Flashback 2010 — Notice: This is not a column about a dog

Kitty, August, 2010

   

     Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis died this week. While I certainly did my share of holding up the bar at the Goat, I never wrote about it, or him, much — someone else did that. My relationship with Sam was a distant one. I did check the archive to see what I had written about him, and he makes a cameo in this column which is too much fun not to share, and also explains why I avoided Sianis and his bar, as a topic if not as a watering hole.

     My younger kid nailed his bar mitzvah last week -- really nailed it; letter perfect, no muss, no fuss, no heavy lifting, out of the park on the first swing, chugging around the bases, doffing his cap.
     He did so well that I bypassed the several days of foot-dragging and delay that I would typically enjoy before doing something that I absolutely did not want to do, and instead took him directly, two hours after the luncheon ended, to pick up his bar mitzvah present: a new puppy.
     The first half dozen or so colleagues to whom I mentioned our new household addition — 2 months old, cute as hell — all said a version of the same thing: "You must write about this!"
     To which I answered, in ruffled indignation, that I certainly was not going to write about the dog, that I would never write about the dog, because my colleague Mark Brown has already laid claim to all matters canine, and that if I started doing so as well, not only would I be poaching on his preserve, but there would then be two columnists at the paper exploring the world of dogs, and that was one too many.
     (Writers can be odd that way. I am certain that, were I to find myself sitting on the white paper strip in a physician's office, and the doctor were to somberly inform me that, he's sorry, but I have a dire illness, my very first thought, before any personal woes sunk in, would be a frantic: And I can't even write about this, because Roger Ebert already has. Roger planted his flag on that frosty pole, and anything I might add on the subject would be merely derivative, like someone hanging out at the Billy Goat and writing about Sam Sianis as if Mike Royko never existed).
     So this column is not about the dog.
     I guess it's about me.
     See, I never wanted a dog, I see now, because I was completely unfamiliar with dogs. We never had any growing up, nor did my father, nor his, nor, as far as I can tell, any Steinberg going back to bondage in Egypt. I disliked dogs. They bark. They smell like dogs. They lick you. If you took every minute I've spent within a yard of a dog in my entire life and added them up, you wouldn't have been able to fill an hour.
     What happened? As much as I was dead-set against dogs, there are other people in my life beside myself and — surprise, surprise — they can be just as stubborn and mulish as I am, if not more. My younger son wanted a dog as much as I didn't want one, and wheedled and noodged me for a dog for about the past year, then saw his opportunity and pounced. He quite cannily seized upon the chance offered by his bar mitzvah — a big accomplishment, requiring mastery of ancient Hebrew — as a lever he could use.
     He was right. As much as I was set against dogs, I was even more reluctant to be the Dad Who Didn't Get His Son A Dog, Not Even For His Bar Mitzvah.
     He found this puppy online — I've had more than a few gimlet-eyed PETA sorts ask me where the dog is from, not in a friendly, curious way, but in a leering, gotcha mode, to see if the source of our dog passes the moral purity test. Let's put it this way — we've gotten five cats from shelters, so we did our share, and if you need to know exactly where this dog's from, OK: I run an animal-testing lab as a hobby, squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of puppies to see how they react, and this one was an extra. Satisfied now?
     Anyway, this puppy belongs to the boy, but she really, really likes me, for some unfathomable reason, and when I come home she goes crazy, doing backflips, spinning around, her tongue lolling out. She runs up to me, and I lean down to pet her, and next thing you know I'm rolling on the floor, giggling as she licks my face.
     My family, of course, is horrified.
     "Stop it!" my older son, who has become quite the fussbudget at 14, commanded. "You hate all creatures, big and small."
     Not anymore. I am born again in dog heaven. Having sworn I'd never take care of the dog, I now stand happily at 3 a.m. outside in the rain as she does her thing.
     But what amazes me — what allows me, just this once, to poach on Brown's turf — is recognizing what has happened here.
      I was against a certain class of individuals — in this case dogs — of whom I was completely ignorant, based on my preconceived notions of what they might be like and my fear of being inconvenienced.
     And then I met a specific member of this class, this bichon/shih tzu pup which my boy has named, delightfully, "Kitty."
     Now I'm a different man. A dog person.
     Is there not a moral here? People are not dogs, but the mechanism is the same. Much of our national discourse in this shameful historic moment has to do with groups of people dismissing other groups, based on fear, based on nothing, keeping them at a distance and missing out.
     If only they could set aside their fear and get to know a few individuals in the class that so disconcerts them. They might be in for a big surprise. I was.
     — Originally published Sept. 5, 2010

Prank

 

     I went downstairs to walk the dog, turned right on Greenwood, and meandered. The night was warm, soft, lovely.
     I should say I was in Hyde Park — it wasn't my dog, but my son's. Not my home, but his, and his wife's. They were, ah, busy elsewhere and, in my full service dad mode, I'd volunteered to go walk the dog.
     No hardship. A perfect night. Gorgeous stone mansions lined the street. Why doesn't anyone even try to build these anymore? Mature trees — do I call Northbrook "the leafy suburban paradise"? Hyde Park makes Northbrook look like Nebraska.
     At 50th Street I passed the above sign. Obama's block. Odd, I thought, walking on, that they'd cut off traffic for him — he's hardly ever there. I wonder if the residents resent it. They must. Past 50th, a second sign. I took a closer look. Oh. The "P" was taped on. A college prank, probably. And I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. You'd think, having written a book on college pranks myself, I wouldn't be taken in so easily. No shame there. We are all duped now and then. This at least is clever, and harmless. Without effect, except to draw a smile. And when was the last time something presidential did that?

Has Facebook begun the long slide toward ruin?

Breuget's electrical telegraph machine (Cabinet of Physics, University of Coimbra)

    Here's an odd coincidence. On Friday, I grabbed the post from 10 years ago and it, too, decried the crappification of Facebook. So maybe the habit won't be so easy to break after all. 

    So another grandchild, born this week — maybe to me, maybe to somebody else. Who can say? I really shouldn’t be more specific than that.
     Certainly no word of the news, if there is any news, breathed on Facebook. I ... or, um, another person very much like myself ... would sooner sell a child to the circus than post its photos, or any identifying details, on any sort of social media. As for what the potential harm of that could be, beyond strong and immediate rebuke, I’m afraid to ask. Maybe X snatches their images and does unspeakable things with them.
     As it is my ... well, somebody’s ... adult children view Facebook the way I, when young, would look at my grandfather’s dentures falling into the soup: as an embarrassing lapse of age. Worse. It’s like yanking the dentures out of your own mouth and flinging them into the soup, with pride. Not an accident, an intention.
     Facebook is no longer hip, or the bomb, or dope, or fire, or whatever the current term for coolness might be. “Slow death” is the phrase encountered online. The young might have an account, allowing Facebook to pretend it’s reaching the sweet spot demographic. But the 20-somethings I know never use it and mock those who do. The cracks are starting to show. On May 20, Meta, the parent of Facebook, is laying off 8,000 workers — 10% of its workforce. Last week, The New York Times, in an opinion piece, declared Meta “at the start of a long, slow decline.”
     The plan is that artificial intelligence will do the jobs of the freshly fired, even though AI is part of what’s wrecking Facebook, all those blocks of regurgitated history lite and random pop culture factoids. And that rash of ads. God forbid you buy shoes, as I have. Facebook will dangle the shoes you just bought under your nose for a month, hoping you’ll buy a second pair. And this is the super-intelligence that would rule us.
     I have to admit, I’m kind of savoring the Facebook riffs, being myself lashed to an oar in the old world, pulp-based, legacy media. It’s like when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I winked at the Book Bin and other independent bookstores which survived the era when giant bookstores roamed the earth, hardy voles, gazing out from their safe nooks, watching the dinosaurs bellow and die.

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"How does it feel to be a minority?"

     "You're not gay, right?" said my neighbor at a table in the Hilton ballroom, packed for the annual American Civil Liberties Union Illinois luncheon in late April.

     Busted. Is it really that noticeable? Do I radiate a certain straightness? At the moment, perhaps, in my way butch blue Lauren blazer with gold buttons. But he should see me fussing over my little dog; I'm like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." And I do love Judy Garland, live at Carnegie Hall.
     Still, I admitted he had me dead to rights. 
     "Guilty as charged," I said, or words to that effect.
     "You're the only person at the table who isn't gay ..." he continued. I had been invited by a gay lawyer's association, which, apparently, you have to be a gay lawyer to join. Funny. I've been to the local Council on American Islamic Relations office — not everyone there is Muslim.

     "...how does it feel to be in a minority?" he asked.

     "I'm Jewish," I replied, immediately and perhaps with more asperity than I intended. The I'm in a minority everywhere I go that isn't a synagogue or Israel was unvoiced. He let this comment pass unanswered — perhaps I had just admitted something disreputable. Jews had their minority status card revoked long ago. We're white, though all the privileges pursuant to whiteness — the right to run a country, for instance, or worship without people showing up suddenly to kill us — doesn't seem to go with it. Honorary whites, for the purpose of criticism only. 

     Jews don't bask in the highest esteem in a good year, and this isn't a good year for Judaism. Lately we've been suffering a bad time, between Israel deciding to push the brute force approach to its limits, prompting college sophomores to embrace what strikes them as simple truth: The Jews don't belong wherever they happen to be! An insight the Germans hit upon long ago, to their eventual sorrow. Five hundred years didn't plant us in Nuremberg, why should 2,500, 0r 25,000 for that matter, give us claim to Jerusalem? Not when people who have never set foot there have their heart set on it.

     Had I been thinking, I'd have leaned forward, made intense eye contact, smiled my toothiest, and confided in a Peter Lorre voice, "It's the killing of children and drinking their blood part that I like best..."

     "Well," he continued, circling back to his original conversational gambit. "Nobody can really say they aren't gay, just that they aren't gay yet."

     Ah. I chewed on this a moment. It's almost as if he were  ... nah, that doesn't happen. To me. Anymore.

     "Well, I'm 65," I said, arranging my thoughts into audible order. "I'm certainly taking my sweet time about it."

     He said that he himself had had a few kids before he saw the light, and ... well, I should probably not be too specific. Don't want to embarrass anyone. And in truth, I wasn't embarrassed, or offended, or even miffed. Just ... sort of ... puzzled. That's it. Puzzled. It was an odd conversation to take a train ride for 45 minutes, then walk for half an hour, in order to hold. But I had been invited, an invitation turned down the past few years, but this year thought, heck, let's get out there in the public. But now I was, in public, enjoying the company of people other than myself, well, let's say it was an endorsement of solitude if ever there were. 

     The program began and we fell silent. The speaker, NYU Law's Melissa Murray, was very good, and I'll try to type up her remarks and run them when the Supreme Court lurches back into the news, which happens every other day, it seems.

     Fun had, chicken consumed, remarks recorded, I was the first person at the table to stand up and leave, even while the program was still going on, thanking my seat mate for his conversation and my host for inviting me, pumping his hand, the first words we'd exchanged. I threaded my way around the tables, walked briskly out of the Hilton, up Michigan Avenue, and to Union Station making the 1:33 Metra Milwaukee North with five minutes to spare. 

From garbage into the stuff of history, a trove is donated to the Newberry from Illinois poet

Marc Kelly Smith, left, and Alison Hinderliter at the Newberry Library.

     Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home in Savanna, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to the Newberry Library on the Near North Side, to deliver piles of paper that could be easily mistaken for garbage, even by their owner.
     “I would have the tendency to throw it all out,” said Smith.
     Flyers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker’s box and a paper shopping bag.
     “There’s some good stuff in here,” says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s manuscripts and archives librarian.
     The box is labeled “SLAM MEMORABILIA,” reflecting Smith’s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry — the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer — took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.
     As the ephemera rolled on a library cart, it moved from detritus intended to be stapled to a telephone pole then melt in the rain, into the stuff of history, carefully preserved by curators in white cotton gloves, to be — perhaps — joyously discovered someday by future scholars.

     “I’m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,” said Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. “I think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests — in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don’t know who’s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they’ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past — it’s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.”

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Flashback 2007: "Wives think their husbands are stupid"

     

     Before I decided to run a pair of series, metaphors and food, while I was on vacation, I pulled a few chestnuts from the archive, thinking they would serve. Though unneeded, this one is too fun not to share.  I would hesitate to say whether I'm considered more or less stupid now than in 2007. Let's just say, I'm smart enough not to ask.

     Wives think their husbands are stupid. They have to. It's the modern way. If you're a married woman, just try saying to a female friend: "You know my husband, he's so smart. I think he's a genius."Just try. You can't, can you? Not with a straight face. Probably not at all. Your mouth won't form the words — it's as if I asked you to fire off some twisting bit of Gaelic: Is e do bhaile do chaislean.*
     My wife certainly thinks I'm an idiot. Of course, she'll deny it — I can hear her, reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, denying it to the cats, "I do not!" But you do, honey. Remember the light fixtures?
     The light fixtures in our boys' bedrooms? They were plastic — milky white inverted ziggurats from Menard's. Not elegant, but they withstood years of onslaught by flung balls and hacked light sabers and thrown stuffed animals.
     Until they didn't, until they cracked, eventually, then broke apart, beyond repair, in both rooms. I'd like to say that the boys endured the uncovered light bulbs for a year, a not-at-all-pleasant bus-station-at-3-a.m. effect. But it might have been two years. Tempus fugit.
     Eventually we bought new light fixtures — glass, vaguely breastlike affairs with an air of the 1890s — something that fits in with our ancient house. The boxes sat in the guest room for — I don't know — three months. Maybe six. Nine, tops. Waiting for my wife to call an electrician to put them up. I can do things around the house, but draw the line at electricity because Electricity Can Kill You.
     Eventually the sight of the boys in their rooms, squinting at their books under the harsh interrogation blaze of unshielded lights, overwhelmed my caution. I waited until my wife was out, then went about my task.
     Installing a light fixture is not as difficult as I imagined — you unscrew the old one, disconnect the wires, hook up the new one, then screw it in. They looked quite nice, blazing away.
     I could barely wait to show off my handiwork. My wife returned, and I ushered her upstairs. She regarded the new lights.
     "WELL, I HOPE YOU TURNED OFF THE ELECTRICITY!!!!" she cried, with alarm and a hint of rebuke. I was taken aback.
     "If I didn't turn off the electricity," I answered, through gritted teeth, "I'd already be dead."
     Yes, I suppose there are people each year who buy the ranch by working on wiring without first cutting the power. And no, I am not mocking the loss of your uncle, or father, or husband, nor suggesting he is a moron. Tragedies happen.
     But I am right now looking at the instruction sheet for the fixtures. The very first words are: "WARNING: BE SURE THE ELECTRICITY TO THE WIRES YOU ARE WORKING ON ARE SHUT OFF. . . ."
     So not shutting the power off must be an issue . . . there must be people, men, supposedly, husbands, one assumes, who go at copper wires with metal implements while the wires are still hot.
     Maybe the low opinion that wives have of their husbands is not without justification. But jeez, honey. I went to college. I know to cut the power. Give me just a little credit.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 18, 2007

* "Your home is your castle." I can't believe I printed that, untranslated. Maybe I AM stupid.

Neither arches nor ballrooms do greatness make

 Rua Augusta Arch in Lisbon, about 40 percent shorter than the arch planned for Washington.

     It was good to take a couple weeks off. But it's also good to be back — thank you for your forbearance. 

     Column writing is a kind of gearbox. It isn't always engaged. But when my mind shifts into column-writing mode, I can almost hear the process grind to life. As it did, almost unbidden, while touring the Pena Palace in Sintra — which doesn't actually appear in this column. Nor do I address the initial question that first came to mind: when people come from all over the world, at great bother and expense, to wander these opulent halls, what is it they're trying to touch? The concept of royalty did remain, which I used to consider our present circumstance.

     PORTO, Portugal — What do you think of when you think of Portugal?
     When my wife first suggested visiting here, I drew a complete blank. No associations whatsoever. Not a single destination — just the opposite. I knew Lisbon was destroyed by a huge earthquake in 1755, but only because the catastrophe darkens Dr. Pangloss's sunny mood in Voltaire's "Candide."
     Otherwise, my gut told me Portugal is a kind of low rent Spain. Still, I agreed to go because, as I've said before, if I didn't take my wife's lead, I'd still be a single guy living in a one-bedroom apartment in Oak Park.
     I went expecting nothing. Certainly not the jaw-dropping procession of palaces, castles and mansions we've just finished touring, each an endless warren of elaborate rooms crammed with crystal chandeliers and gilded opulence, oil paintings of royals dripping in ermine robes and bejeweled bling. Look up, and the ceilings were crammed with cherubim and angels and Greek gods smiling down.
     As I listened to tour guides gravely explain which royal posterior graced which dynastic throne, who begot whom and which king built what architectural folly, I couldn't help but consider that I was seeing the other side of the tunnel my own country is currently plunging into, as the United States slides into monarchy.
     Do I exaggerate? Has our leader not declared himself God's chosen vessel? ("I am the Chosen One" were his exact words). Have the customary checks and balances — Congress, the courts, the rule of law — been subdued? Is not voting, the traditional method that American citizens use to show they hold power over their leaders and not the other way round, being undercut?
     Is our leader not furiously impressing his image on nearly every flat surface he can find? From passports to National Parks passes, and soon to be grimacing from coinage, a flex going back to Nero.
     Think of all the effort expended on that White House ballroom. Half a dozen ballrooms in Portugal dwarf the one occupying far more time than a man trying to manage a war that refuses to cooperate with his pronouncements ought to spend. Not to forget the planned Triumphal Arch, to be 50% taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
     They've got a big arch in Lisbon, too, the Rua Augusta Arch. Still, a mere slip of a structure — 100 feet tall — compared to the 250-foot behemoth some are already calling the Arch of Trump. The Rua Augusta Arch offers a warning, if anyone is in the learn-from-history business anymore.
     The arch was begun after the aforementioned earthquake of 1755, intended to celebrate the rebirth of the city. But they were celebrating something that hadn't happened yet; the arch wasn't finished until 1873. At a similar rate, Trump's arch will top out in 2144. If you're sick of hearing about that ballroom now, imagine how you'll feel midway through his third term. Or his son's first term. These kings, they like to keep power in the family.

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                Not even royal: the Commercial Association of Porto's Palácio da Bolsa.

Mother's Day, 2026

     This is the first Mother's Day since my mother passed away. In the last few years before she died, I spent a long time talking to her about her life, and began to write about it for an unpublished project.

     "I was a beautiful child," my mother recalled. "My mother entered me in Shirley Temple contests."    

     That she did. A suspiciously large quantity of 8 x 10 studio portraits exist of my mother as a baby and toddler, her blonde hair in fat ringlets. More than even the proudest parent would commission, too large to ship safely to Poland; snapshots tucked into letters are cheaper and more practical. On the back of one, the remnants of a label from a "Beautiful Baby Contest," half scraped off 

     A reminder. We consider the current subhell of influencers, all those 11-year-old girls solemnly unboxing packages of eyebrow sparkle for their budding YouTube channels, as a particularly modern deformation of the once-innocent childhood experience. It's not. In the 1930s, ambitious parents wanted their children to be movie stars. Not just Shirley Temple, the apex, but Deanne Durbin and Mickey Rooney, not to forget Jackie Cooper, Dickie Moore, Darla Hood, and other "Our Gang" stars. Plus countless lesser lights, including local radio personalities in every major city. Feeding this dream were acting classes, dance studios, singing lessons, piano teachers. They even managed to monetize being smart; the "Quiz Kids" radio show began in 1940 and ran for 16 years.  

     My grandmother was a member of the Jewish Singing Society, and my mother took a cue from her.

     "I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree," she sang, at 10 years old, the Joyce Kilmer poem set to music, her debut performance, at a Sunday school run by the Jewish Bureau of Education. 

     "I loved to be in front of audience and my passion was to perform," she wrote, years later. She joined the Cain Park Theater and began, by age 13, to enter radio singing contests. Grandpa Irv paid $10 to have a 78 rpm record cut of her competing on a radio competition. "Big Broadcast" written on the label in a careful hand. "March 17, 1950." St. Patrick's Day. 

     Nowadays we record everything and drown in unexamined documentation. But this 78 seems a precious few minutes improbably preserved from the deep past, captured, rescued, scooped out of the torrent of events and set aside in a china teacup outside of time. 

      A blaze of static, then: 

      "Act No. 6. A charming young lady. How old are you? 

      "Thirteen," she says, in a piping baby doll voice. 

      "Thirteen! A great big girl now," the host exudes. "A blonde. She has a brilliant flame red dress on. Her name is June Bramson. Where do you live June? " 

      "3161 East Derbyshire Road." 

      "June is going to sing. Have you ever taken any lessons?" 

      "No," she says, almost pouting. Listening to it, hearing her childish voice, it strikes me: at 13, she'll meet my father in less than five years; marry him in a little more than six, and I'll be born, 10 years and three months after this broadcast.

     "Those are cute gloves," the host says.  "What do you do with those? Make music with them?" 

      There's something almost forward in that question, "What do you do with those?" She doesn't answer. The host pushes on.

      "June, what do you want to sing for us tonight?" 

      "'There's No Tomorrow.'" 

      "That used to be 'O Sole Mio.'" 

      "An Italian song," my future mother agrees. 

     The studio piano plinks to life. "Love is a flowwwwwwer, that blooms so tennnnnnder…" she begins, a throb in her voice, occasionally going a bit flat on "tomorrow." The thick one-sided record was carefully shelved for nearly 75 years, salvaged by me, safely tucked in a record album of Al Jolson 78s — back when albums had pages of sleeves, like a photo album. In 2025, I have it digitized at the library next door and play it for my mother in her assisted living facility in Addison. 

     She sits in her wheelchair, head cocked, listening carefully. The song ends. The studio audience not only claps, but cheers. My mother doesn't share their enthusiasm. 

     "I never won," she says, flatly. "I didn't win. I should have picked a better song. 'Goody Goody' would have been better. Something with more pep." 

     "I never won." That seems very telling. My kind wants so badly to win, it makes not winning burn, and we remember the bad part. The good part — I sang on the radio, I wore a flame red dress, my father paid $10 to record my voice at a time when a quart of milk cost a quarter — doesn't register. Then again, I just pointed out that my 13-year-old mother sang flat. So I'm reporting on a tendency while simultaneously suffering from it. If indeed that is a liability. I like to think of it as candor. When putting the shiniest gloss you can on yourself and everything you do is practically an American folk ailment, pointing out the flaws in life becomes a patriotic duty.

D'oh, nuts!

    Fate has a way of upbraiding you.
    If you remember EGD's most recent guest post, a week ago Sunday, a friend related a terrible experience with Dunkin'' Donuts at Midway Airport — service so bad that at least one reader doubted it could be true. It was.

     In my little introductory paragraph, I really laid into Dunkin' Donuts. "Never eat at a Dunkin' Donuts for any reason whatsoever," I urged.

     Though I felt guilty about it. My condemnation was based purely on thinking their donuts are not worth putting in your mouth. I wouldn't do it, and I'd eat a Circus Peanut. Even as I applied the lash, I remembered those many long ago mornings in my early 20s when I'd look forward to breakfast consisting of a pair of Dunkin' muffins in a waxy paper bag and a cup of coffee as I made the drive from Oak Park to my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal.  A bran muffin for the main meal and a chocolate chip muffin for dessert. They were good company in my dead grandmother's dinky blue Chevy Citation. Peeling off chunks of the muffin top, the shiny, dense, best part, life seemed to hold promise.

     Maybe they were sweet and awful and I just didn't know any better. But I still liked them.

     The day that post ran — garnering twice the readership of anything I wrote the previous week (heck might as well say it — earning better stats than anything I wrote all month) — I found myself at O'Hare with my wife, heading out on the trip that we are now returning from (apologies to readers whose comments I didn't post. "AHA! You're on VACATION! You're OUT OF TOWN, not CURRENTLY RESIDING IN YOUR HOUSE IN NORTHBROOK. Which is now EMPTY..." My wife doesn't like me to post that on the blog. People are crazy. Things happen).

     My wife isn't crazy. She is sensible, and eats good food. Sitting there by the gate, she wanted something not in our store of foodstuffs. She wanted a banana. Knowing I was at an airport where prices are insane, I asked, before setting out in search, what the most I should spend on her banana. 

    "It could be five dollars," I warned.

     "Two dollars," she said, sensible. In a supermarket, a banana costs about 19 cents.
     I dutifully toddled over to a nearby market sort of place, with sandwiches and cheese sticks and such. Insane prices. $12 for a modest bag of candy. And no bananas. Nearby was a Dunkin' which had — and you see this coming, right? — a bowl of big, yellow, unblemished, perfectly ripe, bananas.  Price — $1.10 apiece.
    So Dunkin', which I had keelhauled that very day, was offering the cheapest, best foodstuff for sale at O'Hare, not that I did a survey. Having advised others to never patronize the place, I was patronizing it myself. Touché, fate.

     Walking back to the gate, I couldn't resist tucking the banana into my fleece pocket, so that one end poked out.
     I walked up to my wife.
     "Say it," I instructed.
     She smiled, instantly understanding.
     "Is that a banana in your pocket," she said "Or are you just happy to see me?"
     "Both," I said.
     She took the banana.
      "I was going to say it even before you asked," she said.

     My friend, by the way, said that Dunkin' Donuts did apologize to her for their abysmal service, without so much as offering her a gift certificate, not that shed' patronize them again. I would. But only for bananas.
     

Foods I love #5: Bolo de cenoura

      Carrots and I go way back. To the days when my mother would serve frozen peas and carrots and I would instinctively go for the orange cubes. Who wouldn't? The peas were mushy and green and gross and I hated them. But the carrots — bright, sweet, and encouraging.
      Later they were crinkle cut and, even better, roasted. Glazed with brown sugar at Thanksgiving.

     Carrots are root vegetables, meaning they grow underground. But compare them with their cousin, the potato. Tubers are big brown lumps of mundanity that must be enlivened by ketchup or sour cream or cheese. Carrots are slimmer, sexier, yet harder to find, as if the great mass food manufacturers can't be bothered coping with their complexities. Carrots are more colorful, more exciting, yet it is potatoes that McDonald's fries in enormous quantities, some nine million tons a day, worldwide. Mickey D's only sells carrot sticks in a few niche markets, like Ireland. 

     To be honest, I am not a fan of carrots in their raw form. I will eat them, and even enjoy them if you heap enough humus on one end. But a carrot stick is work, crunchy in a bad way, grainy in the mouth.

     But what wonders can be done with them with the application of heat, ingenuity and fat.
     When my wife and I got married in 1990, my sole contribution to the wedding dinner menu was to suggest we start with cream of carrot soup with ginger. I've ordered many a main course simply because it came with carrots.  One River North eatery served a carrot salad, with pine nuts that drew me in regularly. Then it was gone. I complained, and after the waiter explained that carrots were not in season, I objected. "They sit in cellars for months," I believe were my exact words, and didn't go back for years. A head of lettuce will last three weeks in the fridge; a fresh carrot will be good for three months.

     I can't say I am always on the look-out for carrots — that would lead to too much disappointment. They're that rare. But carrots have a way of finding me.
     Earlier this week, at the excellent Padaria Ribeiro bakery in Porto, Portugal, my attention was drawn to dense orange triangles, covered with chocolate sprinkles. 
     "What are those, sweet potato?" I asked, tapping on the glass case.
     "No, carrot," the clerk said. That focused my attention like a star flare. The magic word. I ordered one, with coffee Americain, and took a seat at one of the little tables outside, watching the university students, in their colorful top hats and canes, parade by.
     English is prevalent in Portugal. But when I went back into the bakery, after we consumed the orange slice in a delirium of pleasure, and asked what it was we had eaten, she said, "bolo de cenoura."  Simply Portuguese for "carrot cake," but this was not like the traditional American carrot cake with cream cheese frosting you'd find at Gibson's. It didn't have pieces of carrots. This was almost more like a pudding. The carrots are pureed. 

      What histories I could find said that the dessert was created in Brazil, Portugal's former colony, in the 1960s, based on American carrot cake, then filtered back to the mother country. 

      To my delight, my wife enjoyed it as much as I did, and immediately found a promising New York Times recipe. Which we will have a chance to whip up now that we are home — today, if all goes well — after our near fortnight in Portugal. I appreciate your patience, with last week's metaphor series and this week's favorite food series. They were fare I could whip up ahead of time and leave sit until it was time for them to be consumed — well, except for this one, pounded out in a guest house room in Porto Tuesday night, with memories of a superlative slice of bolo de cenoura still very fresh in mind. 
      

Food I love #4: Fresh challah

Fresh challah at Masa Madre, a Mexican Jewish bakery in East Garfield Park, now, sadly, defunct.

      True story.
      Once I stopped by Tel Aviv Bakery on Devon Avenue for some ... I don't know what. Hamantaschen maybe. And while I was buying whatever I was there to buy. Could be bagels, though those should really be gotten at New York Bagel on Touhy, I detected a smell, a tantalizing aroma: warm challah, fresh from the oven.
      So I bought one. How could you not? Dense, rich, ever so slightly sweet bread, the crust shiny with egg white. 

     At the car, I put whatever I bought — does it matter? — and began to drive. Proud of myself, thinking of how surprised, and pleased my wife would be with the fresh warm challah that I was thoughtfully bringing home to her.  
     But it's a long drive — say 25 minutes — from Tel Aviv Bakery to our house. And it was late afternoon. A loaf of challah, it's big. A lot for two people. What harm would there be from a pick-me-up, just a hunk of challah, from the end? Yes, it would detract from the complete braided purity of the loaf. But it was just a taste. Surely, she would not begrudge me that.  

     God it was fantastic. If you haven't eaten a chunk of warm challah — and that's the ideal way to eat it. Not sliced; cutting it with a knife commits violence against the bread. Challah is braided, by talking three fat strands of dough and weaving them together, and so pulls apart, naturally, along those original fault lines (and really, how many foodstuffs are braided? A sign this is something special).

      At Sabbath, when the Hamotzi — the prayer over the bread  — is said, the challah is passed around and everybody breaks off a hunk. It might even be a commandment somewhere. I'll have to check.

    So I'm driving, and eating this warm, really superlative challah. Time passes. I'm basically in a fugue state, lost in reverie, communing with the challah, as retrospective as a mollusk. I'm glad I didn't drive into the back of a truck.

     And now I'm home, and I gather up whatever it was I bought — it could have been cookies, I really have no idea. And I pick up the white paper bag with the challah in it. And the bag is weirdly light. Like there isn't an entire loaf in there at all. I look inside. A pathetic heel. That's it. Something had happened to the warm loaf of challah. All that was left was ... a scrap, a remnant I was embarrassed to share with my wife. Though I must have. Frankly, my mind is blank of how that went over. Nature can be kind sometimes. I'd ask her, but I'm too afraid of what she might recall. 
      I'd eaten most of the loaf in the car — I shouldn't feel the need to point that out, but this is also read by people slow on the uptake, and I don't want people writing in say, "So what happened to the bread?" Nor do I need to be told that eating 1,500 calories worth of challah is not a smart move.
      You'll notice that today's subject is not "challah" but "fresh challah." That's because they are really two very different types of food. Challah, regular, not fresh challah, the kind usually sold in grocery stores, can still be good — you can make a sandwich out of it. But fresh challah, no more than a few hours, less than a day at most, from birth is entirely different. Because over time a dryness, a stiffness, a subtle change that is both slight and enormous. 
     The thing to do with un-fresh challah is to make stuffing — I've written about that. Or French toast. Add cinnamon and a cap of vanilla to the egg batter — the vanilla is the secret. I was known for making absolutely nothing in the years my boys were growing up, but challah stuffing and challah French toast.

     I feel almost guilty writing about fresh challah as a favorite food, because I really don't get it enough to qualify. I really should stop by Tel Aviv Bakery more often.

Food I love #3: Hot dog cart dogs

      So here's the question: if the ideal hot dog is charbroiled — and it is — then why would anybody ever want a hot dog that has been floating in hot water for a few hours?
      If you want your bun toasted on the grill — and you do — then why consume a hot dog slapped in a roll that has been steamed over the self-same hot dog water?
     Answer: it's a mystery. You just do. A hot dog cart dog is a gestalt — the boiled dog, the warm moist bun, the cheap mustard, eaten from a sheet of wax paper or, as above, crinkled paper nest, standing up in some strange city.
    That has to be a factor — just as a crowded ballpark ennobles a hot dog in a shiny foil-like wrap that you'd be hesitant to touch, never mind eat, in any other situation, so hot dog cart franks have a built-in romance and a splendor. 

     And rarity. Chicago has virtually no hot dog carts, another mystery, one I delved into 30 years ago, in a column that ran under the way-dull headline, "A New York Tradition we're healthier without." 

     NEW YORK CITY — Within an hour of arriving, my wife and I celebrated our being in Manhattan by sharing a potato knish bought from a cart at 46th Street and Broadway. It was great.
     So, too, were the hot dogs from a metal wagon in front of the Plaza. And the hot, sugared almonds from a nut stand on Fifth Avenue. And the big, salty pretzel purchased minutes later.
     Frankly, we would have gotten more food on the street — falafels, Mister Softees, cream sodas — but we also were eating three meals a day in restaurants. And more. We went directly from dinner at a funky restaurant in the West Village to the city's single outlet for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, a southern institution that has just invaded Gotham to great fanfare.
     I am not ashamed to say that eating a 45-cent original glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut, hot from the oven, was one of the outstanding experiences of my life.
     Well, maybe a little ashamed.
     Food on the street is just one of the many things that makes New York very different from Chicago. Writers are always wringing their hands over loss of diversity. They see the Starbucks and Gaps and Hard Rock Cafes popping up everywhere and conclude that all cities are now all the same and the entire world is merged into one vast Anyplace.
     But this is simply not true. Uniqueness still exists. New York is so different from Chicago that a glance at any 10 feet of storefront is usually enough to tell you which city you're in. Even the garbage cans are different in New York, and they're at curbside because the city doesn't have  many alleys. The little stores are different — New York has its bodegas, with ziggurats of fresh fruit out front. The street signs are different — New York has all those barking signs, "DON'T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE" and this simple, almost lovely one: "Don't Honk."
     In general, New York has a tougher, more armored look — more sliding metal grates, steel doors and security cameras.
     New York certainly sounds different. In Chicago, certain streets are filled with foreign languages — French tourists, Russian and Hispanic immigrants, whatever. But in New York half the time when I overhear foreigners, I can't even figure out what kind of language they are speaking. Again and again I puzzled over some mushy blast of whirling verbiage, all harsh consonants and spittle. What is that? Macedonian? Urdu? Pathan? No clue.
     Since New York drivers don't pull over to let firetrucks pass, the way we do here, they have a lot more of that piercing, pulsing death scream strobed out by emergency vehicles as a desperate last resort.
     Which is perhaps why people stay up all night in New York, packing the streets. In Chicago, we sleep, because we can.
     Lest someone misunderstand, I should stop right here and state, clearly, that I am not praising New York. I have this image of walking by a softball game and hearing somebody yell, "That's him! The guy who likes New York! Get him!" then being chased by 20 big guys waving aluminum bats.
      For the record: Nothing about New York is better than Chicago.
     Different, yes. Particularly those street food vendors. I kept wondering about them. Why so many in New York — four at a street corner, in places — and absolutely none in Chicago?
I took a deep breath and plunged into the bureaucracy.
     "There is no such thing as a hot dog cart with a wash-up sink," explained Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health. "Where does the food handler wash his or her hands?"
     Another city official speculated that a strong Chicago restaurant association had something to do with our lack of food carts. He, of course, didn't want to be named.
      I then wondered, if food vendors are so pestilential here, how do they pass muster in New York?
     Taking two deep breaths, I plunged into New York's Health Department. Spokesman Fred Winters said that New York vendor carts have sinks and running water and precautions are taken.
     "Our vendors use rubber gloves or wax paper," he said.
     Winters couldn't let that bit of naivete float in the air too long, however. He quickly added, "They don't always do it."
     The vendor who sold me a hot dog in New York certainly didn't. I had flinched when he lifted a bun out of the package with his bare hand and used his thumb to split it open. Where had that thumb been? And I flinched again as Chicago's Hadac waxed poetic on the perils of food carts.
     "The person is handling money and currency, which is soiled," he continued. "The person may be shaking hands with someone. And then there is the issue of where does that person go to the bathroom?"
     So why, in his opinion, do they permit them in New York?
     "Maybe this is a quaint tradition," he said. "Maybe if New Yorkers want their hot dogs and sauerkraut they're not going to let anything get in their way."
     "Not going to let anything get in their way" – that's the motto on the city seal of New York, isn't it?
               — Originally published in the Sun-Times Oct. 13, 1996

Food I love #2: Pork chops

     Confession time.
     In the years I regularly patronized Gene & Georgetti with my pals, the check was inevitably picked up by someone else, a Springfield lobbyist type, or law firm partner, or utility bagman, or top Sun-Times editor with a bottomless expense account. Whatever my regular dish, the "Schultz Special," aka filet mignon on a piece of toast, cost — say $35 — was not my concern. Nor the bottles of wine, nor the carrot cake dessert. My problem was getting back home in half decent condition after spending an long afternoon with Steve Neal and Dan Rostenkowski and half a dozen other hale fellows well met. A bar I did not always clear.
     But sometimes, on rare occasions, I would find myself the host of my own lunch at Gene's — thanking a colleague perhaps. And then, knowing the knee-weakening check arriving, eventually, would be my responsibility or, worse, I would have to try to expense it, I would rein in the dogs of appetite. Sometimes I would get their garbage salad — an oval platter piled high with lettuce and cocktail shrimp — or their pork chop.
     A pork chop is both steak lite and a bargain. At Gene's 20 years ago they were $19.99, which seemed less of a gut punch, bill-wise. On the lunch menu now, a petit filet mignon is $67, a double pork chop $38. Twice the food for half the money.
     Much cheaper and honestly, still quite good — a pork chop is the love child between a t-bone steak and a chicken breast. 
     Now that I have diabetes, I run through pork chops. Zero carbs. Zero sugars. Toss a couple on the grill. I'll have them for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, though not all three on the same day. Not yet anyway. The cheapest steak you can find runs you $7.95 a pound, on sale at Jewel. Pork chops are $2.99 a pound, and if they're trying to unload them, they'll give you two for one. As I said before, I'm a man who likes a free chop.
     I don't want to give the impression that cost rules my culinary habits. I am still employed, and would not eat as much L. Burdick's chocolate as I do if that were the case. But there is ... treading carefully .. a certain Stockholm Syndrome effect at work, and over the years, I have gotten more practical. So I enjoy a thick pork chop, dusted with tarragon, both sides, eaten along with a nice cup of all natural applesauce.

     And yes, I know at this point there is one reader, or a dozen, who is scratching vigorously behind his ear thinking, "Heyyyyy, wait a sec. A pork chop? Ain't ya, you know, Jewish?"

     Yes I am. And I've addressed this before, and recently too. Too many times — there must be some kind of perverse pride at work. I must like poking the empty stereotype. But for you newcomers, despite what you read on the Daily Caller, Jews are not a mass of conformity, with our beards and black coats and secret handshakes. Jews get to be individuals — it's one of the redeeming qualities of the faith. 

     Actually, everyone gets to be an individual; Jews just are less good about ostracizing the oddballs — if we were, there'd be no one left. I'm speaking of the more liberal branches. The Hassidim seem to have no problem imposing uniformity. No pork chops for them. Which is fine, in my opinion. That means more for me. 

    

Food I love #1: Beef and broccoli

     I'm still on vacation. I could have easily extended "Meet my Metaphors" for another week, but thought, "enough already," and decided to tack in a new direction. Writing about food is fun and easy. As for reading about it, well, you tell me.

     Business took me to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab last month — that story is coming. My appointment was at 2 p.m. so, responsible journalist that I am, I of course had one thought: get downtown early, swing by Star of Siam for lunch.
     The Star of Siam has graced Illinois Avenue, tucked just west and below Michigan Avenue for ... I'm going to hazard a guess before checking: ngggg, 32 years.
     Not close: 42. The Star of Siam opened in 1984, the same year I started writing, freelance, for the Chicago Sun-Times. Fashions come and go, but we icons soldier onward, defying time.
     When with a group, I'd start with chicken satay and peanut sauce, and am passionate about their Pad Thai. But by myself, and with Mr. Diabetes standing over my shoulder, clucking disapproval, I went with my. go-to: beef and broccoli.   

      Fresh, firm, bright green broccoli. Succulent marinated strips of beef. Shards of ginger. An oyster sauce. Eaten with chopsticks — that's part of the fun, and I have my pride. A splash of red sauce to keep things interesting. Meat and vegetables — I can tell myself it's healthy, ignoring all that oil glistening over it.
      No rice, of course, no big glass of super sweet Thai iced coffee. (What's the Stones song? "Dancing, dancing, dancing so free/Dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me/Dancing with Mr. D..." A song not up to the Stones' elevated standards, critics felt at the time, but I'll take my symbolism where I find it. I should have put it on my list of diabetes songs — Mick is singing about death, not elevated blood sugar, though the two do intersect, uncomfortably.
     Beef and broccoli is not Thai, but Chinese — well, Chinese-American that is, concocted in California chop suey shops about 100 years ago, according to what little is known. Just as spumoni is unknown in Italy, so beef and broccoli isn't really a thing in China. Or so I'm told.

     I order beef and broccoli 90 percent of the time I'm in a Thai or Chinese restaurant. Maybe 95. Which is a point of amusement for my wife and of concern for me. Where is the adventure of life? And I do occasionally order something that is not beef and broccoli, just to show I can. But am inevitably disappointed because, well, if you really want beef and broccoli, anything else is something less.
     Speaking of which. I probably should add that, last time I was at Star of Siam with my wife, she felt the place was not up to their previous standards. I demurred. It was fine. Was she right? I'm not the one to tell. I tend to like what's put in front of me, particularly when it's beef and broccoli. But even if she is correct — and she usually is — well, even noble Homer dozed, and the best can have an off night, like the rest of us. I'm hoping to get her to go back. This most recent visit, I found it especially good, cleaned the plate with gratitude and appreciation, then headed off to my appointment.

Flashback 1999: Crudity in eye of beholder

 

Uffuzi Gallery

     In looking up M.C. Escher references, I reread this column. Note the unashamed pointy-headedness of the opening. Young, and showing off. It also ran on a Tuesday, in the features section, where my columns were briefer: only 550 words, compared to the column today at almost 800 words.

     When the subject of the crudity of our day arises, as it so often does, I like to tell this story from Herodotus:*
     An Egyptian army mutinies, fleeing toward Ethiopia. The pharaoh, Psammetichus, finds out and confronts the soldiers, begging them to reconsider. Think of your wives and children back in Egypt, he says.
     At that, a deserter pulls aside his tunic** and says, "Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children."
     That's a crude story — charmingly crude, in my eyes, because the macho bluster resonates over the eons and makes the anonymous Egyptian foot soldier seem very real.
     I tell this as introduction to a letter I received this week. A lone person who wrote to object to my defense of Niles North presenting the risque musical "A Chorus Line" and to argue that vulgarities in school are wrong.
     "Please tell me, how is that supposed to be helpful to our young people?" he asks, listing the various off-color details of the play. "It seems that there is a complete loss of any kind of standards here."
     My purpose is not to embarrass the reader, whose letter was erudite and well-reasoned. I believe that he speaks for a large number of people who look around and see a world in 1999 very different from the world in which they grew up, and who aren't pleased with the changes.
     And "A Chorus Line" isn't the half of it. We see things now that we would never see, even a few years ago. For instance, Simon & Schuster is publishing a book, aimed at teens no less, with the newspaper-unprintable title of "The - - - - -Up."
     This is far from what our letter writer wants schools to teach. He quotes Samuel Johnson:
     "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit." He adds: "There is nothing in Johnson's words about barnyard epithets."
     Or is there? This is where he lost me. I would argue that, as in the case of our anonymous Egyptian soldier, or "A Chorus Line," there are instances when, to be good and genuine, to reflect real people, a work also needs to be somewhat obscene.
     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.
     Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.
     It doesn't bottom out because standards do tighten, though we seldom notice. For instance, certain words that could be sung out on a high school stage in the 1940s — say in a minstrel show — would not be sung today. Our sensibilities changed.
     The most important thing, whether you find something offensive or artistic, is to remember that being crude and being bad do not always go together. Sometimes evil hides in the guise of high culture, as the great Dr. Johnson himself noted:
     "Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly; he may cheat at cards genteelly."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 6, 1999

*  From "Speculations about the Nile," Herodotus, II. 19-31, translated by D. Grene, quoted in Michael Grant's "Readings in the Classic Historians." 

** The exact phrase is, "...one of their number showed him his prick and said, 'Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.'" I don't recall if I tried to get that published and failed, or didn't bother. But it remains unprintable in the Sun-Times, then and now. Their loss.

Meet my metaphors #6: The M.C. Escher staircase

"Ascending and Descending," by M.C. Escher

    When people find out I am that most exotic of beasts, a newspaper columnist, the common reaction is an uncomprehending stare, as if I said that I shave butterflies for a living. No, I exaggerate. The common reaction is to not even process that I've said anything. The expression never changes. It's as if I muttered some garble: "I flemulate klaxons." 

     Every now and then, though, the first word, "newspaper," does register, and in order to say something, they latch onto that familiar first word and roll with it, managing a question along the lines of, "So how is the newspaper doing?" 

     At that, I pretend to think, then deploy the following well-worn observation, almost a koan: "Journalism is like that M.C. Escher staircase that keeps going down and down but somehow never reaches the bottom."

     It's true. Newspapers have been collapsing like so many ancient towers since my senior year in high school, when the great Chicago Daily News was liquidated because ... well, I'm still not sure why.

     By the time I've finished invoking the above staircase, my audience, who wouldn't know what i was talking about even if they had been listening, has already turned and gratefully fled. It isn't as if they really care about the answer. So I never get the chance to explain that I am thinking of "Ascending and Descending," a 1960 lithograph by the Dutch master draftsman M.C. Escher, who was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s.  I certainly was a fan, so much so that as a teen I bought two expensive books,  "The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher" ($6.95) and "The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher," ($5.95) which have sat on my shelf, barely touched, for 50 years, waiting for their moment to shine.

    In the second book, Escher explains the image in "Ascending and Descending" with charming detachment, as if he had come upon a real scene instead of inventing it himself:

     The inhabitants of these living-quarters would appear to be monks, adherents to some unknown sect. Perhaps it is their ritual duty to climb those stairs for a few hours each day. It would seem that when they get tired they are allowed to turn about and go downstairs instead of up. Yet both directions, though not without meaning, are equally useless. Two recalcitrant individuals refuse, for the time being, to take any part in this exercise. They have no use for it at all, but no doubt sooner or later they will be brought to see the error of their nonconformity.

    Given that, it seems I've misunderstood the image all these years. Most of the monks aren't going down. They're going up. Not like journalism at all. 
    In a letter to a friend, Escher is less whimsical:

    That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd. With similar questions on his lips, our own Albert Camus has just smashed into a tree in his friend’s car and killed himself. An absurd death, which had rather an effect on me. Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring – and where does it all get us? Nowhere.

     Oh, I don't know about that. Fun was had. The lithograph is still intriguing. As a young man, I believed Escher's work hinted at life's secret connection and essential mystery of life, the hidden world of unknowable complexity and beauty, the unseen gears spinning. A natural partner to a profession spent probing beneath the shiny surface, glancing behind the backdrops and stage scenery.

     I found the Camus letter in a 2015 Guardian article prompted by a Scottish show of Escher's work. The article said that Escher was inspired by a classic 1958 paper published n the British Journal of Psychology "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion," by Lionel S. Penrose and his son Roger. Though the paper cites Escher on its first page, so perhaps they were inspiring each other. They triangle they discuss is known as the Penrose Triangle, not the Escher Triangle, so the Brits are probably the true pioneers here.

     Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in the Netherlands in 1898, the fourth son of a civil engineer. He became a somewhat successful artist in his 30s, traveling the continent, including Spain, where the tiles at the Alhambra influenced his work, which was to include elaborate geometric surface divisions, along with his growing fascination with reflections, Möbius strips and other odd takes on the world as befits a left-hander.

     Journalism isn't the only quality I set upon Escher's endless staircase. In 2007, when Dennis J. Hastert driven from Congress, I noted, "While politeness in politics is like that M.C. Escher staircase that always goes down and yet never reaches the bottom, it's obvious that things are even worse now than a decade ago."

     I had no idea what was coming. In 1999, in a column on crudity that I'll repost tomorrow, I noted:

     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.

     Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.

     Escher himself was not only a meticulous artist but a fastidious person. He was in his mid-60s when his work was embraced by the counterculture, a hug he did not return. When Mick Jagger wrote him a fan letter, suggesting he design a cover for a Rolling Stones album, Escher wrote back tartly to the rock star's assistant, "“Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.” He died in 1972.

     Now that I think of it, I have never seen an M.C. Escher print in a museum, not that I recall, not even in the Netherlands. In that regard, he's a Dutch Norman Rockwell — a master craftsman shunned by the art world, perhaps for being too popular. Though the Art Institute just got its first Rockwell, so maybe Escher will get his due. Doing that checking thing, speaking of journalism, I see The Art Institute does own a variety of Escher prints. Perhaps they'll get around to putting one on display someday. I'd like that.