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

Kitty, August, 2010

   

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

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

Prank

 

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

Has Facebook begun the long slide toward ruin?

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

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

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

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"How does it feel to be a minority?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Flashback 2007: "Wives think their husbands are stupid"

     

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

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

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

Neither arches nor ballrooms do greatness make

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

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

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

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

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