Flashback 2000: Comforts few, but it feels like home

     There can be odd resonances in this job, echoes over the decades. This column came up twice this past week. Once in upstate New York, on Thanksgiving Day, when I was chatting with my younger daughter-in-law's grandmother. Not a woman to mince words, she asked, in essence, "How can you do it? How can you write things that jar people's lives?" And I said, basically, that I try not to rattle folks unnecessarily, try to make sure my subjects understand they will be in a newspaper story that others will then read. 
     But the bottom line is, you can't predict how a piece of writing will affect others. This reader, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, was mentioned again in Tuesday's entry from the vault, and several readers expressed interest in learning more about my reader in Yekaterinburg. Read it now, and try to guess what very real repercussion this had in Chicago after it ran. I'll explain afterward.

     What does Rex Rickard miss most about Chicago, now that he's living deep in Russia?
     "Head lettuce," he wrote, "and corn on the cob."
     Of all the occasional correspondents I've accumulated over the years, via this column, one of the most distinctive is Rickard, 51, who got his start in St. John the Baptist Parish, around 50th and Halsted, but for the last two years has made his home in Yekaterinburg.
     His e-mails are filled with details of the daily triumphs and tragedies of life in that city, 900 miles east of Moscow, cradled in the Ural Mountains.
     "You could liken it to Denver," wrote Rickard.
     Well, not quite.
     "Last week at my tram stop there was a dead man lying in a pile of snow," he mentioned in a recent missive. "Apparently to keep his remains fresh while the cop radioed for pick-up service. Folks just took a passing glance at the corpse, if at all. Of course I was mildly shocked."
     It was the fourth corpse he's seen in public in the city, the largest in the Urals.
     Then there is the weather.
     "Winter snows begin in mid-September and I've seen the last snowfall on June 7," he wrote, quoting a local saying: "June isn't quite summer yet, and August isn't quite summer anymore."
     Between the bodies in the street, the snow, the shortages, the lines, the alcoholism and the air pollution ("they have no conception of catalytic converters") it sounded like a pretty grim existence to me, particularly as I pressed him for more things he misses about Chicago. Head lettuce and corn? There must be something else.
     "Of course, when the drinking water comes out of the tap BLACK on occasions, unless it has been `temporarily' shut off for some unknown reason for a week at a time, it gives a person pause," he wrote. "So I guess that I can say that I miss turning on the tap in Chicago and getting a sparkling clean and PURE glass of cold water equal to anything sold in a bottle."
     My God, I said. Why stay?
     "I've got loads of friends here, which I lacked in the U.S. They tend to stay friends for life here. The reason is that they don't move around the way we do. Once they are in a flat, that's it for several generations.
     "And holidays," he wrote. "My Lord do they have 'em! They say that the next holiday is only a bottle's throw away. The usual thing is to sit around a table and do the obligatory toasts to meeting; the holiday; to friends; to the ladies; and on and on till they get into the singing mode. And do Russians LOVE to sing!"
     He added that, as a gay man, he feels a lot more secure in Russia than he did back home.
     "I don't get called `faggot' or the other slurs that I was constantly getting in my beloved hometown," he wrote. "I don't walk down the street in mortal fear of my life."
     In fact, he said, it was the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard that inspired him to settle in Russia, which he had been visiting since the early 1970s.
     Rickard makes his living teaching English and, like teachers everywhere, is strapped for classroom materials. He asked if I knew of anybody who could pass along canceled stamps or stickers of any kind (he gives them out as prizes). His address is: P.O. Box 3, Yekaterinburg, 620151 Russia.
     And how are kids in Yekaterinburg?
     "Kids are the same everywhere," he wrote, with the universal world-weariness of a teacher. "Watch out for them starting at about age 11 or 12. Now I know WHY the Catholic nuns used to whack us!"
     While I find Rickard's messages invariably interesting, what really gnawed at me, as a person who yearned for Chicago bratwurst, even in the gilded comfort of Venice, was what he hankers for from home.
     "Oh yeah," he wrote, finally providing an entirely satisfactory answer. "I still do miss White Castle hamburgers."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 30, 2000

     After it ran, Rex's brother phoned, quite angry. It seems his son attended a Catholic School, and of course had told his classmates about his Uncle Rex in Russia. What he hadn't said — perhaps didn't know — was that his uncle was gay. The kids learned of it from this column and tormented him mercilessly,. The father seemed to think it was my fault. I said I was sorry, but I'm not responsible for the actions of bullies. Still, the moment stuck with me, obviously, as a reminder that you never know how these things are going to resonate. It's hard not to feel a little bit guilty.

     My last email from Rickard was in 2015. I made inquiries, but have not yet found out any new information about him.

Image atop blog: "Red Sunset," by Arkhyp Kuindzhi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Brandon Johnson says he didn't know of Ronnie Reese harassment allegations. He should have.

 

     So Mayor Brandon Johnson, in that by-now-trademark fashion of his to deny everything he isn't taking credit for, says he first learned of the problems with his former communications director, Ronnie Reese, when allegations of bad behavior became public.
     Which leads me to this question. Did he ever talk to the man?
     Because I did, and was it memorable.
     I shouldn't bother going into this. You don't care about the inner workings of city government, do you? Because I tend to bypass the gritty details. To me, politics is like sports: The same thing happening over and over.
     But maybe I'm wrong. For instance, when our brittle mayor quietly jettisoned his communications director in October, I did notice. And set my hands on the keyboard. Then sighed, rolled my eyes and found another topic. It appeared to be just another spin of the revolving door in an administration that long ago assumed the quality of a crashing airplane in a Bugs Bunny cartoon: a higher and higher aerodynamic whine, leading to the inevitable splat.
     But now the mayor appears shocked, shocked to be told there was trouble in the communications office. Well, while I have no knowledge of the specific misdeeds Reese is accused of committing — bullying, sexual harassment and such — I do have experience with him, interacting firsthand.
     Return with me to the golden days of yesteryear — well, July anyway. Old Joe Biden finally permitted his fingers be pried off the steering wheel. Democratic hopes soared. The Democratic National Convention was coming up. I was tasked with writing an in-depth piece on how the event might affect the reputation of Chicago. It hadn't happened yet, and so we didn't know. Would it be a 1968-level disaster? A 1996-ish triumph?
     I had my own operating theory — that it didn't matter. The city's reputation, after being abused by every right-wing aggrievance junkie who could fog a mirror, couldn't become worse. That said, the city also didn't have anything to gain. The people most vigorously using the city as a dog whistle really weren't into the whole reevaluating their opinions based on new data thing.
     But I am, and didn't want to merely regurgitate my opinions. So I began contacting various Chicago boosters, PR pros and North Michigan Avenue Association sorts.
     I thought I'd better reach out to the city. I approached the mayor's press office the way a person tosses a coin into a wishing well, a time-honored ritual without much expectation of actual return. With nothing to lose, I figured, do it with a little panache. I sent the following email:

     Good morning! I'm writing a column on how the upcoming Democratic National Convention will affect the global reputation of the city. I'm assuming there is no one in your office who would offer comments for such a story, but want to ask anyway, just so I can, if I so desire, say I tried and got nothing. Thank you for considering my request, to the degree that you actually do.

To continue reading, click here.

 

Flashback 2000: What hath tech wrought? Dog photos

Office dogs at PCB Linear in Roscoe, Illinois

     I noticed this 2000 column while looking for something else, and had to share it, just because it reflects what all this communication felt like when it was fresh, almost a quarter century ago. Notice: a) the beginning is referring to actual mail, through the postal service, now so insignificant that since the Sun-Times moved to Navy Pier, they don't bother forwarding it and I never thought to ask; b) at the time I used a Dell computer, because their customer service was so good; c) since I was a decade away from owning a dog myself, I undervalued their importance.

     People occasionally send me pictures of their dogs. They read the column, they feel close, they write a letter and tuck in a photo of themselves or, sometimes, themselves and their dogs. Or just of their dogs.
     While I always appreciate this as a sincere gesture of affection, I nevertheless find myself throwing the pictures away. I am not — and this might sound cold — deeply interested in what their dogs look like.
     This is the sort of sentiment that would never struggle its way onto a printed page, were it not for the arrival of the new Dell computer catalog at my house yesterday. It shows off an expensive computer/video camera package and, in the bold color photography promoting it, illustrates a happy family documenting their dog holding a Frisbee in its mouth.
     The dog's image, fixed electronically, will supposedly be posted on Web sites and e-mailed to gigantic phone book lists of friends and associates. None of whom, it's a safe bet, are even remotely interested in seeing the dog.
     That sums up my view of our present moment in technology. Our capacity is expanding wildly. We can reach anybody anywhere at any time with anything — voice, text, pictures.
     But those messages are, inevitably, pictures of a dog holding a Frisbee or the equivalent: lists of jokes, chain letters, bawdy poems.
     We sit on the train, flip open our tiny cell phones, and say, loudly, "I'm on the train now. The train. I'll be home soon. If you look up and see somebody coming through the door in about 40 minutes, that person will be me. Right — the train. Yup. The same one I take every day. Yup yup. Bye."
     Nobody ever says, "The serum is arriving on the midnight plane! Have the dog team ready to rush it up to Point Barrow!"
     You have to ask who is the beneficiary of this communication. Traditionally, the recipient is supposed to be the one who receives an advantage. They learn a fact, or are entertained, or something.
     But I'm beginning to think that communication, due to all this technology, has taken on a new meaning, and now the sender is the one who gets the most out of it.
     Nearly every day, sometimes several times a day, a reader in Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mails me with a long report documenting daily life in the Urals. I read it, usually, or at least skim it, in that hidebound belief that a person should read his mail.
     But to be honest — and I mean no offense, since I know you're reading, Rex — there are days when my heart doesn't exactly soar to see that the new report from Yekaterinburg is here.
     I don't want to make too big a deal over this change in communication because I also sincerely believe it will pass. When the Sony Walkman came out, people also went nuts with the possibility of music anywhere. For a while you couldn't ride the subway without half the passengers bobbing away to their private music halls, and it was sad to think that society would become unglued as we all retreated into our cocoons.
     Didn't happen. People got tired of them. You still see Walkmen, of course, but the tide has ebbed.
     Not that this present craze will pass soon. Just this morning, walking across the Loop from Union Station, I saw, for the very first time, a man strolling down the street, thumbing the little number pad of one of those digital e-mail pals.
     I stopped and watched him pass. He was young, 22, 24, with the longish sideburns young men are wearing now. He had on a flannel shirt and sneakers and that sort of rice planter's bag slung low across his hip.
     While I have no idea what he was communicating, my guess is something along the line of "Walking down Madison Street now. On way to Walgreens to pick up photos of my dog."
         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, September 28, 2000

A few words on my method

Not in Toledo.

     Q: What's the difference between a newspaper column and a blog post?
     A: You can miss a newspaper column.
     At least in my case. I took off all last week while my wife and I drove to Cooperstown for Thanksgiving. More about that later. And while page two in the Sun-Times was filled with ... umm ... stuff other than me — at least I hope so; hope they didn't just leave it blank — the blog post, true to its "Every goddamn day" name, kept chugging along. 
    Such was the case Sunday, when I pivoted off Shermann Dilla Thomas' new video. I've long been a Thomas fan, and enjoyed his YouTube program sufficiently that I thought sharing it would be something readers appreciated.
    I wrote the post Friday night, in DuBois, Pennsylvania.  The plan was to drive to Toledo, check in somewhere, hit the Toledo Art Museum, which is open until 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays — to capitalize on the singles crowd, I imagine — then cruise home Sunday morning.
     But we had been gone almost a week. All the hotels in Toledo charge an extra $75 for a dog, putting them above $200. Or ... we could just keep driving, save the money, skip the museum, and get home by 7 p.m. Saturday. That sounded like a plan.
    So Sunday I woke up at home, gave the Dilla post a quick read — you want to reread things in the morning, when you're fresh, and catch errors. I thought ... you know .... this is pretty good. It could go in the paper. I was still technically on vacation, and didn't have to turn anything in. But though I make a point of taking my vacation, I also sometimes say that if you aren't in the newspaper, you might as well be dead. The post was 600 words long. It was a few minutes' work to puff it to 750 and put it into BrightSpot. Beside, the additional reach of the newspaper would be good for Dilla's "You Don't Know Chi" debut.
    So that's what's in the paper Monday, a longer version of Sunday's blog post. You can read it here. It seemed repetitive to post the newspaper version here, so I thought ... something else. But what? I was curious what we missed by skipping Toledo. Hmmm — the Toledo Museum of Art has an orange Calder sculpture quite like Chicago's orange Calder sculpture, only smaller. And ... 
    You know what? I'm not doing this. Not sneering at a museum I haven't visited. That's a drawback of having a world class asset like The Art Institute right here. It can make one cocky. Other city museums seem small affairs, crowded with second rate paintings from known names and anonymous genre artists. I'm sure the Toledo Art Museum has many fine qualities. The National Review called it "a treasure trove of the best" while admitting that Toledo "is not near anything." When the day comes that I have reason to pause in Toledo, well, I'll be sure to check it out and tell you all about it.

    Until then... well, it's good to be back home. Now time to find my rhythm and get back to newspapering. 
     

"Driven by history"

     Computers of course are binary. Everything we see on a screen, from a full length Hollywood movie to a text message to the period at the end of this sentence, is broken down into a series of 0s and 1s. Those are the choices. On or off. Yes or no. There is no 0.5. There is no "maybe."
     All too often people can be binary too, thanks to tens of thousands of years of Darwinian survival conditioning. Fight or flight? Friend or foe? Nuance is a fairly modern concept, and still gets lost on a lot of folks. They like "God commands this!" They aren't comfortable with, "Here are your options. Choose four." 
     Take history. Whole swaths of the country seem to believe our nation is either "great," that is, a perfect place that has never done wrong, or sunk in "carnage" brought by outsiders. Nuance is lost on them. Anything that falls below the heroic in American history is a personal insult.  Racism is a myth. Oppression a lie. The worst thing that ever happened in their American history is George Washington chopping down a cherry tree with his little hatchet, and even then, he redeems his wickedness with his honest confession. If their children learn about actual bad things that really happened in the past, it makes them feel bad, about themselves. In theory. Or maybe even in actuality. Maybe because they sympathize with the evildoers. They hate to see it suggested that the Confederacy was gung-ho about slavery. They hate to see it suggested that the South lost the Civil War and I suppose, given the politics of the moment, they might have a point there. 
     Real history isn't about absolutes. It is never black or white, but shades of meaning, depths of complexity. Not one cause but a dozen. Which is one reason I'm such a fan of Chicago's TikTok historian, Shermann "Dilla" Thomas. He goes places. He can be giving you a tour of Bronzeville and suddenly start talking about the Marx Brothers, who lived there over a century ago. His Chicago is never the simple child's drawing of cliches that outsiders like to offer, but a rich, varied tapestry of people and places, achievement and heartbreak. 

      Speaking of the latter, we last visited with him two weeks ago, when I broke the story that ComEd had lured him out of his safe union berth then showed him the gate. Some people would sulk after that, but Dilla has been busy, creating new material.
     On Friday he dropped Episode 01 of his "You Don't Know Chi" YouTube program. Off the bat, he's into nuance. "Now we're either in Chatham or Grand Crossing," he begins, walking down a summery street. "But we can figure that out a little bit later."

      It had over 4,000 views its first day, and is well worth 13 minutes of your time. Ostensibly about the Chicago bungalow,  it ranges over a variety of subjects, including the warmth of neighborhoods like Chatham and South Shore, and a rib joint to add to your must-visit list.  

     As a historian, Dilla's an essentially upbeat guy — as am I — who nevertheless has no reluctance to plunge into the messy and the unpleasant.  But Dilla manages the neat feat of being positive while giving full recognition to history's troublesome places.It's fast-paced and well-produced. Professional, but not too slick. And he always ranges across the spectrum — Mahalia Jackson lived at 82nd and Indiana and, oh yeah, her house was bombed.

     There's no need for me to act as a filter; you should just go watch.

     He's joined by rapper Rhymefest — collaborator with Kanye West, co-writer with John Legend and Common of "Glory" from the movie "Selma" — who supplied what, to me, is the most valuable thought of the episode. I'll provide the answer below. 
    First you should watch the video. Go to YouTube and plug in "You Don't Know Chi!" 
    Finished? Really? C'mon, go back and give it a try. It's fun and easy and you'll learn stuff. I sure did.

    Now you're done? Good.

    It was Rhymefest remark about the scratches and damage on his Grammy, how it being manhandled by the kids he's shown it to is a good thing. 

     "If it didn't have any scars on it, that means I'm not using it for anything," he said.

     That's good sense, and a thought I've never heard expressed before. As someone who can get worked up over that kind of thing — a scratch on a thermos, a ding on a car — I'm going to try to take Rhymefest's attitude to heart. There's always more to learn, from history and each other. I'm looking forward to Episode 02.

Image atop blog is a quilt by Bisa Butler.

Shermann "Dilla" Thomas, earlier this year, in an anechoic chamber at Shure Microphone. 

The Shed endures

 

     For the past 20 years or so, we've hosted Thanksgiving. Big boisterous events packed with food and family. But this year we had an offer we couldn't refuse — spend the holiday with our younger son's new in-laws in Cooperstown, New York. That's quite a drive, and we stopped the first night in my hometown of Berea, Ohio.
     I might not have gone out of my way to eyeball the old house. I saw it, what, 10 years ago? But our host suggested the nostalgia tour, and we swept over. The circle where we played kickball seemed so very small, and I stood at home plate a moment, waiting for a boy now older than I am to roll a ball that wasn't coming. 

      I remembered that when I recently wrote about The Fort I built the boys, a reader expressed interest in seeing The Shed that my father constructed — by himself, during the three weeks I was at summer camp, start to finish, which is about two years quicker than I took to build mine.
     So I gingerly stepped into the side yard and snapped the photo above, hurrying away before the homeowner might notice and jump to shoot me. "This is Ohio after all," I said. 
     In my day there was no decoration — and a tall rectangular window in front that has been painted over. Or boarded over — maybe the glass was shot out too many times.
     The new owner is obviously a golfer, judging by the bric a brac scattered everywhere. And why not? It's his house, and it's a free country — so far, though judging by the number of Trump flags I saw snapping in the buckeye breeze, that could change. My hometown friend urged me to knock on the door and present myself as the original occupant — my father would take his lunch here and watch construction proceed. I was reluctant but, joined by my wife so as not to present "some scary solitary man," I rang, waited a moment then, relieved, hurried away. 

"To remember these things..."

I bought the Virgil quote button from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers in Wauconda. 

      Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are far greater works, but I still prefer Virgil's Aeneid. The first two, being Greek, are spare and powerful. The third, being Roman, brawny and ostentatious.  To compare them is like comparing a pair of those flat, featureless neolithic figurines to a feathered Mardi Gras mask. One is timeless, one fun. 
    Maybe I prefer the Roman ruin because I can pluck more useful sentiments from Virgil. Thoughts that you can carry in your pocket like coins. Tu ne cede malis. "Yield not to evil." The line continues, "... but go forth all the more boldly to face it." That's a plan, right? Hard to argue "Give in to evil..." Oh wait. Maybe not so hard. Not in those words, perhaps.
     Or consider the button above.  Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit, the "j" pronounced like a "y," "youvabit." Odysseus and his men are stranded on a bleak, rocky shore, and the leader hides his own worries, trying to buck his men up. 
     "Call up your courage again," he says, in the Robert Fagles translation. "Dismiss your grief and fear." Then he delivers the line on the button: "A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this." 
     I first read that when I was still in elementary school, in a 1947 story called "To Remember These Things" by Milton White. It ran originally in Seventeen magazine, but I found it in a Scholastic paperback, "Best Short Shorts." God, how I loved getting those Scholastic books — you would order them in school, then they would arrive, and you got to keep them. I still have my yellowed copy of "Best Short Shorts."
     Though oddly, in the story, a nostalgic slice of the end of high school, Luke Connors' Latin teacher translates it as "And in the future it will be pleasant to remember these things," banishing that all important "perhaps." That isn't right. "Forsan" means "perhaps."
     More importantly: will it be pleasant to remember these things? To recall this particular moment, atop the hill before the steep plunge into whatever we've got coming? Could it possibly be pleasant? For people such as ourselves, I mean. I suppose that depends on what happens next. Maybe these will be the Good Old Days. Jesus, I hope not. Then again, as I always say, hope is not a success strategy.

     

Flashback 2007: Killing the dream — History will be a harsh judge of how U.S. has treated immigrants

My boundless professional respect and personal admiration for Sen. Dick Durbin has nothing — nothing! — to do with the fact that he sometimes shows up at my book signings, such as above at Atlas Stationers in 2016, where he poses with co-owner Therese Schmidt. 

   Happy birthday, Senator Dick Durbin, who turned 80 last week. Even though I am on vacation, I would be remiss not to wish him the best. Sen. Durbin is old school, in that he is an unshowy, no-nonsense public servant, harkening back to an era when people wanted the government to do stuff. He was raised under the wing of that platinum bar of probity, Paul Simon, and in a way can be considered Simon's heir on earth, not a compliment I bestow lightly. 

    I went looking for mentions of Durbin in my column, and found this, from 17 years ago. It's  just too goddamn current not to share. Of course Durbin sponsored the DREAM acts, which would have let young Mexican immigrants who came here as children become citizens. Of course we wouldn't take that path. Of course we would take the road leading to our former and future president, who will start building his detention camps on Day One, with trains packed with those we should have allowed to become citizens but for the color of their skin rolling on Day Two. I thought things were bad then, and had no idea the subcellars of shame below that one, waiting for us to dig our way down into them. 

     Even the Correction at the end is current, as the paper is pressing to gather the staff back at the office beginning early next year. 

     This was from when the column filled a page, and I've left in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Haters always have their reasons, always always always. Good, solid, reasonable reasons, at least in their own minds. If you tapped any Southern slave owner on the shoulder, he could unspool a litany of exactly why blacks should remain forever slaves — because they're inferior, because they can't learn, because God Almighty intends them to be slaves — reasons that nauseate us today but made perfect sense to them, then.
     Give our modern world credit. The "illegal" canard brandished by those who want a permanent underclass of Hispanic serfs — shorn of rights except the right to work hard at crap jobs until deported — is a stroke of genius. You can be the most rule-averse, speeding, tax-cheating, shoplifting American miscreant and suddenly you're Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes if it means keepin' down them Mexicans.
     Forget that we invite them in with our open borders. Forget that some have been here for decades. Forget that our mechanism for citizenship is broken. Their papers are not in order, so they must be made to suffer and their children made to suffer, as evidenced by the Senate's craven rejection of Dick Durbin's DREAM Act, the one shred of immigration reform that should have been completely unopposed, a modest plan to let teens brought here as children qualify for college assistance or join the army and harbor hopes of becoming citizens of the country where they have spent most of their lives.
     These are days of shame. Someday, in the country we are assuredly becoming, we're going to look back and ask why we responded this way, who we thought we were fooling with our fig leaf of illegality and how we could have believed it hid our failure to act as decent Americans and compassionate human beings.

FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE . . .

     No sooner have the 17 children hung up their little coats and backpacks, than Bev Sugar — what an apt name for a kindergarten teacher — begins leading them through the basics of the letter "H."
     "See if you can put a line between upper and lower case 'H,' " she says.
     It's 8:55 a.m. A beep and then a voice from a loudspeaker.
     "Good morning! Good morning, one and all!" enthuses Jill Weininger, principal of Greenbriar Elementary School in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     There is a bit of business about birthdays and lunch and recess.
     "And now would everybody please take a moment to think about your day."
     Five seconds pass.
     "Thank you very much. Now let's stand for the Pledge of Allegiance."
     This moment of silence was created by our bowl-haircut legislators in Springfield as their disingenuous way to return prayer to schools — they won't admit that, of course, but there is no other explanation.
     Some see it as the edge of the wedge for religion in school. If so, it is a very thin wedge. Frankly, I wasn't perturbed about it before my visit — not everything is a slippery slope — and afterward it seems particularly benign, the final wheezing gasp of state-backed faith.
     Or as Weininger says: "It's not the hill to die on."
     Sure, it's unnecessary, another straw on the sagging backs of our schools. But it isn't close to the biggest state-mandated waste of time. Frankly, I'd rather my boys started school doing the rosary if it meant we could get rid of a few standardized tests.
     I ask a few of Ms. Sugar's students what they think about during their five seconds of introspection.
     "The same thing every day," says Ben. "Computer lab!"
     "The good times," says C.J.
     After the law was passed, District 28 leaders discussed how to implement it. The pre-moment language was kept carefully neutral.
     "It's against the law to direct their thinking," says Weininger.
     "Yeah, we wouldn't want a school doing that," I reply.
     Setting the time span was a challenge.
     "They don't define 'moment' in the law, thankfully," says Weininger.
     They considered 15 seconds, but that proved too long.
     "You have to find something that works for kids 5 through 14,'' she explains.
     They tried 10 seconds.
     "That's still really long."
     Thus the five-second moment.
     Two weeks in, complaints are minimal.
     "We've heard from a parent," says Weininger, who has the dream answer for concerned parents.
     "I'm bound by law,'' she says.

CORRECTION

     Though I have the luxury of working at home, if I like, I don't very often. I think it's important to be downtown, so I can go to the East Bank Club, gossip with my co-workers, eat at fancy restaurants and, oh yeah, find stories.
     The bad part of being at the office is that my books are at home, and I have an alarming tendency to pull stuff out of the air, intending to check it later. That's how "Arms and the man I sing" got ascribed to Homer's Iliad Wednesday when, of course, it is in Virgil's retread of the Iliad, the Aeneid.
     The truly sad part is that, thinking to check, I did step into the blizzard of cyberspace, and even though I saw it ascribed to Virgil, I somehow ignored the evidence of my own eyes, like that corpsman who noticed the waves of Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor early Dec. 7 but shrugged them off as bombers scheduled to show up later.
      "Arma virumque cano," one of the most famous lines in all literature. It's like placing "To be or not to be" in Paradise Lost.
     The upside is the bracing number of readers who leapt to point out the error — and nicely too. Well, nicely except for Hugh Iglarsh, one of those guys harboring a grudge for years who sees a mistake as a gap in the armor he can drive his spear into and work it back and forth. Wound delivered, Hugh. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus — "Sometimes even good Homer dozes," i.e. we all screw up. That's from Horace's Ars Poetica.
     I think.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     From Ross Steinberg, who turned 12 on Thursday: Five out of four people don't know their fractions.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 26, 2007

"A quartz contentment"

Nov. 6, 2024

 

    I'm on vacation, dredging up recent material written but never posted (amazing to think I write even MORE than what appears here. Almost makes a guy wish someone would sneak up behind me with a sock full of nickels and just coldcock me. Make the man STOP...)
    Anyway, I wrote this the morning after Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States, then decided it was simultaneously too melodramatic and too coy.  Although I noticed a reader posting these exact lines, so I wasn't alone in thinking of them. Hard to believe we're still in the same month, November. Not three weeks into this nightmare. "Yesterday, or Centuries before?" indeed.

     The sky was dull Wednesday morning as I walked the dog. Nobody was out even though it was after 7 a.m. It felt vaguely like a holiday, like New Year's Day. Part something special, part something off.  I thought, perhaps damningly, of Emily Dickinson's poem that begins:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -
And stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

     Not that there was any "great pain" Tuesday night. Trump leapt out of the blocks and never looked back. Took all seven so-called "swing" states. Won the popular vote by 5 million.  "Great pain" is a wild exaggeration, but that "formal feeling" nails it exactly. The street seemed like the set of a play, the sky, a painted canvas backdrop. 

     Dickinson continues:

The Feet, mechanical, go round -
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

     Was there any kind of contentment, quartz or otherwise? I certainly wasn't shaking my fist at the sky. Not "contentment" though, surely. More like a lack of desperation, almost a calm acceptance. I'm all outraged out. We believe in democracy, fine, this is democracy. This is what the people want, apparently. Let them have it then. What's the H.L. Mencken quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
     It's not what I want, but then I am not the common people, in that I have a good job, a solid education, lots of money in the bank, and gold-plated health insurance. This is not what I want, but so what? It's not about me. 

This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go —

     Again, "Hour of Lead" overdoing it, but "the letting go" right on the money. The 2024 race is too much to carry around your heart, though abandoning it is easier said than done.  I'm not ready to let go of the dream that is America. But I'm prepared to spend four years watching it trampled by malicious morons. I hope I am prepared. I am trying to be prepared. Though really, how could you be prepared? That is the Trump essence. A continual shock, a vertigo some Americans nestle into like mire and others can never get comfortable occupying, never get used to. Never close.
      A neighbor came the other direction on her morning constitutional.
     "Good morning," she said, grimly.
     "I can't do a good morning," I replied, not smiling. "So I'll say 'hello.'"

 

Quick snap

     I'm on vacation this week, running posts that somehow never made it online. This was written in August.

      One of the many things I've always loved about the Sun-Times is how ad hoc it is. Not a lot of time for meetings and programs — at least at my level, where we're too busy putting out a newspaper. Reporters never know when they'll be pressed into action, or for what. I remember one Saturday, when I still lived in Oak Park, years ago, the paper called. There was some kind of police incident on Harlem Avenue, a block from where I lived.

    I went downstairs and hurried over. The two moments I remember is arriving to see the police running in my direction, then turning and seeing the person I took for the bad guy, running away, with me between them. I pressing myself into a doorway to get out of the way. It seems incredible, now that I set it down — how was the situation not resolved before I got there? But that's what memory serves up. Maybe it was a dream that migrated into reality, in my mind.
     The other moments was when the article came out — it must have been part of some larger story, because it ended up played prominently. "Only at the Sun-Times," I smiled to myself, "can you be lounging in your underwear in bed at home at 4 p.m. on your day off and still make the front page the next day." I do believe it happened, nearly 40 years ago.
    This all came back Wednesday. I was at the Techny Prairie Rec Center, pressing dumbbells in the weight room, when the phone rang — my editor. Was I near an Illinois flag? he said. Could I get a photo of it? Photographers downtown had been dispatched to a police station and a post office and various sundry, no state flag.

     "Lemmee look," I said. I walked outside. Yup, there one was, right under the American flag. But there was no wind. The flag hung limply on its pole. "Wait a second," I said. "We need a breeze."  The breeze came up, I got my shot, sent in it, and went back to my workout. On Thursday there is was on page five. 

Barack Obama is a skilled orator

"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown (Union League Club) 

     This week I'm burning through vacation days that I'd otherwise lose, and in order to make it a true vacation thought I'd post a few essays written then never published. The following is from mid-October, a million years ago. I imagine I held it back because I came up with something better, and it seemed too much inside baseball, not to mention touching the third rail of race — in a way I find acceptable. Of course you never know whether that electrical rail is live and will kill you or not until you put your foot on it and find out.

     I wouldn't call Barack Obama articulate. Or well-spoken. Even though he is obviously both  — that's why the struggling Kamala Harris campaign trotted him out in Pennsylvania last week to try to convince voters not to let petty considerations prevent them from doing their part to avoid handing our country over to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.
     But I wouldn't use those specific words — "articulate" or "well-spoken" — because ... do you have any idea why? I think this is a media thing. Because a few readers might complain, since Barack Obama is Black, that saying he is articulate somehow suggests that Black people generally aren't articulate or well-spoken, and is thus racist.     
     A stretch, certainly, but one some still make. Maybe trying to improve the world, maybe for the pleasure of lashing out, though the fashion peaked a few years back and I believe is in decline as the general world disaster gathers in strength like the latest hurricane off the Gulf Coast. Maybe the whole thing is an irrational fear of editors and, by osmosis, writers too. Maybe I'm cringing at the sight of a stick.
     It's one of those invisible calculations going on behind the scenes of what's left of the old media. I find the situation unfortunate, as a writer, since it pulls arrows out of our quiver and requires contortions and codes. 
     It affects not just praise, but criticism. You can't apply a cliche criticism about ethnic groups to an individual, no matter how apt. I sometimes forget this. For instance, last week, I wrote a column about Mayor Brandon Johnson's almost psychopathic use of race as a general shield against his numerous flaws. It began. "Respect Mayor Angry!" I liked dubbing him "Mayor Angry" it seemed to fit — and imagined I could use it during what remains of his sure to be brief life in the public eye.
    What I forgot was, at some point in the 1960s Black Panther sorts who were raging about killing whitey were dubbed "angry" and it became some kind of generic slur, the way "cheap" was attached to Jews. Ta-Nehisi Coates raised a tempest last week when idly speculating when conditions in his own life would proceed to an extent where he would join Hamas fighters in raping and killing whatever random Jews he could get his hands on, as a way to make this a more equitable world. Had he called those Jews "cheap" it would have been worse.
     It seems odd, to me, that Ta-Nehisi Coates can say such vile things and I can't call the mayor angry, but then the playing field has tilted one way, the theory being that doing so somehow makes up for it in the past being tilted another. I don't see how that works. But then again, I wouldn't, and comply with the situation as it is to get my stuff in the paper and keep my job for another two years. I changed the lede to "Respect the mayor. No matter what he says or does." Which wasn't the same, but starts off the column well enough.

     

 

Is that a banana on the wall or are you just happy to see me?

 

     By now you've probably heard of the sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” at Sotheby's Wednesday. A banana duct-taped to the wall, it sold for $6.24 million. In fact, the story has receded and is practically forgotten four days later, which is how these things go.
     News accounts tend to consider $6.24 million a lot. "A whopping $6.24 million" The Washington Post gushed.

     "Whopping" — there's an adjective you just don't see much anymore.
     What does "whopping" even mean?  "Very large." Is it? Elon Musk is worth more than $300 billion, so you have to wonder if $6.24 million is really very much money at all — not to you or me, of course, but to guys like Justin Sun, the purchaser of the duct-taped banana. Sun is a Chinese entrepreneur who created Tron, a cryptocurrency. A billion dollars worth of Tron traded Wednesday, with each unit valued at almost 20 cents. By Saturday, it was at 22 cents, a 10 percent rise, so my guess is that he'll made his money back many times over, with publicity increasing the value of his cryptocurrency, which has already appreciated more than 100 percent this year. Money coined out of the air of technology and inflated with the wind of ballyhoo.

     That part tends to get left off of the story. It's also worth noting that he bought not an actual banana, purchased for 35 cents that day from a New York street vendor and duct taped to the wall. But the idea. The artwork comes with 14 pages of instructions and — in a nice touch — a roll of duct tape. Me, I'd build a school.

     My Oxford English Dictionary considers "whopping" colloq. or vulgar and defines it as "abnormally large or great" as well as "monstrously false." That sounds about right.

Guest voice: Shadow people might startle but losing local journalism is scarier

Photo by Karie Angell Luc

      I've known Karie Angell Luc for many years, and always admire her work ethic, her photographs and her positive disposition. So I was shocked, a few weeks ago, when she told me she had abandoned journalism because she felt threatened while doing her job. That is not the town I thought we live in, and I am not willing to let it become like that. I told her she could not give up, she is not alone, should not stop doing what she loves, and that her fellow journalists have her back. I offered to write a column about her situation, but she preferred to do that herself and run it here, and I am glad that I can share it with you. If anyone in Northbrook feels Karie is someone who can be pushed around, they are sorely mistaken.

     With the holidays here, I wish to be kind. As 2024 winds down, I am reevaluating who I am.
     I am thankful for my opportunities and hope to uplift others.
     I joke I have two personalities. One who smiles to be patient with patients. As a proud qualified immunizer, I can give a good shot in the arm. I care about patients and their privacy.
     Then there is this other me who needed a shot in the arm. I believe the truth is the truth and that’s that. This other side of me wears this silly but sensible vest (like a mom purse). I carry no pen and newsgather on the latest iPhone.
     Sports announcers do color commentary and play by play. I do pray by pray. I make things up as I go on faith.
     So, as this one-mom-bander or solopreneur who loves local journalism, I must say the truth.
     I feel unsafe.
     And guess where I feel the most unsafe?
     Here in my own leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     Now that really ruffles my second good sport personality. At home, I have Etsy handmade plushies to snuggle with on my couch while I squeeze in precious moments watching Svengoolie or the Hallmark Channel (when allowed by football fans) while laptop editing photos after assignments. 

Karie Angell Luc

     My cups of comfort are my family and by golly, am I proud of them. But when this truth teller finds dirt in backyard soil, and despises easy-sweet-spoonfed-soundbites sugar coated as official responses from happy dance public relations folks, journomom emerges.
     For a self-employed reinventor lacking time for chores, I’ve seen household dust bunnies and danger. I was at George Floyd protests with no COVID-19 vaccine. I had no one at my back but a frontal PPE mask.
     My husband stopped me from driving to Kenosha, Wisconsin to cover that protest where I might have met that vigilante rifle toting dude.
     I did interview Bobby Crimo in person in 2020 at a downtown Northbrook corner protest. Like most cell phone recorded interviews, folks get erased as did Crimo, who backpedaled on providing a name. Then this same kid smiled at me in a photo I made published again on July 5, 2022. That Highland Park parade shooting suspect has that telltale facial tattoo.
     Crimo could have had a gun that day. The parent in me wishes I could rewind time to offer mom sense. Crimo was dressed as Where’s Waldo. I cringe seeing that Halloween costume. People were killed and injured.
     Aftershock. I still picked something close to that intersection, covering Northbrook Village Hall where I could walk to, if needed, having one family car. I was welcomed heartily. But evolution caused coverage to become controversial with Freedom of Information requests (FOIA), asks like that.
     Sure, I can take it when during a public meeting, I’m called out in a packed room. But the second time I’m called out, I stand up and make photos as visual journalists do.
     Maybe this ain’t worth it with the hours invested. But who’s gonna regularly show up in person, take photos and snapshots, text snippets, fact check not easy legalese and replay audio on village videos to ensure people are quoted correctly? We have these journalism labs and accelerators saving local news. Do I exist?
     I have news for them, good local journalism is fading like newspaper printed ink. Add in tax escrows for freelance risk. Don’t even bring up artificial intelligence.
     What happened last summer was the final straw. I received social media backlash for a story I broke about a proposed tax. People who won’t invest in local journalism past a paywall accused me of publishing misleading facts. I almost didn’t cover a veterans event amid the backfire. I feared their special occasion would get ruined if angry folks working doors away confronted me. I then photographed Northbrook veterans outside for a later assignment and was heckled by a business owner in front of them.
     I will not let veterans down. Do the work. Do what you know.
     My mind decided to fire Northbrook. Heck, Village Hall threatened to fire me in a past life. I skipped covering one community event to avoid naysayers. Then came a request to cover a Northbrook Park District/village event because no one else could do it. It should be safe, right?
     When I covered a Northbrook protest after the Oct. 7, 2023 story regarding Israel, Northbrook Police Chief Christopher Kennedy kept me safe. Kennedy has always been gracious to me but is now abruptly gone.
     So I covered this village/park district op, minding my own business as I mined, and a sanctioned vendor who is 6 foot 2 overshadowed me as I made photos in front of the stage. Imagine a yelling vendor invading your physical space. No filed complaint but Northbrook Police spoke to this person.
     Northbrook Park District Executive Director Chris Leiner said via email on Nov. 21, “When you reported an alleged physical incident…I promptly involved the Northbrook Police.
     “The business owner provided a different account of the events,” and the district, “has not made any modifications to its relationship” with them, Leiner said.
     So I guess it’s a wildcard then to keep using a vendor who may purposefully vacate their post at public bookings.
     Being freelance is lonely. I was thrilled to run into Neil Steinberg. With Neil’s shot in the arm, I got back up on the horse after I fell. I returned to Village Hall. Neil stood up for me by showing up to sit down next to me at a Nov. 12 meeting. I had been in that boardroom once since Aug. 27 to vote early.
     To amazing editors, thank you. To local journalists, please try your best with limited resources. If it gets too tiresome but more crosses the public safety line amid unsustainable economics to pay leafy and lofty hometown bills, find a reasonable gig or reinvent.
     It’s a shame local entities cannot be held accountable by consistent watchdog journalism. It’s shameful when people think they’re too big to apologize when they have the chance. I was just doing my job in a public setting where what was said and published was spoken openly in a public space.
     In the 1980s, my former news director, the late great Glen Moberg, said we did great news on a shoestring.
     Shoes with shoestrings. I can’t trip in my fuzzy black slippers, sandals or winter boots, using taxed second-use Northbrook plastic bags tucked between dry cozy socks worn on slushy assignments.
     I am 62. My comfort zone can be no danger zone. With those grounded low camera angles that make it harder to get back up, I won’t drag anyone down with my shadow. But I will stand up for what’s right.

Is this the Thanksgiving to 'Consider the Turkey'?

     Americans don't put much stock in philosophy — or so I assume. Whenever somebody else makes a sweeping statement like that, I always scowl, thinking: "Really? How do you know? Met 'em all, have you?"
     My guess is that most Americans don't consider philosophy — I mean, just look at them. Nor weigh thorny ethical issues. If you asked your average fellow citizen to name a living philosopher, they couldn't. Alex Jones doesn't count.

     This isn't to lord myself above anybody — the only living philosopher I could name unprompted is Peter Singer, and that is only because of the kerfuffle he caused decades ago by posing a thought experiment: that if you have a severely deformed baby, it's morally justifiable to kill it, provided you replace it with another, less afflicted child. Many people, among them disability rights advocates and parents of children with special needs, didn't like that.

     To me, Singer's argument is easily refuted by shifting the metaphor, slightly, to this: If you have a neighbor you don't like, it's OK to kill him, provided someone else moves next door. While that might work fine from your perspective, the logic falls apart when you consider the viewpoint of the neighbor being killed. Ditto for that first baby.

     Singer is, unsurprisingly, an animal rights advocate. The author of the 1975 book, "Animal Liberation," he's been at the forefront of trying to get society to be less cruel to beasts.

      This is a long way of saying that when I noticed Singer has a new book out, "Consider the Turkey," I thought it would be a Thanksgiving treat to read the brief, bright yellow volume. A treat for you, that is.

      One standard I use to judge nonfiction is: Did I learn anything interesting? I certainly did here. President John F. Kennedy was the first to pardon a turkey, in an offhand quip, though the practice didn't get going until George H.W. Bush.

     Turkey presidential lore is quickly dispatched with, and we get down to the specific abuses turkeys suffer in gigantic farms.

     That goes against my personal experience — I once visited the Ho-Ka Turkey Farm in DeKalb County, the largest such operation in Illinois, and while I didn't quite want to join the gobblers pecking at seed in the yard, the place did not strike me as a horror that would change anybody's dietary habits.

          Singer shares, in great detail, how commercial turkeys are conceived. He carefully — I almost said "lovingly" — goes over the artificial insemination process which, I admit, I had never previously imagined. Without going into detail, as you might be eating your breakfast, let's just say there are people whose job it is to extract semen from turkeys by masturbating them 10 hours a day. Suddenly being a newspaper columnist doesn't seem such a burden.

     With the lack of balance endemic to animal rights sorts, Singer goes on to point out that having sex with an animal is a crime, and treats the insemination as rape, which I imagine humans with experience in that area might take exception to.

To continue reading, click here.

The Fort

     In Wednesday's column about  woodworking, I might have given the impression that I've never touched tools before. That isn't true. This post was ready to go over the summer, then never ran. I'm not sure why.
     Maybe I wanted to keep The Fort private. I haven't mentioned it here before, to my recollection. A structure built in the backyard for the boys when they were small. Maybe it was somehow special, to me — the boys won't care one way or the other — and I didn't want to turn it into material. Not everything is for public consumption. You're allowed to keep some things for yourself. But that ship has sailed, hasn't it? Maybe I just didn't want to offer up to public scrutiny an amateur structure that I designed and built. That sounds right.

     This is from my unpublished travelogue, "The Quest for Pie," written about a five-week trip across the country I took with the boys in 2009 when they were 12 and 13. In this section, I am wondering whether to really go through with the trip, simply because I said that we would.

     Selfishness is a father’s friend, or can be. If you view everything you do for your kids as a sacrifice, every effort as putting yourself out over something you aren’t interested in and getting nothing in return for your trouble, then you’re going to end up not doing much with them. Where luck comes in is when a dad does what he wants to do, and it ends up being good for his children as well. 

     This trip thing, I realized, might work to my advantage. I had been beavering away at the newspaper business for years, for decades, scrambled to the top of this small hill at the very moment it was being washed away. Now I was king of the damp, dwindling mound. Why not take a break to travel, to reflect? What was I afraid of? 

     And I had a previous experience, a template for rashly committing myself to an endeavor that turned out to be both a ton of effort and worth it. We moved to the suburbs from the city nearly a decade earlier, when Ross was about to enter kindergarten. That wasn’t a coincidence. The Chicago public schools try hard but fall short — way short. Ross was a bright, mischievous, talkative little boy, and just the thought of sending him to a substandard city school felt like contemplating child abuse. The public schools weren’t good enough and we couldn’t afford private school. Hence the suburbs, our only option. Ross was as nostalgic and change-averse as any 5-year-old, and didn’t want to go. Hoping to soften the transition, I promised him that, after the big move, he would have a play fort in our ample backyard. What kid doesn’t want a play fort?

     A couple years later, we’re living in our old shambling ruin of a home, an aluminum-sided former farmhouse built in 1905, on its half-acre lot in Northbrook with The Forest running down one edge.

     “So…” I said, probing. “What do you want to do this summer?” 

     “Oh I don’t know…” Ross said, laying the trap. “I wouldn’t mind playing in my fort.” 

     He looked hard at me. Oh right the fort, I thought. I did promise you that, didn’t I? I should pause here to touch upon the idea of unfulfilled paternal promises. When I was growing up, my father often told me how, when he was a boy, his father Sam, a sign painter in the Bronx, tricked him into working every Saturday morning at his sign shop with the promise of a real Lionel train set, the Holy Grail toy for boys in the 1940s, which my grandfather claimed he had already acquired, and was on a certain high shelf in the sign shop, waiting to be earned. He pointed out the box to my father on his first day at work. 

   My father cleaned brushes and painted what he could that Saturday and on many Saturdays to come. Then one day, curious, he got on a chair to take a peek at this train set he would be getting, and it turned out the box supposedly filled with his reward was merely the transformer from a neon sign. There was no train set. There had never been a train set. 

    Something about that story lodged under my skin. Maybe it was the high shelf, or the bald lie of my grandfather’s. The haunting image of a train set that wasn’t there, compounded by the variety of half-plans that my father, despite his own disappointments, nevertheless had dangled in front of me. We would climb Mount Rainier together. The family would move to a series of cities, from London to Baltimore. He would buy a car for me when I turned 16. It never happened. Nothing ever seemed to happen. 

     Okay, that’s harsh. Good things did happen. They did. When I was a teenager, my father spent two summers working in Boulder, Colorado and took the family along. We hiked the Arapahoe Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park. When business took him to Europe, we all went to Geneva for a month, then London and Paris for a week apiece. One summer, while I was away at camp, my father built in our backyard something we called “The Shed,” but was actually an attractive, well-built, two-story A-frame structure — cherry-stained, matching our home, with double doors that swung out to store the lawnmower and his tools on a tongue-in-groove floor below solid enough to drive a truck on, with a wooden ladder that led up through a trap door to a space above, a secret clubhouse just for me with a skylight window that opened. It was fantastic, and that I would initially overlook it and give the impression I was raised in a closet should tell you something important about myself. 

     Memories of that structure were foremost in mind while I was dismissing, out–of-hand, the play fort kits that suburbanites buy at garden centers and put outside their custom-built, million-dollar homes. The kind with the little strip of green fabric as a roof and the flimsy yellow slide. Those pre-fab forts struck me as an astounding lapse, a mystifying cheapness, similar to how some people stick stackable white plastic chairs out on the luxurious wrought iron balconies of their four-story townhouses. My father designed and built The Shed; I would design and build The Fort. For who wants to be a lesser man than his father? 

      I bought a big pad of blue-square graph paper, sharpened pencils and sat planning with a ruler at the dining room table. The Fort had to sleep four — two sons and two friends. It had to have a ladder and a slide and a cargo net. It must be made of cedar: there would be no need for stain or paint.

     Eventually the drawings were done — careful schematics, precise scale plans, thanks to a mechanical drawing class taken in 7th grade. A front view; a side view, a 3-D view. The Fort wasn’t in a tree, but stood on four five-foot-tall, 6 x 6 beams standing atop four concrete footings. To support the structure, the footings — I calculated — should be three feet deep. How much concrete would you need for four cylindrical footings, each 10 inches in diameter and a yard deep? Nearly a thousand pounds, dry. 

     A week passed. Two. I contemplated the drawings. Really, very nicely done, very skillful drawings. The fort had a porch and a flagpole. It looked like a lot of fun to play on, and a world of work to build. I’d never done anything like it. An incredible task, to actually construct this thing. What was I thinking, taking on this burden? Just because I’d promised my son I would? The most complex structure I had built up to that point was a compost bin behind the garage, a rectangular box lined with chicken wire. Building it took a day. 

     But if I balked, what would I do? Show the drawings to the boys someday, tell them: this was the fort I was going to build you, but I chickened out? That sounds familiar. My Lionel train set on the high shelf. 

     No. Impossible. I would build the Pyramids if doing so kept me from being a disappointment to my boys. I went to Home Depot, took one of those low rolling orange platform carts and piled it with nearly 1,000 pounds of concrete — a dozen 80-pound bags. The platform was very heavy, slow to get moving — you had to really lean into it — and tough to push. And at one point, between the concrete section at the far wall and the registers up front, I stopped and just stood there, thinking, “This is insane.” I hesitated for what seemed like a long time, in the middle of the vast warehouse of a Home Depot, frozen before a pallet of concrete, hands around the scuffed metal bar, my own life, stretching back in my head, and the life I hoped for my boys stretching forward. Hope for a life where they might be better off, better tended, better loved, just in general better than their father. I weighed the thought of returning to the concrete section, pictured sliding the bags back into their places. Looked at the thought, almost as if it were a small object nestled in my hand. Then I made a decision, firm and irrevocable, tightened my grip on the bar, bent forward and pushed that concrete until it started to roll toward the checkout counter. 

     The Fort took three summers to build, from the time I staked out the holes and began to dig, to when I nailed in the last cedar shingle in place and signed a hidden message to the boys high up on a beam facing the eaves. The three of us slept in it that night, the night I completed it, a jumble of pillows and sleeping bags, a rare warm November night. They never slept in it again. But they play in it sometimes, during Super Soaker battles and snowball fights. It looks swell, gentling aging in the seasons, the cedar slowly going to gray, like the guy who built it, and while I wish I had started a few summers sooner, I never regretted all the time and effort and money it took to build. I think some of the happiest moments of my life were standing out back in the summer sun, with the yellow DeWalt chop saw set up on the deck, a boombox blasting music, cutting the lumber for that structure, kneeling on the half-completed flooring to screw planks into place, standing up with a pencil behind my ear and a leather belt heavy with tools slung low on my hips. The big hexagonal-head stainless steel carriage bolts used for the ladder — stainless so they wouldn’t rust and streak the wood — were a joy to hold in the flat of my hand and contemplate; so well machined, they made me proud to be a human being. 

     The Fort was in mind when I considered the trip. I could ignore it, for a while, and did. But I could not abandon it. A promise is a promise.

Woodwork would work better, had I started long ago

 

     To be good at anything, you first have to be willing to be bad.
     No one who ever tried anything new, who ever walked out onto a dance floor or an athletic field, would dispute that. Proficiency is hard won, and you have to step on a lot of toes and muff a lot of easy catches to get there. Want to bake well? First you have to bake poorly.
     I know that. But knowing a truth, intellectually, and actually experiencing it are very different, just as writing "hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts" is not anywhere close to extending your digit and bringing down a claw hammer on it, hard.
     The truth of just how badly being really bad at something hurts dawned on me while standing at my workbench at the Chicago School of Woodworking, 5680 N. Northwest Highway, a few weeks ago, contemplating my first attempt to make a dovetail joint.
     How did I get here?
     Paternal love makes a person do many strange and expensive things. It caused me to quit a city I love and move to an anodyne suburb, enduring a quarter-century of reader ridicule and lousy Thai food. It prompted me to spend thousands of dollars on tennis lessons, college tuition, and more recently, wedding cakes. I thought I was pretty much done with that period of life, when my younger son asked if I wanted to take a woodworking class together.
     "Sure!" I said, despite smelling a trap. Nine weeks of 101 Introduction to Woodworking cost $495; I assumed I'd be tasked with making the arrangements and then could later dun him for his share, or more likely, not. My parents inspired me to always be open-handed and generous with my children, though ... choosing my words carefully ... not by direct example.
     Then the amazing part happened. He signed up for — and paid — for the class. I did the same.
We began in mid-October — with seven others, heavy on the legal and computer professions. "I spend all my days looking at screens," said a cybersecurity expert, when we went around explaining why we were there.
     We identified types of wood and joints, and our teacher said something prophetic.
     "You're learning to cut things by hand," she said. "A lot of times it isn't going to look great."
Got that right. We began working on picture frames. We busied ourselves at our tasks. My son and I didn't talk much. He has been woodworking as a hobby for a few years — he made a lovely coffee table for his apartment — and were I of a conspiratorial bent, I'd suspect that after a lifetime of me forcing him to learn skills that I was already proficient at — reading and swimming and such — he was now returning the favor, as payback.

To continue reading, click here.