The glass elephant

      The glass elephant was in my mother's purse when she died, one year ago today. 
      She'd had it most of her life — taken it to Europe with her when she went to entertain the troops, at 16, as a good luck token. I should have asked her the story of how she got it. It's two and a half inches long, pressed glass, cheap. Something won at a carnival in the early 1950s, perhaps. So let's say a boy won it for her or ... reflecting current sensibilities ... that she won it herself. Though frankly, I prefer the won-it-for-her version.
     She lent it to my father as he circled the world as a government scientist. Europe. Africa. Asia. Australia. Carrying the elephant guaranteed safe return. Nobody ever lost it. 
      My brother got to the hospital first, and ended up with the purse, and the elephant. Less sentimental than myself, he didn't want anything of hers. When we cleaned out her room at the dynamic senior living facility in Addison, we divided her effects between things to throw away, and things I was keeping. I envied him his strength. I'll throw it all away too, eventually. Or someone will. But not now.
     I let six or nine months go by — and how quickly time seems to pass, while crawling — then did ask  him for the elephant. At one of our regular lunches he delivered it. Though I was almost sorry I had. Back home, regarding it, I felt a deep pang, almost a shock, as truly sad about her passing as I ever was, because I realized, in that moment, that its locus of significance rested with me and me alone. Nobody else would ever know, or care. Like the glass trinket, her entire world, really, rested in the palm of my hand or, rather, some clump of neurons nestled somewhere in my head. Talk about a fragile weight, a glass elephant. Someday, it would be gone, and before then, I, or someone, would release this glass animal into the slipstream of life, and it would rush away to be, at best, treasured by someone who appreciated its  ... 
     I plugged the picture above into Google Image Search and — to my surprise — learned it is an L.E. Smith pressed glass elephant, made by a Pennsylvania glass company. Twelve dollars and twenty-five cents on eBay and it's yours. We have so much knowledge now.
     Not that it would be her glass elephant, which I added to a little menagerie of her elephants  set up on a shelf in my office. She collected them or, rather, expressed a fondness one, and they became our go-to gift. I moved the group to a better spot, to take a picture, and realized that one member of the herd was missing, a fine green stone elephant that my father bought in South Africa. I hunted for it longer than I should — so much crap in my office — trying to tamp down the almost frantic urgency by thinking of something she used to say when we'd lost things as children: "You'll find it when you're not looking for it."
     That never quite worked — I remember being more annoyed than anything else. And it didn't work very well now, as I hunted around in places I'd already looked. Finally I went off to do other things and, distracted, found some critical distance, and moved on. It occurred to me that I was frantically trying to keep my world together a little longer, in face of the great scattering sure to come. In the end, one less elephant might even be a good thing. Though I still hope to find it. When I'm not looking for it. My mother was a smart woman, in many ways.

'God's chosen vessel'

Barack Obama talks to the Sun-Times editorial board in 2004.

 

    Friday was the official opening day of the Obama Presidential Center, and the internet was alive with clips from the celebration of the evening before, with Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and, of course, stirring speeches by the former president and his wife.

      It got me wondering what I wrote about Obama back in the day, and I dug up these three fun chestnuts from when he was running for, and then newly-elected to, the U.S. Senate. The headline is a nickname I sometimes applied to him.

Race against nobody

     Senator-to-be Barack Obama stopped by Friday. I give him credit for going through the motions of campaigning against Alan Keyes, who, once the media got bored with the freak show aspect of his candidacy, has sunk into utter oblivion. I picture Keyes alone in some muddy Downstate boondock somewhere, lecturing chickens about how Jesus would vote.
     Beyond that image, I haven't decided yet if Obama is Jack Kennedy or Chuck Percy. You remember Percy, the "Wonder Boy from Illinois." He was also going to be president, but fate disagreed because — cue the "Twilight Zone" music — Percy turned out to be too liberal.
     I don't think that is going to be the problem with Obama. He's sharp enough to shave with — as Percy was — but he also has a steely practicality. I asked him to lay out his hit-the-ground-running plans for when he takes over in Washington, and rather than the "Gee, I'll have to get my sea legs and learn from the old hands" line of claptrap I expected, he carefully explained how his Democratic star status translates into fund-raising power, which in Washington translates into real power, which means he should have a lock on the plum committee assignments. Smart.
     Obama might have benefitted from the complete collapse, in quick succession of a) Peter Fitzgerald, b) Jack Ryan and c) the Illinois Republican Party. But he didn't blunder into where he is today, nor does he seem capable of blundering any time in the near future. Think of him as our ace in the hole. No matter how the presidential election turns out, we're still trading in the broken pull-toy duck of Fitzgerald for the souped-up Corvette of Obama. We should be glad of that.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 4, 2004

Honeymoon's over

     Abraham Lincoln did not, to my knowledge, pepper his speeches with the tales of individuals — specific brave soldiers and such. While certain presidents later would inject their dogs — FDR's Fala, Nixon's Checkers — the trend of dragooning individual average Americans to lend luster to addresses began with Ronald Reagan.
     Now it's almost a duty. No politician can open his yap without it. Sen.-elect Barack Obama, in his as-always moving victory speech Tuesday night, evoked a 105-year-old supporter, marveling that her birth year, 1899, was before such modern conveniences as telephones and automobiles.
     Those present applauded, while I thought, "Wrong, pal."
     The Chicago Historical Society has not one but two city phone books going back to 1883 — white for homes, yellow for businesses.
     I don't fault Obama, particularly. Most of us labor under the impression that, prior to our enlightened age, our forebears crouched in caves and smeared themselves with berries. Not so. Phones were invented in 1876 and became almost immediately popular. And an 1899 Oldsmobile cost the princely sum of $650, but you could buy one. There were thousands of cars on the road then.
     Just like 74 percent of Illinoisans, I think Obama is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that he will one day rule a unified and peaceful world. But, as he will quickly learn in the Senate, you ignore the small stuff at your peril.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2004

AND THEY'RE OFF . . .

     One of the sillier political questions is whether Obama will run for president. He already is running, right now, in front of our eyes. What they mean by the question, I think, is, will he officially announce his candidacy? But that too is silly, like standing at the five-mile mark at a marathon, watching the runners pound by, and wondering whether a leading athlete will decide to finish the last five miles of the race. Sure he will, assuming he doesn't collapse. Few fit marathoners — and Obama, if nothing else, has proved himself a political greyhound — shrug and give up after 10 miles. He might not win. But he sure is running.
     The politician that Obama is compared to the most is John F. Kennedy — similarly young (or, if you prefer "inexperienced"). Similarly eloquent. Similarly dynamic and beloved. Both Harvard men.
     And both men had a millstone around their necks that supposedly precluded them from the highest office in the land. In Kennedy's case it was his Catholicism. We view this as a dusty bit of history, but we should remember how real and raw it was, how many Americans were unashamed in their anti-Catholic bigotry.
     "Our people built this country," a Protestant lady in West Virginia told a reporter. "If they had wanted a Catholic to be president, they would have said so in the Constitution."
     Obama's supposed handicap is not that he's inexperienced, but that he's black. Not that his enemies will come right out and argue this directly. Rather, they hint around the edges. Just last week, a longtime Republican Party hack drew attention to Obama's middle name — "Hussein" — as if that were a secret, or significant. It isn't.
     This is right on schedule, and — unknown to those who would derail him — plays right into Obama's hands. Again, think of Kennedy, and his primary victory against Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia in May 1960.
     West Virginia was 95 percent Protestant, many of them sharing the mind-set of the old lady quoted previously.
     Rather than ignore his supposed handicap, Kennedy drew attention to it — just as Obama is drawing attention to his heritage, visiting Africa and such. Kennedy shocked people by talking about his religion — something one just didn't discuss — and how it was part of his personal life but didn't affect his political decisions. He wasn't going to take orders from the pope. Kennedy cleverly made the West Virginia primary into a referendum on the social progress of the state. A vote for Kennedy became a vote for a clear-eyed, unbiased future, while a vote for Humphrey was practically a vote to confirm West Virginia as a nest of Hillbillies. Naturally, Kennedy won.
     Obama could do the same thing — the more his enemies try to undercut him as a guy with a funny name and a Muslim grandfather, the more they allude to the fact his dad was black, the more Obama will seem to offer a fresh start from bias. You can vote for him and vote for a nation that unifies its diverse strands into one powerful whole. Or you can support his opponents, and surrender to the narrow bigotry that inflames so much of the world, and contribute to our nation's downfall.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 4, 2006

Beatrice Lumpkin, workers’ rights leader and 'rock of the movement,' dies at 107

     

Beatrice Lumpkin addresses striking Starbucks workers in 2024 (Roberta Wood/People's World

Beatrice Lumpkin wasn't just liberal, or left-leaning, or a secret communist sympathizer. She was an open, enthusiastic, dues-paying member of the Communist Party for nearly 90 years, whose passion for workers' rights put her on the front lines of post-World War II labor struggles in Chicago, from working with Black Panther Fred Hampton to the fight to compensate employees abruptly fired at the closing of the Wisconsin Steel plant in 1980, to the recent unionization of Starbucks employees.
     "Bea was born and grew up and lived her life in the Communist Party," said Roberta Wood, former secretary-treasurer of the Communist Party USA.
    Lumpkin, 107, died in Hyde Park on Sunday.
     Mayor Brandon Johnson, who declared Aug. 3 as "Beatrice Lumpkin Day" in Chicago, called her "a towering figure in the labor movement, an unwavering advocate for fully funded education, and a continued source of inspiration for us all."
     "Spanning almost an entire century of public engagement, Lumpkin was deeply involved in movements for workers' rights, civil rights, and educational justice. She advocated for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, supported efforts to advance racial justice, and fought for policies that protected vulnerable communities," Johnson continued, in a statement.
     "As a teacher and organizer, Bea brought the lessons of solidarity into the classroom. As a math teacher in Chicago Public Schools and at Malcolm X College, she inspired generations of students while remaining deeply engaged building worker power. Through her leadership in the Chicago Teachers Union Retiree Committee and Climate Justice Committee, she built bridges between generations, reminding us that strong schools and strong communities are built through collective action and a steadfast commitment to justice." 
     She was born in New York in 1918. Her parents, Dora and Morris Shapiro, were Belarus radicals who emigrated to America after the failed Russian revolution of 1905 and ran a laundry. Lumpkin would say she was born "knowing which side I was on." By age 9 she was marching with striking textile workers.

     In her mid-teens, she joined the Young Communist League, and since then, she "never had a moment when there was nothing to do," she wrote in her 2013 autobiography, "Joy in the Struggle: My Life and Love." "There were always picket lines for workers on strike, demonstrations to demand food for a hungry family, knocking on doors to sell The Daily Worker, or bring people out to vote."
     She made speeches denouncing Hitler and fascism, was involved in the effort to free the Scottsboro Boys, the case of nine Black teens framed for a rape in 1931. She was first arrested leading a demonstration in front of a New York department store in 1935.
     She went to Hunter College in Manhattan, but found "union work was too important and too exciting" to waste time in school. She later returned and graduated.
     She moved to Buffalo in 1942 to work for Sylvania Radio. There she met a force in the Buffalo Communist movement, Hattie Lumpkin and, more significantly, her son Frank. They married on Oct. 22, 1949.

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Curious creatures

  

     The other day we had dinner at Kie Gol Lanee — the one in Logan Square, not the one in Uptown.  The name struck me as vaguely Korean, though it's a Mexican restaurant. "Kie Gol Lanee" is the phonetic spelling of Quiegoloani, a small mountain village in the southern highlands of Oaxaca. It means "old stone" in Zapotec.

     Dinner was pretty good. I enjoyed the spicy grasshoppers — how often do you get the chance? My wife didn't, though more for the heat than the insect aspect. The pork chop with tamarind sauce over grilled onions had a nice flavor as well. I can't say I'd hurry back, but wasn't sorry we went.
     Though what really caught my attention was the yard near where we parked, a block north of Diversey. Someone had put a lot of effort into crafting a variety of robots and beasts. The result somewhere between art and craft. Folk art, I suppose. The robots were angry, the dragon, in full cry. I wondered if I would want to be greeted by this distressed menagerie every time I came home. Probably not. Though I'm not sure I'd ever get around to removing them either. It would take a lot of physical effort to haul the pieces away. Plus the psychic toll of effacing somebody's art. I'm not sure I could do it.

     

Happy birthday to me, her and Donald Trump

   

Ed Paschke, "Mid-America"

     My 66th birthday, my granddaughter's 1st birthday, and Donald Trump's 80th, all fell within the same week, and it is hard to resist juxtaposing these three very different occasions, to understand the values they display.
     Mine came first. I've been feeling low key, so my plan was to do nothing. I didn't want more stuff or a fancy meal Downtown. I don't need anybody to put on a show in order for me to feel good about myself.
     My wife, bless her heart, played along, though she broke down at the last minute and commanded, "Go to Sunset and buy yourself a cake," as she breezed out the door to the train. So I did — I'm good at following instructions — a little triple chocolate confection that served nicely.
     Otherwise, I ran errands — took the dog to the groomer — and spent much of the day in the basement, going over a wooden box with steel wool, buffing the finish. The box contained wooden blocks I had cut and sanded and finished as a 1st birthday present.
     Went by quick, right? I don't remark in print upon my grandchildren, other than the fact of their existence, because their parents, quite wisely, view the internet not as the balm and drug we old people do, but as a menace. Meta might be big now, but so was ketchup, and if enough young people avoid it, maybe the thing will also fade. Something to look forward to.
     Caution is the watchword. And it's contagious. The finish for the blocks was carefully chosen for its nontoxicity — plain shellac that comes from the thorax of the female lac bug. So safe it's also used to coat food, like apples. Though the finish was the second concern. My first concern, in designing the blocks, was to find out the dimensions that can't be swallowed by an infant — a cube 1.25 inches on a side — and so I made my blocks 1.5 inch cubes, with other sizes multiples of that.
     I suppose that buffing a set of blocks is not the peak, kick-him-in-the-chest masculinity we supposedly saw on display in Washington over the weekend. But then, the notion that there is only one way to be a good man, or woman, or person, or whatever, is a big reason our country is in such a mess. I'm not threatened by men oiling themselves up and wrestling in their underwear, whether in a UFC cage match or some Halsted Street club. Why should they care if a man builds blocks, or reads poetry, or bakes? Frankly, it seems like weakness on their part — lack of faith in their own path. Though the truth is worse than that: A key part of being a hater is positing imaginary harms to yourself in a futile attempt to justify your own bitterness.
     The next day we drove 400 miles to deliver the blocks and attend a party with cake and streamers. When fellow guests expressed wonder that we'd make the 800-mile round trip drive to attend a child's party, I replied with utter candor: Of course we did, Who wouldn't? The thought not to never crossed either of our minds.

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Flashback 2003: Burying oneself in Joyce brings more than 1 benefit

      Today is the 16th of June, aka Bloomsday, the day in which the entirety of James Joyce's "Ulysses" takes place. I never did finish the famed cinderblock of a novel. To be honest, I never got very far into it. But that did't stop me from having fun with it.

     With potscrape, clump and a gurgle, the blackgreen was pipingily poured into a blazing white soft cup — O joi de cafe! Noir et chaud! — and together, cup and I, went brim-sipping, shuffling, striding, stepping over the iceblue speckled gumsmeared carpeting back to my officespace....
     Sorry. Too much time reading James Joyce. I had to try my hand at parody, mediocre though it may be. June 16 was not only my youngest son's 6th birthday, but "Bloomsday," the day of the year on which the entire action of Joyce's massive novel Ulysses occurs in Dublin in 1905.
     Realizing that next year will be the book's centennial, I started trying to read Ulysses — every few years, I've given it a shot, made some progress, then given up.
     Just like dieting.
     The book is not light summer reading. After more than two weeks of effort, I'm only about 50 pages into it, sawing through the text, still in the part where Stephen Dedalus drags his sorry self around Dublin, musing on Catholicism and his dead mother.
     Not that the book is without pleasure, in spots. Joyce is a good writer (that sounds obvious, but in modern society, we have room for one adjective attached to each person in history, and Joyce — impenetrable. Yet he often writes clearly, with memorable description. The sea has "molten pewter surf," a pier becomes, wonderfully, "a disappointed bridge." Dedalus tells his doddering, anti-Semite boss, "History . . . is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." I had heard that famous line before, unmoored from its context, and running into it in the middle of a page was a small joy, like that cliched wedding march popping out of Wagner's "Lohengrin").

Top 10 reasons to read Joyce

     I should pause here and welcome all the new readers picked up from my appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor" earlier in the week. I put in a few paragraphs about Joyce just to turn off as many religious fanatics as I could — I figure, they'll start reading, decide their ox isn't being gored, then move on, sniffing the ground for the next thing to offend them.
     For those who missed last week's column, I used my visit to an Orthodox synagogue as a jumping-off point to argue that religion shouldn't be used in the government to, oh for instance, deny homosexuals their civil rights.
     That managed the neat trick of offending both the Orthodox, who resented — well, I never did figure out what they were upset about — and right-wing Christians, irked at the suggestion the United States isn't just an adjunct to church, like a big parking lot.
     As if I weren't being beaten down enough, I go on this show. My fault. I never watch that sort of thing, and only had a vague idea that "The O'Reilly Factor" is a big deal (a feather in my cap!) so I went on, not realizing it would be some Bible Belt boob asking me a question, then, as I started to answer, screaming at me. Jenny Jones for people who went to college, and punishment for the vanity of wanting to be on TV.
     The line that got me thrown off the show was, as best I can remember, "You have to understand, if you're not Christian, then Christianity is just another religion, just like a tree cult." In other words, it's possible not to believe. We are allowed not to. Right?
     As queasy as I felt after the show, viewer reaction made up for it. Yes, I heard from a few of those either enlightened by Christ ("Jew Bastard!" a guy screamed on the phone, hanging up) or embroidered with the richness of Orthodox Judaism ("I'd advise you not to come back to our synagogue," said a member of the unnamed congregation in my column).
     But in the main, most people understood that this is America, that people should keep their religion in its place, and not try to use the government to cram it down the throats of the unwilling. Just because the Bible tells you to poke your nose into somebody's bedroom doesn't make it your right.
     Frankly, now that the sour taste of appearing on Fox has passed, I'm left quite encouraged. The pendulum swings, but going rightward it never quite gets back to the Lost Eden that the fundamentalists are grasping so frantically toward, and swinging left a new group of previously shunned people somehow scrambles aboard and takes seats next to us, as we squirm against the window, for a while. Religion as a coercive force is on the wane outside of the Muslim world. The harder that America's home-grown mullahs push to go back, the more America swings away toward its accepting future.
     Some people jump from the beginning of a column to the end, so I should return to my subject at hand, just to throw them off.

More dull stuff about 'Ulysses'

     I should make it clear that I am not suggesting you go out and read Ulysses. Unlike some, my life is not enhanced knowing the world is exactly like me. Nor, if you are, say, reading the latest Tom Clancy thriller, am I putting you down. I wouldn't dream of writing to you, first damning your choice of books, then inviting you to join me in the rarified world of James Joyce. That would be pompous and insulting. But believe it or not, people do just that, though not so much with books as they do, oh for instance, with religion.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 4, 2003

'This is why people hate liberals'

 

     A detail can be intriguing and yet not fit into the story you are writing. A matter of tone. For instance, this sign, noticed in the men's room on the main floor of the Obama Presidential Center. At first glance, it might seem a harmless bit of virtue signaling — "Look, we are so environmentally conscious we collect rainwater on our roof." A big self-administered pat on the back and nothing more.

     No, not "collect." Too ordinary a word. They harvest the rain water. As if it were alfalfa or something. An overly-ornate word, like "curate" when applied to realms other than art. 

     That would be bad enough. But further context cast it in an even dimmer light. The sign goes on to urge readers not to drink the water, even though it appears, not in the main bathroom, by the sinks, where a person might conceivably drink, but in a toilet stall. The folks behind the Obama Presidential Center are not just bragging about the source of the water, but cautioning you not to drink it. Out of the toilet.  Because, apparently, they suspect that otherwise, unless you are fully informed about the situation, you might.
     "This is why people hate liberals," I muttered, snapping a few photos.