Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris

Paris, 2017

     Jack Clark spends his springs in Paris — talk about a good judgment call — and I think he told me with an air of farewell-until-I-return. To which I responded, in essence, "not so fast, bub. Would you consider writing something from Paris?" To which, thankfully, he agreed, asking only that I remind you to visit him at www.jackclarkbooks.com

     When I was 17 or so, I was in love with Christine who lived down the block. I never told Chris how I felt but she knew and she did like me, just not in the same way. Our block, on the far West Side, was Irish and Italian, Jewish, and Greek. I’m of Irish descent. Chris was the oddball. Her family was Lebanese. I probably couldn’t have found Lebanon on a globe back then.
     Four of us would spend hours night after night sitting on Patty’s porch. She lived across the street from Chris. Patty was Greek and her parents were strict. She couldn’t leave the porch. My friend TiTi lived next door. He was also Greek and was another Chris but we all called him by his nickname, which was pronounced "Tee Tee."
     We were all American kids. I’m pretty sure that most of our parents were born here too. Mine were. So were my grandparents.
     We talked about everything and anything, usually while a transistor radio played rock and roll with the volume down low. Most of that talk is now lost to the years. But one thing I remember clearly is Chris telling us proudly that Beirut was considered the Paris of the Middle East. I think her family visited relatives every few years.
     The neighborhood changed eventually and we all went our separate ways. Chris and I kept in touch for a bit over the telephone. I only remember seeing her one more time. She was working downtown and I was going to school out by Navy Pier, trying to figure out how to become a writer. We got sandwiches at Jerry’s Deli on Grand Avenue and carried them down to the river to have lunch. And that was it. A few years later, I heard she’d moved to Denver and we haven’t been in touch since.
     In the mid-70s a Civil War broke out in Lebanon with Beirut at the center. It went on for years and didn’t end officially until 1989. It’s never really ended, not for Beirut. There have been breaks here and there, otherwise it’s been one shock after another to the current dark days.
     Whenever Beirut made the front page, I’d think of Chris and our nights on Patty’s front porch and wonder what the Paris of the Middle East looked like after the latest round of troubles.
     Many years later, I fell in love again and ended up in the real Paris. And I don’t mean the tourist city, which I do my best to avoid. Hélène and I have pretty much been inseparable for the last 15 years, except for those long months when we’re living 4000 miles apart.
     Hélène lives in public housing. I like to joke that she’s in the Cabrini-Green of Paris. But Paris and Chicago are completely different worlds, and so is their public housing.
      Chicago is the larger city both by size and population. But Paris has over 250,000 public housing units. That’s close to 25% of total residences. By comparison, at its peak Chicago had around 40,000 units. It’s now down to 15,000 with an additional 35,000 families relying on Section 8 housing vouchers.
     The residents in Hélène’s building are mostly working people and their children. Her next-door neighbor is a woman named Thérèse. She’s Lebanese. I’m pretty sure that’s where she was born. She has three grown children. They’re French.
     If we run into Thérèse on the street or in the hallway, she and Hélène usually speak in French while I twiddle my thumbs. But if I run into Thérèse when I’m alone, we speak English and she almost always ends up apologizing for her lack of proficiency. I answer that I should be the one apologizing. I’ve spent almost half of the last 14 years in France and I still can’t speak the native tongue. I have zero proficiency and should probably apologize to the entire country. Although I will say, once I gave up trying to learn French, my Paris life has become much more enjoyable.
     I sometimes like to amuse myself by looking at the listings pasted in the windows of the real estate offices. A million doesn’t get you much anymore. Not in Paris. It’s only public housing that keeps the City of Light from turning into an amusement park populated exclusively by the rich. It’s still a livable place for people like Hélène and Thérèse, a couple of single moms who raised their kids next door to each other while working full time.
      Hélène is a retired social worker. I assume Thérèse is retired too. I know she goes to Lebanon for months on end. Unlike the typical vacationer, when she comes back she sometimes looks more distressed than before she left.
     We were on our way out last week while Thérèse was coming in. “Ça Va,” we all said, as both a question and a statement. Pronounced as "sava," this is one of my favorite French expressions. You ask, "It goes?" The standard answer is: "It goes." And then you ask back, "It goes?" It’s the equivalent of "How are you? Good. And yourself?" without all those extra words.
     And then Thérèse turned my way. “Ça Va aux États-Unis?” she asked with a bit of aggression in her tone. It goes in the United States?
     How could I answer that except to say no. It does not go in the United States. Not this year. Not this month. Maybe never again.
     Her expression changed and she brought her hand to her heart twice and bowed slightly. “Désolée. Désolée,” she said.
     Once again, I told her that I was the one who should be sorry. And I am, of course. I’m sorrier than I’ve ever been and also ashamed by the actions of my own country, but that doesn’t do her or anyone else any good.
     Decades back, when we were all sitting on Patty’s front porch, the Vietnam War was going full blast, while a couple of miles east of us, large sections of Madison Street and Roosevelt Road were going up in flames.
     Our families packed up their possessions and we scattered and moved away. The war finally ended. The riots burned themselves out. But everything was different. New neighborhoods. Lost friends. Still, life went on almost as before.
     Maybe that will happen again. This period will just become another one for the history books and life will go on almost like before. I tend to doubt it but I hope it’s so.
     In the former Paris of the Middle East, they’re not looking for life to go back to the recent status quo. That’s what they’re hoping to get away from, their own dark history.
     We might try that ourselves in the coming years. But I think we’ll probably find this an impossible task. Darkness doesn’t always lead to light. There’s no guarantee that the sun will rise, that a new morning will ever come.

                                                                       — Paris, April 2026

 

Technology always wins, but we can make our own magic until then

"The Hand & The Eye," $50 million worth of high end magic palace located in the old McCormick Mansion on East Ontario. It opens Saturday. 

     A lot of old people on Facebook wax nostalgic about drinking out of garden hoses, riding in the beds of pickup trucks without seat belts and the freedom of no cellphones.
     Count me out. I was there and recall a lot of boredom. Much thumb-twiddling, whistling and staring out of windows. As for seat belts — I was riding with Phil Flanigan in his mother's 1966 Ford Falcon when she hit the brakes and I went over the front seat and knocked out my front teeth on the dashboard — baby teeth, thank goodness. Still, I'm a big fan of seat belts. They save lives.
     As for iPhones, one question: Have you gotten lost lately? Me neither. Getting lost sucked. 
     Not to be confused with wandering. Wandering is great, I went Downtown twice this week, researching columns. Marching up the wide, sunny arc of Wacker Drive, marveling at the passersby, but also thinking how soon the striding pedestrians and zipping electric scooters (c'mon guys, pretend you have brains to protect and wear a helmet) will be forever joined by squads of little rolling robots, like the pair that took out a couple bus shelters in West Town and Old Town last month. These are the last days we can pad around without flocks of drones buzzing over our heads. 

     Yes, some complain about these robots. I'm glad I'm not so touchy as to feel violated by somebody's order of beef and broccoli trying to squeeze past on the sidewalk.
     Sorry, I know, lots of delivery workers out of jobs. And cabdrivers, by self-driving cars. And journalists.
     But not yet. Feeling lousy about it doesn't help. Every technological advance in history was greeted with howls of ambivalence. When Gutenberg created movable type, some worried that the personal connection of reading an author's own handwriting would be lost. The first programmable machine was not a computer, but a Jacquard loom, whose designs could be changed by switching punched cards. Outraged English textile workers attacked the looms. Got them nowhere. Robert Louis Stevenson complained in vain when gaslight was replaced by electric light, "a lamp for a nightmare," producing "ugly blinding glare." No matter. Technology always wins.
     I say this, despite AI coming for my job. But not yet. It can form words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs. But can AI do the footwork? How is AI at rambling? At wandering in a random fashion across an urban environment and stumbling upon interesting stuff?

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Flashback 2009: Lump of coal from Keillor — His 'Christmas' gift won't keep on giving

     Garrison Keillor is coming to the Park West on May 4. I can't go — previous commitment — but I've seen him perform several times, at Ravinia and elsewhere, and know he always puts on a good show. That prompted me to look back at what I've written about him over the years — I interviewed him once, but that was already posted.

     Sidelined in 2017 over accusations of unwarranted sexual advances, none of then seemed as consequential as any given dozen crimes attributable to our president. I particularly appreciate the work he did promoting poetry, both in print — his "Good Poems" collections are priceless — and on the radio.

     This is an oddity — a pan of a little Christmas volume of his. A reminder that even the mighty — and I consider him the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain — have their lapses. I present it for the pure joy of a good pan. 

 
A CHRISTMAS BLIZZARD

By Garrison Keillor

Viking, 180 pages, $21.95

     This coming April, Mark Twain will have been dead 100 years, and were you to throw a cocktail party for all the American humorists since his demise who have created enduring fictional worlds, it would a very small gathering indeed:
     James Thurber, standing alone by the mantle, swilling his scotch and complaining how he never could manage to write a novel. Neil Simon, picking cashews out of the nut bowl.
     And that's about it. Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman would have sent regrets — already sucked into the maw of obscurity that took Bill Nye and Josh Billings and everyone else whose work is too topical or too minor to withstand the grind of time.
     Of living authors, there would only be one: Garrison Keillor, well-loved for his long-running radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," but also respected for his short stories, novels and essays. His Lake Wobegone might not quite shine equally alongside Twain's Hannibal, Missouri, but if our progeny are still reading any comic fiction writer of our era a century from now, odds are it'll be Keillor. 

     Of course Keillor can't be expected to knock one out of the park every time — even Thurber started churning out those testy complaints about grammar as he aged — and A Christmas Blizzard, Keillor's latest, is a holiday trifle that will be relegated to the scrap heap of misfires by otherwise good authors, though many of his fans no doubt would rather read a mediocre book by Keillor than a good book by anyone else.
     A Christmas Blizzard is a tall holiday tale that rolls merrily along, crammed with inventive riffs on popular culture and quirky characters, all limned in Keillor's distinctive voice. We meet James Sparrow, a fabulously rich Chicagoan with a butler and a private jet, and his wife, Joyce, and if having the two main characters named James and Joyce is too much of a sly wink for you, you better get used to it, because the Hawaiian home where James longs to spend the holiday is called Kuhikuhikapap'u'maumau and the stand-in for Minnesota where our hero gets stranded when he goes to visit his prosaically named but dying Uncle Earl is called Looseleaf, North Dakota, and there is the standard contingent of Floyds and Elmers you'd expect with Keillor.
     Despite the cute names that are more Soupy Sales than Thomas Pynchon, Keillor's wit is generally sharp and intact, and along the way he skewers Americans, from blissed out New Agers to Right Wing conspiracy fanatics. Easy targets, maybe, but it's impossible to completely dislike a holiday book that refers to "the sheer horror of 'The Little Drummer Boy.'" Though by the time we get to the talking wolf, A Christmas Blizzard assumes a random, hallucinogenic quality that makes it feel longer than its 180 pages.
     Early on, Keillor's describes Joyce's writing this way: "She was clever and facile and could spackle bright words on a page in the shape of a poem but she lacked heart." The same could be said for this novel, where Keillor revisits favorite tropes — the indignity of middle age, the quirkiness of small towns, the melancholy of love — grafting them onto a miracles-and-redemption Christmas tale that flirts with incoherence.
     Keillor's 19 previous books are listed in the front, and any one of them would probably provide a richer, more nuanced experience than A Christmas Blizzard. But if you've read them all and enjoyed them all, then you'll probably enjoy this one too, at least a little.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 29, 2009

Trump feuding with the pope? I thought he was the pope

 

     By now you know what happened.
     President Donald Trump, up to his neck in the Iran quagmire and thus perhaps more angry than usual, lashed out at Pope Leo XIV for doing what popes do: urging peace, while pointing out that the efforts of the Trump administration to paint its war as the Ninth Crusade was not Christianity in its highest form.

     "Pope Leo is WEAK ON CRIME, and terrible for Foreign Policy," Trump began, in a long tirade posted on his Truth Social network.
      No doubt you've read all or part of it.
     So the "what" being established, I want to explore an aspect that is being lost in the noise and thunder:
     Why?
     Why would a struggling and isolated leader, having failed to lure his erstwhile allies into saving his butt in Iran, start tongue-lashing the pope, a beloved figure internationally, but particularly in the United States, and especially in his hometown, Chicago? A pope who, remember, wasn't doing anything beyond normal pope stuff — promoting harmony, encouraging brotherhood. That's like blasting Mr. Rogers for being neighborly.
     You would think that anyone with half a grip, his back against the wall, closing the Strait of Hormuz himself because Iran won't open it, would not pick this battle. It's like a man in a blazing room setting fire to one sofa that isn't burning.
     Again: Why?
     If the answer isn't crystal clear — and really, it should be, by now — here's a clue:
     Last May, when Leo was named pope, Trump distributed an AI picture of himself, Donald Trump, in the garments of the Vicar of Christ. Because — and forgive me, this is obvious, but so much so that it gets overlooked — it's all about him. He is the subject of all sentences, the cynosure of all eyes, and anyone else — anyone else — who isn't actively groveling before him is an insult and a threat. There is no Congress. No courts. No law. No pope. He is the pope. Donald Trump, pontifex maximus.
     In his own mind To me, Donald Trump is a morality tale about the futility of ego. He suffers from a grandiosity so bottomless that being immensely rich, the president of the United States, adored by millions, the golden spoon stirring the world pot for the last decade, are not enough. Nothing is ever enough. He is King Midas, breaking his teeth on gilt apples, starving in a room full of food.
     That's the only way any of this makes sense. It explains his every action.

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Freedom and coffee go together

Coffee break, Amsterdam

 

     Honest question:
     Have you ever gone to a coffee shop for a cup of coffee?
     I don't mean, have you ever gotten a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. Everybody has. I mean, have you ever thought, "I need coffee!" and then gotten up and gone out to a Starbucks or Intelligensia or whatever and bought a cup?
     Because I haven't. And I love coffee. But coffee is very easy to make. You rinse out the pot — or if there's a cup left from the day before, just heat that up and drink the day-old coffee, a skill I learned from my years at the Northwestern Anthropology Department. I'm doing that now. It's fine. It tastes like coffee.
     As I did that, thinking toward the future, I popped in a filter, add the coffee, the water. For more coffee. Coffee: the one addiction you never have to give up.
     That said, coffee shops are social places. You meet people there, Last week I wanted to talk to a man I might write a profile about, so I asked him to meet me at Bean Bar, a new coffee shop that is now the beating heart of Northbrook. Opened in an old bank, the place is enormous, and every table was filled — fortunately, there's usually room at the high tops way in the back.
     Should not be surprising. The importance of coffee shops as places where people gather is well-chewed over in academia. The American Revolution? Plotted in coffee shops. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels getting together to hatch communism? A coffee shop, Café de la Régence in Paris in August 1844.

    It should not be surprising that totalitarian regimes across the globe and throughout history have banned coffee and coffee shops. King Charles II banned both in 1675, considering such places a challenge to his regal authority. The ban didn't last — coffee proved stronger than kings.
     So it's interesting to see a coffee shop forget this heritage and botch the social aspect as badly as Philz Coffee has. To be honest, I never heard of Philz, nor saw one, to my knowledge. But according to Saturday's story in the Sun-Times, they prided themselves in their, well, pride, and displayed the gay pride flag until recently, when the company abruptly ordered all of them pulled.
     No skin off my nose. I'm fairly impartial about the pride flag — I don't own one or fly one, though consider myself an ally. I only have one flagpole at home, and only fly one flag, Old Glory, bought from W.G.N. Banners. Trying to imagine what might prompt me to fly one, I suppose, were social to clamp down on LGBTQ+ even harder than its doing now, I might fly one, in solidarity, the way I posted a green Islamic banner with a star and crescent as my Facebook profile picture in 2017 when Donald Trump first took office and started banning immigrants from Muslim majority countries.
     The whole thing would be beneath notice were it not for one word Philz CEO Mahesh Sadarangani used in explaining why banners had to be purged from the store.
     "We are working toward creating a more consistent, inclusive experience..."
     "Consistent" is meaningless here — you could also achieve consistency by demanding that all Philz shops display the flag. The giveaway is "inclusive" and by that, he means he wants to encourage MAGA world sorts creeped out the the idea of welcoming gays to nevertheless buy coffee there.

     That is a tactic the intolerant right has been deploying a lot lately, because it works. Tolerance is intolerable, to them, because certain groups are forbidden by their religion, their politics, their inclination. So to include the hated group is to exclude them. Acceptance is prejudice, and Orwell is achieved.

      Never forget the bottomless cup of selfishness that is prejudice: everything is about them, their bias, their fears. So out with the pride flag, and — the theory is — everyone will flock to their coffee shop.

      Except they won't. I don't see MAGA sorts as the type who will pop $5 for a cup of coffee. So Philz is alienating their own clientele while appealing to a group that isn't about to start patronizing them. It's stupid. But prejudice is stupidity in action, ignorance rampant. Of course they have a right to fly whatever flag they want. And potential customers have a right to never go there. 

    In the fall of 2013, Glenbrook North High School students from Glenbrook North's Gay-Straight Alliance, decorating windows in downtown Northbrook, put a pride flag in the window of the Caribou Coffee on Shermer. The owner, aghast, washed it off. I described the result in my blog:

     The Caribou Coffee in Northbrook is radioactive. You can't go in. A dead zone, our own Chernobyl. Oh, the building is there, a block from our house, but it no longer exists as a place a person could walk into and get coffee and a sweet roll and go online.

    The Caribou coffee in Northbrook closed down a few months later, part of a general retrenching by Caribou — dozens of stores closed. Today Caribou has about as many outlets as they did a dozen years ago. A reminder: hatred is not only wrong, it's bad business.

     

      

Older, sicker Americans waiting longer to get into crowded hospitals

     An endocrinologist is a doctor specializing in hormone-related diseases, such as, in my case, diabetes. When first diagnosed in late September 2024, I got a crash course in the huge demand for that profession's services. The first endocrinologist I approached wouldn't see me for a year. The second wouldn't see me at all; he was refusing all new patients.
     Figuring I would have to engage another gear if I didn't want to sit around, doing nothing, waiting to go blind, I grabbed my notebook and decided, if I couldn't meet with an endocrinologist as a patient, I'd find out what I needed to know by writing a column. Diabetes affects 40 million Americans; it isn't as if it's a personal affliction.
     That third endocrinologist not only spoke with me immediately — barred doors fly open for publicity — but put me in touch with a colleague who, either through a sea change in my luck or, I suspect, some kind of secret doctor-to-doctor dog whistle, took me under her wing as a patient.
     If this strikes you as morally squishy — the journalist pushing to the head of the line — I worried about that, too. But I didn't misrepresent anything; the column ran in the paper.
     Besides, with health care, you have to be a strong advocate for yourself. Faced with the prospect of letting my condition go unchecked while I hunted with increasingly numb fingers for an endocrinologist with an open slot, I did what I could. At that point, if meeting Morgan Finley in a Cicero motel room and handing over an envelope of cash would have gotten me an appointment, well, I certainly would have considered it.
     I thickly assumed this was a problem inherent to endocrinology. Getting diabetes is easy — I just woke up one morning with Type 1. Medical school is hard. Of course, there's a shortage. Now it turns out I was encountering, not a diabetes-specific bottleneck, but a generalized, widespread condition.
     This week, The Economist published a story with the musical title, "Hospitals are stuck in a deadly doom loop." Turns out the 2020 COVID crisis not only killed millions worldwide and shut down society, but it also "did lasting damage to health-care systems."
     Where? Everywhere, all over the world. What's been damaged? In a nutshell, everything.
     "From admission to discharge, hospital care is now harder to access, takes longer and is of worse quality," the magazine reports. "The resulting toll includes avoidable deaths. Almost everyone is affected: across 18 rich democracies, satisfaction with health-care quality fell sharply after the pandemic and remains well below the pre-pandemic norm."
     Getting an appointment takes forever. As does getting admitted after showing up in the emergency room. Last year, one in 10 patients visiting an emergency room in England had to wait 12 hours or longer before being shown a room.
     And in Chicago, an NBC News Channel 5 report found that Chicago has longer wait times to see a doctor than most American cities — a month to see a primary care doctor. For specialty care, like neurologists, up to five months.

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Flashback 2011: Maybe that pain in your gut is cancer

     Sometimes one aspect of life can have an odd resonance with another. I was looking through the archive, noticed this story, and figured it might have the same potential positive effect now that it was intended to have 15 years ago. Then later in the day, I read the obituary of a woman who died from the same ailment that's spotlighted here. Which I took as a nudge to actually post it. Not as fun as dental floss, but perhaps of far more value.

     Even in the heyday of journalism, when newspapers were known for lavish expense accounts, the Sun-Times always embraced a distinct frugality, an attitude I expressed this way: “Before they issue you a new pencil, you have to turn in the stub of the old one.”
     The make-the-most-of-it mind set carried over to reportage. I remember 10 years ago wanting to accompany a team of Chicago surgeons from Shriner’s Hospital to Lithuania, despairing at my chances of being granted a full week for the journey, never mind the associated cost, and rejoicing when I realized the president of Lithuania at the time, Valdus Adamkus, had lived for 47 years in Chicago before renouncing his U.S. citizenship and going back to lead his country. Interviewing him at the palace would add heft to my plea — two birds with one stone! — I cooked up a few more angles: should Lithuania join NATO? What about Catholicism? By the time I was done piling on, we ran a weeklong series that fellow reporters still shake their heads over.
     The travel story was perhaps a stretch — I admitted that few Chicagoans were going to scrap their Disney World plans, but if you were of Lithuanian extraction, or had become bored with the typical European vacation spots, you could do worse than visit Vilnius.
     That story was written sincerely. Yet I was shocked — taken aback, almost frightened — when I later heard from a family who read the piece and were persuaded to go to Lithuania, had a great time and wanted to thank me.
     Somehow I managed not to blurt out, “You went?! To Lithuania?! On my advice!? What, are you crazy?!” But that’s what I thought.
     I felt responsible. Sure, it worked for them. But what if it hadn’t? What if they had a bad time in Lithuania? It would be all my fault.
     I shouldn’t say this: but occasionally, the messing-with-other-people’s-lives aspect of this job unnerves me. You try not to think of that part too often, try not to think of families shlepping to Eastern Europe on your say-so. But sometimes the fact clicks into focus.
     For instance . . .
     The day after Sun-Times owner Jim Tyree died, like everyone who knew him, I was upset, and wanted to write something appropriate. He was fighting stomach cancer, and since the public is not that familiar with stomach cancer, compared to, say, breast or lung cancer, I thought it might be a fitting tribute to use the tragedy to educate others. Tyree would have liked that.
     So I called Loyola University Medical Center and asked for a stomach cancer specialist.
     But by the time Dr. Gerard Aranha, a professor of surgery, called back the next day, I had already written something about Tyree. Still, the doctor was on the phone. It wouldn’t do to just say, “Column’s done, goodbye.” The polite thing was to talk with him for a while.
     “There were 21,000 new cases of stomach cancer reported in 2010,” Dr. Aranha said. “It is the sixth overall, much less common than esophageal or colon, but holding steady.”
     The connection between smoking and stomach cancer is weak, as opposed to charred foods and nitrates, which encourage it. Heredity is also an important factor.
     “There is a familial connection,” said Dr. Aranha. “I always like to ask which family died of gastric cancer — it was Napoleon and his mother.”
     What are the warning signs?
     “A feeling of getting full easily,” he said. “More often pain, like a patient has an ulcer, the sort of pain that doesn’t respond to the usual antacid therapy or, when it does, say with Prilosec, when you stop the Prilosec the pain comes back. Then you’ve got a problem.”
     Also “unease after eating, dyspepsia, bloating, belching, gas that persists for two weeks, are all clues.” Males get stomach cancer about 50 percent more than females do.
     What should a person with symptoms do?
     “See a doctor,” he said. “The doctor will put an endoscope — a tube — down your throat and look at the esophagus and stomach and, if he’s seeing any abnormalities, take a biopsy.”
     Early detection, as with all cancer, is key.
     In Japan, Dr. Aranha said, where use of the endoscope is more common, some 30 percent of stomach cancers are caught in the more treatable early stage. Here, where people are less aware, only 9 percent are found early.
     I almost let this subject drop — who wants to read about stomach cancer? But then I remembered that family going to Lithuania and realized that, once I had this information, it was my duty to pass it along. There might be one guy — maybe you — who looks up from the paper and says, “Geez, I’ve got those warning signs, I better see a doctor.” For me, it’s just another column. But for somebody, it could be a matter of life or death, and once you have that in mind, there’s only one thing to do.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 2011