The crowded house

     There is an old Yiddish tale that goes like this:
     A village man comes to his rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I have a problem — my house is far too small for my growing family, but I can't afford a new one. What should I do?"
     The rabbi looks at the man.
     "Do you have a chicken?" he asks.
     The man is a little confused.
     "Yes," he slowly replies. "I have a chicken."
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Take the chicken into your house to live."
     The next day the man returns.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. Now I have the chicken flapping around, feathers flying, in addition to my children running, my wife scolding. It's even worse!"
     "I see," says the rabbi, stroking his beard. "Do you have a goat?"
     "Yes..." says the man, unhappy where this is going.
     "Good," says the rabbi. "Bring the goat into your house as well."
     The next day the man returns, eyes red.
     "Rabbi," he says. "I did what you told me. But this is even worse: madness — the goat braying all night, chasing the chicken, the children running, my wife complaining. It's a nightmare."
     "I see," says the rabbi. "Do you have a cow...?"
     You see where this is heading. The story can be continued with any number of livestock until the poor man is at his utter wit's end. Then the rabbi instructs him to remove all the animals from the house, and the man returns, grateful and amazed, at how his home situation has been improved.
    "Rabbi you are a true tzaddik, a sage!" he exudes. "There is so much room for everybody."
     The moral, I believe, is that we have it good, but we don't know it, until things go bad for a little while. I had it good, until I had my rotator cuff surgery when ... well, honestly, I still have it good. Yes, the thing hurt like the dickens for ... two days. But the drugs helped. ("So long as I'm in pain," I hissed to my wife, "it's not addiction.") As does physical therapy. And my wife has been a godsend, as always.
     Harder was wearing the sling for 24 hours a day. Not just any sling — with a pillow and its own red ball for me to squeeze — reminding me of the little shovel on my Ariens snowthrower. On my left hand — my dominant hand. For six weeks.
     I became quite good with my right hand. I wrote in my journal, slowly. And learned to dictate copy. Wednesday marked my third week in the sling. Three more to go. But it will come off, eventually, and I will be so happy for a time, joyously thinking of the tale above, along with the line from Psalms that came to mind when I first contemplated the vast amount of time to be spent in the sling: "A thousand years are but a day when it is past." (Checking, the actual quote draws God into the equation: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." I like my remembered version better.

Extra credit: I'm a huge Eugene O'Neill fan, and after I wrote the last paragraph above, I realized there is a slight echo of his greatest play. Any idea?

The final line of "Long Day's Journey into Night" — "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

Speaking of private ailments

       Lately, it seems the news has quieted down. The daily Trump disaster? Almost muted, a muffled din far away. The war in Iran, even more absentee than before. The economy, despite everything, chugging along uneventfully. The gathering global warming catastrophe? Routine now.

      Maybe because it is summer; the August slough.
      Then I began to suspect it wasn't the news, so much as me. I had this surgery and have been focused on recovery, sleeping, sort of, in a chair every night. Maybe I'm just not absorbing current events very well. The news is there, but since I'm not writing a column — back on Friday, in theory — I'm not processing it effectively.

Henry David Thoreau
(National Portrait Gallery)

    Which reminded me of my one of my favorite quotes, from Henry David Thoreau, one that I've posted here a couple times, but bears repeating, warning against all who "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere."
     Despite my frequent quoting — seven times, as recently as last year, quite a lot really — I don't recall the context. Had to be "Walden," right?
    Wrong. I plugged the quote into Google, and AI fell flat on its face, as AI will do:
   "AI Overview — Henry David Thoreau used this phrase in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, written on December 5, 1856." 
     Bold-face be damned, when I went to look at the citation itself, in his letters posted by Project Gutenberg, I got an Oct. 18, 1843 letter to his sister Helen. This is the germane passage, where he refers to his friend, Willam Ellery Channing — the poet who suggested he build a hut in the woods and go live in it:
     "You think that Channing's words would apply to me too, as living more in the natural than the moral world; but I think that you mean the world of men and women rather, and reformers generally. My objection to Channing and all that fraternity is that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company."
     In essence, reformers themselves need the help they deign to lavish on others.
     True enough. But this is the interesting part. As useful as that phrase is, and as much as I used it, when I plug the quote into Google, up pops six EGD and one Sun-Times reference. Nothing else, It doesn't quote any other work than mine. Which I find hard to believe. Maybe Google is now so self-referential that it sends me back to my own stuff, like a dog returning to its mess. Or could it be that I'm the only person ever to quote that particular line? That idea defies belief.

Flashback 1996: Immigrants turn up heat on the natives

     God, this is SO depressing...
     Are we doomed to chew over the same old bullshit FOREVER?
     I was up early Saturday — big day, had to head over to Bridgeport first thing in the morning. I figured, let's take care of EGD early. And I was in the Newsbank, and thought, "Wonder what I wrote this week 30 years ago?" My column began in 1996, and I can see what odd, antique, esoteric issues were captivating public attention then.
     Oh look. Immigration. Republicans fear-mongering over the prospect of swarthy people crossing the border. Everything old is new again.
     Sigh. I guess they keep doing it because it works. Donald Trump will serve eight democracy-shredding years as president of the United States because half of America is terrified they'll lose their job to a 22-year-old who just showed up in this country and barely speaks English. The hate runs deep. My column starts up again Friday, and I swear, I'm tempted to turn this in. It could be printed, word for word, as is and, except for the mass citizenship ceremony, be entirely accurate.

     I happened to be driving past Soldier Field Tuesday when the ceremony let out.
     Eleven thousand or so Chicagoans, beginning the day as immigrants, had roasted in the sun for hours waiting for the federal government to hand over a piece of paper. Now they were transformed, finding their way home as new Americans.
     Traffic, already snarled by construction, snarled more. I'd like to say that everybody in the cars were honking and smiling and waving and giving thumbs up at this freshest batch of fellow citizens outside of a maternity ward, dressed proudly in their Sunday best.
     But we weren't. We just sort of sat there and gawked at them. I thought about honking, but I was in the left lane, stopped, and I figured the guy in front of me would get out of his car and shoot me.
     I couldn't help but imagine that many motorists in the traffic jam had their usual simmering outrage over immigration jacked up a few notches.
     I pictured them drumming their fingers on their steering wheels, eyeing the mustachioed men and dark-skinned women and thinking: "This, this is the peril! The waves of traffic-blocking, job-grabbing, foreign-tongue-jabbering humanity polluting our beloved American lifestyle and sapping our vital national essence!"
     Were not such thoughts common, how else could the Illinois Republican Party dare run that horrible television ad, the one with the grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of illegals scampering across the border? The implication is that we're being invaded; foreign people are pouring across our porous borders, the gates left open by bleeding-heart liberal Democrats.
     And then what? That's the part I never quite understood. What bad thing are all these immigrants supposed to be doing?
     Taking jobs, I guess. Though the argument has a basic flaw. If your job is such that a guy raised in a small village, a guy who doesn't speak much English, can wade across the Rio Grande and take it away from you, well then mister, maybe you should be thinking about personal career development, immigrants or no.
     Not to imply that the world doesn't send us its share of doctors and engineers and physicists. But the fact is that many recent arrivals tend to take the lowest jobs, at least until they acclimate themselves, which can take years.
     Many immigrant Ph.Ds are sweeping up after hours. It must gall them, along with all their fellows cleaning the toilets and tending mewling babies, to be treated as some sort of unwanted menace.
     Let's not be coy, either. "Immigration" is a code word for "immigration from Latin America." Those Republican fear ads didn't show a group of Colleens in knee socks dancing the Siege of Ennis, or a bunch of Gdansk shipworkers arriving at Terminal Four clutching cardboard suitcases.
     (Though it would be funny to imagine such ads: "There are a million grandmothers in Kiev who would rather be feeding the birds in Grant Park, and will, if you let them!" Maybe the Republicans are saving those for October.)
     I have a sneaking suspicion as to why so many native-born Americans are so worried about Latin American immigrants. Not that they would admit it, but I think that, in their hearts, they're afraid the immigrants are better people than we are. Harder working. More dedicated to their families. Less given to bellyaching and self-pity.
     They worry about how they'll be able to park the truck behind the worksite and catch the traditional midmorning nap and still keep their customers if some clutch of short, swarthy men with cowboy boots and big belt buckles, some plantain-eating recien llegados are going to work their tails off 12 hours a day?
     Not to worry. We're just as good, but maybe a little less motivated. The new immigrants, by setting a good example, will help us. Because the vast majority settling here will buoy us. They always do.
     And anyway, we'll get used to them. The irony of immigration is that while Average Joe American is always worked up about foreigners, in general, the specific groups keep changing. A hundred years ago it was the Irish who were viewed as bestial interlopers whose base origins and strange habits would prevent them from ever assimilating into our precious Way of Life.
     Guess what? They did, and the same thing will happen with Hispanics. Bet on it. All the haters and nativists who flinch whenever they see a sign pointing out a telefono, or clench their jaws in passing a frozen fruit bar vendor, those people will die off, to be replaced by people who grew up in a country where Latin American immigrants were just another part of the multitude who came here and found a home and prospered. Here, to this great country, which doesn't persecute people because they can read Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the original.
     Welcome to it. Sorry about the botched, over-long ceremony in the hot sun Tuesday. But that's how it goes over here. You'll get used to it.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 11, 1996

Cold ... colder ...

     Cold sinks. Heat rises. But why? A bright boy such as myself should know. It's because ... ah ... guessing ... with warm air, the molecules are busier, bouncing around, while with cold air they are slower, bunching together. Thus denser. Heavier.
     Am I right? Let's ask AI: why does warm air rise while cold air sinks?
     "Warm air rises and cold air sinks due to differences in density and the force of gravity," the AI overview begins. "When air is heated, its molecules speed up and spread apart, making the warm air less dense than the surrounding air. Earth's gravity pulls harder on the nearby cold, dense air, causing it to sink to the ground. As this cold air drops, it slides under the lighter, warm air and forces it upward."
     Sounds right to me. Meaning I was close enough. I'm glad being the son of a nuclear physicist had some advantage.
     This is significant because for the past two weeks I've been sleeping in a blue recliner in our TV room, on the ground floor of our house. It's colder there, I realized, because the warm air rises to fill the three levels above.
     So cold that, the other night, I actually adjusted the thermostat, which is an earthquake for me. I never adjust the thermostat. Not in winter. Not in summer. I always feel just fine. It's a gift.
     I didn't think about this until Friday afternoon, when my wife announced that she was too was cold, working in the living room, and would adjust the thermostat. She did so, fiddling with a dial located under an African doll in our front room. That wasn't the one I used.
     "I actually adjusted the thermostat the other day," I informed her. "But the one in the TV room. I was cold."
     She laughed.
    "That one doesn't do anything,*" she said.
    "It doesn't?" I replied. genuinely surprised. "Did not know that."
    "And how many years have we lived here?" she laughed.
     "Twenty-six years," I said, in a small voice.

* To the air conditioner, she later elaborated. It controls our boiler; the house has radiator heat.

Books on the TV tray next to the reclining chair. And on the phone...

     An EGD reader asked me what books I've been reading during my convalescence. Good question. I'm working on my own book, about the benefits of Judaism, so for the past year have been trying to make a dent in modern Jewish literature, pressing forward on three fronts: audiobooks, physical books and, the first time and at my wife's urging, reading on my iPhone, since I can hold it easily in one hand.
     The first book I read on my phone was "The Chosen," by Chaim Potok. I read it 50 years ago, but only vaguely remembered something about a baseball game. It's an excellent novel, a crisply-written character study of the friendship between the protagonist, Reuven Malter and his friend Danny — slated at birth to become the next tzaddik, or leader of his particular sect  of orthodoxy. Plus their relationships with their demanding faith and strong-willed fathers. A reminder that, like all religions, Judaism is not a block of uniformity, but a spectrum; the various factions sometimes hate each other. The opening game is played between the Hasidim and a less rigorous sect. We might see them as both orthodox Jews, but the Hasids really despise their opponents, warning them that they're going to hell for being apostates.
      Right before the surgery, I read Harry Golden's surprisingly-useful
"Only in America." I googled "10 best contemporary Jewish novels" and one of them was Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" which I picked because it won the prestigious Man Booker award. The funny, thoughtful book was published in 2010 and is surprisingly current, with much of the plot pivoting on the Palestinian situation. One character joins a group he calls "Ashamed Jews" and they go around apologizing for the continued existence of the state founded in their name.

     The physical book I'm reading is James Loeffler's "Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America," published this month by Metropolitan Books. It's set in Chicago, beginning in 1949 with what is essentially an anti-Jewish pogrom in Englewood. One of the book's many shocks is realizing how American antisemitism cruised right through World War II, largely unaffected by the Holocaust, a term rarely used until 30 years later, after a TV series of the same name. Much real estate is given to Terminiello v. Chicago, a Supreme Court case that grew out of a anti-Semitic priest holding a hate rally on the West Side, and the question of whether groups can be protected from libel in the same way individuals are.
     The center section is about the legal ramifications of the 1977 attempt of Nazis to march in Skokie, while the last third brings us up-to-date to the present day I'm going to write a column about it so I don't wanna get too far into it, but it makes her gripping read with a caveat that the center section explores every legalistic posture, maneuver, and nuance in microscopic detail. 
     I'm also finishing Andre Aciman's sweet and melancholy "Out of Egypt" on Audible, which I read years ago and was really just fact checking one passage but ended up listening to the whole thing. It's a sentimental look at his family before they were kicked out in 1965 part of the Arab world's purge of Jews into Israel, where it turns out they don't belong either.  The book is billed as a memoir, though Aciman, who went on to write "Call Me by Your Name," recreates conversations and scenes from decades earlier that he couldn't possibly remember, and as a writer of memoirs myself, I wondered how much art embroiders the reality he is describing.

     What's next? Beyond the obvious Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. I think I'm going to polish off Elie Wiesel's "Night," which I managed to miss in high school, when everybody else read it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Flashback 2012: The semi-precious joy of a campus tour

Charles Martin Hall statue at Oberlin College
(Photo by Gary Cohen, '11, used with permission of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine)

     August is college tour season. Sometimes I suggest to parents embarking on the process that they check out my odyssey with my older son, "Nice work if you can get it."
     I didn't remember that I'd also written anything in the paper. But Facebook disinterred this 2012 column on Wednesday, and I couldn't resist sharing it, if only so I can show my son that his path to the law wasn't quite as straight as he may now believe it was.

     Charles Martin Hall is not famous in the way that, oh, Monty Hall is famous. Which illustrates the deadening effect of TV, since the place in our brains where the shrieks of strangely costumed audience members on “Let’s Make a Deal” still reside could instead be dedicated to the young Ohioan who discovered an easier way to extract aluminum from ore.
     Though the most common metal on earth — present in almost every plant, animal and rock — up to Hall’s discovery in 1886, aluminum was vastly expensive to refine, and what little was made was seen as a novelty of the wealthy, a semi-precious metal used in jewelry. The crown jewels of France included bars of aluminum. That changed after Hall went on to found Alcoa. The price of the metal dropped to 1/1000th of what it had been previously, which is why we use aluminum in soda cans instead of wedding rings.
     The only reason I know this is because — gosh — 20 years ago I wrote a book on college pranks, and Hall was a 21-year-old graduate of Oberlin College working on the college campus when he made his discovery. At his death, he gave a ton of money to the school, which expressed its gratitude by naming a variety of buildings after Hall. Alcoa continued the praise by commissioning a life-size sculpture of the lad out of aluminum and donating it to Oberlin, which for the next 50 years had to contend with students — who like nothing better than to mock the pieties of their elders — stealing the easily transportable, hollow-aluminum statue and dragging it to various spots around campus.
     Mildly interesting, perhaps, but not the kind of knowledge that has much practical daily value, and it sank deep into my subconscious until early last week when, snooping around Oberlin’s campus with my family on our first official college visit for my older boy, nearly 17, we strolled past Hall Auditorium.
     “Who Hauled Hall on Top of Hall?” I exclaimed, to puzzled stares. “It was the name of a song.” I described the Hall saga to my boys who, truth be told, couldn’t have cared less.
     No matter. As much as parenthood involves sacrifice, there are eventual benefits, such as the chance to hie yourself to various college campuses around the country and kick the tires of academic institutions. This is a new joy for me. People didn’t do it back in the 1970s — at least not people in Berea, Ohio. I signed up for Northwestern having never seen the campus, and still recall my relief, pushing beyond Norris Center and glimpsing the little curling promenade along the lake and thinking, “Hey, this is nice...”
     Nowadays we hedge our bets, and parents of college-bound kids are convinced that if we’re going into hock for decades, we better go see what our sprouts are getting. Though I almost missed out a second time. My older son is nothing if not headstrong and at first dismissed with a wave of the hand our suggestion that he visit schools. A waste of time. He would attend Johns Hopkins, become a doctor of neurology, end of story. My wife and I exchanged worried glances. You need to go take a look first, we insisted. “What,” my wife ventured, “if you don’t like the campus?”
     “Mother,” he said, in a tone of frozen contempt that I’ll be chuckling at for the rest of my life. “I’m not going there for the campus.”
     I’d like to say that our reason prevailed but suspect we had nothing to do with it. Rather a book he is reading — The Thinking Student’s Guide to College, I believe — encourages visits, adding that students hot to do research should consider small liberal arts colleges, because while at a big university you’ll end up in an auditorium with 150 other freshmen listening to some grad student mumble about the research a professor you’ll never meet is conducting in a lab you’ll never see, at a small school you might work with the professor yourself. Hence Oberlin.
     I went along for the information session — a good thing, because I could counter my lad’s revulsion at the idea of co-ops, a bewilderment that some students would voluntarily choose to manage their dorms and cafeterias when they could be studying the folds of the brain, and I could explain that it takes all kinds to make a world, and some kids are interested in business management.
     But I skipped the walking tour and hot-footed over to the college’s art museum, a lovely building resembling an Italian villa, which reminded my younger boy of the Gardner in Boston. Later, I walked the dog on the quad, marveling at my good fortune: Now I get to visit colleges. With time growing short, I realized what I had to do — hurry over to the science building to pay my respects to Charles Martin Hall, tucked away on the second floor, his statue bolted to a one-ton block of granite, to discourage future wanderings, but decorated in sunglasses and a lei by some creative student carrying on the fine tradition of undergraduate derision.

         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 5, 2012

'To write is to err'

    

     With time on my hands, I thought I would catch up on my movie viewing. I don't remember ever actually watching any of the Marx Brothers, movies or, if I did,0 it was so long ago, in the distant mist of the 1970s, that I've forgotten. 

     So I started in on "Animal Crackers," but barely got a minute into the film when I had to stop and go back (I originally said, "rewind"). The spelling of the first name of the Groucho character, Captain Spaulding, in the credits was different than the spelling in the movie itself, "Jeffrey" versus "Geoffrey." The kind of continuity flaw you don't see in modern Hollywood movies very much. I wonder how many viewers notice.

     Errors are both trivial and important. Trivial in the sense that we all make them. When a loyal Sun-Times reader with basic math skills pointed out to me that the Chicago Tribune had botched some simple math trying to figure out what 10.5% of $10 might be — "Not that the Sun-Times would ever gloat..." he began — my impulse was not to rush it into print. 

     He then followed up with the Trib:

"Please check your arithmetic. Your editorial last Friday stated that "beginning Saturday, Chicagoans will pay $1.50
on every $10 in retail purchases. On August 1 the sales tax is going from 10.25% to 10.50%. 10.5% of $10.00 is $1.05 not $1.50. Whether this error is AI related, the work of a summer intern or just a simple mistake, the prominence of the Tribune's erroneous statement entitles the readers to an explanation."

    Of course the Trib neither ran the letter nor corrected the error.

    Still, my thinking was mostly: "There but for the grace of God ..." Particularly after I noticed that the $22 million Alex Giannoulias has in his campaign fund was inflated into $22 billion in Tuesday's Sun-Times. We all do it.

     But the growing world of AI slop and constant social media bilge raises the questions of how we approach the slurry of mistakes sprayed at us along with it. Obviously finding the creator and demanding some kind of fix isn't possible. Nor is the problem limited to anonymous content creators I've noticed that the more august source, the more reluctant they are to fix mistakes. I've given up notifying the New York Times of their occasional gaffes. They never respond.

     Can we become so comfortable with mistakes that we start to accept them? That the margin between fact and fiction, ever broadening in the Trump era, can grow so wide that nobody cares what's real and what's not, and we all live in our own dream worlds of delusion and fantasy. Maybe we already do. For instance, I'm convinced this thinking and veracity stuff is important.

     For writers, our duty is clear. We have to be fierce proponents for accuracy in our own work. An easy task for me as every mistake that's ever found its way into print still stings. Thirty years ago, on the opening page of "Complete and Utter Failure" I refer to a cornet, the instrument, but spelled it "coronet," like the crown. Thank God, the chapter was excerpted in Doubleday's company magazine, and a New England English professor pointed out to me in time for the typo to be corrected in the book itself.

      That's the weird dichotomy a writer must straddle: vigorously trying to eradicate mistakes while acknowledging that they're bound to happen no matter what. Or as I sometimes say: too right is two air.

     Whoops, what I meant was, "to write is to err."