Works in progress: Michael Cooke

Michael Cooke, 2019, Magallanes, Chilean Antarctic region.

     Michael Cooke introduced himself over the phone. Exactly 25 years ago. Hollinger had just bought the Sun-Times; their editorial team hadn't even arrived in Chicago. But I had written a column about Leanna Dorsett, a 13-year-old who collapsed and died in front of her class, a girl I had held as a premature infant born with cocaine in her system. Michael, the new editor-in-chief, liked the column, wanted to know if I was on staff. I told him I was.
     We formed a sort of mutual admiration society. He respected my work. I admired his editorial brio and general joie de vivre. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, I wanted to run a necessary illustration with my column without securing expensive permission. "Fuck 'em," he said, telling me to go ahead. "We're a newspaper. Let 'em sue us."
     Not an attitude I encounter much lately.
     I could fill 10 pages with my relationship with Michael. When he moved to the New York Daily News, he brought me with him. For a crazy half year, I wrote columns in both papers. The most astounding thing is that, while most friendships tend to fade with time and distance, ours has survived. Six years ago he invited me to accompany him on a scientific cruise up the Antarctic Chilean coast, and we spent a delightful two weeks inspecting glaciers from Zodiac boats and hanging out in tango clubs. I don't have many friends who'd do that. In fact, only one, the sui generis Michael Cooke. He mentioned that, at 73, he's heading back to school, and I asked him to write a Works in Progress post. His report:

     As a boy, I loved the drama of the Bible. The parting of the Red Sea. Or when the slaves unfurl that big red carpet and out pops Elizabeth Taylor.

     I love it still, and am moved by its power and occasional relevance. The phrase “threescore and ten” stands tall in the King James Version — my old school Bible — with the glory of a royal decree: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten.”
     And then that’s it. Curtain drop. Maybe a sad encore if you’re lucky.
     What terrifies me isn’t the precise number — I’m 73 — it’s the nightmare fear of squeezing out a few more encore years and then one random Friday morning in the “residence”getting strapped naked into a mechanical hoist and being slowly lowered to death in a tub of scalding water by a caregiver busy texting a boyfriend.
     So every day is bonus time. There are still things I want to see:

     • a baby being born.
     • the opening of a big archeological find
     • a woman bursting out of a cake. Don’t ask why. It’s a classic. Doable. Let me have this.
     OK maybe those are a bit cliche-y so here’s another: the older I get the more I realize I have so much to learn. That’s why I’m going back to school this fall. Online but serious. Call it a work in progress.
     I was a poor high school student. At least according to five years’ of term reports from a variety of teachers at Lancaster Royal Grammar School in the northwest of England, where I struggled from 1963 to 1969 … the teachers were called "masters" and nothing says pedagogical gravitas like a medieval job title.

      The school was founded in 1256 when beer was safer to drink than water and carrots were in their original color – purple. My school held on to as many traditions as possible over the centuries, including using blackboards not whiteboards and discipline was delivered with a cane rather than a conversation. (Thank you for asking: several times actually, mostly for “impertinence.”) The masters swept about in black gowns and the buildings today still look like the ones you see at Hogwarts.
     I loved that school. That school didn’t love me. To them I was the Band-Aid on the bottom of the pool. The headmaster pulled the plug and tossed me out at 16, never to sit in a classroom again.
     Here are some of the zingers the masters wrote about me in the reports sent to my mother and father:

Age 11:
     English class: “He is always ready with an answer in class but it is rarely the right one. He never seems to grasp the essential point of any piece of work because he has already decided what the lesson is about before it begins.”
Age 12:
     Geography: “Loquacious but illegible. He is very knowledgeable on agrarian matters but his written work has not shown the same keenness.”    
      Form Master: “He has an impudent manner which gets him into trouble.”
Age 13:
     Latin: “He is very reluctant to work. Progress is therefore slight.”
     Form Master: “He is a pleasant boy. He is always lively in class.”
Age 14:
     Chemistry class: “He has made little effort to learn anything and so has had little success.”"
     Form Master" “He remains a cheerful character and has done well as Class Captain.”
Age 15:
     Form Master: “He can produce sound work when he tries.”
Age 16:
     Form Master: “Interest is shown in some subjects and a lack of it in others.”  

     When I was 50 — a full score shy of my King James–allotted threescore and ten — and Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, the old school summoned me back to England to deliver the annual Speech Day address.
     To tell you the truth, I got off a few zingers myself as I grinned from the podium, the ancient hall filled with teenage versions of myself — all fidget, ambition, and barely concealed boredom.
     But I swear a few boys grinned back.
     Now I’m going back to class, going deep on the King James Bible where so many of today’s phrases come from such as ….
     Bite the dust
     To put words in someone’s mouth
     A wolf in sheep’s clothing
     Dozens and dozens first in English in that Bible: A law unto themselves/ A stumbling block /A thief in the night / A thorn in the side / Den of thieves / Eat, drink and be merry / Fell flat on his face / Fight the good fight / In the twinkling of an eye / Land of Nod / Money is the root of all evil / Out of the mouths of babes / The blind leading the blind / The signs of the times / The skin of my teeth and, well, etc. etc.
     King James’ language and cadence has shaped literature, music, political speeches, and idioms since 1611. Lincoln was a serious student so I’ll be in good company. His Gettysburg address is drenched with the King’s style and themes, starting with “fourscore and seven years ago.”
     Shakespeare was deeply influenced too. Check it out.

     I missed Shakespeare completely at school but I plan to get to him. Threescore and ten is stretchable.

Going up river with Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey, plus another guy

     "Even if it's just you and me and Lee, we'll have fun," I told my wife, of the architectural river tour I'm hosting Aug. 21. An indication of my mindset when writing this — tickets were expensive, and we needed to sell a bunch of them. So I crafted the best sales pitch I could. 

     Completely unnecessarily, as it turned out. What I never contemplated, not for a second, was that all the tickets would sell out in a couple hours on Thursday, when they opened sales for supporters of Chicago Public Media. I was shocked, and unsure if the column should even run. But I played with the ending, and we decided to go ahead. The response was very gratifying, and I appreciate everyone who signed up.

     So. July melts into August. Summer about half over. Are you having fun? What is fun, anyway? There’s small fun: drinking coffee on your porch fun. Tossing cards into a hat fun.
     And big fun. Big Chicago fun. Enjoying the unique activities that only a city like Chicago can provide.
     Such as? What are peak Chicago summer experiences? A Cubs game at Wrigley Field. A hot dog and fries at Gene & Jude’s. To me, it isn’t summer unless I stop by MingHin, grab some dim sum and then meet my wife at the Gehry bandshell in Millennium Park to listen to ... well, honestly, I don’t really care what we listen to. Music. Blues, jazz, opera. Whatever.
     A Chicago River cruise fits perfectly into the mix. Frankly, the Water Taxi works for me. But the ideal, full, peak cruise experience is the Chicago Architecture Center cruise. Because the buildings along the Chicago River, well, they’re Chicago's glory, aren’t they? I can’t tell how many times I’ve taken that cruise. Filling my pockets with informational coin that I can dole out for years to come.
     Although, the last time — I had trouble. The docent, she was very nice, and, ah, informed, in a gentle, volunteer, small town librarian sort of way. And it isn’t as if the information she was telling us was wrong, per se. But I found myself almost biting my hand, struggling not to interject the sharper facts she was overlooking.
     How can you point out the Tribune Tower and not use the phrase “Gothic horror show of a building”? (Okay, neo-Gothic horror show ...) How can you mention the 1922 architecture contest that selected this mess of flying buttresses — the best the Middle Ages have to offer — and not observe that the truly innovative design, Eliel Saarinen‘s far superior and influential, though never built, tower, came in second?
     Or that Tribune publisher Robert McCormick — a world class xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker — sent his correspondents to beg, borrow or steal chunks of the great landmarks of the world, the Parthenon and Taj Mahal and such, to embed in the outside wall at ground level in his monument to American exceptionalism. A staggeringly misguided display of architectural homeopathy that would revolt us if we weren’t so familiar with it.
     See how fun this is? Musing on how I could both enjoy the summer and raise some money for my financially struggling newspaper, I cooked up what we’re calling the Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline. A gloves-off, no-holds-barred, sharp, adult architectural river cruise. Not for the faint of mind.
     Although. Since I do like to have an adult in the room — someone who really knows the topic, and can backstop me if I go blank, plus share the inevitable blame — I invited Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey to join me. And in a very uncharacteristic bit of recklessness, he agreed.
     Lee, who worked for both Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the city, brings a granular knowledge of the buildings we'll be drifting past, and will keep things from getting too negative. I’m with him there. I mean, I got married at the Intercontinental Hotel. It isn’t that I don’t like it. But the former Medinah Athletic Club, well, it’s also very strange, with those big Assyrian bas reliefs of bulls and kings and whatnot. What were they thinking? We'll tell you. For 90 minutes.
     In a city like Chicago, there's a lot to keep track of. I was talking Saturday to a young lady of my acquaintance, who conflated the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Building, now 875 N. Michigan.
     When I pointed this out, she said, “Aren’t they the same building?”

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Flashback 1997: It's all water into the crib

Harrison crib, left, built in 1900; Dever crib is to the right.
(Chicago Department of Water Management photo)

    I was chatting Saturday with a young person about, ahem, stochastic mathematics, when the subject strayed to the water intake cribs, the purpose of which she'd recently discovered. I mentioned that I'd visited several of the cribs, years ago, and would dig up that column and share it.

     Five big cement trucks floating two miles offshore. A cellular phone with a rotary dial. Gas-powered toilets. Solar electric panels near what might be Chicago's last coal bin still brimming with deep black cubes.
     Welcome to the strange world of the Chicago Water Department's six intake cribs, a string of whimsical, round, fortlike structures studding the lake horizon. Cribs that not only serve as the business end of the drinking straw from which the city and 118 suburbs thirstily suck, but offer an odd blend of contradictions: old and new, latest technology and relics of the past.
     From north to south, the cribs are: Wilson Avenue, Carter Harrison, William F. Dever, Four-Mile, 68th Street and the Edward F. Dunne. Only Dunne is now drawing from the lake, feeding to the 79th Street water treatment plant.
     The Dever crib also was working until July, feeding to the Jardine Treatment Plant north of Navy Pier. Then the 106-year-old tunnel of its adjoining Harrison crib collapsed, threatening the quality of Dever's water and, in the bargain, closing two lanes of northbound Lake Shore Drive until early spring so the shore end of the damaged tunnel can be sealed off.
     That's where the cement trucks come in. Not only is the tunnel being bulkheaded off at Chicago Avenue, but also at the Harrison crib, 2 1/2 miles out. The cement workers accompanying the trucks on a barge seemed slightly dazed to find themselves in the middle of the lake.
      "This is an extremely odd job, once-in-lifetime job," said Dave Potter, a driver escorting 350,000 pounds of concrete.
     Harrison and Dever — the two are connected by a spindly, 30-foot metal walkway — are crawling with activity. Not only do divers wait to funnel the concrete 100 feet down, but electricians are updating the living quarters on Harrison.
     Though no longer drawing water, the Harrison crib is being renovated because it still will serve as living quarters. For decades, people lived nearly full time on the cribs — a two-man crew in summer and a four-man crew in winter, plus a cook. The rooms seem from another age: iron beds, a rotary phone (albeit one hooked up to a cell site). The cribs always have been bypassed by time: In 1953, a visiting reporter noted the presence of a tulip-horn Victrola.
     In summer, the men scraped debris and hapless crabs and fish from the screens. In winter, they dynamited ice from the intake ports. And year-round, they provided security and monitored a weather station.
     The live-in crews are gone now, their duties no longer needed.
     Zebra mussels forced the removal of screens over the intakes (debris is now screened out at the treatment plants, where chlorine spray keeps the zebra mussels at bay). Motion detectors provide security.

     The weather stations are gone.
     Still, the living quarters are used, mainly by workmen on major repair projects and those caught on the cribs by storms.
     Ice is still a problem, but rather than stay out full time, workers travel to the cribs on the icebreaker James J. Versluis. Ice is kept from the intake ports with the same technology used 100 years ago: one-third sticks of dynamite, lowered on a chain.
     Usually the man on the other end of the chain is Ray Perkins, the city's head crib keeper.
     "He's our only crib keeper," said Francis Blake, deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Water Pumping. "Our only holdover from that group of guys who used to live on the cribs."
     "It was boring," said Perkins, 65, who joined the department in 1956. "Fun at times. When we first started, there was no TV. Mostly radio, and crossword puzzles. Some guys painted. A week out here could be a lifetime."
     The history of the cribs is anything but boring, however, rather a wonderful tale of rescues, fires, explosions, high drama and odd events.
     Coast Guardsmen with rifles were posted at the cribs during World War II to prevent sabotage. One day in March, 1914, a crib keeper who had drowned the previous November and his successor, who drowned in February, washed up together at Oak Street Beach.
     In 1929, a storm so caked one crib with ice that the men inside had trouble breathing. "We were trapped like rats in a caulked barrel," said the keeper.
     Then there was the huge alewife assault in the early 1960s.
     "Billions of fish out here," remembered Perkins. "We were taking them out in wheelbarrows. Finally there was no place to put them."
     Perhaps the dramatic highlight of the cribs occurred in the frigid January of 1948, when single-digit temperatures forced the crews into a 30-hour losing battle with ice. Despite the detonation of 55 sticks of dynamite, the Wilson crib intakes froze completely, cutting water pressure to the North Side.
     Just to give an indication of the vital role of the cribs, that drop in water pressure forced schools to close, hospitals to take emergency measures and all Chicagoans north of Fullerton to boil their drinking water.
     Until the Harrison tunnel is sealed, the Jardine plant is drawing its daily 750 million gallons of water directly from the lakeshore - the water is dirtier there and costs more to process, which is why the aging cribs, in the relatively clean water several miles out, are still valuable.
     Perkins gazed at the small vortexes of water forming on the surface of the interior of the still-active Dunne crib and summed up what all the fuss is about. "You can't do anything without water," he said.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 16, 1997

When the news isn't new

"Napoleon's Return from Elba," by the Charles de Steuben.

     This Epstein thing, just goes on and on and on.
     Which is so puzzling.
     What about it is new? There are all these photos of Donald Trump partying with creepy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. We've seen them for years. They're not in any way inconsistent with everything we know about Donald Trump, and his pussy-grabbing, porn-star-schtupping, daughter-sexualizing ways.  The man's a major creep, scuzzball and swine. Married three times, most recently to an Eastern European soft porn model.
    Suddenly, some part of the MAGA world, indoctrinated for years to the Epstein saga, looks up from its silage and snaps to the fact that the Epstein files they were promised, whatever they are, aren't materializing. That Trump and his henchmen, who had promised to release some kind of explosive information, or list, or whatever, aren't doing so. 
    My God, it's almost as if the man were a liar!

    Or at least the liberal media is viewing it that way.

    "Because of Epstein, Americans are Finally Seeing Donald Trump," the Lincoln Square newsletter headlined Wednesday morning, going on to observe. "For all his talk about making American great again, people are noticing that he has instead pulled us all down into his sewer of lust, power, ego, betrayal, greed, pettiness, and cruelty."

    Are they? Really? Noticing. Pretty to think so. Or even if they are? Noticing, that is. And then what?
    This isn't something I'd normally react to. I don't traffic in the obvious.
    So why comment now? Well, my column for tomorrow got held Tuesday afternoon — something about necessary insurance forms not being signed, believe it or not. It'll make sense when you read the column.  Friday.
    Nothing in the paper today. But this space here can't be left blank. 
    So returning to Trump, and Epstein, and the latest developments, and my only reaction, which is a phrase I sometimes use in conversation:
     And Napoleon escaped from Elba.
     What does that mean? Napoleon, the emperor of the French, was undercut by his disastrous Russian campaign, then sentenced to exile in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. He arrived to the island off the coast of Italy on May 3, 1814, brooded there about 10 months, and escaped.
     What does that have to do with Trump?
    Well, Napoleon's escape was big news, obviously. At the time. Two hundred years ago. Now it seems, to me, as symbolic of something which isn't really news anymore, because everybody already knows about it, or should.
     Hence Trump and Epstein. If you are discovering the president is a liar and a perv, well, welcome to the party. But pardon me if I don't share your excitement, because you're discovering the painfully obvious.
    I would struggle to muster some enthusiasm if I thought this might change the situation. And while anything is possible, this just seems to be setting up yet another limbo bar for the MAGA faithful lower themselves beneath. However this works out — there could be videos of Trump committing some unspeakable illegal perversion — and his faithful end up face down on the floor, salaaming, as always. 

Hog wild

 

   My stock of Yiddish phrases is not very deep. But I do know "shonda fur di goyim" — a disgrace in front of the gentiles. Usually directed at a member of the tribe who, by playing into some ethnic stereotype, has embarrassed his religion before those who are too quick to scorn us anyway.
     I've always viewed that attitude with skepticism. It seems predicated on the mistaken notion that haters are making judgments, gathering facts. When they begin with their conclusions, and cherry pick only the facts that fit. I don't have many rules as a writer, but "Don't write for people who hate you," is one of them. People who consider Jews cheap are going to do so whether I pinch pennies or not.
     I also don't write for the easily embarrassed. When I wrote Friday's column about ordering a pork chop at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, DC, I had my concerns — it was a trivial, share-my-high-life kind of post. I decided not to mention that the pork chop cost $35. Class distinctions inflame, why pour gasoline on the fire?
     I also didn't put in a few sentences explaining that YES, I know, I'm a JEW ordering a pork chop. Deal with it. First, I've said exactly that before. And second, I only had 790 words to tell a story that ended up being complicated. I decided to accept what flack I got for being who I am.
     In the end, it was only one guy. Let's call him David, since that is his name. David writes:

     I have been reading and enjoying your column for years. It's one of the reasons I still subscribe to the Sun Times. However, I was disturbed by your Friday column restaurants and pork chops.
     I personally don't care what a person eats or if they choose to consume something that might not fit in with their culture. Live and let live has always been the way I've conducted my life. In this case though, coming from a Jew, which I am too, I think glorifying pork chops complete with a picture sends the wrong message to many of your readers.
      Some readers, particularly non-Jews, may be confused thinking pork chops are off limits to Jews and I think to most Jews, that's where they draw a line. Virtually all of my friends who do not keep kosher avoid eating pork and bacon.
     In my mind, a Jewish guy writing a column about pork chops is inappropriate. As I said, you have every right to eat whatever you want but to see you, who occasionally writes about things Jewish, which I appreciate, writing such a column was very disappointing.
     I will continue to enjoy your column but please, at the very least, publicly respect a tradition that goes back thousands of years. You don't have to keep kosher to do that.

     I might not have answered at all. But he was, he said, a fan. He deserved a response of some sort. I thought carefully and answered this way.

     Let me start by saying that I appreciate that you have been reading for so many years. I appreciate your loyalty, and should probably just leave it at that.
     However. It troubles me that, despite this steady readership, so little of my worldview seems to have worn off. Perhaps you've read, but not for comprehension. Perhaps you've been skimming. If that is the case, let me urge you toward greater focus. Because if anything is clear from my column, it is that, while I am a proud Jew, I am not what they call a shomer shabbos Jew. I have never suggested I am any kind of role model or, indeed, anybody other than who I am. This can't be news to you. In fact, I've even addressed the pork chop issue, and quite recently. Here, please read the top of this. That's why I didn't take time in Friday's column to try to ward off a letter such as yours.
     Since you are a regular reader, I'll only ridicule you a little, in a gentle fashion. Here's what you said: while you yourself don't care what a person eats, you nevertheless care enough that I should pretend not to eat pork, or at least not admit to it in print. Because non-Jews, mistakenly, think pork chops are off limits to Jews. And we need to encourage that error so ... here I lose the thread. So they don't think less of us? I can't imagine doing the same thing for other faiths, castigating Christians for missing Easter services, or Muslims for not praying five times a day facing Mecca. Are these not personal choices?
     You go on: since "most of your friends" don't eat pork — how could you possibly know? Have you asked them? — I should pretend not to eat pork too? In case we ever become friends?
     Honestly, David, if I were to compare both our lapses: my enjoying pork chops in print, and you feeling that Jews need to present a unified front, pretending to engage in practices which few of them actually do — and up to 85 percent of American Jews do not keep Kosher — I would humbly suggest that I am the one displaying the more traditional Jewish values, at least to the degree that we still value honesty, individuality, sincerity and the like.
     I think that's enough. If you don't mind — and even if you do — I think I'll post this on my blog on Tuesday for the benefit of my most loyal readers. But don't worry, I will shield your name, to protect you from embarrassment. I recognize that it takes chutzpah to write to a newspaper columnist, and respect you for making the effort. But I hope you then accept my response in the spirit it was intended.

     No answer of course. Reading this a second time, I worry I was too hard on a landsman — another Yiddish term, for a fellow Jew from your general area. Sometimes I can be heavy-handed. Should I have gone for a lighter touch? 

Trump's executive orders on homelessness: 'Inhumane ... ineffective and counterproductive'

     A homeless man has been sleeping on a low flagstone wall at the corner of Shermer and Walters in Northbrook for the past few nights. A block from my house.
     The first time I saw him, while walking our dog with my wife about 9 p.m., I steered us in a different direction, worried he would, I don't know, leap up and stab us. It happens.
     The second time I saw him, I had a very different thought: "You know, we have those extra bedrooms. Maybe we should put him up for a few nights ..."
     Two very different reactions — fear and kindness — that neatly bookend the general reaction to pervasive homelessness in American society.
     On the one hand, we're afraid. Even though the unhoused are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than the cause of it. Not just for our own safety, but for the health of our communities as a whole.
     Few motorists driving along Lake Shore Drive, I imagine, see the tents sprouting in Lincoln Park and think: "Cool. A welcoming city provides safe space for its most humble citizens." Not the city beautiful Daniel Burnham had in mind.
     On the other hand, we recognize life is hard. There are many ways to fall through the cracks: addiction, mental illness, divorce, unemployment, poverty. Some unfortunates struggle to maintain the barest fingerhold on society.
     Who among us wants to tread on their fingers? I doubt many Americans wake up and wonder, "How can I make life more difficult for homeless people today?"
     Such people exist and now have a strong ally in Washington. America is in the midst of her Golden Age of Fear. It's like we're cycling through vulnerable communities, one by one, to see who can be demonized and oppressed next.
     Trump 2.0 came out of the blocks swinging at immigrants — who now can be arrested on sight by masked police, without due process, and shipped to foreign countries while we race to build our own domestic gulags.
     Then trans people, who now can be cashiered from the military for reasons that had nothing to do with their ability to serve.

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'Manifest Destiny'

Detail of "Manifest Destiny," by Alexis Rockman (National Portrait Gallery)

     When methods of communication are being discussed, there is of course our drug, passion and universal solvent, social media. Then a passing glance at radio and television, with a sigh of parting for the fading old ways: books, magazines and of course my own ever shrinking ghetto, newspapers.

     Oil paintings don't even make the cut. Which is a shame, considering the drama and power they are capable of. Consider Alexis Rockman's mural "Manifest Destiny," noticed in the National Portrait Gallery during our recent visit to Washington. It is kind of hard to miss — an enormous expanse of sunbaked orange, crumbling infrastructure and suffering wildlife.

      Though its placard understates the case:
     "What might happen if we don't exercise responsible environmental stewardship?" it begins.
     "What might happen"? Ya think? I'd say it bleeding well is happening, right now, and quicker than we expect. "If we don't exercise responsible..." This ship has freakin' sailed on that one, has it not? We elected Mr. Damn-the-Windmills-and-Dig-Baby-Dig.

     "The painting shows the Brooklyn waterfront as it might appear several hundred years in the future if human-induced climate change continues unabated." Another underestimate. As with Hemingway's description of bankruptcy, these changes are happening gradually then suddenly.
     You can see why Trump came for the Smithsonian, almost right out of the box. In March he signed an executive order to “remove improper ideology” from the museums, forbidding exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
     Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery —  the star of the Smithsonian — stepped down even as Trump was firing her for expressing "anti-American ideology."
     Looking clearly at the future, like accurately accessing the past, is apparently no longer an American value. Being concerned for the rapidly deteriorating state of the planet is no longer an American value. Facts are un-American.

     At least at the moment. In some quarters. But it will change. Eventually.

     If you think sentient Americans curse Trump now, imagine how residents of that sun-blasted world — maybe decades, not centuries away — will revile his name, and the blindered rampant ignorance  he represents. He isn't dooming us — he's doing something worse. He's dooming our children and grandchildren.

Rockman's mural is eight feet tall and 24 feet wide.

Demolished house

      The house was small. And white. On Catherine Street, two blocks from my own. With black shutters that never closed once — decorative. Grasping, along with the coach lights, toward some whiff of colonial splendor that almost seems a joke when you think about it. A symbolic white handkerchief of elegance in a neighborhood where people build gigantic faux farmhouses. Where some build enormous homes, live in them a bit, then, decide these estates just aren't big enough, buy the lot next door and double the size of their already huge house into some kind of super huge house.     

     I've thought of knocking on the door and demanding a tour — "What do you do with all that room?" A bad idea, at houses where I've literally never seen a person outside, coming or going. Not in years.

     But that wouldn't go over well. Not my place, literally or figuratively, not as a local dog walker and humble senior citizen, newly enrolled in Medicare. With a half price Metra pass freshly installed in my wallet, awaiting its first use. 
     The chain link fence went up weeks ago,. Maybe months. Then last week, the Caterpillar excavator arrived, signalling the brink of doom for the old home. I tried to imagine the years of life unfolding there, the new couples arriving, the babies squirming, the children running around. The gradual deprecations of time, ignored as always. Or as Mary Oliver writes:

We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.
When seedlings blossomed in the eaves,
When branches scratched upon the door
And rain came splashing through the halls,
We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.  

     A vague and haunting image of happy life when it is past. Though honestly, I failed completely, conjuring up the lives unfolding here. Hard to imagine the life of someone you know, a person standing in front of you. Hard enough to remember your own, sometimes. Doing so from the architecture of a house about to be torn down is impossible. At least for me.
     The house is ... what? 1930s? That would be my guess, but I'm not knowledgable about such things and invite correction.  Colonial revival was a style throughout much of the 20th century — some 40 percent of American homes built in the 1920s reflected it. 

     I didn't dwell on the house being pulled down, which couldn't take an hour. There's enough cause for melancholy in my own life without channeling anybody else's. Two days later, when I passed again, the house was rubble, the bricks already palleted up — old bricks are a hot commodity. Apparently, we just can't make them like we used to. Something about the minerals in the clay. Or maybe we could, but don't bother. The current not-quite-so-nice bricks are good enough.

      Someday soon my wife and I will stroll by this empty lot, and she'll say, "I don't remember what was there." And at least now I'll say, "I have a picture, if you're really interested."

    The Oliver poem ends this way:

For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done,
And so rose up, and went away,
Inheritors of breath and love,
Bound to that final black estate
No child can mend or trade away.

Top quality restaurants don't resemble 'The Bear'

   

Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.

     Chefs are rock stars. Waitstaff are coveted. You know who never gets their due? Even though they're the key to restaurant excellence, as important as food or service?

     Management.
     "I think you might have something there," said Rich Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, the wildly popular family of eateries. Most new restaurants fail, but Lettuce has been in business over half a century and owns, manages and licenses more than 130 restaurants in a dozen states. They know what they're doing.
     This epiphany struck me this way: my wife and I recently helped our son, his wife and new baby move from Jersey City to D.C. I must have really stuck my landing, because toward the end of our two, count 'em — two weeks — helping, my wife announced that she would take me out to a celebratory lunch at the venerable Old Ebbitt Grill.
     Reservations proved impossible. So we just showed up, and were told the wait was 45 minutes. Parking ourselves at the bar, we ordered drinks. My wife requested an ice tea.
     "I'll get it," said a manager at the end of the bar who overheard the order. That struck me as unusual, like a company vice president stepping out of his office to mop the floor.
     "Let me comment on that," said Melman, when I described the scene. "I think very small. And that's how we got big. You're probably dealing with the manager in charge of the bar. In busy times, they have key people watching over whatever is going on. There might be another manager watching the dining room. Another manager watching over the kitchen. It's like a great shortstop/second base combination. You know what to expect. You know each other's moves."
     Why do some restaurants work and others don't?
     "I think it would be called restaurant leadership," Melman said. "There's got to be somebody who has the passion and the knowledge and the stick-to-it-ness to make something work. That becomes the culture of the organization. What impressed you is how the team works. There is a lot of teamwork in a good restaurant. Covering for one another."
     Speaking of teams, I haven't mentioned the astounding part. I order the Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.
     The chop shows up, a thick, 16-ouncer. A thing of beauty. I reach for my phone — dead after a morning snapping photos. Sure, I could have used my wife's phone. But I had more pressing things to do, like digging into that pork chop.
     Regret came later. How could I write about this spectacular pork chop and the organization serving it up without a photo of the pork chop in question? I considered going back the next day and ordering the chop again. But that's seemed nuts.
     So I did a Hail Mary, and called Clyde's Restaurant Group, which runs Old Ebbitt. Did they happen to have a photo of their pork chop?

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'The busy bee hath no time for sorrow'

Bob Israel

     We are the architects of our own happiness. Or sorrow. I think we forget that. It's too easy to offload responsibility for our lives onto fate, circumstance, others. To sit on your hands and complain. If you don't like what's going on right now, get busy and change it.
     I'm thinking of Monday morning. I'd been working for a couple hours, but hit a wall. It was about 9:45 a.m. I looked up, a little stunned, to find myself sitting at a desk, writing stuff. How did this happen? This is where working in a place with other people would be helpful. You could get up, get coffee, wander over and talk to one of those other people.
     But I work alone. I groped to think of someone to call, but came up empty.
     Drifting over to Facebook — which gets a bad reputation, but definitely has its uses — I noticed Bob Israel, a Northbrook trustee I'd met once after a recent village board meeting. He'd posted a photo of himself in a beekeeper's mask. Plus a trio of honey jars with homemade labels.

     "I have honey — I’m home today," he wrote. "Does anyone want to stop by and pick up a jar (or three)?"
     Posted 11 minutes earlier.
     Why the heck not?

     I grabbed $15 and the car keys. Google Maps told me Bob and his hives were a five minute drive or ... a 10 minute bike ride. I hopped on the old Schwinn. Always choose the more strenuous option. Riding a bike helps.
     Bob has several hives and about 125,000 bees in his back yard. He's been keeping bees for about five years.
     "The neighbors were initially freaked out," he said. "But then they realized their gardens have been better than ever. One of my neighbors took out all his grass and put in flowers."
     That's true — he'd replaced a section of back lawn with bee balm, daisies and other bee friendly flowers, a gorgeous tableau.

     "I started keeping bees because of my concerns about the environment and desire to be more restorative than destructive," he said. "As I took classes and started to learn more about the bee's social structures and began working with the bees, I found it to be both mind-calming and to benefit the flora in my neighborhood — so, effectively my reward is found in a bit of clearing of my mind and a multitude of blooming flowers.

     I stood before the hives, admiring them, and Bob directed me off to the right, "out of their flight path." There being nothing flowery about myself, the bees ignored me entirely, as they did Layla, Bob's dog, who practically was jamming her nose into the swarm.

     My admiration for bees was sparked in part by Virgil's Georgics, which includes a parody of battles in Iliad, fought by bees, whom he calls "stout warriors in their waxen kingdoms."

     Bob refers to his bees as "the girls," which I liked very much. I told him I knew this is correct gendering, as most bees in a hive are female.

     "There's some drones," he said.

     After 10 or 15 minutes I paid $15 for a pound of honey — the money goes to a worthy charity. Bob wrapped it carefully in a sheet of styrofoam, I put it in my bike basket and donned my helmet. A car pulled into the driveway and a man stepped out.

     "If you're here for honey, you've come to the right place," I said, and rode away.

     The sunny, summery morning certainly looked better than it had less than an hour earlier. I got back to the house, broke out the honey and dipped a spoon in. It tasted excellent: fresh and light. A reminder: the sweetness is always out there, waiting. Sometimes you have to get off your duff and go find it, that's all.

     If you too are in bicycle distance, and want to arrange a honey pick up, you can contact Beekeeper Bob at bobisrael@sbcglobal.net

"Stout warriors in their waxen kingdoms."

If you don't get this app, this dog might die

Kitty

     A dog cannot clear its throat, exactly. What Kitty, our little 15-year-old Shichon, does each morning is appear at my bedside about 6 a.m. and emit a low grumbling sound. My cue to get up, get dressed, pop in earbuds and take her for a walk.
     Center Avenue is empty at that hour. Tree-lined, nice houses. You'd think the pleasant vista of leafy suburban comfort, set to my favorite tunes, would put me in maximum good spirits.

      And it does, to the degree that anything can. Yet, after we return home, the first thing I do is fill her water bowl to the brim, thinking, "I want her to have plenty to drink in case we drop dead and nobody notices for days."
     A grim thought. And a rather improbable one — I mean, yes, people our age, mid-60s, do die abruptly. But the odds of both my wife and me  expiring at the same moment are slim. How would that even happen? An awful coincidence, perhaps. She steps in front of some idiot on an electric scooter blasting down a Loop sidewalk at the same moment I stumble headlong down the stairs at home.
     Morbid stuff. Where did that dog-dying-neglected thought even come from? I'd like to blame Gene Hackman — he and his wife died in February, unnoticed for over a week, and one of their dogs perished in a crate, horribly. But I was having this thought long before.
     Looking for relief, I wondered if there might not be some internet gizmo that will sound the alarm if you don't check in.
     Snug Safety is a cheerful, well-designed little app that sends a text every day at a set time with a big green button to tap. Fail to tap, and it alerts an emergency contact. Hit the button, and you're rewarded with an affirmative little quote.
     You can pay — $199.99 for a year, $19.99 for a month — for access to a human dispatcher. But the basic service is free.
      Every day, a big green button. Then the quote. First day:
     "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men." — Herman Melville

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If the headline rings a bell, yes, it is
an homage to this classic National 
Lampoon cover.

Nothing here to see

U.S.A. Flag, by Claes Oldenburg (National Gallery of Art)

     Once we get into the practice of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     I've said that before. But it bears repeating.
    Donald Trump's mind is a guarded by a kind of mental gate where praise is welcomed with wild cries of delight and criticism is loudly rejected. Real, unreal, is not an issue. He has created his own reality where glory — whether true or not — is greedily accepted, assuming it wasn't generated himself, while criticism is dismissed as fantasy.  Those are the rules.
    Somehow, this mindset of delusion and self-puffery was embraced by half the country, and tens of millions live by it still. Our nation spent a decade, more or less, sprawled before one deeply unfit man, serving his ego. With no end in sight.
     So when this sordid Epstein saga — which clearly Trump has always been a part of, because that's who he is — flared up again, I was sincerely bewildered. What's new here? The only thing different is that some of Trump's followers have had their faces to the ground for so long they don't seem to realize that a frank assessment of the Epstein crimes would tar their guy even more than he already is. More slime on a man dripping with it. 
    Or would tar him, if they cared about that kind of thing. Which they don't. On this Donald Trump and I seem to agree. We both don't think it matters — except, in his case, he believes that's a good thing.

You never actually own a City Council seat, you merely look after it for the next generation

 

Created with ChatGPT

   The bad news is that I'm stepping down. The good news is that my son, Neil Steinberg Jr., will be taking over this space. So it'll still be Neil Steinberg writing this. It just won't be me.
     I know what you're thinking: "But this Neil Junior" — I call him Sport — "is he any good?' Will he similarly hold us captive with his biting wit and hard-hitting journalism? It isn't as if writing well is a heritable trait, like my green eyes or wide feet.
     OK, OK ... the above is untrue, mostly, except for the lack of a column-writing chromosome. I'm sticking around. And as pompous as I can be, I didn't name either of my sons after myself — Jews don't generally do that. Neither of my boys feels it worth his super-valuable, billable-by-the-1/10th-hour time to regularly read my column, never mind consider taking a pay cut to write it.
     What inspired the above is Fran Spielman's Friday article on Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) wanting to bestow his City Council seat upon his 29-year-old namesake.
     "Don't judge him based on him being my son," said Burnett, pere, as if there were any other reason the lad is being finessed into City Hall. "Judge him based on what he can bring to the table ..."
     He went on at length to extol his son's many excellent qualities. I don't fault him for that. I'm a big fan of my kids, too. I just wouldn't have the chutzpah to try to hand one my job as if it were my wedding china. Not that he'd want that either.
     You know who never says a peep in Fran's story? Despite being invited to do so by the dean of City Hall reporters.
     That's right, Walter Redmond Burnett, the alderperson-in-waiting. The man can speak, correct?
     I know he can because Block Club recently cornered him at a coffee shop, where he addressed such crucial matters as what he likes to be called — "Red" — and why this isn't yet another case of, in Block Club's words, "classic Chicago nepotism." The story also mentions, in the 14th paragraph, that Burnett the Younger spent "almost a decade in New York" as an investment banker.

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Judgment call

Mrs. George Swinton,by John Singer Sargent
(Art Institute of Chicago)

     My wife works in the Loop on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and usually comes down to the kitchen to get her lunch together about 7:30 a.m., while I'm sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and scanning the papers — okay, pretending to read the paper and drink coffee, actually just lingering, there simply to enjoy the pleasure of her company before she vanishes for the next 10 and a half hours.
    On this particular day, this past week, she was wearing white linen pants, a robin's egg blue knit top, and a sort of a shirt-jacket that brought the blue and the white together. A very soigné ensemble. I thought of taking a photo; then thought better, and didn't. A private person, she.
    As much as I like to use the word soigné — French, for "elegant, put together" — I did not say that. What I did say was, "You look very summery ..."
      The next thought came to me, and I manfully resisted it for a fraction of a second, then gave in to the inevitable, adding, "...if you will forgive a summery judgment."

      We both froze a moment. 
     A pun, for you non-lawyers, on "summary judgment," when a party asks the judge to, in essence, decide a case before it goes to trial, based on some aspect of the facts and the law. 
     Yes, she groaned. But it was a good groan. A groan of appreciation. Or so I tell myself. 

'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 accurate. 
     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 is 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 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.

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"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.