Passover 2026 — remembering one difficult time in another difficult time

     This ran in the paper Wednesday, while here I deployed the mandatory April Fool's post which, I'm pleased to report, did catch some readers napping. Running a day late — or a year, or 10 — alas won't undercut the topicality of today's column.

     Passover and April Fool's. On the same day! The possibilities are endless. I feel compelled to greet our guests at Wednesday night's Seder with a hearty, "Welcome! Let's eat!"
     Not laughing? As with all jokes, it's only funny if you know the set-up: Seder means "order" in Hebrew, and the meal only comes after a protracted span of praying and storytelling. Some years we don't eat until 9 p.m.
     Makes no sense, right? Then you're probably not Jewish, like 97.5% of Americans. Jews are a shrinking shard. Rather than control the world, we can't even control our own children, who wander off, as kids will.
     My wife, in her infinite wisdom, introduced a new Seder tradition: preliminary soup. We say a few throat-clearing prayers, and then her excellent, cannonball-dense, matzo ball soup is served, to fortify participants for the hour or two until the festive meal proper begins, the exact time being a tug-of-war between grey-bearded traditionalists and the younger generation, who want to eat and race back to their real lives.
     I suppose the strictly religious might view early broth as the kind of canonical slippage that leads to Christmas trees and, eventually, even fewer Jews. I consider it kindness toward hungry relatives who have consented — heck, some traveled long distances — to endure this dusty rigmarole in return for a hearty meal, eventually, and all the wine they can hold.
     My late colleague Roger Ebert once said that his entire political view can be summed up by "kindness." I'd like to extend that to religious orientation — if your religion doesn't prompt you to be kind, first and foremost, then it's just another tool for oppression, like the others. All religions are the same in that regard, or as I've said before: religion is a hammer: you can use it to build a house, or to hit somebody in the head. Same hammer.
     Focusing on cosmetic differences seems so strange to me. "Oh, you've got an Estwing? Well, MY hammer is a Stanley. I believe the wooden handle absorbs shock better..."
     Thus fortified, antisemitism rolls off me. All bigotry is ignorance married to fear. How much mental energy should be spent getting upset that the person viewing life through a keyhole caught sight of you? Someone who has lapped up the vile poison trickling through gutters for a thousand years now wants to upchuck a bit on my shoes. How hurt am I supposed to be? "Oh boo, frickin' hoo. The knee-jerk hater who bought a load of idiotic bilge doesn't like me..."
     Maybe I'm hardened, as a newspaper columnist who hears from haters daily. I don't want to underestimate the scary turn the country has taken after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, and the current war in Iran, in lockstep with our good buddy, Israel. The latest twist on antisemitism — that Israel is a monstrous evil that should have never existed in the first place and must be stamped out by force — is certainly frightening, for its popularity, though it's really just a new set of steps to a very old dance, the classic Jews Don't Belong Here Polka. Don't know the words? You can hum along: "Life ... would be great ... but we've got these Jews here ... infesting ... INSERT LOCATION ... where they don't belong ... and we'd all ... be so much happier... if only they'd go live in ... INSERT SOME SPOT FAR AWAY.... " 

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Dante on EGD: 100 Days, 100 Cantos

 

               Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
               mi ritovai per una selva oscura
               che la diritta via era smarrita.

    Lately, with work becoming more and more demanding ... well, not really. Just the same three columns a week, though it feels harder. Anyway, with the news so grim... No, that isn't it. As grim as usual. Maybe it's just the author, so old and tired. That sounds more on point. Plus having to then migrate the columns here, and also think of something to dispatch the remaining four days, the whole process began to seem an intolerable burden, for me, and probably you too.

     So I've been thinking, lately, "How can I perk up EGD? Make it more, you know, fun." For me and, it would follow, you as well. Happy host, happy guest.

     Which led me, as always, back to Dante. As longtime readers know, I am a fan of the dour Florentine, and drop references to his epic Commedia now and then. I know how much readers love him. 

     Okay, maybe not. I know what you're thinking: what's fun about Dante? C'mon, his famous book (he does have others) is Commedia — "The Comedy." Something that begins in crisis but ends happily. (And, to be thorough, because he wrote it in Italian, instead of Latin, which at the time was seen as truckling to the masses. It can be argued that Dante invented modern Italian).

     Mostly now and then. A little Dante, I assumed, goes a long way.

     But what if I'm mistaken? It occurred to me: why limit myself? Self-restraint is so 2016. It's bad enough the Sun-Times expects me to march grimly from topic to topic, never spending much time on anything, assembling 795 words on some ephemeral news development that came out of nowhere and is forgotten just as quickly. Then 48 hours later, do it again, turning a spotlight on a puff of fluff.

     What if, instead of doing that, I settled in and really deep dived into something significant, timeless and eternal? Something that has held the thinking world in rapt attention for more than 700 years. Something like the Commedia. The perfect subject for a blog, when I am unconstrained by space considerations, or the need to either generate money or hold readers' interest. It's my hobby blog — shouldn't I be able to do as I please? To have fun?

     The Commedia offers so much. Demons and angels. Popes and Muslims. Satan and God. As you should know, it takes place over 100 cantos — chapters, basically, from cantus, Latin for "song" —  over three books. Inferno — the most famous one, with the pitchfork-wielding devils  — Purgatorio, or Purgatory's mountain, no font of fascination, true, but not without its merits. And Paradiso, aka heaven. Lots of light and swirling glory.

     Why not devote a day to each canto? Sure, news and current events and whatever piffle I put in the paper will be overlooked. But think of what is to be gained. By a careful, line-by-line analysis of the text, including the original Italian, as seen above, the famous opening lines.

     What could be more enjoyable Nothing that I can think of, that's for sure. So let's get to it.

     Nel mezzo del camnin — poet Robert Pinsky translates that as "Midway on our life's journey." Me, I would be more literal — "In the middle of the journey of our life." That more closely tracks the original. (Someday I have to assemble clunky translations of Dante, staring with Henry Francis Cary's, "In the midway of this our mortal life," though "midway" does allude to the carnival aspect of existence).

     Be honest. That "our" sticks out for you, in each translation, does it not? Me too — I was hoping you would notice. Is Dante being grandiose? One one hand, that would suit him. Full of himself, he is. Speaking in the first person plural does drip of regality, Queen Victoria's "We are not amused."

     Particularly when Dante immediately shifts into first person: "I found myself in a dark woods."

     Why the inconsistency? A mere mistake? Wouldn't a good copy editor leap to correct that? Impose parallelism. What are we to make of that shift? Luckily, like Dante, we are not alone (sigh, because he's soon joined by Virgil, who acts as his guide. One way of viewing the Commedia, perhaps unique to me, is as the original buddy adventure). 

By Gustave Dore

     Francesco Mazzoni's devotes 12, count 'em, 12 pages to analyzing this very couplet, in his essential Saggio di un nuovo commento alla “Divina Commedia”: “Inferno” –Canti I-III (Sansoni, 1967). 

     Summarizing mightily, Mazzoni says the shift is done to direct the reader from a universal human condition — feeling lost in middle age — to a specific personal experience of being dragged through hell by a dead Roman poet.

    Prue Shaw, whose new book I wrote about recently, puts it well: "But it is our life as well as his (nostra vita); we are implicated in the story. This double focus is present from the beginning. Dante stands for all of us, as a representative of humanity, an everyman figure."
     Dante is us. Okay, me anyway. And, admit it, probably you too. Sure, we don't all have our property confiscated while being banished form our hometowns, by the pope no less, after seeing the love of our lives marry someone else and then die at 24. But we all have our disappointments. 

     Dante returns to this shift later — in the opening Canto of Paradiso, for instance, when he says, basically, he's not smart enough to convey what he's seen: nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,/che dietro la memoria non può ire. or "our intellect sinks into an abyss /so deep that memory fails to follow it" before shifting back to the first person. The idea of sinking into an abyss is very 2026, is it not? Another reason I love Dante — always relevant. 

     But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Not jumping ahead is going to be a challenge. Patience. Returning to the opening tercet. To be fair, since I've previously commented on the general unreadability of John Took's Dante, I feel duty-bound to observe that he agrees with Shaw, assembling a moment of coherence when he points out, "Dante registers the journeying character of his own humanity and, as the understands it, the journeying character of humanity as a whole." Given the slim odds of many readers struggling over the 322 pages Took needed to get to this point, I feel I'm doing a service by sharing this with you now.

     Since some of you, hard as it may be to believe, are perhaps new to the Commedia, I should probably mention the terza rima rhyme scheme, which Dante invented, being a fan of rhyme, calling it concatenatio pulcra — "beautiful linkage."  The cantos are divided into stanzas of three lines — each line having 11 syllables, though only of course in the original Italian. 

     The first and third lines — ending vita and smaritta — rhyme, obviously, while the end of the second line, oscura, introduces a new final syllable that rhymes with the opening line of the second stanza, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura," which in turn rhymes with the end of the third line, paura, while the second line introduces a new sound, forte, which links to the opening line of the third verse, morte. 

    Locking the whole thing together and giving it strong propulsive force.  Think ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on, for you diagramming at home.

    While we're giving backstory, I need to elaborate on mezzo — middle. The Commedia, while fiction, (it might seem odd to point this out, but otherwise you find yourself slipping into thinking that Dante actually did go to hell and report back what he found there) takes place over a specific period of time, Easter Week, 1300. So Dante, born around June, 1265 (he doesn't specify a day, but does say he's a Gemini, as am I, which I find very cool) was 35 years old, meaning that if we take the biblical lifespan of three score and 10, he was precisely halfway through his life (precision, as we will see, being a central value in Dante's writing). 

     Looking ahead, the opening line is the first of 575 biblical citations that Peter S. Hawkins counts in the Commedia.  Or as Hawkins explains:

    "A case in point is the very first line of the Commedia, coming immediately before Dante tells the reader of his terrifying experience in the dark wood and of his resolve to recall it, 'because of the good that I found there'. . . he also echoes King Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:10, whose song of thanksgiving is written down in the prophet's book to commemorate a rescue from mortal illness: 'I said: in the middle of my days I shall go to the gates of hell'."

    Indeed, as Hawkins continues: "the opening line of the Commedia reveals in miniature the biblical matrix of Dante's imagination. He assumes the Psalm's estimation of our lifespan, draws not only upon a single sentence, but upon a narrative moment in the book of Isaiah, and then adapts for his own purposes an ancient exegetical tradition on what it means to face Hell in the middle of one's days."

    Moving on to the second line, mi ritovai per una selva oscura, which Pinsky translates as, "I found myself/In dark woods." Charles Ross has it, "I found myself within a shadowed forest," which makes it seem like he's wandered into the Cook County Forest Preserve. (Cary's must be remembered; there is a mesmeric power to a bad translation: "I found me in a gloomy wood astray.").    

      Much thought has been expended on those trees.

     "Here the forest precedes the journey through Hell," Charles Ross and Allen Mandelbaum write in Lectura Dantis. "It is the dark wood of life on earth when lived in sin; it is Dante's interior wood; and it is the wood of political darkness, of Florence, of Italy, of papal corruption, of the absences of imperial authority."

     Reminding us that it isn't really a forest at all. The trees are, for want of a better word, notional.

     "We find ourselves in a forest that is not a forest, we see a hill that is not a hill, we look up toward a sun that is not a sun." Benedetto Croce writes in his La poesia di Dante (Bari: 1920).

     Hmmm ... it occurs to me, just now, that we've been going at this for quite a while, and not only have we not dispatched Canto 1, as planned, but we've only discussed the first line and started in on the second. There are 134 more to go, not to forget the 14,097 lines waiting beyond Canto 1 in the rest of  the Commedia. 

     Plus I'm not done with everything I have to say about that second line — I'm looking at nine more pages of notes.

     At this pace, well ... okay, let's be frank: 100 days are not going to do it. We'll try to be briefer tomorrow when we pick up with line four, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cost dura. 

    Daunting? Not at all. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes, "Above all, the reading of Dante is an endless labor, for the more we succeed, the further we are from our goal. If the first reading brings on only shortness of breath and healthy fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss hobnailed boots. In all seriousness the question arises: how many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat paths of Italy."  

     In that spirit, strap on your stoutest footwear, your Redwing boots, lace 'em up good and tight, and let's join Dante wandering around the back alleys of Ravenna. Thank you for embarking upon this adventure with me, this massive undertaking. I'd feel stupid doing it alone, and knowing that my EGD readership is right there with me, eagerly awaiting each new installment, is a great comfort. Truly, I'm blessed that you would agree to accompany me on such a massive undertaking. I'm sure when we are finished, some months or, heck, to be honest, years from now, we will find the effort well worth it.  Until then: onward!

     Oh, and to encourage brevity, I've kept my footnotes and sources separate, but if you want to read them — only another six pages — you can find them here. 

Tomorrow: Lines 4, 5 and 6.  

     

Swinging into spring

Truth in advertising — the Waterlily Tulip, a central Asian flower is known as being first to bloom in the spring and, good to its word, was the only tulip we noticed on display at the Botanic Garden. 

     Monday was a fine day — 80 degrees at O'Hare, a record for March 30 in Chicago, with hardly a cloud in the sky. I did not shuck my responsibilities, initially. In the morning, I made progress on the advance obituary of an alderman who was much more impressed with himself than history will be. A common enough failing and I tried to treat him with a certain mortuary tenderness. Plus, worked out a few of the knots in Wednesday's column.
     But I didn't let work absorb my entire day. That would have been tragic. By noon I was heading to the park with a young lady of my acquaintance, accompanied by her parents, stopping first at Little Louie's for a char dog and a salad, eaten al fresco at a picnic table next to the playground, where dessert was pushing my houseguest on the baby swing, a new passion of hers, discovered yesterday. 
     Well, dessert was really a raspberry chocolate chip cone from Graeter's. But it wasn't as sweet as the swing time was. Then we walked toward the Basin.
      Later in the day, we all headed to the Chicago Botanic Garden which, despite the fine weather, was not particularly crowded. My son met a school friend, and just listening to their conversation was a treat. Smart kids. 
     When evening came, and I had to think about today's post, I realized I had utterly nothing to say, about the political situation or anything else. I was pleased how easily it was all shucked. Not that it isn't important; it is. It just wasn't important today. As scary as the times are, it is good to be able to set them aside for a memorable afternoon. A luxury achieved by not being afraid of anyone or anything, and having resources and family and living in a good place. None of them were accidental, or even easy. None are permanent. But they're all here now, for a time, and I'm glad to be able to appreciate them while they are. What's the Crosby, Stills & Nash  lyric? "It was a long time coming; it'll be a long time gone." Tuesday morning I'll have to get that column into final form and off to the public, like meat tossed into a river of piranha. 

     But that isn't so bad either. Monday's column on immigration drew a ton of feedback. I appreciated the praise, and gave the boggled outrage the attention it was due, which was far less consideration than I devoted to my job as a kiddie swing attendant. A man needs to have his priorities in order.
     

There is no debate over the ongoing abuse of immigrants

"The Last Yankee," 1888

     Journalism is failing America.
     At least mainstream media, newspapers and TV networks and such, the remnant still chugging away.
     What's our job? To report the news, to convey what’s happening.
     And what do we do? Describe fantasies, ghosts, processes that aren’t occurring.
     Consider the recent murder of Loyola student Sheridan Gorman, out with a group of friends at a beach in Rogers Park when approached by a masked man, shot in the head and killed.
     That was all too real.
     But the moment the suspect was identified as a Venezuelan immigrant, the MAGA outrage machine started to whir. Led by President Donald Trump, who called him “an animal.” The murder was waved about as confirmation. Because one member of a minority group always represents everybody in that group. While white folks, naturally, are individuals, each unique in his or her own way, hardly responsible for their own actions, never mind stand-ins for anybody else.
     And how did the media present this deceptive carnival? This acrobatic leap from one crime on the North Side of Chicago, one victim and one suspect, to the entire country and all immigrants everywhere? 

   A conversation. An argument. The Sun-Times called it “a national immigration debate.”
     There is no conversation. No argument. Nobody is debating.
     What is going on is dehumanization. The officially designated pariah group — nowadays, immigrants — is being stained with false rationales to justify their abuse: they are violent; they are diseased, they don't belong. If these rationals are contradictory — they are lazy and take all the good jobs — that doesn't matter. In 1930s, the Jews were both dirty vermin crouched in the shadows and jewel-encrusted millionaires secretly running the world. Few Germans seemed bothered by the contradiction.
     The nation is busily building ... let's call them “detention camps” ... for this despised group. Billions are being spent ramping up a paramilitary force to snatch people off the street. Don’t be fooled by the hesitation after Minneapolis. A temporary setback. The Democrats trying to get ICE under control is what the entire airport nightmare is about. Air travel in the United States is being throttled so we can deport more immigrants. A reminder that racism blows back on the racist. Trying to hurt others, they hurt themselves. Ask the Germans.
     Why doesn't the media hit this point harder? Our error comes from a 7th grade civics class, how-a-bill-becomes-a-law mindset. It's our job to list the excuses given, noting, eventually, how inaccurate they are.

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Chicago History Museum, 2018

Mesmee-rized

 

  
     Is AI writing advertising now too? I saw the above over Wordle, and instantly thought that, then decided, no, it sounds more like a translation issue.
     Which actually was fairly perceptive, and a reminder that social media means it is you and whatever native intelligence you've managed to develop and retain against the world. Spoiler alert: the world is winning. Then again, it usually does.
     Click on "LEARN MORE" you go to an enormous page, with many pictures of the shoe contorting, and a countdown timer urging you to buy now ("Hurry up!" is what they actually say) while this fabulous sale is going on.
     "Buy now!" is always a good indication that you should stop, think and most likely buy never.
     What they don't say is the name of the shoe — well, eventually, yes, way down the page, in a photo caption: Mesmee. Looking for an actual company, I found a review page with remarks like this:
     "0 Star Rating For Cheap China Crap Falsely Advertised As MADE IN USA!"
     "Complete rip-off and "got cheated" and "9 weeks and no shoes. 2 emails no response. these 
people are crooks of the worst ilk. do not order a thing from them." So we have consensus. The message is: always know what you're buying and who you are buying from. Cave canem.
     Oh wait. That's "beware of dog." I mean Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
Since I never criticize someone's headline without offering an improvement, even a paltry scam, let's throw "Walking shoes for elderly with poor balance" on the cutting board and see what we can do with it.
     Hmmm...how about "Stable shoes for striding seniors"? Or "You won't wobble walking in these floor-grippers." Or "Shoes for walking, not falling."
     A reminder that the problem with artificial intelligence is that it's heavy on the former and light on the latter.

Works in progress: Jack Clark on drugs

Sign, San Ignacio, Belize.

     Turns out Jack Clark and I have more in common than I thought. Back in the day, we both took a dim view of drugs. He favored beer. To me, beer was a temperance beverage; make mine Jack-on-the-rocks. That was enough.

     Like him, my stumbling block was that if I bought drugs, then I'd be a person buying drugs, and that struck me as loathsome. So while I'd partake for free, now and then, I didn't particularly like the effects, and never sought it out. Thank heaven for small favors.

     Anyway, I'm taking up space that should go to EGD's favorite pinch hitter, with a memory of the altered life. Take it away, Jack:

     I’m probably one of the last guys who should be writing about cocaine. I tried it once — or who knows? Maybe two or three times. But the night of the Super Bowl is the only time that stays in memory, that night, and the morning after.
     When cocaine came on the scene at the Lincoln Park bar where I was hanging out in the ‘70s, I’d already heard how expensive it was, so I was too cheap to even give it a try. What if I ended up liking it? I was a domestic beer drinker. That was my price level. Every so often, I’d splurge and get a bourbon on the rocks. I would never do shots of anything. I could go out with $20, drink the night away, feed the jukebox, leave a reasonable tip, flag a taxi, and still have enough left to pick up a morning newspaper on the way home.
     When people would say, “You want to take a walk around the block?” That was shorthand for Let’s go smoke a joint. I usually shook my head unless it was a pretty girl, and then I’d take the walk just to keep her company. I wouldn’t partake or at least not much. I liked that simple beer buzz so much better.
     The first time someone invited me to meet them in the washroom, I didn’t get it at all.
     My friend must have seen my confused look. He opened his hand to show me the vial in his palm. “A little blow?” he said.
     “Thanks,” I said. “But no.”
     Before long, I seemed to be in the minority. At least, in this particular bar. On my birthday in 1979, Harry invited me to the washroom. I shook my head. “I don’t do that stuff.”
     “Yeah. But it’s your birthday.”
     A few weeks later on New Year’s Day, he tried again. “I already told you, I don’t do that stuff,” I said.
     “But it’s the ‘80s now,” he said and predicted the flavor of the new era.
     Some call the ‘80s the decade of decadence but where I hung out it was definitely the cocaine decade. It started with the thought that this was not an addictive drug and ended with the realization that if you used it frequently, when you stopped, you found yourself depressed for no apparent reason.
     I believe, given enough time and a large enough grant, I could figure out the missing link.
     Before the ‘80s were over, Harry had lost his business, home, and marriage. But he never lost his sense of humor. When I reminded him about what he’d said on the first day of the decade, he didn’t remember saying it, but he was proud of himself and found it quite amusing.
     I was in my own little bubble half the time and didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on around me. I’d stopped listening to the radio around the time of Grand Funk Railroad. But I didn’t mind pumping quarters into the jukebox and getting lost in the music. Three plays for a quarter or seven for a half dollar. That seemed pretty reasonable compared to what some of my friends were spending to keep themselves amused.
     A good bar is like a decent church. It needs music, lighting, comfortable seats, an interesting congregation, and something to drink. Oh, and a religion, of course. I decided that my druggy friends thought they were outlaws. That was their religion. All that sneaking around, whispering, money changing hands or being tightly rolled, those were their rites.
     But what was I doing there? That’s probably a question that anyone who’s spent too much time in a saloon asks.
     It was a comfortable room. Everyone looks better under amber bar lights. The jukebox was great. I don’t remember most of the songs anymore and they changed records regularly, which is one sign of a good box. It was the first place I ever heard Merle Haggard’s "Rambling Fever." The B side was his great rendition of "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.' Mink DeVille's, "Just to Walk That Little Girl Home," was another favorite. The opening line: “It’s closing time in this nowhere café.”
     It’s a great song but it doesn’t explain what I was doing in a bar where I was becoming an outsider. I was there for the moments when it all came together, the light and the music. The buzz. If you could just hold it there, right there, you might finally understand something important. This feels so good, you think. This is how it should always be. I almost feel normal.
     It never holds, of course. The room tilts, the lights get too bright, someone’s playing mediocre songs on the jukebox, it all slips away, and you’re back to being you.
     The mix of clientele at the bar reminded me of the West Side block where I’d grown up. There were doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, cops, mechanics, salesmen, waiters and waitresses, carpenters, janitors, and everything in between. A wannabe writer, moving furniture to pay the bills, fit right in. People talked about books, music, politics, anything you could think of. There were always new, interesting people stopping by.
     As the years went on, much of that diversity went away and it became, more and more, a cocaine bar. Some of the old regulars disappeared, others rarely came in. The level of the conversations dropped considerably (along with my IQ, I’ve always figured). Often, they weren’t conversations at all but a series of monologues. It was no longer a very inviting place for new people. "What’s he doing here?" was the typical feeling. Is he a narc?
     I didn’t do cocaine but I found myself being suspicious of strangers all the same. It was no longer such a comfortable place.
     One night one of my non-druggy friends invited me to the washroom. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re buying that stuff now.” I’d always thought he was a fairly intelligent guy.
     “You know, if you don’t buy now and then,” he’d said, in a very serious tone, and changed my opinion with a single sentence, “people stop inviting you in.”
     I started to expand my horizons. But if I was out and about, I’d sometimes try to make it to my old home for one last drink at closing time. One bartender liked to joke that she laid out milk and cookies for me.
     One year, I came in on Super Bowl night. I hadn’t seen the game or heard the score. “Who won the Super Bowl?” I asked.
      “Bruce and Gary,” the milk-and-cookies bartender said. These were two regulars. (I’ve changed names here to protect the living and the dead.)
     “No really?” I said.
     “Really,” she said. “Hang around. They’ll be back.”
     It wasn’t long before they were back with a cast of thousands. Well, maybe it was only twenty. I finally found out the answer to my question. Bruce and Gary had won the Super Bowl. They’d gone to some high-end bar for a big-time Super Bowl party. They’d split a $1,000 square, putting up $500 each. With 100 squares on the grid that meant the total pool was $100,000. I don’t remember how the payout worked but they’d ended up winning two of the four quarters and walked away with something like $37,000 and a TV.
     So I joined the hangers-on as we went from one late-night bar to another. I refused all invitations to the toilet but was happy to take free drinks when they were offered.
     We eventually ended up in someone’s living room, all sitting around a huge coffee table with a pile of cocaine in the middle. To me, it looked like someone had upended a 2-pound bag of flour.
      Oh, what the hell? I thought. This was a special occasion, which meant I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for never offering them some of mine.
     At dawn, there weren’t that many of us left, so I finally got to do a bit of talking. But every time I said something, a guy I didn’t know very well said, “That’s a given, Jack.”
     I’d always heard that cocaine made you feel smart. It was having the opposite effect on me.
     After a while, I’d had enough, not of the cocaine but of that guy. I left the survivors still around the coffee table. The sun had been up for a while when I made the long walk home. It was a pleasant spring-like morning and all the birds were singing the same damn song: “That’s a given, Jack. That’s a given.”
     Later, as I recounted the night to a friend, I said I’d never felt so stupid.
     “Oh, you idiot, don’t pay any attention to him,” she’d said. “He says that to everyone.”
      I probably should have thanked him. If nothing else, it had cured me of any further interest in the drug. All these years later, I don’t remember his name or even what he looked like. But I still hear those birds now and then.

Americans, once 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water,' face return to bad old days

Protesting pollution on LaSalle Street, 1970.

     In 1889, the American correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan and was momentarily impressed.
     “I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago,” Rudyard Kipling, 23, informed his readers in northern India. "The other places do not count."
     But initial approval evaporated as he looked around, noting: "Its water is the water of the Hughli," — a branch of the Ganges in West Bengal famous for its pollution, "and its air is dirt."
     Unregulated industry — enormous stockyards dumping into the canals, making them, in Kipling's words, "black as ink, and filled with untold abominations," smokestacks belching filth — will do that. Today when we call Chicagoans "gritty" we are speaking about toughness; 137 years ago, it meant they were coated in coal dust.
     What changed? Well, conscientious businesses, concerned about the effect pollution was having on the quality of life of their neighbors, took it upon themselves to clean up their acts and ...
     Ha-ha, just kidding. Early April Fool's. No, of course, business, then and now, cares only about short-term profits. But government forced them to act in a socially-responsible fashion, setting health standards and limiting pollution. Only then did city dwellers breathe easier, and "grit" could fade into colorful metaphor.
     I was reminded of this flipping open the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and coming upon "The Dismantling of Environmental Protections — A Grave Threat to America’s Health" by a pair of Harvard doctors, Adam W. Gaffney and David Himmelstein, joined by three other health experts.
     They start with another once notoriously dirty city — Cleveland — and the 1969 combustion of its Cuyahoga River, so polluted it caught fire, "sparking national attention to environmental degradation."
     A president not famous for his selflessness, but Cincinnatus compared to our current commander-in-chief, took decisive action:
     "In his State of the Union address seven months later, President Richard Nixon lamented that Americans were being 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water' and proclaimed that clean air and water should 'be the birthright of every American.' At Nixon’s urging, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) with bipartisan support. Air-quality upgrades mandated by that act and enforced by the EPA are among the most effective health interventions of the past half-century, having reduced air pollution by 75% in the United States and saved at least 200,000 lives per year."
     Now our birthright is being taken away — it isn't just voting. Our country is in full retreat regarding the environment.

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Sparrows

    
     If you're not careful, trying to solve one problem, you end up creating a worse problem.

     House sparrows, such as these black-throated specimens above, were an English bird, introduced to the United States in 1851 as a way to combat caterpillars. Over the next 50 years, sparrows spread across the continental United States.
     That's an oversimplification — there were continuing efforts to bring the bird to this country through the 1870s, on both coasts.
     By the 1880s, sparrows were seen as pests, and an effort was made to undo the folly — bounties were put on them. Books were written on how to hunt sparrows. Regret set in.
     “Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” W.L. Dawson wrote 1903 in "The Birds of Ohio."
     To add insult to injury, it was discovered, too late, that sparrows do not eat insects. They eat seeds, and grain.
     This sparked what was called "The Sparrow War" in the late 19th century, with some advocating their destruction, and whether they could be considered "American" birds — a designation which was not grudgingly given until 1931, according Diana Wells' essential "100 Birds and How They Got Their Names."
     At first, Wells writes, "sparrow" described any small bird. The word itself is old, from Old English spearw, , meaning "a flutterer." The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word deep into the mists of time, well over a thousand years old, offering numerous cognates, including the useful "sparrow-blasting," deployed with jocular or contemptuous force" and meaning, "The fact of being blasted or blighted by some mysterious power, skeptically regarded as unimportant or non-existent," popular around the late 1500s.
     Another useful variant is found in Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" — "sparrow cop," defined as "a policeman in disfavor with his superiors and assigned to a park to guard the grass," dismissed as "not common," though perhaps it should be.
     I expected Noah Webster, writing his 1828 dictionary, to view them as English birds, but he does no such thing, calling them, "a small bird of the genus Fringilla and order of Passers. These birds are frequently seen around houses," which certainly meshes with my experience.   

     Working backward in time, to Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary, a sparrow is merely "a small bird." He quotes a line from Macbeth that at first seems bland, almost meaningless: "As sparrows, eagles, or the hare, the lion." Until you check the context — the Captain is answering a question whether Macbeth and Banquo are frightened by an attack from the Norwegians, and declares they are as little concerned as eagles and lions are when confronting sparrows and rabbits.
     Johnson wrote his dictionary practically alone — an accomplishment that was to be of great pride to his countrymen, especially compared to French team who spent decades compiling their nation's dictionary — so can be forgiven for overlooking a much stronger appearance in Shakespeare. Horatio tells his friend Hamlet that if his mind isn't in his duel with Laertes, he will find a way to delay it.
     "Not a whit, we defy augury," the melancholy Dane insists. "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all."
     That sounds like a plan but — spoiler alert — the duel will be the death of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude and Claudius.
     In other word, thinking you are ready for what you suppose is coming, and actually being prepared for the mean trick fate actually has in store for you, can be two very different things.

Donald Trump mounts a Chicago hobbyhorse — Christopher Columbus

Columbus monument, Barcelona, Spain.

     Certain issues just seem to belong to Chicago. Dibs, for instance. That peculiar tradition of trying to claim a parking space with a few scattered chairs, or dinette tables, or whatever, just because you took the trouble of shoveling it out. A weird blend of private effort and public display, these fragile monuments to selfishness. "I went to the trouble to clear the public way, so the space now belongs to me." There's something tragic about dibs; I sometimes snowblow the sidewalks of my entire block; I don't then try to stop people from walking there.
     So it stood out, from the general wrongness of everything happening in Washington, D.C., to see Donald Trump's White House leap into the Christopher Columbus fight, erecting a statue of the great explorer near the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning. Truly, it was as if the president had issued an executive order banning ketchup on hot dogs, not to give him any ideas.
     “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero," a spokesman declared.
     I bet he is. Columbus's heroism has curdled in some quarters, particularly after the 2020 George Floyd protests, when the exact degree that our government values the lives of people who didn't have the good sense to be born white came into sharp relief. Suddenly, deifying Confederate traitors and rampaging colonizers couldn't be shrugged off quite so easily.
     Columbus statues were taken down in other cities across the country, such as Boston, Richmond and Pittsburgh. Baltimore's was broken into pieces and tossed into the Inner Harbor. The statue erected on the White House grounds, in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, was created by an artist — to stretch the term — working from the shattered Baltimore statue, fished out of the water.
     Still, Columbus seems a uniquely Chicago concern. Maybe because the city yanked three Columbus statues off the street in 2020. Maybe just from watching close up the day-to-day gyrations of old-school Italian pride groups trying to make the case that once someone is honored in a public space he therefore must be honored forever, no matter how tastes change. The issue resembles school prayer, where specific groups insist their own private devotions become mandatory public ritual.
     Maybe because Columbus, while known around the world, has been a particular fixation in Chicago, where the city's monumental 1893 fair was dubbed "The World's Columbian Exposition," part of the 19th century trend of celebrating Columbus for discovering the continent. An effort picked up enthusiastically by Italian immigrants, who at the time played then playing the despised outsider role now forced upon Venezuelans. Columbus became demonized in the 21st century for his rough handling of the discovered — raping and torturing and murdering them more than many like to see in our public heroes. Except for the president, of course, who has made a career of slathering plaudits over the most loathsome personalities,  particularly himself. 

     As a historically minded person, I generally don't like to see statues pulled down. It smacks of the Taliban blowing up Buddhas. There is an enormous monument to Stephen Douglas at 35th Street, just west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Douglas was not only a slaveholder, but a notoriously neglectful slaveholder. Yet the edifice remains, and rightly so, because it's historic and in a part of the city not otherwise bristling with tourist sites. Besides, it's also Douglas' tomb, and it could be argued that everyone, no matter how vile, gets to slumber in his own grave.

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Flashback 2012: If they go to school, kids will know who Pulaski was

     There are so many tragedies manifesting themselves right now — a deepening war, a shuddering economy, a corrupt and cruel American government bent on its own enrichment and establishing permanence in power, for starters — this one might seem far down the tree of disaster.

     But seeing how vibrant young immigrants come to America and become the same hidebound haters and status-starved revanchists found among the native born, the subject is important enough to merit a reminder. The Italian old-guard claws at the vanished majesty of Columbus, and embraces stone cold haters like Trump when he supports them in their self-destructive folly. 

    It is natural that both strands would come together, as Trump placed a statue of Columbus on the White House grounds Sunday, to show his hand. You'd think it would chill the bones of any conscientious immigrant. No doubt they dug it. As for Poles...

    This ran when Rahm Emanuel suggested that Chicago Public School children go to school on two make-believe ethnic holidays. Spoiler alert: CPS dropped Pulaski Day as a holiday in 2012.  Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day in Illinois in 2017, and CPS decided not to make it a school holiday in 2019. Now if we could only work on summer...

 

    On the base of the Dante Award that the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans gave to me at a lovely luncheon two years ago is the inscription, “Never be a timid friend to truth.”
     Those words appear, more or less, in the 17th canto of Paradiso, the middle of the third book of the Divine Comedy, a particularly beautiful chapter containing Dante’s famous lines about exile: “Bitter is the taste of another man’s bread, and hard is the way going up and down another man’s stairs.”
     The motto on the award ­— a life-size bust of Dante — isn’t exactly what Dante wrote. He is torn whether to speak the truth and risk angering his friends or keep quiet and risk oblivion. “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth,” he tells his patron Cangrande, “I fear that I shall not live on.”
     Which is a fair summation of the thought that went through my head when I saw that representatives of Chicago’s proud Italians and equally proud Poles were objecting to Rahm Emanuel’s plan to send kids to school on Columbus Day and Pulaski Day.
     “Part of an ongoing campaign to diminish ethnic recognition in the city,” said my pal and lunchmate Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee.
     “A slap in the face,” said Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Polish American Association, whom I don’t know but I’m sure I would like if I did.
     The polite thing to do would be to cough into a fist and ignore them, confident the mayor will not cave under pressure. If he can frog-march the teachers union, he can handle the old guard ethnic guilds too. In the delicate kabuki of ethnic and racial politics, caring is best left to those with credentials.
     “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth. . . . ” A "timido amico." Dante doesn’t add “regarding my own people,” does he? Besides, I’m sort of an honorary Italian already, due to the award, and my ancestors came from Poland; my grandfather was born in Bialystok, and even though some Polish readers seem to be unwilling to accept that a Jew can be Polish, I don’t see the conflict.
     So here goes . . .
     Our school system betrays the children it’s supposed to teach in many ways, but the worst is the abuse of low expectations. It’s always easier for a teacher to show a film.
     All sorts of secondary side values undermine education, from our state’s messed up finances to meddling parents to antique customs that should have been scrapped long ago. Why do we kick kids out of school every summer for nearly three months? So they can go into the fields and help bring in the crops. Only guess what? They don’t do that anymore. We dismiss them anyway, for a summer of Nintendo. Not all bad, of course; there’s also Little League and family vacations. But it isn’t a rational system.
     Columbus Day and Pulaski Day are similar relics, inserted into the calendar as a sop to large ethnic communities that craved honor and belonging. And that’s fine. Human nature. Have a parade, close the Recorder of Deeds office, put on a hat with a feather and go enjoy a glass of grappa or Slivovitz.
     But school is serious. Poor education is both a major cause and serious symptom of half of our problems. If you want to put a finger on why America lags further and further behind the rest of the world, you’d have a smorgasbord of reasons: broken health care, crumbling infrastructure, knee-buckling debt. But a wheezing, feeble education system designed to babysit the lowest achievers would be the ice sculpture in the center.
     We’re not supposed to make ethnic generalizations anymore, though everybody does. But if I had to use one word to describe what I consider being Italian means, its essence, I would say, “boldness.” I wish my pals at the Joint Civic Committee would have asked themselves: What would Galileo have done? Add a day of school or keep the day off so kids can hang around the mall? How about Columbus? Would he let the crew sit on deck playing cards because it’s a saint’s day, or would he have them hoist the sails and get moving toward the New World?
     And for Poles, the word I use is “hard-working.” We get up in the morning and plow. If you’d told my grandpa it was Pulaski Day and so he should sit on his butt, he’d have laughed and said, “No work, no pay.”
     Dante is advised — spoiler alert! — to “forswear all falsehood,” vex the shameful, and “then let him who itches scratch.”
     Good advice. So if you want my Dante Award back, I’ll box it up. But kids aren’t going to learn about Columbus or Pulaski or much of anything else while on vacation. Send them to school, and let the adults slake their thirst for honors somewhere else.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2012

Iran War won't be so absentee

 

     What was America's longest war?
     Not the Civil War — that was the bloodiest, 620,000 dead, with Americans falling on both sides. That ended three days shy of exactly four years.
     Not World War II — four months shorter. Not the Vietnam War. Good guess, but no. Nearly 20 years, from the first military advisers in November, 1955 to the fall of Saigon in April, 1975.

    A long time. But topped, by a couple months, by the Afghanistan War — how quickly we forget. Also nearly 20 years, from 2001 to 2021, 2,400 American military died, not to forget maybe 150,000 Afghan civilians and fighters.
     And for what? The country is under the thumb of the Taliban. Just like when we started.
     We should think hard about these past conflicts as we go sailing off into a new one. Well, we should have thought about them before we went sailing off into a new one. But thinking hard wasn't on the table, apparently. No consultation with Congress before going to war, as required by law. No communication with the American people — the opposite, we were told the job was done last year. No huddling with our allies — our former allies, fallen away after a year of Donald Trumps global charm offensive.
     Trump says the war will be Iran will be over "very soon. But Trump says a lot of things — the war is won, no, it continues. Five thousand Marines are on their way. The Strait of Hormuz will be easy to open — no, we must have the help of NATO to do it.
     The only thing happening very soon is the war's one month anniversary — on Saturday, the 28th. A good time to consider where we're heading.
     Wars take on a momentum, a weight of their own. After the first six Americans died, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dragooned their grieving families into an imaginary chorus, urging our country deeper down the hole. Using initial to justify feeding an unknown number of soldiers into a grinder for an undetermined span of time.
     “What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family," Hegseth said. "They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done.’”
     Finish what? What is this exactly? We seem to be making the goal up as we go.
     Not to be outdone, Trump conjured former presidents expressing envy at his triumph. All four living ex-presidents deny saying that.
     If the war lasts a year, or 10, we'll want to look back and see what we were thinking when it started. The Republicans were thinking, "Whatever Donny wants, Donny gets." While Democrats gnashed their teeth and wailed, quietly.
     Afghanistan could go on for 20 years because the war was so removed from our everyday existence. Pain was felt, but not by us.

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Company man

Calbert Wright

     When Calbert Wright began work at the Ford Motor Company's Chicago Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights in 1963, the factory was a noisy, smelly, smoky hellscape with a leaky roof. Working one shift imbued your clothes with what one veteran called "the Ford smell" causing wives to demand they strip down at the door when they got home.
     And it was hot: 100 degrees on the production line.
     "Ooh," Wright said. "No fans. Water fountains were rare, very rare."
     Plus Black workers such as himself were given the hardest duties.
     "The first month, I didn't like it," remembers Wright, 85, "I said, 'I'm not going to stay here'. They had us stacking steel. We couldn't touch no presses. All we could do is stack stock. They were trying to work us like Hebrew slaves."
     But stay he did.
     When Wright began work at the age of 23 at Ford, John F. Kennedy was president. Henry Ford still ran the business — albeit Henry Ford II, grandson of the man who founded the automobile manufacturer in 1903.
     Meaning that Wright, who still prowls prowling the floor today checking that workers on the line have enough parts to keep the robots busy — and takes taking their place when they go on bathroom breaks — has worked for Ford a little more than half the 123 years since the company sold its first car, a two-cylinder, two-passenger Model A, in red, the only color available, for $850 to Ernest Pfennig, a dentist on Clybourn Avenue.
     Wright had come up from Mississippi when he was 11, and his voice is rich with Southern drawl. He had an uncle at Ford's Torrence Avenue assembly plant, and got a job at Chicago Stamping.
     Why did he stay? 

     "There weren't jobs paying like this," he said, laughing: $1.40 an hour. "Big money."
     He had a wife, Thelma — now married 65 years — and an infant son to consider. And things were changing.
     "[Martin Luther] King, plus the union, made everybody be classified," Wright said. Conditions improved. He moved up from stacking steel. "That's why I stayed so long."
     Wright's 63-year tenure isn't even the longest of Ford's 177,000 workers — that would be Art Porter, 86, who joined Chicago Stamping in 1961.
     Their longevity is especially amazing when you realize how frequently workers change employers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average worker at a private factory like Ford works 4.9 years before leaving.
     Wright has put in a dozen times that, and seen many changes.
     One of the biggest is automation. When robots were first introduced, in the 1970s, it wasn't clear whether they'd be a benefit.
     "They were throwing parts all over," Wright said. "They were dangerous. They couldn't control it. They were putting welds in the wrong place, blowing holes."

Better with robot help

     Gradually, the machines improved.
     "They got it right now," Wright said. "They come out better with the robots. They put the welds in the same place. When they manpower with a gun, they put one here, one there."
     Walking through the plant with Wright now, it's cool and almost quiet, except for the faint panoply of clanks and hisses. Only occasionally do you spy a person, shielded by machinery., evoking the quip attributed to Henry Ford: "Machines don't buy cars."
     "Them robots came in and knocked all those people out," Wright said. "Each line would have 18 people, Now they got three. When I hired in, they had 6,500 people in this plant."
     Now Chicago Stamping employs 1,100.

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Work in progress: Jack Clark on the No. 93 bus

     Not living in the city, I probably like buses more than Chicago residents do — familiar enough to grab one when convenient; not familiar enough to be thoroughly schooled in their shortcomings. Like them enough to show up toward midnight at the Kedzie Avenue garage once, near midnight, to watch one being cleaned. 

     Thus I'm happy to present the latest contribution by Jack Clark, a deep dive into a particular bus route. My guess is this won't be everyone's cup of tea, but that some will appreciate it, if only for its granular look at part of a city we all love.

     I’d write to the CTA if I could figure out a concise way to express my thoughts, which aren’t about important issues like crime on the system or whether Donald Trump will figure out some way to cut funding. Mine are closer to home: the route of the CTA’s 93 North California/Dodge bus, which comes out of Evanston and was recently rerouted so it now connects the Purple Line in Evanston, the Brown Line at Kedzie Avenue, and the Blue Line at Logan Square.
     Now before I go on, I should tell you that I can see Kedzie Avenue out my kitchen window. (I just looked. It’s still there.) And, at first, I assumed that my desire to have the extension of the 93 go straight down Kedzie on its way to Logan Square was nothing more than typical selfishness. I did a bit of research and changed my mind.
     There are two California buses, the 93, which I mentioned above, and the 94 California bus, which goes south from Addison Street all the way to 74th and Damen. Until recently, the two buses did not meet. Most of this can probably be attributed to the blockade put up by Ravenswood Manor, where California becomes a narrow side street and only runs for a single block in the half mile between Lawrence and Montrose Avenues.
     The old 93 didn’t try to get around this gap. It just gave up on California, took Foster to Kimball, went down to the Brown Line terminal at Lawrence, and started back north for Evanston.
     The new route takes Foster only as far as Kedzie where it turns south and connects with the Brown Line. A few blocks later, at Montrose Avenue, the bus makes a wrong turn. The CTA could have sent the bus the direct and logical way, straight down Kedzie, (past my kitchen window) a little over two miles, to the new end of the line at Logan Square. Instead, they decided to add a mile to the trip and go east, back to California.
     Now this makes sense on paper. It’s the California bus after all. Shouldn’t it be on California? Confusion starts as soon as the bus makes that turn. Montrose Avenue already has a bus. People have been taking it for decades without having to check to see if it’s the right one. If a CTA bus came along it was the Montrose bus. So now, of course, you have people getting on the wrong bus only to discover their mistake once the bus turns south.
     South of Montrose, California is a quiet street. There’s an ordinary residential neighborhood on the right. On the left, is first Horner and then California Park. Mostly what you see from the bus are parking lots. Beyond those, there are playgrounds, baseball diamonds, a nature walk along the river, a dog run, a swimming pool, and a bike, walking, and running path that goes under the Irving Park bridge, over the river and into Clark Park, and all the way to Belmont Avenue. There’s also an indoor sports center with tennis courts and an ice rink.
     In my several fact-finding trips, I haven’t seen anybody getting on or off the bus who looks like a park patron. I haven’t seen many riders at all. It’s a pleasant trip during daylight when you can actually see what you’re passing. At night, with the tinted windows, what you mostly see is your own reflection.
     The parks end just north of Addison where DePaul College Prep--the recently renamed Gordon Tech High School — sits, and this is also where the 94 California bus turns the corner from Addison and begins its long, 13-mile journey, south to 74th Street. The two buses, the 93 and the 94, now run together for a mile, both with California in their name, which must cause a bit of confusion. At Diversey, the 93 turns west, causing even more confusion as it drives a half mile down a street which already has a bus, and goes right back to Kedzie where it turns south for a block or so, to the end of the line at Logan Square.
     So the bus went a mile out of its way on two streets that already have buses, just so it could go two miles down another street, a mile of which is already covered by another CTA bus with a very similar name. Mass transit turns to mass confusion.
     The CTA apparently wanted to connect those two California buses, probably so passengers could transfer from one to the other. This makes sense, of course, but believe me, there are better ways to do this.
     Here’s what the 93 missed by not staying on Kedzie all the way to Logan Square. The Auto Zone auto parts store at Cullom, which is right next door to the Easy Clean laundromat. The Cermak Produce grocery store at Berteau, which is right across the street from Sanabel Bakery and Grocery, which is full of Middle-Eastern baked goods and other products.
     The next block, Belle Plaine, is where you would get off for the Village Discount, a huge thrift store. At Irving Park, there’s a currency exchange, a full-service Chase Bank, a Walgreens, and Fuller’s Pub which has live music many nights of the week and is not a bad place to watch the Bears.
     At Byron there’s another laundromat with a dry cleaners attached, and at Grace there is the Daniel J. Doffyn Post Office, which is the main post office for zip code 60618. This appears to be the only post office in the entire city that is not serviced by the CTA. Yes, you can walk two blocks from the Irving, Kimball, or the Addison bus, or four blocks from California, where nothing at all is still going on.
     I’m sure there are plenty of people who would appreciate a bus that would take them right to the front door. Of course, this would lead to even longer lines inside the post office. Well, I don’t really mind the lines. In this busy world, it’s sometimes nice to have nothing to do but think about CTA buses ambling down that orderly grid of Chicago streets. Orderly Grids. That sounds like some boring, generic breakfast cereal. What’s really needed here is a bit of sex, some drugs, and rock and roll. 

     Now Kedzie Avenue is not much on that first diversion. To my eyes, it’s one of the least erotic streets in town. You want rock and roll? Go right back to Fuller’s Pub at Irving Park. Drugs? Straight ahead on the left just past Addison. That’s where you’ll find the BLOC Dispensary. According to Google “it is a Latino- and woman-owned social equity dispensary…” They also sell marijuana and related paraphernalia. You have to go around the back to get in. I think this is to remind you how much fun you used to have sneaking around when drugs were illegal and much, much cheaper.
     Wait a minute, can you get a contact high just writing about reefer? I missed the White Castle which is kitty-corner on the other side of Addison, and the big Jewel/Osco, which anchors a big shopping center across Elston Avenue with a bunch of other stores including, believe it or not, another currency exchange and another Chase Bank. Kedzie Avenue, the financial center of the North Side. Who knew?
     From here on out, Kedzie is just about as boring as California. So, dear CTA, if you really think these two buses must meet on California itself, you could send the 93 down Elston. The two buses could kiss when they meet at Belmont, and then proceed south a half mile to Diversey where the 93 could wave goodbye and turn back to Kedzie to get to Logan Square.
     But this brings up another issue, one which I’m sure the CTA in its insular way has never even considered. The California exit from the inbound Kennedy Expressway is one of the worst exits in the entire city. It frequently backs up onto the highway. This happens because cars wanting to go east on Diversey must make an immediate left turn when they come off the exit ramp. If more than a couple of cars are attempting this, it generally blocks everybody else trying to get off and the exit backs up. I’m sure there have been plenty of accidents on the ramp and on the expressway itself because of this backup. Adding a second CTA bus to the confusion cannot help matters.
     But I have a simple solution. Let’s just send the 93 straight down Kedzie Avenue (and by my kitchen window) to Logan Square. This was how it went until the route was cut back to Lawrence Avenue in 1982, which in my mind is still sort of the recent past.
     Now the other California bus, the 94, is going all the way to 74th Street. That’s so far away it sounds like another galaxy (and let’s face facts, if the numbered streets didn’t make the South Side layout so easily understood, for most of us on the North Side, it might as well be). The bus already has to make a detour at Chicago Avenue to get around the Metra yards, which cuts off California between Grand Avenue and Fulton Street. So one more diversion on the way out of the Milky Way is hardly going to matter.
     My suggestion — after 1500 words — send the 94 down Logan Boulevard to Logan Square? It’s only a half mile. The two buses could do their little kiss, people could transfer from one to another, and then the 94 could go right back out the boulevard to California and continue on its way.
     Of course, now it’s the 94 that’s going a mile out of its’ way. But Logan Boulevard is a wide street without much traffic, so this diversion will take much less time than the one currently in place. There hasn’t been a bus on Logan since the early 1950s when the old boulevard bus system was taken over by the CTA. So there won’t be any confusion with other buses as there is on Montrose, California and Diversey.
     And the last time I looked, there was even an old sidewalk-to-nowhere left over from one of the old boulevard bus stops. So the CTA could bring back a bit of transit history too.
     Before I finish, I should tell you that I rarely take the CTA. I usually get around by bicycle, unless it happens to be really cold or it’s raining or snowing, like it’s been for the last several months.
     Now how ironic is that?

 

 

JustFoodForDogs

  

    No column in the paper today. I was on assignment for the Sunday editor, and wrote a larger piece that's running this weekend.

     "I wonder if they have any food for cats," I mused, as my wife and I drove to Highland Park. "Maybe I'll ask them."
     We don't have a cat, not anymore, having lost our Natasha last June. So no need for cat food. But my odd comment becomes less mysterious when you understand our destination: a shop called "JustFoodForDogs" in Highland Park. I guess I was trying to be funny, and failing.             
     Our Kitty, who is a dog, for new readers, or longtime readers slow on the uptake, is pushing 16 years old this summer and has been suffering from what we call a wanky stomach. As have we. I will spare you the details. Let's just say instead of taking her out three times a day, I've been taking her out five or six. This morning, my wife took her out at 1 a.m. And I went at 2:30 a.m. We know to do so because she starts crying. It's like having a newborn.  This also necessitated several visits to the vet — three, maybe four — a variety of tests, including x-rays. An expenditure, I estimate, of some $500. At least.

     We'd given her medications. We'd mixed canned pumpkin into her food. Now the vet's suggestion was to go to this JustFoodForDogs — not sure what happened to the spaces between the words, but that's how they present themselves — and secure some balanced remedy food. No problem. Had Dr. Jones suggested we go to Lourdes and wash her in the water at the Grotto of Massabielle, well, that's what we would do. We love her that much.

     I must admit, I was taken aback by the store, particularly its sparseness. The place reminded me of the Parachute boutique on Oak Street in the 1980s, when "you're going to pay a fortune on this rags" was conveyed by having just a few exquisite garments hanging from a hook or two. Or the Richart chocolate shop in Paris. Swanky dog food.

     I let out a mental slow whistle.

     Our entrance tripped some secret signal, in the back, and a young man hurried out and curated our high end dog food needs. He was a handsome young man, tall, with his face obscured by a mass of hair, and I considered taking his photograph, then thought better of it.

     We bought two forms of the food, a frozen slab and a small box of what was, in essence, cooked turkey and rice with a bunch of oils and vitamins in it , and took it home.

     Kitty zupped the stuff up. And while the unmentionable problems got only a little better, if that, we were encouraged enough to return. This time I bought three frozen slabs, each weighing 18 ounces, for a little over $30, and took them away in a little white bag, the sort of thing you'd expect at a jewelry store or expensive boutique, which I guess this is.

     Yes, it occurred to me we could whip up some turkey and rice and mash it up and save ourselves about 90 percent. But we could also make our brooms out of sorghum. "We cook our dog's food ourselves," is not a sentence that I ever want to utter. 

     JustFoodForDogs was founded in 2010 to offer "human-grade food" to canines without all the filler, sawdust and ground up horses and whatnot that must be in commercial dog food.  In addition to the stand-alone stores, they're available in PetSmart — also no space; I'm beginning to see a trend here,. Maybe the pets eat the spaces between the words.

     When I made the cat joke at the beginning of today's post, I immediately realized that I was re-working a joke David Letterman made when he visited a store called "Just Bulbs" for his show. Doing my due diligence, I dug up the sketch, and was a little shocked to see the bit was aired in 1982. 

     "Do you have any sandwiches here, do ya?" a shockingly young Letterman asks the proprietor. "So besides bulbs, what do you have here? How about shades here? Can you get shades?" She suggests he go to a store called "Just shades." And he does. "Do you sell bulbs?" he asks her, earnestly.

     That's the thing with these jokes. A good one can stick in mind for a long, long time.