Mixed message

Starved Rock State Park, Oct. 1, 2025.

     My first instinct was to simply post this photo without comment. Let the headline be the punchline.

     But that seemed perhaps a touch too wry, for the matter at hand. Death by falling is a perennial problem at Starved Rock, whose dramatic precipices make it a place of beauty and danger. Accidentally and intentionally. In 2022 the Operation Disrupt Signs went up, in Starved Rock and 16 other locations around the state. But the signs — which are not just at this overlook — did not prevent two people from committing suicide at Starved Rock in 2024. 

    So I thought a few words were in order. The boardwalk helps a lot — stay on the wooden paths, behind the rails, and you won't slide off any precipices. Not unconstrained nature in the usual sense, not the deeply-ravined woods you got in the pre-boardwalk days — which I remember, scarily, and not just out of fear of falling. But better to stay on the pre-approved route than boldly forge your own path off a cliff.
    I was mildly curious as to whether there was any history to this "Lover's Leap" — I assume it's a common mythic local place name, like "Dead Man's Curve," and is a reflection of danger more than any association with specific death. None presented itself to me but, then again, I didn't look that hard. This is one of those moments in our nation's history when to reflect on anything other than gathering doom feels terribly beside the point. Twiddling your thumbs on a sinking ship. I'm not a believer in leaping to one's death. Life is but the once, and we should all tough it out, no matter the hardships of our public or private conditions. But I understand why people do it. 

Survivor's plate

 

     The problem with vanity license plates is that, typically, they're more vain than clever. "CAR4MOM" or "VROOOM" or whatever. I can't recall seeing one and thinking, "'Yes! That's very cool."
     Which sums up my thinking when I saw this plate in the parking lot of a trailhead at Starved Rock State Park on Thursday. While I've never had a mammogram, the process has been described to me well enough to know exactly what "Smush" refers to, and in case there were any question, the plate has the pink ribbon of breast cancer prominently displayed.
     As I was admiring the plate, the owner arrived, and seemed nonplussed to find a stranger examining her car closely. That's the beauty of surviving an ordeal — you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
    Karen Aldworth, of Shorewood, laughed when I asked if I could take her photo and told her the name of the blog I intended to post it on.  She said yes but, being a thorough, considerate sort, I explained that once a thing goes online, you never know how people might react.

     "I don't care!" she exuded. That's the beauty of...well, you get the point. She explained the process behind coming up with the plate.
    "I thought,'breast cancer survivor,'" she said, of herself. "It's a mammogram plate. I wanted something to go along with a mammogram plate."
     "You immediately know what you mean," I said, citing the mark of good writing. 
    "You do!" she said. "Men and women both know what I mean." 

    And she was was gone, off into the woods, hiking briskly.
     

Boxed in

    My older son moved to a place without grocery stores, Well, there must be some somewhere, but none within walking distance, and he doesn't own a car.
     Which is not the problem you might think it is — okay, not the problem I might have thought it could be — because he gets all his groceries from Amazon. He orders them now, Whole Foods drops them off in an hour. It makes a lot of sense.
     To him. To me, well ... I knew Amazon was there, and knew it owned Whole Foods, but to see it in practice was ... a surprise.  I like going to the grocery store. Ride my bike to Sunset Foods, disconnect the front basket, wear it over my forearm, almost like a purse — almost like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." I feel part of something. Almost like I belong.
      My wife orders things from Amazon. "Need anything from Amazon?" she says. I thought hard, then said, tentatively: "You know those gel pens? We don't have any. Some gel pens might be nice. Blue."
     A day or two later, this box showed up. Gel pens! I'm not going to insult you by making the obvious observation, that the volume of the box is 50 times greater than the size of the pens. It would be inefficient to have boxes in more sizes than necessary, and small boxes could get more easily lost. Toss it in a box, deliver the box, recycle the box. Who cares? Not me. No siree.
     I only note these changes, I don't shake my fist. A postman was a member of the community. He checked on shut-ins, collected a cookie at Christmas. Northbrook has a bronze memorial to a beloved mail carrier. The Amazon driver, well, he's in and out, pausing only to snap a picture of the box on your stoop, to wash his hands of it. You could be hanging out the window with a knife in your back and ... well, I don't want to malign out of ignorance. I'm sure plenty of Amazon drivers have burst into burning homes to rescue a baby. At least I hope they have.
     Even that driver, he — or she — is an interregnum. In a few years — five, ten tops — the truck will drive itself, and some drone or little wheeled thing will spurt up your driveway, fling the box at your steps and retreat back to the truck for the next box.
     It really is a very nice pen. But good only for writing things. In a notebook. We all have our limitations. 

'A very sweet guy who had every reason not to be'

Bob Kazel

     Bob Kazel was a gifted writer, a devoted friend, a caring volunteer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 18, and for the next 44 years battled manic depression until he died on Sept. 17.
     "He was a fighter," said Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who turned his own mental illness and addiction into a platform to encourage others to speak out and fund treatment and research.
     Kazel was born in Chicago — his father, Sidney, an electrical engineer, died in a car accident when Bob was 14. His mother, Beverly, became his steadfast supporter. Kazel was editor of the newspaper at Von Steuben High School and set his sights on the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism.
     "He always wanted to be a journalist," said his older brother Mitch. "When he was under 10, he got a typewriter for his birthday. He immediately started putting out a one-page newsletter of what was going on at home, with headlines like, 'MOM TO MAKE SPAGHETTI.'"
     Kazel got into Northwestern. Then things began to go wrong.
     "I started feeling overwhelmed," he said in "Profiles in Mental Health Courage," a 2024 book Kennedy wrote with journalist Stephen Fried.
     Kazel ended his first semester in the psych ward at Evanston Hospital. He went on lithium and restarted the next year at Medill, where he shined.
     "Oh, my God, he was the best writer at The Daily Northwestern," said Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for his biography, "King: A Life." "We had a few Pulitzers come out of that group, but he was the best. Incredibly creative."
     Eig pointed to a story Kazel wrote after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Kazel rode the L back from a downtown Medill class and pondered the subdued CTA riders.
     "Television,” wrote Kazel, then 22, “a keeper of dreams that had guided them all their lives around the world’s realness, had betrayed their trust and shown them their own nightmares. A glimpse of chaos, of a baffling arbitrariness that they now saw clearly and would try to work out, by themselves.”
     For Kazel, mental illness reflected the same "baffling arbitrariness."
     "Bob took his meds, went to his psychiatrist, took good care of himself, and for periods he could live his life," Fried said. "Then his symptoms would break through."

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A number of readers wrote in to express condolences to me, and I should point out that while Bob was a devoted friend, he wasn't MY devoted friend. I never met him. I wish I had.

Bob Kazel at a 2008 birthday party at the Eig home.