Flashback 2013: Hello, I’ll be your flu for today . . .

     A lot of illness going around: flu, COVID, RSV — that last one being some kind of lung infection. Whatever it is, I went to get the vaccine Wednesday night. Nothing worse than a sore arm. I'm taking some vacation days from work, but sick or well, I'll still be posting here, a rigor that didn't start with Every goddamn day, but led to it, as this column reminds us. It ran back when the column filled a page, and I've kept the old headings — and the part about going to the opera, a reminder of a lost world.

     Being a workaholic (God, both a workaholic and an alcoholic — I should get some kind of prize) my first thought, when I suspected that the flu jamming emergency rooms and scything through offices is knocking on the side of my head, was to get this written, quick, so I can collapse in a corner and hope to be better 48 hours from now.
     Sure, I could just call in sick, but calling in sick is for the weak; I hate doing that — you’re not in the paper, you might as well be dead; besides, in most offices the present sit around plotting the demise of the absent.
     Plus, it might not be the flu; maybe it’s just some cosmic hand that has reached into my skull, snatched out my brain and is squishing it before my eyes, grey matter oozing through its fingers. Not a terrible feeling, really; a dizzy exhausted numbness. This must be what stupid people feel like all the time.
     Thank goodness I have a few housecleaning topics I’ve been meaning to put in the paper, which shouldn’t demand too much brainpower to relate, or to read, and will keep me in your I hope unflu-flummoxed minds until Friday, when I plan to be better.

Opera winners off to swell nite

     Speaking of Friday . . .
     The Sun-Times is a do-it-yourself kind of place. Not a lot of meetings or memos. No legmen, rare secretaries, certainly none for me, few interns — I’ve never asked anybody to fetch me a cup of coffee in my entire career, frankly because there was never anyone around who I was confident wouldn’t reply, “Get it yourself, you pontificating baboon.”
     Thus when a rare situation arises where I have to depend on other people, it makes me nervous that they will actually hold up their end of the bargain. A trust issue, I suppose.
     Such as my Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Opera contest — 100 lucky readers and I will enjoy “Hansel and Gretel” this Friday at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with a pre-party at the Rittergut wine bar nearby.
     With the date looming, you can imagine my relief when I got this email from a reader.
     “I am over the moon thrilled,” wrote Lisa Cristia, a Chicago massage therapist, who said she has been in the opera house, kneading a diva, but never actually seen an opera. She’s taking her mom, Darlene, who has never seen an opera either, but adds, “it’s one of those events that you should have on your bucket list to do at least once in your lifetime whether you are an opera fan or not.”
     That it is. I am happy she is excited, but even happier that she was notified. So thanks to Kristen Davis and all the other Sun-Times marketing folk who handled the heavy-lifting. I appreciate it. And congratulations to the 50 winners and their guests. See you Friday.

Correction

     Whenever our digital future is discussed, the typical reaction is to bemoan what will be lost — no folded newspaper tossed at the end of the driveway every day, no chance to shuffle curbward each morning to sample the weather, to dip your toe in the day ahead.
     That’s true enough — the brief stroll is always infused with optimism. But there are advantages to the electronic, the central one being the correction of errors: bam, they’re fixed. As opposed to the typical print way to address significant goofs: run a correction and hope people see it. A hastily applied bandage, at best — the error was given bold play, while the correction is coughed into a fist long afterward. I tend not to run them much, first because I, ahem, tend not to make them, and second because space in print is limited, and I am reluctant to shave off what I’m writing today to revisit some past blunder.
     But being sick, this is an ideal day.
     A few weeks back the phone rang — it was Ald. Ed Burke; no, make that “long-serving alderman” Ed Burke; no, rather, “the longest serving ever” as he informed me, having taken office on March 11, 1969, a date that found me in Miss Maple’s fourth-grade class.
     He was not sharing this information out-of-the-blue, but because, in a column gingerly seizing one Ald. James Cappleman (46th) between my thumb and forefinger and holding him under a bright light for his pigeon fixation, I had wrongly written Ald. Dick Mell (33rd) is the “longest serving alderman” (in my defense, I was listing aldermen off the top of my head, so checking seemed unfair).
     Anyway, in my blubbering, yes-sir-alderman-so-sorry effort to apologize, I told Burke I would run a correction, and then promptly forgot about it, until Mell himself, not satisfied at inflicting one relative, son-in-law Rod Blagojevich, on the world, made news applying political lube to ease his daughter, Deb, into his seat. Not her fault; she seems a good egg, and if my dad could name me to some pantheon of 50 well-paid writers who get to make speeches and send staff for coffee, I’d likely tell him to go ahead, though with a bit more guile than Mell is capable of.
     Anyway, the Sun-Times and I regret the error.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, January 9, 2013