Flashback 1992: Dated books tell tale of schools' fiscal woes

From "The World is Round," by  Rose Wyler (Grosset & Dunlap: 1937)

 

    You need to keep your eyes open in this job. Because one story leads to another. When I reposted the 1988 investigation into the bad shape many students were in when they presented themselves to kindergarten at Chicago Public Schools, another memory stirred. Don Hayner and I had to go around to schools and collect — or drop off, I don't recall — questionnaires. Sometimes we had to wait, and we'd do our waiting in the school libraries. Naturally, I browsed the books, in those pre-Internet years. And perhaps unsurprisingly, was aghast at just how out-of-date and shabby they were. Four years later, I dropped this. This isn't a column — I wouldn't get one for almost another four years. What surprises me, reading it now, is how I downplayed the rather significant news — that schools were holding onto outdated books and loaning books to each other to fool federal regulators, and that companies were reluctant to deal with CPS because they were so slow to pay. To me, that wasn't as interesting as the musty information being forced on children. Say what you will about the Internet, at least the reading isn't generally 20 or 30 years out-of-date.

     Of course, this story could not be written today because there wouldn't be librarians to talk to. Over the past three decades, investment in libraries at CPS has cratered, and only about 15 percent of Chicago's public schools employ a librarian. Though now that I think of it, talking to the remnant might yield interesting results. One story leads to another.

"Meanwhile the savages — or Indians, as Columbus miscalled them — were gathering rapidly in the protective jungle; a thousand or more . . . the savages chattered like sea-fowl, offering to barter their cotton for any trinkets, however cheap; but the admiral would accept only gold."
      — From The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Armstrong Sperry (1950)

     You can actually see the high-water mark of Chicago education: the line where a surge of money and students pushed schools to their zenith, flushing them with resources and promise, before breaking and rolling back.
     Just step into any public school's library and look at the books.
     The collections are filled with volumes bought during those heady times: science books stockpiled in the post-Sputnik rush to embrace technology; sports books purchased with plentiful federal dollars in the 1960s.
     They are old now, worn and out-of-date. Those that deal with any sort of technical subject are woefully behind the times.
     "If you live in a large city, you have probably seen big buildings with computers in them," speculates a 1972 volume on the shelves of one elementary school.
     Those that deal with history, like the Columbus volume, often view it through an outmoded lens, blurry with bias: "The largest number of today's newcomers has been the blacks," muses Chicago and Its People, a 1972 volume that lumps together blacks, Appalachians and Latin American immigrants.
     Yet schools are forced to keep antiquated books on the shelves because there is no money to buy new ones.
     "If you start pulling all those (outdated) books off the shelf, you are not going to have anything," said Ann Tanner, a librarian at Lane Technical High School, 2501 W. Addison.
     "I'd love to get more books," said Caroline Whalen, librarian at Louisa May Alcott Elementary School, 2526 N. Orchard. She estimates she would need double her budget to replace books such as Baseball's Greatest Pitchers, whose "Heroes of Today" section lauds Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson and Denny McLain.
     "Kids love new books," said librarian Glenish W. Gillespie, of Michele Clark Middle School, 5101 W. Harrison. "Some of them won't look at an old book unless they are highly motivated."
     But at Michele Clark, the biography of Henry Aaron stops with the slugger hitting his 504th home run. A book titled Desert War refers not to the one in the Persian Gulf, but the one in North Africa against Rommel. The two copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm looked unused.
     It is no different at other schools. The volumes of the Best Plays series on the shelves at Amundsen High School, 5110 N. Damen, begin in 1899 and end, abruptly, in 1961.
     A look on the sports shelves at one school is a step into not only another era but another city: It's Good to be Alive, by Roy Campanella, Koufax, by Sandy Koufax, and a history of Walt Alston and his Dodgers crowd one shelf.
     Five different books about space can be pulled off the shelves at Lane Tech without finding one recent enough to include any of the Apollo moon landings.

   "But to go to the moon with a manned ship is something that cannot be done unless we have the space station first." 

     — From Rockets, Satellites and Space Flight, edited by Willy Ley (1958).

     Despite the problems they cause — librarians must routinely steer students toward newer reference books and caution them to always check copyright dates — outdated books are a valuable commodity.
     To keep certification, vital for its students applying to colleges, a school library needs a certain number of books per student.
     After Kelvyn Park High School "got rid of the junk" in its collection several years ago, the librarian had no new books to replace them. She found herself forced to put in a desperate call to nearby schools, begging them to quickly send over any obsolete books in storage to line Kelvyn's shelves before a certification inspection.
      Kelvyn got the books.
     The reason Kelvyn weeded out its surplus had less to do with keeping an up-to-date collection than with another common library problem.
     "Our library is totally inadequate in terms of space," said Patricia Hanlon, Kelvyn librarian. "It's so crowded that, every time we get a new book, we have to decide what we are going to throw out."
     At least one librarian keeps old books because they have a certain weight — literally. At one end of the Michele Clark library, scores of identical copies of beat-up textbooks are used to weigh down the freestanding metal shelves, which the librarian fears might otherwise topple over.

   "The company did not employ negroes in the factory. But they were hired to clean the streets, to work around the mill yard, and for other menial tasks." 

     — From The Way Our People Lived: An Intimate American History, by W. E. Woodward (1945)

     This isn't to say old books are necessarily bad. Librarians point out that most classic fiction does not go out of date, and some older biographies are superior to their newer counterparts.
     "Sometimes they're very good," said Frances Szymanski, librarian at Amundsen. "I have found many of the newer books are not well-written but are geared for a lower-level of reading. When you want an in-depth study of a person, what you want is an older book."
     Szymanski proudly points to recent additions — a beautiful 16-volume Spanish atlas, Gran Atlas Salvat; the Reference Library of Black America; the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. But they are not enough.
     "I would greatly increase the number of duplicates in fiction," she said, when asked how she would improve her library if given more funds.
     If anything, the problem will get worse before it gets better. The book budget is often the first thing to get axed — most high schools had their library budgets cut by a third this year.
     "Don't be taken in," said Tanner, gesturing around the three-story library at Lane Tech, with its wood carvings and murals of Native Americans. "Yes, it is a lovely room, very beautifully appointed. But for a school this size, the library is woefully small."
     Tanner said her library has so many pressing needs that new books aren't even the same priority as, for instance, improved security.
     "Maybe my focus isn't on new books because so many of our good books walk that it gets depressing," said Tanner.
     Even when schools have the appropriations to buy new books, they often are held up because of the school system's budgetary procedures, she said.
     "Companies do not want the business of the Chicago public schools because payment is so slow," said Tanner, adding that companies hold books back every year because of board debts. "I call them and they say, `Yes, Mrs. Tanner, we've got your order, but we're waiting for the board to pay its bills.' "
     Sometimes just finding time to order books is a challenge.
     "School librarians have virtually no time to prepare book orders," said Hanlon.
     And Szymanski added: "We would like to remove, perhaps, more old books, if we had the staff and if we had replacements. But we're just not getting the kinds of funds we need. So we just keep taping them."
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1992

MY world is oh-so special....

     Lunch Saturday was at Dolce Arte, a bright and airy Italian restaurant at 3622 S. Morgan in Bridgeport, attached to an enormous art gallery space. My meatball sandwich was just so-so, but the pastries we shared were first rate. Afterward, we poked around, looking at the enormous photographs of David Yarrow — I liked his shots of animals; less so, the staged tableaus of Wild West models and wolves on LaSalle Street. The prints cost over $40,000 apiece, so somebody must covet them.
     Above one door was the sign at top. Not sure if it was an artwork or mere decoration. Moreover, I'm curious as to whether what stopped me, reading it, will also stop you. "My world is full of possibilities."
     What's your reaction to that? I instantly, well, not took offense, but found fault. It seemed needlessly reductive. I'd have gone with "The world is full of possibilities." There is a stench of ego to "My world is full of possibilities." My immediate reaction was along the lines of, "Fuck you, buddy, everybody's world is full of possibilities. Whether they act on them or not is another matter...."
     Am I wrong here? Maybe I was feeling unusually touchy. I'm still sleeping in a chair in the TV room. But it reminded me of the taint of ego, how it can poison an otherwise positive thought. Of course, there's a lot of that going around.

Maybe adults should follow students in setting down our phones

 

     My high school had a smoking lounge. But don't let the term "lounge" fool you. There were no comfy chairs, no billiard table, not even any walls. It was outside, behind the school, a weedy area where students would gather before, after, and I imagine, during class to get their nicotine fix.
     This was in the late ’70s. And if today it seems wildly inappropriate that a public school would facilitate smoking among teenagers, remember, back then smoking was considered nearly a human right, and there was a problem they were trying to address: smoke-filled restrooms. At least the lounge got smokers outside where they wouldn't impose their vice upon others.
     Memories of the smoking lounge wafted into mind while I was on medical leave, when Illinois joined 38 states allowing cellphones to be banned during school next year.
     When Illinois first contemplated the ban, I was against it. Phones are part of our lives now, like auxiliary limbs. Schools would do better teaching kids restraint regarding their phones since they will be constant companions after graduation. The focus should be on harm reduction.
     Then I thought about the situation some more, and through a superpower of mine called "changing my mind," decided that the ban is right. It helps that social media has degraded into an odious AI slop sink. Facebook imagines that my being Jewish means I want to view an endless loop of every antisemitic incident anywhere on earth, interspersed with agitprop about Israel, plus trite little tales about the Holocaust, which is being retrofitted into a feel-good story of heroism, resistance and survival.
     Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
     Meanwhile, Instagram served up so many snippets of "The West Wing" that I finally realized I could just watch "The West Wing" on Netflix and cut out the middleman. That's when I thought of smoking in school. We are biased toward the present, and it's hard to imagine things changing. But change they do, and today's necessity becomes tomorrow's puzzling affliction. Someday people gaping at their phones could be viewed with the same disapproval extended toward the miserable knot of co-workers puffing around the office entrance.
     Social media is so harmful to teens, so toxic, schools are right to teach youth there is life outside their screens. And the smoking lounge made me wonder whether high schools might not only be right regarding phones, but a vanguard, pointing society toward where we should all be going, as they were with cigarettes.
     In 1978, when I graduated from high school, the smoking rate among American adults was 36%. Today it is 10%, a triumph over damaging addiction, with countless years of life saved. (Though that might change now that the federal government is getting out of the "help people stay healthy" business.)
     Illinois banned smoking in high schools in 1990. Eighteen years passed before the state got around to banning smoking in restaurants. At the time, it was unimaginable — to not light up after a meal? Calamity. The restaurant industry would die. We journalists were dead set against it — what would a newsroom be if you couldn't grind out your cigarette on the tile floor? (The Sun-Times had its own smoking lounge, a truly repulsive little room that did have chairs, plus an enormous air purifier. I would go there sometimes to smoke a cigar and listen to Art Petacque reminisce about the mob.)

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Flashback 1988: How parents fail in preparing kids for kindergarten

 

     My three grandchildren marinate in adult attention. Love, books, toys. I've watch all four parents in action, up close and over time, and have nothing but admiration. They rock.

      The only problem, as I see it, is that all children aren't given such a leg up in life. 

      Not close. Most stories vanish, but this one has sat in mind for nearly 40 years, and I thought I would post it now, to mark the end of my surgical recovery period and prepare for my first column being published tomorrow. 

      This is a story was written as part of a team producing a series, "The Critical Years." We developed a questionnaire, working with the Board of Education, the Erikson Institute, and Chapin Hall Center for Children at U of C (we did things up right, back in the day) and sent hundreds to Chicago Public School kindergarten teachers, following up with focus group interviews with teachers and parents — I remember sitting in a room at the Robert Taylor Homes, conducting an interview with half a dozen parents, thinking, "We're not in Berea anymore...."  

     As shocking as this story is, in my memory, the reality was worse. Children would show up to kindergarten not knowing their names — they'd know a nickname, "I'm Little T!"  They wouldn't know the primary colors.

    Whenever critics of Chicago Public Schools are slamming CPS for their results, I remember this story and want to pipe up, "But consider where students start at. A lot of these kids are royally screwed from Day One — with the best conceivable education, many would never catch up."

      The news today is hardly better. One in four adults in Cook County is functionally illiterate. The ham-handed slashers of the Trump administration have gutted Headstart and other programs designed to throw a lifeline to such kids. I'd be a little reluctant to share such an old story with you, were I not completely confident we could write the same thing today. Maybe we should. That said, it's quite long — feel free to skim.

    This story ran on the front page, bylined, "By Don Hayner and Neil Steinberg."

     A 5-year-old boy came to kindergarten at Drake Elementary School last year not knowing common words like "doll" and "cat."
     He didn't know how to look at a picture book, or how to do things most children learn "from just being alive," said Judith Bowden, his teacher at Drake, 2722 S. King.
     The boy's mother is illiterate and could not read to him, which Bowden said was a major cause of his school problems.
     More than six of 10 children in city public school kindergartens are not read to by parents, according to teachers responding to a Chicago Sun-Times survey.
     By comparison, nine of 10 kindergartners in Wilmette public schools are read to by their parents, as are 87 percent of middle-and upper-income children attending Chicago public schools. Yet experts say reading aloud to children is crucial to their educational development.
     "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. This is especially so during the preschool years," according to the landmark 1984 report Becoming a Nation of Readers by the Commission on Reading.
     One ongoing study by Linda Meyer, a senior scientist at the nationally recognized Center for the Study of Reading in Champaign, goes even further. Meyer's study suggests that parents reading to their children is not enough. There must be quality reading that involves an exchange of questions and insights between parents and children.
     Teachers surveyed said six of 10 children have parents who do not know how to prepare them educationally for kindergarten. Teachers in Wilmette said only one of 10 children has such parents and slightly more than two of 10 middle- and upper-income Chicago children have parents who don't know how to prepare them.
     Typical survey responses from kindergarten teachers:
     "The children are left to take care of themselves." "Parents don't talk to children or ask them questions." "Nobody worked with these children. Television is their baby-sitter."
     Many Chicago children are far behind when they start school. And while the study indicates parents want to help, it also shows they don't know how.
     Educators, who for a long time looked within the school system for the key to academic improvement, are increasingly looking to parents.
     "It is unlikely that we will be able to make a major difference for the child unless we place equal priority on education and academic remediation for the parent," warned a 1988 Ford Foundation study, Toward a More Perfect Union: Basic Skills, Poor Families and Our Economic Future.
     Once a young child falls behind, he may never catch up, said Burton L. White, director of the Center for Parent Education in Newton, Mass., and author of The First Three Years. He added:
     "The child who is delayed at age 3 when he enters Head Start invariably, with virtually no exceptions, is behind on language. And if he's nine months or more behind on language, the chances are very good he'll never be an average student. Ever. The probability that any Head Start program is going to make him even an average student is very, very low."
     Teachers said some parents don't even talk to their children.
     "Many young parents don't know, for example, that even though a child is not verbal, the mother or father being verbal helps language develop," said Laura Devon, spokeswoman for Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project assisting children at risk.
Besides lacking basic parenting skills or information, parents have some ideas that are just plain wrong.
     "When you think you've heard the worst, something the next day always tops it," said Cheryl Stampley, a nurse working with new parents at the Robert Taylor Homes.
     Often, mothers feel that showing attention to newborns will "spoil" them. Some fathers feel that, until they are 6 months old, babies cannot see. Or hear. Or feel pain.
     A surprising number of parents will not put their children in a crib. They're afraid of crib death, although the crib itself, of course, has nothing to do with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
     A parent does not have to be poor to be overwhelmed with the responsibility of child rearing. Middle-class parents also frequently don't know what children need.
     "As bright as they are, they are totally unprepared (to be parents)," said Pat DeMar, director of a Family Focus drop-in center in Lincoln Park.
While poor parents may lack knowledge, said DeMar, affluent parents, ironically, sometimes have too much.
     "They read numerous books, on child bearing, on child rearing, but they reach a point where they're so well-read they lack security in their own instincts," DeMar said. "I worked at Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor, and I saw better parenting because they felt their instincts were OK."
Without adequate parental involvement, children can be so far behind when they enter school they have great difficulty catching up, even if the school does its job.
      At Terrell Elementary School, 5410 S. State, next to the Robert Taylor Homes, fourth-graders made a year's worth of progress in reading during 1987. Yet they still remained about 1 1/2 years behind the national norm.
     "We have to work twice as hard to get the children half as far," said Terrell Principal Reva Hairston.
     Parents often instill in their children a distaste for school that never goes away.
     One young mother, Kathy Jackson, sees her lack of participation as the cause of her son Robert, 11, having trouble in school.
     "He's not interested in school," said Jackson, "I didn't read to him, I didn't do anything with him. I believe that had a lot to do with it." She said she has begun to read to her younger son, Rodney, who is enrolled in the Dewey Child Parent Center, 638 W. 54th Pl., and that he seems to like school.
     It's futile telling some parents to read to their kids. "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Laura Devon of Ounce of Prevention, a statewide project aiding children at risk.
     Many parents are illiterate. One of every three to four adults in Chicago is functionally illiterate. From 650,000 to 1 million Chicagoans above the age of 16 read below the sixth-grade level. Only one-half of 1 percent of these adults are enrolled in literacy programs, according to the Chicago Literacy Coordinating Center.
Illiteracy itself, though, needn't prevent a parent from enriching a child's early years and helping to foster a desire for learning.
     "Even if you can't read yourself, you can contribute by telling your child anything from fairy tales to stories of your childhood. You create a social event in which the child gets the idea of gaining meaning," said James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development.
     Many parents are themselves children. In 1986, 9,959 children were born to teenage parents in Chicago. If these children were entering Chicago public schools today, they would represent one-third of all kindergartners. Studies show teenage parents are more hostile and punitive to their children. They also don't talk or listen to them as much as older parents do.
      "I was 15 when I had my little girl," said Estasia, a mother in the Beethoven Project, which assists parents in caring for their children. "I had to give up cheerleading. I loved that uniform. She was my responsibility, from the moment I got home from school."
     "There is that tug-of-war between being a responsible parent and doing what you want to do," said Devon of Ounce of Prevention.
     "Often young parenting increases the incidence of child abuse and neglect. We've seen that in news accounts of the last couple months, where a mom left her baby in a cold garage. Many young moms might think it is OK to leave an infant in that situation for a couple hours."
     More than 10 percent of the babies born in Chicago are also dangerously underweight, according to the Public Health Department. Low birth weight - anything below 5 1/2 pounds - is caused by a range of prenatal factors, from drug abuse to poor nutrition to depression.
     Low birth weight is a factor in 70 percent of Chicago's infant mortalities, and surviving low-weight infants have a greater chance of suffering physical and mental handicaps.
     Most poor parents want the best for their children, according to the Sun-Times study. They just don't know how to get it.
     The survey shows that 65 percent of parents come to school to discuss their children's progress more often than the two times required to pick up report cards.
     "You don't discuss your child's progress unless there is interest," said Ted Sanders, Illinois education superintendent, commenting on that figure.
     And nearly six of 10 try to help their child with homework, according to the study.
     "I've never met a parent who didn't want her child to succeed, but some of them don't know what to do," said Reva Hairston, principal at Terrell for the last 12 years.
     "So much depends on the home life and how much parents do with their children as far as listening and talking to the child," one teacher wrote, echoing a sentiment of many of those surveyed.
     Although a distinct minority, some parents seem to have almost no involvement with their children's education after they start school.
     About 14 percent of children have parents who have never come to school, not even to pick up their children's report cards.
     "Many children raised themselves, and come to school when they feel it's time," said Pam Stevens, director of the Dewey Child Parent Center. "I went to a house on a home visit, and the door was open, the babies walking around, and the parents nowhere to be found."
     Almost one of 10 children is regularly more than 15 minutes late for school, and 15 percent of all children miss more than five days of school a month, according to the Sun-Times study.
     Bowden of the Drake school said she has one child who was absent 51 days and another who was absent 40 days this school year."I think some parents are so overwhelmed with their own problem they can't see, so their priority is self preservation," she said.
     Teachers say many parents don't like to visit schools because it reminds them of their own academic failure.
     "When they come to school, it's because their children are destructive," said Dr. Grace Dawson, principal of Beethoven School. "They come to school for negative, not for positive, reasons."
      While parental involvement will improve a child's chances of school success, increasing that involvement is not easy.
     "It would be nice if we said to parents that involvement is in your child's best interest, and they would do it," said Dewey director Pam Stevens. "But we have to use all kinds of bribes and incentives. We have to persuade. We have to be evangelical. There's a big gap between where we are and where we are supposed to be."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 29, 1988

The bagel lot

    Tuesday morning found me plunging backward, into the past, looking for the first use of the word "bagel" in the Chicago Record, a short-lived paper of the 1890s, and the Chicago Daily News. 
    The results were not what I expected.
    "Bagel" first shows up as a name, such as a certain Conrad Bagel, waylaid and robbed by five masked men in front of his State Street saloon in 1893. For 40 years it is only a name, plus misreadings of other names like Paget (the tendency of microfilm is for letters to puff up and degrade; optical scanners can have trouble reading them).
     The foodstuff shows up in the 1930s. In 1936, columnist Clark Rodenbach makes a colorful visit to Gold's, a restaurant at 810 W. Roosevelt since 1902. He notes that Sears executive Julius Rosenwald was a patron, Illinois' first Jewish governor, Henry Horner, "drops in when gubernatorial duties permit," as do Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and Groucho Marx.
    Being a journalist, Rodenbach must count as a near-celebrity, because he can't leave without a gift.
    "Before you go," says Moe Rafison, the third generation to run the place, "let me give you a bagel or two."
   Rodenbach feels obligated to explain what he's talking about. "They are roughly of donut form; and, like the rye bread, crispy on the outside and tender within. A great breakfast favorite with show-people after the last show."
     It was interesting to follow the bagel into more general acceptance — though even in the late 1950s, bagels were still being explained (including humorously, such as "a donut made of concrete") not only in a daily newspaper, but apparently among Jews themselves. 
    "Are Lox and Bagel (salmon and rolls) essential to Jewish Survival?" is the topic of a humorous debate held at the K.A.M. synagogue in Hyde Park in 1956, though I hold out hope that the explanation was inserted into the topic for the benefit of the general public.
     What really intrigued me was the use of "bagel" in the classified ads in the 1960s and 1970s.  

       "AUTO sales mgr. 100 cars a mo. If you can run a Bagel Lot." reads one, in 1966. "Floor plan & financing available."
     "SALESMAN BAGEL LOT," reads another, in 1972. "MUST BE EXPERIENCED."
     It didn't seem a term used with the customers themselves, but part of the private lingo of the car lot. "AUTO SALESMAN" a 1976 ad explained, "Need 2 experienced salesmen for high volume 'Bagel Lot'"
     My Wentworth and Flexner "Dictionary of American Slang" had nothing, as did AI. I formed a theory that it would turn out to be the deepest discount cars, pivoting off the "Jews are cheap" calumny. 
     I wasn't far off. In Paul Dickson's "Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms" I found, "bagel: a poorly maintained car, to a person looking at it for trade-in."
     As to why a bagel was a poorly maintained car, for now we'll leave that to the imagination.
      If you are like me, you are wondering what happened to Gold's. At the crossroads of the Jewish ghetto in the 1930s, it was steamrolled along with much of the neighborhood by the University of Illinois campus in the early 1960s. Although as a reminder that being Jewish is to never be too far from calumny, I noticed a brief, laudatory 1931 Daily News description of Gold's uses the word "clean" four times. A moment's reflection and you'll realize why.
    

The crowded house

     There is an old Yiddish tale that goes like this:
     A village man comes to his rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I have a problem — my house is far too small for my growing family, but I can't afford a new one. What should I do?"
     The rabbi looks at the man.
     "Do you have a chicken?" he asks.
     The man is a little confused.
     "Yes," he slowly replies. "I have a chicken."
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Take the chicken into your house to live."
     The next day the man returns.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. Now I have the chicken flapping around, feathers flying, in addition to my children running, my wife scolding. It's even worse!"
     "I see," says the rabbi, stroking his beard. "Do you have a goat?"
     "Yes..." says the man, unhappy where this is going.
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Bring the goat into your house as well."
     The next day the man returns, eyes red.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. But this is even worse: madness — the goat braying all night, chasing the chicken, the children running, my wife complaining. It's a nightmare."
     "I see," says the rabbi. "Do you have a cow...?"
     You see where this is heading. The story can be continued with any number of livestock until the poor man is at his utter wit's end. Then the rabbi instructs him to remove all the animals from the house, and the man returns, grateful and amazed, at how his home situation has been improved.
    "Rabbi you are a true tzaddik, a sage!" he exudes. "There is so much room for everybody."
     The moral, I believe, is that we have it good, but we don't know it, until things go bad for a little while. I had it good, until I had my rotator cuff surgery when ... well, honestly, I still have it good. Yes, the thing hurt like the dickens for ... two days. But the drugs helped. ("So long as I'm in pain," I hissed to my wife, "it's not addiction.") As does physical therapy. And my wife has been a godsend, as always.
     Harder was wearing the sling for 24 hours a day. Not just any sling — with a pillow and its own red ball for me to squeeze — reminding me of the little shovel on my Ariens snowthrower. On my left hand — my dominant hand. For six weeks.
     I became quite good with my right hand. I wrote in my journal, slowly. And learned to dictate copy. Wednesday marked my third week in the sling. Three more to go. But it will come off, eventually, and I will be so happy for a time, joyously thinking of the tale above, along with the line from Psalms that came to mind when I first contemplated the vast amount of time to be spent in the sling: "A thousand years are but a day when it is past." (Checking, the actual quote draws God into the equation: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." I like my remembered version better.

Extra credit: I'm a huge Eugene O'Neill fan, and after I wrote the last paragraph above, I realized there is a slight echo of his greatest play. Any idea?

The final line of "Long Day's Journey into Night" — "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

Speaking of private ailments

       Lately, it seems the news has quieted down. The daily Trump disaster? Almost muted, a muffled din far away. The war in Iran, even more absentee than before. The economy, despite everything, chugging along uneventfully. The gathering global warming catastrophe? Routine now.

      Maybe because it is summer; the August slough.
      Then I began to suspect it wasn't the news, so much as me. I had this surgery and have been focused on recovery, sleeping, sort of, in a chair every night. Maybe I'm just not absorbing current events very well. The news is there, but since I'm not writing a column — back on Friday, in theory — I'm not processing it effectively.

Henry David Thoreau
(National Portrait Gallery)

    Which reminded me of my one of my favorite quotes, from Henry David Thoreau, one that I've posted here a couple times, but bears repeating, warning against all who "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere."
     Despite my frequent quoting — seven times, as recently as last year, quite a lot really — I don't recall the context. Had to be "Walden," right?
    Wrong. I plugged the quote into Google, and AI fell flat on its face, as AI will do:
   "AI Overview — Henry David Thoreau used this phrase in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, written on December 5, 1856." 
     Bold-face be damned, when I went to look at the citation itself, in his letters posted by Project Gutenberg, I got an Oct. 18, 1843 letter to his sister Helen. This is the germane passage, where he refers to his friend, Willam Ellery Channing — the poet who suggested he build a hut in the woods and go live in it:
     "You think that Channing's words would apply to me too, as living more in the natural than the moral world; but I think that you mean the world of men and women rather, and reformers generally. My objection to Channing and all that fraternity is that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company."
     In essence, reformers themselves need the help they deign to lavish on others.
     True enough. But this is the interesting part. As useful as that phrase is, and as much as I used it, when I plug the quote into Google, up pops six EGD and one Sun-Times reference. Nothing else, It doesn't quote any other work than mine. Which I find hard to believe. Maybe Google is now so self-referential that it sends me back to my own stuff, like a dog returning to its mess. Or could it be that I'm the only person ever to quote that particular line? That idea defies belief.