'Why would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?'

The Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, a haven for ventriloquist dummies, is one of the countless subject that nobody gives a shit about, at least until I write about them. Then they tend to.

      As a rule, I try to let the commenters on my blog post comment, and not get involved in the discussion unless there is some question I'm in a position to answer. I've had my say; now the readers get theirs.
      But sometimes questions are raised that merit my involvement. Such as this, after Friday's post on museums, from Bill:

Question,

There's two different kinds of people which one are you?

When you go to a place That's open to the public say a restaurant or a museum for instance and there's almost nobody else there do you say to yourself I'm so lucky I'm so smart nobody else came here out of the 7 billion people on earth I'm the only one here lucky me or do you realize that no one else gives a s*** and that's why you're in there alone because it's of no interest to anyone else?

You are a very fine writer most of the time you write about things that a fair number of people care about why on earth would you want to write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again?
Are you writing for you or are you writing for us?

I know that's more than one question but I figured you got to write about something

     In another mood, I might not have even posted that — the "I'm so lucky I'm so smart" is nearly an accusation — I'm an arrogant bastard — the standard MAGA mind trick of imagining something stupid and then projecting the thought into the mind of people they hate. "I'm lucky I'm so smart" is not a thought I have often, certainly not compared to, "I'm lucky I blundered here through blind fate, despite the fact that I didn't want to come here because I never want to go anywhere."
    But he said something complimentary. And that "Write about things that hardly anybody cares about over and over again" is fairly accurately. 
     I considered, and answered on the blog this way:

That's a valid question. The short answer is: I'm writing for me, absolutely, 100 percent. The fact that other people who aren't myself want to read it is a continuing marvel. As far as the nobody gives a shit aspect, I would reply with a question: 1) "Who appointed you their spokesman?" and then make an observation: "And yet you're here." But this seems a topic worthy of expansion, so I'll write tomorrow's blog post about it. Thanks for asking.

     The reader preference feedback loop is the bedrock of much social media — you click on a video of a turtle being cut out of a net by a diver, and suddenly your feed is inundated with aquatic animal rescue, Artificial Intelligence thinking, "More animal rescue!" 

      And we worry AI is going to take over the world.

      "Give the lady what she wants," was the slogan for Marshal Field's. Instead, I see myself as a sifter. I go to these very dull and ignored subjects that for some reason catch my attention, dig up handfuls of facts regarding them and toss them onto my fine-mesh sieve of a mind. Then begin to shake. Out drops the parts that not only aren't dull, but interesting. Those, I share.

    I'm the guy who, 30 years ago, wrote a chapter in my book on the National Spelling Bee. This was before all the novels and plays — in fact, I like to think I had a small hand in creating the literary bee genre. The spelling bee was an obscure and strange American institution that got grudgingly reported on and generally ridiculed at the end of May. I followed a girl through a year of the bee, beginning in her middle school, then proceeding to  state, and ending at the national bee in Washington, D.C.

     The chapter, called "Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys" is one of my favorite pieces. It gives every word my champion, Sruti Nadimpalli, received in a year of the bee, but is never dull, and others joined me in that estimation.  Granta, the esteemed London literary quarterly, republished it on their cover.

    Returning to Bill's question, my writing about things nobody cares about it not an accident. I set out to do that. Because the things people do care about — sports, celebrities, today's political crisis — are already covered like a damp shirt by a thousand other writers. Why join the scrum?    To me, the greatest accolade is to walk an untrodden path. And while people don't care about the topics before I address them, by the time I'm done, they care more than they did before. Sometimes a lot more.

     I loved visiting Neenah Foundry to watch manhole covers being made because it was a dream of mine, and took me about five years of badgering to get them to agree, and because what I found there was gold, well, okay, iron, but you get my point. Before the story ran, I took the time to check the Sun-Times, Tribune and Daily News files, and found that, in the 100 years Neenah has been making manhole covers for the city, nobody from the Chicago press had ever found a way to drive up there and write about the process. Not once. I was the first. That, to me, is something to be proud of, to be that guy, the guy who asked Cologuard, "Who opens the jar?" For many subjects, I'm the only one who wrote a particular story in the Chicago press over the past 40 years — the social lives of transvestites. A factory making table pads. What it's like to visit a dominatrix. The fact that nobody has written before, or since, and no reader was waiting for the answer, isn't a reason to pause. It's a reason to hurry forward. A plaudit. Icing on the cake.

    Does that help, Bill? Because if you don't find this stuff interesting, nobody is putting a gun to your heads. As I tell sometimes tell people who complain: But I don't write this for people who don't like it. There must be stuff you like. Go find that. Because I'm certainly not changing to suit the displeased.

 

Enjoy the national museums while they're still here

     Once upon a time, the Sun-Times had a jazz critic and an opera critic, a book editor and a TV reviewer. All those experts, that passion and specialized knowledge, were washed away in the endless internet storm. Now their titles seem wild indulgences plucked from the deep past, something out of Louis XIV France: the keeper of the king's slipper, the reviewer of rock 'n' roll concerts.
     I don't believe we ever had a museum critic. A shame, in a city like Chicago. I think I could step away from this general interest column hamster wheel and happily devote three days a week apprising you of what's up at the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Field Museum, That Rich Guy in Florida Whose Name Sticks in My Throat Museum of Science and Industry, and all the lesser lights: the radiant National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, the museum formerly know as the Oriental Institute. And on and on.
     When I was in Washington, D.C., as much as we enjoyed unpacking my son and daughter-in-law and tending, though never jiggling or kissing their new baby, my wife and I would occasionally slip away for a few hours to give the new parents some alone time. Believe it or not, as helpful we certainly were, they never once grabbed us by the lapels and implored, "No no, please stay!"
     First stop was the National Portrait Gallery, an underappreciated wonderland. The good news is the lobotomy that the current administration seems intent on inflicting upon our cultural institutions has not yet manifested itself here. One of the first portraits I saw was of Opal Lee, "the grandmother of Juneteenth," hanging in the entrance hall. I imagine it'll be crated in some warehouse in suburban Maryland next time we visit, replaced by a black velvet painting of Kid Rock. The exhibit of Civil War portraits was so fascinating, my wife and I almost never made it further.
     But I was interested in checking out the "America's Presidents" gallery.
     "I want to see if they're all Trump," I said.
     The other 44 predecessors are still there, starting with Gilbert Stuart's full length George Washington portrait. The past can both comfort and distress, but I've been definitely groping toward the former. I paused a long time before Chester Arthur, not one of history's favorites: He took over after James Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker.
     "Though Arthur had long favored this 'spoils' system, he endorsed the Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883)," the placard noted, "which created competitive examination for some federal positions and offered protections from partisan discrimination."
     The president giveth, the president taketh away.
     Arthur also signed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, "the first significant law restricting immigration."
     There would be more to come, a welcome reminder that few jaw-dropping lapses of today are worse than what once passed as ordinary. We're running backward, true, but at least to a place we know how to escape. We've done it before.
     Another day, I popped over to the Hirshhorn Museum, and am glad I did.
     In 2021, the Hirshhorn gave Glen Ellyn native-done-good Laurie Anderson a room, which she painted with slogans and figures, white on black. I spent awhile reading the pithy (and oblique) Andersonian aphorisms.
     "Books are the way the dead talk to the living" and "If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don't understand technology — AND you don't understand your problems." I smiled seeing one — "I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet" — a longer version of a phrase she had on a piece of magnetic tape on a violin bow, played in concert to great effect.

To continue reading, click here.

"Your autograph please"

Rabbi Sally Priesand

    

     Do kids still collect autographs? I have my doubts; the practice must have been ruined long ago by eBay. Busy celebrities are turned off, assuming that their efforts, rather than being cherished forever, will end up for sale by the next afternoon.
     A pity. Because nothing says, "I stood in front of you," quite like an autograph. I probably would never remember meeting Margaret Meade, the giant in anthropology, were it not for her precise signature above the year, 1972 in my little book with "Your Autograph Please" emblazoned on the cover. 
     The first page, I worked practiced making the request by securing the signature of my elementary school principal, the gloriously-named "J. Earl Neptune." Meaning I was in 6th grade.
     After Meade, another autograph I am very glad to have — Lillian Gish, the silent film star. She now seems part of the far distant past. But when I met her, in 1972, the star of "Birth of a Nation" would have been 79.
     And if you're wondering how a bowl-haircut boob in Berea Ohio was bumping into several acclaimed women of the 20th century, the answer is that the sandstone capital of the world was also home to Baldwin-Wallace College, now Baldwin-Wallace University. Luminaries would come through to speak. My mother, hoping to expand my horizons, would take me. Thanks ma.

   Another name in the book is Sally Priesand, whose name won't ring a bell.  But when we visited the National Portrait Gallery last week, the picture above was one of the first we saw.
     "In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi..." the placard begins.
     "I was there," I told my wife. Priesand went my synagogue, Beth Israel: The West Temple. I knew I attended her ordination, not because of the book, which did have her autograph. But because of a program, typed and photocopied and folded, that I tucked away after she signed it.
     Although. Now that I look into the history, the ceremony I attended was not her actual ordination — that was June 3 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This was two weeks later, a "Joint Service to Honor the Ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand." 

      Ah well, close enough for baseball.  

      And kids do still collect autographs, according to Prof. Google. Though the practice is now wedded to Disney World, apparently, where visitors get autographs from the various characters prancing around the park. Those certainly are expensive, if not valuable. On eBay, I see that Sally Priesand signatures are starting at $50. Pretty good, though I'm not selling mine. 

'Every day that God gives you, use it'

 

      Loneliness is the curse of old age. Your friends are gone, your family distant, your life's work, a box in the basement. Most seniors struggle with it.
      But most seniors are not Edith Renfrow Smith, who at times Monday had a dozen visitors in her room at Brookdale Senior Living on Sheridan Road. And that was before the party celebrating her 111th birthday.
      Regular readers might recall meeting Mrs. Smith on her 107th birthday and learning about her extraordinary life. Born in 1914 in Iowa, she became the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell College. She pooh-poohs it, but had her share of encounters with the famous, from Amelia Earhart to Muhammad Ali.
      Not to forget her grandparents, born in slavery.
      Or the boy across the street, Herbie, who taught her daughter Alice to play "Chopsticks" on the piano. Herbie Hancock, the future jazz great.
      I joined the crowd, and asked: How did the past year go?
     "Everything has been fine," Mrs. Smith said, precisely, not mentioning specifics.
      Such as in September, when Grinnell College named a dorm after her — Renfrow Hall. Not to be confused with Renfrow Gallery, or the Edith Renfrow Smith Black Women's Library, previous tributes bestowed by the college, which granted her an honorary doctorate in 2019.
      Two recent graduates, Feven Getachew and Valeriya Woodard, hung on the conversation. Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, the Louise R. Noun '29 chair in gender, women's, and sexuality studies at Grinnell, observed from a distance.
     "I've been listening to Mrs. Smith and realized she is her family's historian," said Beauboeuf-Lafontant, who is writing a book on Mrs. Smith's matrilineal history. "She keeps the memories, she inherited the memories from her mother. It's extraordinary she has taken on an old West African role of preserving the memories of your family, your people."
      Mrs. Smith seemed content to let conversation flow around her, though I tried to pick out highlights from the last year. I asked if she voted in November, drawing a reaction near outrage.
     "I NEVER have not voted," she said.
     Does she still bake? Last year we watched her and Alice, 79, bake a pie with, all the drama that can be expected from a mother-daughter pair who have nearly two centuries of life between them.
      "Sometimes," Mrs. Smith replied. "Over there on the counter is a pie we baked yesterday. A cherry raspberry pie."
      The pie was brought out for admiration. Though the reason for its creation is even more noteworthy — her Sunday helper, Ebony, had confessed that she had never baked a pie. Mrs. Smith thought that a lapse worthy of immediate correction.
      "It was the first time she had ever made a pie," she said. "Her mother had taught her to cook, but never to bake. That's why I told her to take a piece to her mother. I like to do things; I don't like to do nothing. She was here to take care of me, and I said, 'Oh, we can make a pie.' So that's what we did. I said, 'You made the pie.'"
      Living to 111 is extremely rare. About 3 in 10,000 Americans live to be 100, or 0.027 percent. There are thought to be fewer than 1,000 "supercentenarians" — people who live to 110 — in the world. Making Mrs. Smith not one in a million, but closer to 1 in 10 million.
       I asked her what 111 feels like. She replied:
      "It feels just like every day..."

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1999: Close friends, comedians gather at `wake' of dying Second City icon

 

Vanitas still life, by Pieter Glaesz (Franz Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands)

     A reader said that he went looking for documentary evidence of the 1999 Del Close wake mentioned in Sunday's post, and came up short. Another reason to regret that, unlike some papers, the Sun-Times does not have its archive online (though you can find it complete on NewsBank). I told him I'd post my story written about it at the time.

     Memory adds a few details. We had an entertainment editor, Darel Jevens, who adored comedy — he studied improv with Close — and would have plucked this story for himself. But there was some unavoidable scheduling problem, so he handed the plum assignment to me. 

     It was a challenge. The room was packed. My encounters with the stars were awkward. When I came face-to-face with Bill Murray — close enough to smell the booze on his breath — I blurted out something stupid, along the lines of, "So you trained under Del Close?" to which he twisted his face into an expression that eloquently conveyed, "I'm HERE, aren't I, idiot?"

     Harold Ramis, the director of "Groundhog Day," had been featured in the paper that week, a piece by Dave Hoekstra. I observed that Dave seemed to do a good job — a safe intro — at which Ramis winced and exclaimed.  

    "He got something wrong!" 

    Oh no, I said, that isn't like Dave, what was the mistake?

    "He referred to my 'Buddhist ATTACHMENT' and he meant 'Buddhist DETACHMENT." 

     "And you're displaying that now, big time," I thought, but did not say.

     I wrote this immediately upon getting home, and it ran in the paper the next day, the day Close killed himself, which is why his death isn't mentioned.

     Illinois Masonic Hospital was only a few blocks from where we lived on Pine Grove Avenue, and I remember walking home, thinking, "Wow. Some job I have."

     With their friend and mentor on oxygen and battling for his life, Chicago comedy legends whose careers were shaped by Second City icon Del Close gathered in a basement room at Illinois Masonic Hospital Wednesday night for an unusual celebration that was half birthday party, half "pre-wake."
     "I think he needs a little encouragement; I think that's all he needs," said film star Bill Murray. "Whatever he's going to do next, whatever his next project is."
     About 50 people, including a pagan priest and priestess who performed a brief ceremony, feted the actor/director as he sat in a wheelchair while a film crew from Comedy Central taped the event.
     Close, 64, a former drug addict and alcoholic, is suffering from complications due to emphysema.
     "He was dying," said Charna Halpern, who co-founded the Improv Olympic theater with Close, adding that the event seemed to perk him up. "Del is a true comedian, a true performer who when faced with an audience comes back to life."
      Students and professional associates came from as far away as Los Angeles to attend the party.
     "I owe a lot to Del. He has been a major influence," said Randy Dixon, who owns the Market Theatre in Seattle.
     "He is the dark and wonderful sinister influence on comedy over the last five or six decades," said Kelly Leonard, director of Second City. "Second City, `Saturday Night Live,' `SCTV' —anything great and funny and a little bit in bad taste is in part due to Del. He was an amazing teacher."
     Messages of goodwill were read from people as varied as actor Peter Boyle and 1960s icon Wavy Gravy, who wrote, "See you in hell." Robin Williams called earlier.
     Close was philosophical about his fate.
     "The death of a working man at an American hospital doesn't have to be the traumatic agony that people think it is," he said.
     Murray, who paid for the party, spent several minutes in serious conversation with his former Second City director. They spoke mostly of their salad days.
     "You can have a pretty good life pretty cheap. I didn't know that until I was dying," Close said.
     "I found it was better to live in New York when I had no money than when I had some money," said Murray, who asked Close if there was anything he could get him.
     "That chocolate martini you were talking about," Close said.
     "Del was, is, the single most powerful force in improv comedy in America," said writer and director Harold Ramis."He's the intellectual and moral standard that guides us all in our work. He taught everybody the process."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 4, 1999

'A silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people'

 

     "Extremely hot — 106, an all time record. Like being hit with a hammer ... had idea about pulling literary quotes on the heat ... so I spent a pleasant hour in the library."
     — Journal entry, July 13, 1995

     Normality has a weight, an inertia, almost subject to the laws of physics. "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest." Habit sits there, slumbering, pelted by events, and doesn't want to stir, let mercury or flood waters rise.
    Thirty years ago, a murderous heat wave hit Chicago — 739 people died. Had they perished in Daley Plaza it would be remembered as an epic tragedy — the Great Chicago fire killed less than half as many. There would be a statue.
     But the heat wave victims died alone in scattered rooms, windows sealed, air conditioning broken. They were mostly elderly, though two were toddlers who fell asleep in the back of a day-care van, forgotten for one fatal hour.
     The government was slow to grasp what was happening. The media was slow. I was slow.
      I remember looking up at Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donahue doing a press conference on TV and sniffing: "Showboat. He's calling everybody who dies in Cook County a heat death ..."
      In our defense, being slow to recognize problems and then fast to forget them is an American folk illness.
      "The political lesson of the heat wave was you can deny and ignore and forget the disaster," said Eric Klinenberg, the New York University sociologist whose 2002 book, "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago" is the seminal text of the disaster.
      "You can say it was an act of God. You can blame the victims for not taking care of themselves, and in American politics, that works. An enduring fact about this enormous Chicago catastrophe is that it just disappeared, almost as it was happening, but certainly after it happened."
       "Another wildly hot day ... Head off to the NU library where I got some good books. Dinner at the Davis Street Fish House; though I really wasn't hungry — a factor of the heat."
      — July 14, 1995
      The literary quote story ran that day and haunts me still. Coleridge's "summer has set in with its usual severity." A bit of light nothing whose underlying message was: It's summer. It's hot. Get over it.
       In my 2002 review of "Heat Wave," I wrote:
      "As I read over my droll little exercise, I couldn't help but think of some Sun-Times subscriber, an elderly man in a strap T-shirt, sitting in his sweltering, closed room on the West Side, reading halfway through, folding the paper, then quietly turning his face to the wall and dying."
      "How is this affecting people other than myself?" is not a very sophisticated question. Not rocket science. Though you can argue our political moment is based on the conviction that huge swathes of the American population simply don't matter and should be ignored, the parts of the government that aid them lopped away.
     FEMA was about to be disbanded when the Texas floods hit. Those girls who died at Camp Mystic in Texas were sleeping in cabins built by the river in an "extremely hazardous" floodway.
     What the Texas floods had was drama, visuals and the kind of victims the media can get excited about.
      "What's especially chilling about the Texas floods is, all these children who died; the drama of the parents looking for the children," Klinenberg said.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2012: Sandburg awards dinner gathers literary celebs in glittery cavalcade

Typewriter Eraser Scale X, by Claes Oldenburg
(National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.)

     I came home from Washington, D.C. Friday evening to find an eagerly-awaited advance copy of "The Gossip Columnist's Daughter," the new novel by Peter Orner. I immediately began reading, reminding me that I had enjoyed his previous work, and written something — but what? Which led to this too-fun-not-to-share report on the Sandberg Literary dinner. A rare bold-face, name-dropping column, doubly apt, given the novel's celebrity-rich setting. 

     Mine is not one of those columns studded with bold-faced celebrity names, mainly because the closest I usually come to mingling with celebrities is having an office right in between the offices of Richard Roeper and Bill Zwecker. But whatever malign force in the universe generally keeps me from star-choked events lifted Wednesday night, and I found myself at the annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner, the advent of which I of course dreaded, predicting “a series of minor humiliations as punishment for the hubris of reaching toward a tiny honor.”  That’s how these dinners always are; I end up tucked behind a plant in the corner of a vast ballroom, squinting into spotlights at the distant speck of a well-known person accepting a cube of lucite, feeling like a supernumerary shuffling through the role of Townsman in a Cheap Suit in an elaborate pageant celebrating someone else.
     The idea that the Sandburg dinner was going to be different first dawned on me about five minutes into the opening reception, when I spied honoree Don DeLillo sitting at a small table. I plopped down in the chair next to him and introduced myself. He explained, in a whisper, that his voice is fading, no doubt the standard East Coast literary set line that major authors use to politely blow off intrusive small potato bores — not that it worked.
     “That’s OK,” I said brightly, “I’ll do the talking for both of us,” and proceeded to praise Underworld and White Noise and lay out my own career in an agonizing detail that I hope did not destroy the evening for him.
     After that it was off to the races. I cornered mystery writer Sara Paretsky, looking soigne, and talked to her about an email exchange she didn’t recall. Then I bumped into my old pal, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of the influential Heat Wave and, more recently, Going Solo. I got a hearty hello from my pal Bill Kurtis and ran into director Robert Falls, whom I seem to run into everywhere. His wife, Kat Falls, whose sci-fi novel Dark Life is in development at Disney, was being honored, and we took turns happily sticking pins in a certain Wall Street Journal drama critic we mutually dislike and, speaking of which, I luckily detected Walter Jacobson in time to avert my eyes and rush off in the opposite direction.
     They arranged us in alphabetical order, so we could march across a stage and be recognized as Official Literary Sorts, putting me next to Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, who gave an update on his doings in China, and unspooled a tale of rescuing Carl Sandburg after he got trapped in the elevator of the governor’s mansion. Architect Stanley Tigerman borrowed a pen and impressed me by then returning it.
     Just sitting got old, fast, and I wandered over to say hello to Second City founder Bernie Sahlins, reminding him that I had not seen him since the wake Del Close threw for himself the evening before he committed suicide to cheat the Grim Reaper, who was about to kill him with cancer, a wild affair that included Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and a satanic priest who performed a dark ritual.
     Speaking of darkness, Rick Kogan was there, thank God, and we talked about his success as a host on WBEZ. He introduced me to poet and short story writer Stuart Dybek, and to Kevin Coval, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival and we discussed the joys of the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, and lauded our mutual friend, slam poet Patricia Smith.
     The marching across stage part took a while, and I tried to make small talk with an unloquacious Scott Turow — selling 25 million books must render you taciturn — who accepted plaudits for Presumed Innocent and his other mysteries. He did laugh, when novelist Peter Orner crossed the stage, and I said I had read his debut novel, Love and Shame and Love, and perhaps he could have more accurately titled it Shame and Love and Shame.
     Space dwindles, and I’m leaving folks out — Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, folk singer Bonnie Koloc, NPR Saturday Edition’s Scott Simon, whom I badgered unmercifully, demanding that he feature my new book on his program. Walter Isaacson, who won the Sandburg award for non-fiction, shared tales of Steve Jobs, Nami Mun, given the 21st Century Award, who movingly told the 700 people gathered to benefit the Chicago Public Library about being homeless, and how homeless shelters and Planned Parenthood helped her get off the streets. Zenobia Johnson Black came up and said she is a big fan of the Sun-Times, and introduced me to her husband, activist, historian and icon Timuel Black, and I think I shocked the poor man by practically grabbing him by his lapels and demanding that he have lunch with me later, and he agreed, if only to escape my clutches.
     My wife, Edie, laughed at me all the way home in the car. “I got this dinner I gotta go to,” she whined, in an amazing imitation of a glum nasal depressive bemoaning his latest woe. “You wanna keep me company?”

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 18, 2012

Mea culpa, Uber

Only an idiot would have taken a photo of the rain. The tuna steak will have to do.

     Pride goeth before a fall. And a dousing.
     Yes, writing the headline for Tuesday's blog, "Uber is for the weak," I paused. Was this not hypocritical? I did sometimes take Uber. And preening? Still, it's a headline. It's supposed to provoke, draw the reader in. Sure, I could water it down. But no. If you've going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

     The watering down was coming.
     Dinner on Wednesday was at 7 p.m. — solo, I was meeting a pal, an old college roommate at Hamilton's, a happening 14th St. eatery. His pick. Rain was forecast, sure, so I had an umbrella in hand. It was a $33 Uber ride — the price doubled, because of the rain.

     Or a 30 minute walk. I had the time...
     There was a light rain, yes. Nothing to deter a hardy soul such as myself. Certainly walkable. Build up an appetite. I strode off confidently into the sprinkling twilight.
     For about 30 seconds. The rain immediately picked up. I angled the umbrella toward it, increased my pace. Suddenly, the sky burst into one of those downpours that comes in sheets. Cinematic rain. It looked fake, only it wasn't. I took refuge under a trestle. "This is a bad idea," I thought, soddenly. I couldn't call for an Uber there — a blind highway curve where no sane car could stop.  The rain rained.
    Nothing to do but go forward. The wind picked up. The rain somehow increased. Buckets. Firehose blasts. The umbrella turned inside out and was useless anyway. The rain seemed to be coming from all directions at once. 
    Drenched to the bone. Soaked. No way I could sit in an elegant restaurant like this. I turned back, fought my way back to my kid's place, a drowned rat. Slunk back, ten minutes after I'd left. Emptied my pockets — my wallet was a damp slab of wet leather. Toweled off, put on a fresh set of clothes. Called my friend — he'd taken the subway and found refuge in a doorway a block from the restaurant. Birds of a feather...
     Ten minutes later I was downstairs, getting into an Uber, a service which I now ululate and praise. Cool, dry. All hail ride shares, savior of the rainy day. I got to Hamilton's at 7:15, only 15 minutes late despite everything.
    Hamilton's was jumping for a rainy Wednesday night. We were seated in a large, gorgeous paneled room. Big Audobon prints of birds lined the corridors to the restrooms. We ate for two hours, talked, laughed, reminisced about old times, past restaurants — the great Lion D'Or, a Washington institution back when French cuisine was king. 
     Shortly before 10 we headed out into the night. The rain had stopped, the night, cooler. I walked my friend to his subway station, then headed over to the Metro center and caught a silver train to L'Enfant Plaza then walked the last 10 minutes. I'm still a fan of public transportation, but you have to be smart about it. Check the weather forecast. Sometimes bringing an umbrella is not enough. 

'Let no one mistake it for comedy'

Scopes trial, July 20, 1925 (Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)

     Chicago's most notorious attorney, Clarence Darrow, was riding high in 1924. He basked in the national spotlight while defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Hyde Park teens who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it.
     Darrow admitted their guilt — which was undeniable — placing all his chips on saving the smug idiots from the death penalty. It worked.
     In the spring of 1925, Darrow was looking for his next mountain to climb. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to fight the Butler Act, a new Tennessee statute banning public school teachers from discussing "any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”
     That law was advocated by another American titan, William Jennings Bryan. Like Darrow, he'd made his name in the 1890s, the "boy orator" who mesmerized the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his "cross of gold" speech advocating free silver. He ran for president three times and lost each time. By the 1920s, he had shifted into religious conservatism, plumping for Prohibition and battling Satan in the form of Darwin's theory of evolution being taught in public school.
     To have a case, the ACLU needed a defendant, and took out newspaper ads looking for one. The hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, bit. Hoping to draw attention to itself and maybe make a few bucks, it enlisted a 24-year-old football coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes.
     He never taught evolution.
     "I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair" Scopes said.
      With Jennings on board, Darrow leaped into the fray.
     "At once I wanted to go," Darrow wrote. The trial began July 10, 1925.
     Limelight can scorch the uninitiated. Dayton, which surprised newsman H.L. Mencken by being "a country town of charm and even beauty," bit off more than it could chew.
     "Here was an ... almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?" Mencken wrote. "Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke."
      Despite Darrow's famous eloquence, the trial's outcome was never in doubt.
      "The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it," Mencken wrote. "The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions."

To continue reading, click here.

Thinking about memorials

        Just as predictions of the future are far more accurate reflections of the time in which they are made — the hopes and fears of the moment — than they are any kind of augury of what is to come, so monuments embody the era of their creation in a way that rivals the events they are supposed to commemorate.
     This came home to me when I noticed that the cornerstone for the Jefferson Memorial was set by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. Suddenly all the warnings about tyranny flashed in stark relief; this marble temple isn't about protecting the rights of 18th century Virginia planters, but about steeling our noodle national spine against Hitler.
      That is most clearly seen in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, a vast garden of large stones and waterfalls. I remember the controversy when it was built — disability rights advocates complained that FDR's wheelchair was largely obscured by his Navy cape, while his partisans countered that he would not want to be portrayed that way, defined by a disability he struggled to hide. 

       I wrote a column, which I'll have to dig up, pointing out that the wheelchair wasn't exactly a state secret — H.L. Mencken wrote in 1932 that the man was too much of a cripple to be president. And FDR himself mentioned his condition, in a speech before Congress no less, when he apologized for not standing because of the steel braces on his legs.

    (Our gossip columnist, Irv Kupcinet weighed in, that when he was a boy, he didn't know FDR had polio and I, with the cruelty of youth, observed that when Kup was young, FDR didn't have polio, having contracted it in 1921, when Kup was 9). 
     You can also see his hands arranged where his omnipresent cigarette should have been — I was tempted to buy a pack and tuck one in, and certainly wouldn't be the first.

Vietnam Memorial's trio of soldiers.

     The memorial was dedicated in 1997, with an additional statue of FDR, clearly in his wheelchair, added as a sop to activists in 2001, the way a statue trio of soldiers was tacked onto Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial for those who couldn't bear to have the disaster commemorated with a pure marble scar in the earth. 

     I was prompted to check when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed — 1990 — as the FDR Memorial is a tribute to accommodating people with disabilities as much as it recounts his three and a twelfth terms in office. No stairs, little bronze models of the statues for blind people to feel, plus bas relief pillars and walls, with the story in icon form. And Braille. And recorded messages. 
     This isn't a complaint, mind you. I'm a big tent kind of guy — curb cuts benefit us all — and  have many friends and neighbors who struggle with various physical challenges. As will I someday. And you, and everybody else, sooner or later. I think it's cool that Northbrook's Prairie Grass Cafe has periodic low "sensory-friendly" dining hours so people on the autistic spectrum can enjoy a restaurant meal without over-stimulation. That's both kindness and good business.

World War II Memorial

    Of course once you start assessing monuments as creations of their time, the tendency is to keep going. At first it's easy to dismiss the widely scorned World War II Memorial — the Washington Post called it a "hodgepodge of cliche and Soviet-style pomposity" with "the emotional impact of a slab of granite" though I settled on "horrendous" — as a product of our cretinous president, George W. Bush, since it was unveiled in 2004. 

     But that's unfair, since it was years in the planning, and Bill Clinton was president while the mortuary plaza of wreaths, headstones, stars, and an aviary worth of eagles was being designed. I can only suggest that Clinton had better things to do than micromanage monuments. Though he did break a string of eight consecutive presidents who wore a uniform in World War II (nudging LBJ into the fold since he suited up as a congressman riding along on a bombing mission). So maybe the president famous for caring didn't care too much when it came to this.

Martin Luther King Memorial

      I'd mentioned my monument theory to my wife, and at the Martin Luther King Memorial, she asked what it said about its time of creation — the first decade of the 21 century. The best I could come up with, on the spot, was that by the 2000s it was all too clear that civil rights had been only a partial achievement, a work in progress, and you can see that in the way King emerges halfway from his stone of hope, itself freshly quarried from the "mountain of despair" directly behind him. We aren't finished.
     The Lincoln Memorial was unveiled in 1922, a few years before the Klan was boldly marching up Pennsylvania Avenue (the centennial is next month for those who want to bake a cake). It certainly doesn't reflect Lincoln's era in the way a more contemporary monument does — if you've ever gone inside the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, dedicated in 1894, it feels as if you've stepped into the 1860s. 
      The Marine warfighting manual refers to the "fog of battle," and lately I've recast that phrase into "the fog of the present." It's very hard to see outside our current moment, especially forward into the future, but even back into the past. We're too biased by how we are now. Monuments help us look backward, to a limited degree. Although I have to use this opportunity to put a plug in for the FDR Memorial, if only for one of the better sculptures of a dog on public display.
    "These Republic leaders have not been content with attacks on me or my wife or my sons," I announced, in my best imitation of Roosevelt's plumy, patrician voice, "they now include my little dog Fala." He'd been accused of sending a Navy destroyer to retrieve his beloved Scottish terrier. 
     My wife smiled, indulgently, and said nothing.

DEI at DC memorials ripe for purging

The statue of Thomas Jefferson in his Washington memorial. Built during World War II, the memorial highlights diversity, equality and the need to always oppose tyranny

     WASHINGTON — The statue in the Jefferson Memorial is 19 feet tall, but it's the words carved in stone around the bronze figure that are truly monumental.
      Such as these, from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:
      "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL."
     "Again with the equality," I thought, forcing back a smile. And the diversity — "all men"? Really?
      Can't have that. Not in 2025 America, where the same government that went to the expense and bother of erecting this palace to DEI is now scrubbing references to unfavored groups from official websites and giving certain people the bum's rush — out of the military, out of the country.
     How long will this offense be tolerated now that intolerance is the latest dance craze? Envision a trio of Three Stooges administration lackeys. The same crew who flagged for removal from Department of Defense pages images of the the Enola Gay  — the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — because, ewww, "gay."
      Imagine them showing up at the Jefferson Memorial in a blare of calliope music, a jumble of ladders and drop cloths and eye pokes, splattering plaster as they efface that forbidden "EQUAL" and slap on a more acceptable sentiment along the lines of "ALL MEN ARE CREATED ... MANLY."
     "Nyuk nyuk nyuk, Moe, we soitenly are!"
      Their next stop would have to be the Lincoln Memorial, where the Gettysburg Address covers one wall and goes straight into the DEI weeds: "FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO" (let's revert to lower case. These memorial caps look fine in marble but scream in print) "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
      "Alllllll men"? Yikes! Even immigrants who came here seeking refuge? Can't they be unceremoniously bundled in a van by masked police and shipped to East Africa?
      Or men who identify as women? Of course they can be cashiered from the armed forces because ... well ... I'm not sure what the excuse is. They make our leader uncomfortable, perhaps.
      Meanwhile, my friends on the left will drill down on "men," pointing out that women weren't included in all this hoo-ha about freedom. Flash: There was no electricity, either.
      Are these really our choices? History as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. "Father, I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet." Or history as Thomas Jefferson, rapist and enslaver, who also did some other stuff?
      Does it have to be celebration or revulsion? Can't we have the full spectrum? Glory and shame?
      When I wasn't minding (though not jiggling or kissing) my new granddaughter in her new home, I strolled over to memorials. Not just the Jefferson and the Lincoln, but Martin Luther King Jr., who of course was caught speaking publicly about "dignity, equality and freedom." (I imagine the MAGA stooges will plaster that over with transcripts from J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance tapes.)
      The underappreciated and thoughtful Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — contrast it with the explosion of wreaths, stars and eagles that is the insipid World War II Memorial — seems practically ripped from the headlines.

To continue reading, click here.

Uber is for the weak

Young people aboard the LaGuardia Link.

  

      "We're the oldest people on this bus by 30 years," I said, then gave a second look around and revised. "Maybe by 40 years."

     It was true. Everyone else on the LaGuardia Link Q70 seemed in their mid-20s. A time when money tends to be tight.
     Money isn't tight for me; at least we can afford ride shares and taxis. But I can also do math. And spending $111 on an Uber from LaGuardia to Jersey City, a trip that would take about an hour with traffic, didn't make sense. Not when you can make the same trip for $7.75 — the free shuttle from the airport to 75th Street, the $2.50 subway down to the World Trade Center, and then five bucks or so — I didn't even take notice if the exact price — for the PATH train under the Hudson to Exchange Place.
      Sure, it took closer to two hours, with the pause at the Oculus Starbucks so my wife could grab a revivifying cappuccino. But we weren't in a rush.
      I've enjoy taking public transportation. Great way to become familiar with a place. I spent weeks in cities from Tokyo to Paris and never gotten in a cab or, more recently, called an Uber. (Not that I'm condemning the practice; I take Uber too, when necessary. The headline is a glib brag, not a blanket condemnation you need to get agitated about). 

      Sometimes public transportation is a challenge —  last year I was offended that there was no direct public transportation route from Boston to Boxborough, so cobbled a complex public transit odyssey together. It was almost an adventure. Even when publications are paying. I don't have many rules when traveling, but I seldom take a cab when a bus works, or a plane when there's a train going the same place. 

     I remember going to cover the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I checked into my motel — nothing fancy here at the old Sun-Times — and then got in the queue for the bus, smiling quietly to myself, thinking about a colleague who ran up nearly a grand in taxi bills, supposedly, in London and almost lost his job over it. 

     "You'll just have to find another reason to fire me," I thought, paying my fare. Plus there was a captive audience of talkative Clevelanders waiting for me there.

    When there is no public transportation, there is always walking. We had a magnificent lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. When we finished, we considered calling an Uber. It was hot, and a half hour walk back to where we were staying. We walked.

Nothing distracts like a new baby

     My wife asked if I wanted to cover the mirrors. A Jewish tradition in a house of mourning. At first I said no. Many pressing practical concerns had been raised by my mother suddenly dying that morning, but her soul becoming trapped in a mirror wasn't among them.
      Then I immediately changed my mind and agreed. Rituals comfort. The tradition had been retrofitted for modern times, in that nimble, adaptive way religion employs, scrambling to stay both timeless and relevant. Now covering mirrors is supposed to discourage vanity among the bereaved. I'm all for that. We could all use less vanity. Imagine where our once-proud nation would today be if fewer people were consumed by unchecked self-regard.
      "Suddenly" is the wrong word. My mother had actually been steadily dying for years — ailment upon indignity upon deterioration. Every time I'd visit, I'd make sure to kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her because I really wasn't sure if I'd see her again. The last time, a week earlier, I'd gone to show her a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter.
      My mother, increasingly indifferent for the past few months, perked up, and even phoned her sisters, whom she'd uncharacteristically ignored, to share the happy news. We agreed that this was the most beautiful and perfect baby in the history of babies, and as soon as the tot could travel — probably at Thanksgiving — she would be personally presented for approval. Though I had my doubts of that ever happening, and stood in the doorway a long moment, just gazing at my mother, until I realized she was glaring back at me with a "what-are-you-looking-at-bub?" expression, and turned away.
      The next time I saw her she was dead, in bay 48 of the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital. Not a moment I'd prepared for. I don't believe I actually turned to my wife and implored, "Do something!" But I certainly thought it. My mother sang as a young girl — on the radio, on television — and sang to us all our lives. Last month was the first time she didn't call on my birthday and sing "Happy Birthday to You," In those last few moments together, I sang a couple brief lullabies she'd sung to us: "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," an odd Scottish dirge she's somehow turned into a bedtime song, speaking of retrofitting. But apt in its sense of loss and longing. "Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me."
      We went directly from the hospital to Golden Haven in Addison, where our parents lived. I told my father that his wife of 69 years had died. "How old was she?" he replied. I said 88, He nodded and observed that 88 is a good age, then let the matter drop. If he brings up the subject again, I plan to say that she went to the hospital, which is true, and leave off the rest. Who wants to re-discover, even vaguely, that his wife has died, over and over, every day, if not every hour?
      Jews get our own into the ground fast. My mother died on a Saturday, and was buried the following Wednesday. I'm not sure how we picked Shalom Memorial Park — that was my brother — but I admired how smoothly the whole process was handled. My mother had a keen eye for the mistakes of others, a trait I've inherited in full. But the only wrong aspect to the process in my view was there are no headstones jutting out of the ground — the Arlington Heights cemetery is a memorial garden, all bronze plaques, flush with the grass. When we drove through the place, I was uncomfortable with that absence, and considered insisting we find somewhere else, where she could have a granite tombstone.. But I decided to go with the flow, speaking of suppressing vanity, and not insist upon my own preference. Maybe covering those mirrors had an effect after all.

     The paper told me to take as much time off as I liked, and most of a week was consumed with planning the funeral and then holding it, removing her effects out of her apartment and donating them to charity.
     But in one of those examples of lucky timing that would look trite in fiction but life doesn't blush to serve up, 48 hours after we buried my mother, my wife and I flew to New York City to meet my new granddaughter, and help her parents pack up their apartment and move to a different city. Because merely having a baby isn't difficult enough.

To continue reading, click here.

Can you pick the near Vermeer?

 

So is this the close-but-no-cigar Vermeer?

    Odd. I'm a certified art museum buff. We're members of the great Art Institute of Chicago and visit regularly, seldom missing a new exhibit. I love nudging Chicagoans toward Pilsen's National Museum of Mexican Art — few seem to go otherwise. I've even been to the quirky little Intuit Art Museum , with its tableau of the apartment of the deeply strange outsider artist Henry Darger. Though not since they expanded into Howard Tullman's old apartment. Going back to check out the new arrangement is high on my agenda.

     When visiting just about any city, hitting the local art museum is always a top priority, though after touring the museums in most smaller cities my main takeaway is near pity. The Art Institute they're not. 

     Still, most museums have at least one work worth seeing — Dallas's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, for instance, has Grant Wood's ever-more-significant "Parson Weems Fable." 

     Sometimes I fall down on the job. It hurt me to be in New York City recently and not hurry to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent show. But time was limited, and duty called.
    Generally, I collect museums the way other guys collect major league ballparks. The Prado. The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, plus the Van Gogh Museum. The British Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I'm proud to have gone to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before its famous 1990 art heist. 
     But the National Gallery of Art in Washington just wasn't on my radar. Maybe, given a spare few hours in the nation's capital, I always rush to the National Portrait Gallery, with its hall of presidents, or the American History Museum. Even the little round Hirshhorn. 

Or maybe this one? 

     

     On the 4th of July, I was headed to the Air & Space Museum— haven't seen that for years — but it was all sold out (tickets are free, but you need one). So we wandered over to the National Gallery, which turns out to have an enormous, deep collection — the only Leonardo da Vinci in the Western hemisphere (her room packed with tourists taking selfies of themselves, in some daft after echo of the mobs around the Mona Lisa). 
     An astounding trove of French impressionists, including Monet after Monet. My wife confessed to not being a fan of his near homophone, Manet, but by the time we were done she was won over by works such as "The Dead Toreador." 
     Rare paintings and studies by Georges Seurat, who created the Art Institute's masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (rare because he died at 31) 

Or this one?

     The museum has an excellent Dutch collection, with a number of fine Rembrandts. It also has three of the world's 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. As a fan of his quiet scenes of Dutch domestic life, I headed over to see them. 

     The National Gallery used to have four Vermeers. But in 2022 the museum took advantage of being closed due to COVID to put its Vermeers under sophisticated scanners, and decided one of them wasn't done by the master himself — the brushstrokes are wrong, apparently — but by someone in his studio.
     Knowing this, it seemed clearly inferior. But that opinion might have been skewed by knowing it wasn't from the master's hand. Which inspires me to quiz EGD readers. Take a look at these four paintings. Can you tell which three are real, supposedly, and which four is not quite up to Vermeer standards? The New York Times spills the beans here.

     I'm only touching upon the glories of the National Gallery of Art. In three hours we saw maybe half of it.

    I've been to the Rodin museums in Paris and Philadelphia, but was still impressed by their collection of his busts and sculptures (this time I managed to resist pointing out. yet again, that German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was Rodin's secretary. Typically my resolve fails me — as it did when I found myself mentioning, for the umpteeth time, that Rodin's Thinker is supposed to be an incredibly buff Dante, conjuring up his Inferno). 

    If you go before Nov. 2, check out the ground floor exhibit "Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World," a fascinating deep dive into 16th and 17th century depictions of insects and other small creatures. 

    Oh, and in addition to being a museum fan, I'm also a foodie, and lunch at the National Gallery was first rate — a chicken and orange salad for me for $18, a curry chicken salad for my wife. It's tiring work slogging through gallery after gallery, and nothing braces you for the effort than a plate of high grade chow. 

High-level training

 

     My attention was drawn to three jets of water shooting out high atop a building being constructed on Hudson Street in Jersey City. At first I thought the water had to be due to some kind of construction mishap. A burst pipe maybe. That might account for one jet. But three? 

     "They must be testing the standpipes," I said to my wife, referring to the vertical water pipes installed in all buildings taller than four stories, designed to be used by firefighters. 

     But I'm not a big fan of guesswork, not when an explanation can be found. We strolled in that direction, figuring enlightenment might be found there, and it was, in the form of a firefighter looking up at jetting water.
     I addressed my question to him, and he said that firefighters do not often get the chance to train 50 floors up in a high rise. They were being permitted to use the raw space to practice their hose work. That made sense. Firefighters sometimes make use of high rises that are about to be torn down, or have special training towers to simulate the layout of skyscrapers. Such simulations are important -- high rise fires are particularly dangerous, with the usual hazards of fighting a fire magnified by  additional mechanical and electrical systems, not to forget the difficulty of hauling gear up a few dozen flights of stairs. 
      We moved on down the street -- the water was shooting out so high up, maybe 500 feet above the pavement -- that by the time it reached street level, it was no more than a fine mist, quite pleasant on such a hot day. 

He's baaaaaaaack!

                            

    John James Audubon's Washington Sea Eagle is a magnificent bird. But there is a problem with it.
    It might not be real.
    While America's master of depicting birds is not known for just making them up, the fact is that this glorious specimen has never been found in nature. So either it went extinct after Audubon captured its golden glory, or he just got the bird wrong -- it isn't as if he could take reference photographs. 
     Making the Washington Sea Eagle the bird of the moment. As a stand in for our beleaguered nation. Glorious yes. But is it real? Or just a pretty picture? Did our land of freedom and liberty ever really exist? Or is it just a flattering story we've convinced ourselves is true?

     Glory seems in short supply, as congressmen cave and the thin veneer of values that many at least gave lip service to is utterly abandoned. Economic responsibility? Gone. Concern for the struggling? Gone. Half the nation watches in horror through latticed fingers as Donald Trump codifies and strengthens his hold on power and entrenches his administration policy of cruelty and abuse. While the other half either cheers or yawns,  cycling through Instagram, bored with it all.
     I'm ... what? Tired. Distracted. A little bored, to be honest, because the story lately never changes. The bad guys win. Still keeping track, sort of, despite a personal life that has suddenly become very, very busy. 
     Honestly, I've enjoyed the break. I could get used to this. In fact, I have a fine obituary ready to go for Old Obit Week #5.
     But ... well ... am I the only one who thinks Old Obit Week is feeling a little ... old? Stale. I like to give you your money's worth (which is a joke, ha ha, because you don't pay anything. Get it?)

     While I'm still officially on vacation, from the paper, helping my son relocate his new family, extending my week off to bury my mother to a second week off to welcome my granddaughter — talk about a shift in tone — an email from a reader served as a firebell in the night, a call to duty, such as it is.
     "Hi Neil," JS begins.

      "I am of German heritage. I have friends that are German immigrants. I have always struggled with how the German citizens of the 1930-40 era could capitulate to the horror of the Holocaust. Today, after the passing of the big bad bill, I understand how good people will look away. It's very sad and i need you to write about it. Help me make this ok or help me make it better.Please write something to help me. Help all of your readers.Thx. Your readers love you."

     And I love you guys, too. Truly. I'd feel stupid writing this for nobody. 

     My first thought was that I could never make this okay and wouldn't want to try. How could it be okay? This confederation of cowards kneecapping the poor while lavishing resources on our aborning police states. This is the exact opposite of okay. It's horrible. My general optimism sags under the weight of events. With far worse certain to come.
     One thing that made taking time off easier is there is nothing useful to say that I haven't been saying for years. This is a process, turning our flawed republic into a totalitarian state and then, maybe, turning away from that doom. We punched the ticket, we need to take the trip, to go through it, unfortunately. This is the part where we endure. It isn't pleasant. Bad things are supposed to feel bad. If you think this is terrible, wait. It gets worse.

     There is good news: this epoch will end someday. But until it does, all that decent Americans can do is pay attention and manifest ourselves in whatever small ways we can. I can't pretend this blog post or my Sun-Times column have any influence whatsoever. But they can buck up readers like JS, and that is not without value.
     I wrote her back, saying, essentially, now is a time for courage and forbearance, which are free, and no one can deny you. I am a fan of an organization that puts much stock in the concept of hitting rock bottom — that you have to reach some unacceptable nadir before improvement is possible. For a while, I hoped the insurrection of Jan. 6,2021, had to be that bottom. But I was wrong. Obviously we have further to slide. The future of America includes concentration camps.
Shit, the present of America includes concentration camps.
     If being in a state of constant anxiety would shorten the Trump's era by 15 minutes, I would do that. But the entire collection of voices thundering against him have done exactly diddly squat. He's stronger than ever. Yet I remain strangely optimistic. Maybe it's some kind of psychotic disconnect and denial. Maybe I'm relieved I'm not in a camp, yet. But I do retain a bedrock faith in this country that cannot be shaken . The good guys win, eventually. This country defeated King George III, the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor cannot prevail forever. We will defeat this monster. Just not anytime soon.

Old obit week #4: Bill Sennet, 70, `bright star in the neighborhood'

     Not everybody I wrote an obit about was famous. Some of my favorites were about exceptional-though-unheralded — I almost said "ordinary" — people who make life worth living. I wondered if it was too much of a burden to impose old obituaries on the EGD audience, but "He understood the joy of every day" makes the entire endeavor worthwhile, to me if no one else.

     Bill Sennet was a great neighbor.
     "He was Chicago all the way: Lane High School, Korean War, worked with his hands," said Paul McCloskey, whose yard abutted Mr. Sennet's in their Lakewood; Balmoral neighborhood. "His hardware shop in his basement was better than Ace. If you needed a tool, you didn't go to the store. You went to Bill. He not only had it, he said, `Here's how you use it.' You broke out a can of beer and sat there while he did it, then said, `Gee, thanks Bill,' and he said, `Let me know if you need any more help.' "
     Mr. Sennet, 70, died Dec. 19 at home.
     Born in Chicago — his dad worked in the Post Office — Mr. Sennet worked for 40 years in the insurance industry, as a safety engineer. But he had heart trouble_he had two bypasses_and retired about 1990.
     His friends remember him as one of those rare, wonderful people who brings a community together.
     "He was like the glue that bound everyone — the young and old and middle-aged — on the block," said another neighbor, Roger Flaherty, an assistant metro editor at the Sun-Times. "He loved to talk with other neighbors — new ones and old — about politics, neighborhood issues, how to fix things around the house, the best way to get rid of weeds and rodents, how to make a catapult. He was endlessly curious about the world around him."
     Mr. Sennet attended Wright College for two years, and was in the Army in the Korean War.
     He served on the local school council at Peirce Elementary, and volunteered, particularly with the art program.
     "He was really the most cordial, giving and warm person, always willing to support the school and very interested in art," said Peirce principal Janice M. Rosales. "Most recently, he was working with the artist-in-residence; he was working on a mosaic project just last week."
     "He understood the joy of every day," said Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th). "Where some people don't seem to understand the miracles that surround us all, he understood those miracles and he was able to communicate the meaning, to children in particular. I worked with him for many years on children's art events. It wasn't the doing of art; it was discovering and believing you could try and achieve something. I miss him so much."
     "He had a lot of interests," said McCloskey. "He loved a good martini, good music, loved to go to the Art Institute, loved working with his hands, loved doing financial things, loved working on his house."
     Mr. Sennet periodically adopted dogs from the city shelter. The latest, Zoe, was prowling his house a day after his death, searching for his missing friend. It was a feeling shared by everyone who knew him.
     "It is such a loss, not just for the family, but for the school and the whole community," said Rosales. "One of the neighbors mentioned to me: `He was a bright star in the neighborhood and well liked.' Everyone will miss him."
     Survivors include his wife, Josephine, daughter Karen and son Erik and a sister, Doris Potter.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 2000