. We walked out. She praised my honestly, but I was thinking of how the situation would have transpired had it been, not superfluous wrenches, but a DeWalt reciprocating saw. I really could use one of those.

'I still have a life' — amputees struggle to cope with loss

 

      Usually, they cry.
      Because losing a limb is not subtle, not a hidden loss, like losing a kidney. You see what is missing. Everybody does. A part of you is gone and never coming back. The absence affects your daily life — how you stand, walk, sit, if a lower limb. Or every time you reach for a cup of coffee or scratch your nose, if a hand.
     About 2 million Americans live with limb loss, with another 3 million born missing an extremity. About 500 people in this country lose a hand or foot, an arm or leg every day, most to vascular conditions, such as diabetes. The rest to trauma, particularly car and motorcycle accidents.   

     Last year Karl Fisher, a Zion medical van driver, lost both legs at the knee. He was 6 feet 7 inches before.
     "Now I'm 4 feet tall," he said.
     Fisher wept when he learned what would happen. He also cried when he met the man waiting outside his room one afternoon on the 20th floor of the sun-filled Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Downtown Chicago.
     L. Bradley Schwartz, a Glenview lawyer, has visited 50 or so new amputees, to share his experience. He knows, their concerns — am I still me? When can I get back to living my life?
     You can consider him a volunteer, though he doesn't see himself as having much choice.
     "I can't ignore people that have been through this," he explained.
     Schwartz is what Shirley Ryan AbilityLab calls a "peer mentor."
     "A peer mentor provides their support, their insight, their lived experience to someone who's going through what Brad has gone through, to provide that insight so they can live successfully out in the community," said Cristina M. Mix, peer mentor coordinator at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
     And what has Brad Schwartz gone through? A medical nightmare almost beyond description.

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Flashback 2010 — Notice: This is not a column about a dog

Kitty, August, 2010

   

     Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis died this week. While I certainly did my share of holding up the bar at the Goat, I never wrote about it, or him, much — someone else did that. My relationship with Sam was a distant one. I did check the archive to see what I had written about him, and he makes a cameo in this column which is too much fun not to share, and also explains why I avoided Sianis and his bar, as a topic if not as a watering hole.

     My younger kid nailed his bar mitzvah last week -- really nailed it; letter perfect, no muss, no fuss, no heavy lifting, out of the park on the first swing, chugging around the bases, doffing his cap.
     He did so well that I bypassed the several days of foot-dragging and delay that I would typically enjoy before doing something that I absolutely did not want to do, and instead took him directly, two hours after the luncheon ended, to pick up his bar mitzvah present: a new puppy.
     The first half dozen or so colleagues to whom I mentioned our new household addition — 2 months old, cute as hell — all said a version of the same thing: "You must write about this!"
     To which I answered, in ruffled indignation, that I certainly was not going to write about the dog, that I would never write about the dog, because my colleague Mark Brown has already laid claim to all matters canine, and that if I started doing so as well, not only would I be poaching on his preserve, but there would then be two columnists at the paper exploring the world of dogs, and that was one too many.
     (Writers can be odd that way. I am certain that, were I to find myself sitting on the white paper strip in a physician's office, and the doctor were to somberly inform me that, he's sorry, but I have a dire illness, my very first thought, before any personal woes sunk in, would be a frantic: And I can't even write about this, because Roger Ebert already has. Roger planted his flag on that frosty pole, and anything I might add on the subject would be merely derivative, like someone hanging out at the Billy Goat and writing about Sam Sianis as if Mike Royko never existed).
     So this column is not about the dog.
     I guess it's about me.
     See, I never wanted a dog, I see now, because I was completely unfamiliar with dogs. We never had any growing up, nor did my father, nor his, nor, as far as I can tell, any Steinberg going back to bondage in Egypt. I disliked dogs. They bark. They smell like dogs. They lick you. If you took every minute I've spent within a yard of a dog in my entire life and added them up, you wouldn't have been able to fill an hour.
     What happened? As much as I was dead-set against dogs, there are other people in my life beside myself and — surprise, surprise — they can be just as stubborn and mulish as I am, if not more. My younger son wanted a dog as much as I didn't want one, and wheedled and noodged me for a dog for about the past year, then saw his opportunity and pounced. He quite cannily seized upon the chance offered by his bar mitzvah — a big accomplishment, requiring mastery of ancient Hebrew — as a lever he could use.
     He was right. As much as I was set against dogs, I was even more reluctant to be the Dad Who Didn't Get His Son A Dog, Not Even For His Bar Mitzvah.
     He found this puppy online — I've had more than a few gimlet-eyed PETA sorts ask me where the dog is from, not in a friendly, curious way, but in a leering, gotcha mode, to see if the source of our dog passes the moral purity test. Let's put it this way — we've gotten five cats from shelters, so we did our share, and if you need to know exactly where this dog's from, OK: I run an animal-testing lab as a hobby, squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of puppies to see how they react, and this one was an extra. Satisfied now?
     Anyway, this puppy belongs to the boy, but she really, really likes me, for some unfathomable reason, and when I come home she goes crazy, doing backflips, spinning around, her tongue lolling out. She runs up to me, and I lean down to pet her, and next thing you know I'm rolling on the floor, giggling as she licks my face.
     My family, of course, is horrified.
     "Stop it!" my older son, who has become quite the fussbudget at 14, commanded. "You hate all creatures, big and small."
     Not anymore. I am born again in dog heaven. Having sworn I'd never take care of the dog, I now stand happily at 3 a.m. outside in the rain as she does her thing.
     But what amazes me — what allows me, just this once, to poach on Brown's turf — is recognizing what has happened here.
      I was against a certain class of individuals — in this case dogs — of whom I was completely ignorant, based on my preconceived notions of what they might be like and my fear of being inconvenienced.
     And then I met a specific member of this class, this bichon/shih tzu pup which my boy has named, delightfully, "Kitty."
     Now I'm a different man. A dog person.
     Is there not a moral here? People are not dogs, but the mechanism is the same. Much of our national discourse in this shameful historic moment has to do with groups of people dismissing other groups, based on fear, based on nothing, keeping them at a distance and missing out.
     If only they could set aside their fear and get to know a few individuals in the class that so disconcerts them. They might be in for a big surprise. I was.
     — Originally published Sept. 5, 2010

Prank

 

     I went downstairs to walk the dog, turned right on Greenwood, and meandered. The night was warm, soft, lovely.
     I should say I was in Hyde Park — it wasn't my dog, but my son's. Not my home, but his, and his wife's. They were, ah, busy elsewhere and, in my full service dad mode, I'd volunteered to go walk the dog.
     No hardship. A perfect night. Gorgeous stone mansions lined the street. Why doesn't anyone even try to build these anymore? Mature trees — do I call Northbrook "the leafy suburban paradise"? Hyde Park makes Northbrook look like Nebraska.
     At 50th Street I passed the above sign. Obama's block. Odd, I thought, walking on, that they'd cut off traffic for him — he's hardly ever there. I wonder if the residents resent it. They must. Past 50th, a second sign. I took a closer look. Oh. The "P" was taped on. A college prank, probably. And I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. You'd think, having written a book on college pranks myself, I wouldn't be taken in so easily. No shame there. We are all duped now and then. This at least is clever, and harmless. Without effect, except to draw a smile. And when was the last time something presidential did that?

Has Facebook begun the long slide toward ruin?

Breuget's electrical telegraph machine (Cabinet of Physics, University of Coimbra)

    Here's an odd coincidence. On Friday, I grabbed the post from 10 years ago and it, too, decried the crappification of Facebook. So maybe the habit won't be so easy to break after all. 

    So another grandchild, born this week — maybe to me, maybe to somebody else. Who can say? I really shouldn’t be more specific than that.
     Certainly no word of the news, if there is any news, breathed on Facebook. I ... or, um, another person very much like myself ... would sooner sell a child to the circus than post its photos, or any identifying details, on any sort of social media. As for what the potential harm of that could be, beyond strong and immediate rebuke, I’m afraid to ask. Maybe X snatches their images and does unspeakable things with them.
     As it is my ... well, somebody’s ... adult children view Facebook the way I, when young, would look at my grandfather’s dentures falling into the soup: as an embarrassing lapse of age. Worse. It’s like yanking the dentures out of your own mouth and flinging them into the soup, with pride. Not an accident, an intention.
     Facebook is no longer hip, or the bomb, or dope, or fire, or whatever the current term for coolness might be. “Slow death” is the phrase encountered online. The young might have an account, allowing Facebook to pretend it’s reaching the sweet spot demographic. But the 20-somethings I know never use it and mock those who do. The cracks are starting to show. On May 20, Meta, the parent of Facebook, is laying off 8,000 workers — 10% of its workforce. Last week, The New York Times, in an opinion piece, declared Meta “at the start of a long, slow decline.”
     The plan is that artificial intelligence will do the jobs of the freshly fired, even though AI is part of what’s wrecking Facebook, all those blocks of regurgitated history lite and random pop culture factoids. And that rash of ads. God forbid you buy shoes, as I have. Facebook will dangle the shoes you just bought under your nose for a month, hoping you’ll buy a second pair. And this is the super-intelligence that would rule us.
     I have to admit, I’m kind of savoring the Facebook riffs, being myself lashed to an oar in the old world, pulp-based, legacy media. It’s like when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I winked at the Book Bin and other independent bookstores which survived the era when giant bookstores roamed the earth, hardy voles, gazing out from their safe nooks, watching the dinosaurs bellow and die.

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"How does it feel to be a minority?"

     "You're not gay, right?" said my neighbor at a table in the Hilton ballroom, packed for the annual American Civil Liberties Union Illinois luncheon in late April.

     Busted. Is it really that noticeable? Do I radiate a certain straightness? At the moment, perhaps, in my way butch blue Lauren blazer with gold buttons. But he should see me fussing over my little dog; I'm like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." And I do love Judy Garland, live at Carnegie Hall.
     Still, I admitted he had me dead to rights. 
     "Guilty as charged," I said, or words to that effect.
     "You're the only person at the table who isn't gay ..." he continued. I had been invited by a gay lawyer's association, which, apparently, you have to be a gay lawyer to join. Funny. I've been to the local Council on American Islamic Relations office — not everyone there is Muslim.

     "...how does it feel to be in a minority?" he asked.

     "I'm Jewish," I replied, immediately and perhaps with more asperity than I intended. The I'm in a minority everywhere I go that isn't a synagogue or Israel was unvoiced. He let this comment pass unanswered — perhaps I had just admitted something disreputable. Jews had their minority status card revoked long ago. We're white, though all the privileges pursuant to whiteness — the right to run a country, for instance, or worship without people showing up suddenly to kill us — doesn't seem to go with it. Honorary whites, for the purpose of criticism only. 

     Jews don't bask in the highest esteem in a good year, and this isn't a good year for Judaism. Lately we've been suffering a bad time, between Israel deciding to push the brute force approach to its limits, prompting college sophomores to embrace what strikes them as simple truth: The Jews don't belong wherever they happen to be! An insight the Germans hit upon long ago, to their eventual sorrow. Five hundred years didn't plant us in Nuremberg, why should 2,500, 0r 25,000 for that matter, give us claim to Jerusalem? Not when people who have never set foot there have their heart set on it.

     Had I been thinking, I'd have leaned forward, made intense eye contact, smiled my toothiest, and confided in a Peter Lorre voice, "It's the killing of children and drinking their blood part that I like best..."

     "Well," he continued, circling back to his original conversational gambit. "Nobody can really say they aren't gay, just that they aren't gay yet."

     Ah. I chewed on this a moment. It's almost as if he were  ... nah, that doesn't happen. To me. Anymore.

     "Well, I'm 65," I said, arranging my thoughts into audible order. "I'm certainly taking my sweet time about it."

     He said that he himself had had a few kids before he saw the light, and ... well, I should probably not be too specific. Don't want to embarrass anyone. And in truth, I wasn't embarrassed, or offended, or even miffed. Just ... sort of ... puzzled. That's it. Puzzled. It was an odd conversation to take a train ride for 45 minutes, then walk for half an hour, in order to hold. But I had been invited, an invitation turned down the past few years, but this year thought, heck, let's get out there in the public. But now I was, in public, enjoying the company of people other than myself, well, let's say it was an endorsement of solitude if ever there were. 

     The program began and we fell silent. The speaker, NYU Law's Melissa Murray, was very good, and I'll try to type up her remarks and run them when the Supreme Court lurches back into the news, which happens every other day, it seems.

     Fun had, chicken consumed, remarks recorded, I was the first person at the table to stand up and leave, even while the program was still going on, thanking my seat mate for his conversation and my host for inviting me, pumping his hand, the first words we'd exchanged. I threaded my way around the tables, walked briskly out of the Hilton, up Michigan Avenue, and to Union Station making the 1:33 Metra Milwaukee North with five minutes to spare. 

From garbage into the stuff of history, a trove is donated to the Newberry from Illinois poet

Marc Kelly Smith, left, and Alison Hinderliter at the Newberry Library.

     Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home in Savanna, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to the Newberry Library on the Near North Side, to deliver piles of paper that could be easily mistaken for garbage, even by their owner.
     “I would have the tendency to throw it all out,” said Smith.
     Flyers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker’s box and a paper shopping bag.
     “There’s some good stuff in here,” says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s manuscripts and archives librarian.
     The box is labeled “SLAM MEMORABILIA,” reflecting Smith’s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry — the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer — took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.
     As the ephemera rolled on a library cart, it moved from detritus intended to be stapled to a telephone pole then melt in the rain, into the stuff of history, carefully preserved by curators in white cotton gloves, to be — perhaps — joyously discovered someday by future scholars.

     “I’m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,” said Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. “I think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests — in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don’t know who’s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they’ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past — it’s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.”

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