After all that, she hardboiled the eggs

Not poached.

     Sunday morning the dog cleared her throat by my bedside at 4:40 a.m. and I did what I always do. Rolled out of bed, got dressed, took her on her walk, fed her, and then made the executive decision not to try to go back to sleep, but to head up to my office, to email my blog post, finish the column and, taking a break at 6 a.m.-ish, go downstairs to see after coffee, which involved reheating yesterday's.
       Breakfast seemed an option — sometimes I wait for the wife, sometimes I don't. She had bought Muenster cheese the day before and that settled it for me. I put a slice on a piece of toast, sprinkled with with oregano, and browned it in the broiler. Heaven.
     And hour later, when my wife got up, she asked if I had breakfast. I admitted I had, seduced by the presence of Muenster cheese. 
      "I think I'll poach an egg," she said. 
      "You mean steal it, perhaps from a game preserve?" I replied. 
      I was playing off the dual meanings of "poach" — to nab something, usually an animal, that doesn't belong to you. And "poach" as to cook something by simmering it in water.
     Leading to today's episode of my favorite game — what's the connection? And which usage is older?
     Honestly, I was stumped. The Oxford English Dictionary starts by tracing the word to the French, pocher, meaning, to enclose in a small bag — we see a remnant of that in the expression "a pig in a poke." Plus, don't forget, "pouch."

     Then the cooking meaning: "Poach 1. trans. To cook (an egg) by dropping it, without the shell, into boiling water. [F. pocher, in this sense, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.]" The usage is traced to 1390.
     Then a meaning having to do with poking things with a stick or finger, such as an 1859 usage, "We'll poach the fire"
    Then stamping with the feet and, finally, a third section:
     "III. 9 intr. To encroach or trespass (on the lands or rights of another) in order to possess oneself unlawfully or unfairly of something, esp. in order to steal game; hence, to take game or fish illegally, or by unsportsmanlike devices." 
      This usage is far more recent, 1611: "to poche into, or incroach upon,, another mans imployment, practise, or trade" 
    I should probably point out that "pocket" comes from here, with a familiar usage showing up in Shakespeare's Henry IV ""Have you enquir'd yet who pick'd my Pocket?"
    If we want to gaze into the more distant past — and we probably shouldn't, especially if you're having that poached egg — I see that poc in Old English was a pustule, or ulcer, or other little bags of skin filled with fluid, going back to the year 1000, hence the word "pox." I have to think they're somehow related. 

Maybe 450,000 Lollapalooza fans trampling Grant Park every year isn't such a good idea

You can't get there from here. The former U.S. Steel South Works site.

 

     The 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition worked so well, between the Graf Zeppelin floating by and Sally Rand, with her naughty bubble dance, many Chicagoans never wanted it to leave.
     They extended the fair for an extra season in 1934, then wondered: why not keep the party going? Mayor Edward J. Kelly proposed building a sprawling lakefront pleasure center — a "wonderland" of exhibition halls, picnic shelters, public beaches, an ice skating rink, a casino, and a big parking garage. Paid for by the federal government, of course.
     There are some funny moments in the "Secret Diary of Harold Ickes," where Franklin D. Roosevelt's penny-pinching secretary of the interior, a University of Chicago graduate, dismisses Kelly's dreams of a "Coney Island" on the lakefront, warning FDR that a significant chunk of any federal money thrown at the plan would end up in the pockets of the Kelly-Nash Democratic machine.
     Still, Kelly's dream was not far-fetched. The site where this wonderland was to be built became McCormick Place, and having a vast hall — then two — has been a magnet drawing exhibition business to Chicago: all those auto, electronics, restaurant and houseware shows.
     With the historic fireworks coming from last week's election, you could be forgiven for overlooking that more than two-third of Chicago voters — 68% — said "yes" on the referendum question: “Should Chicago develop a permanent festival and outdoor event space for large-scale events?”
     Hell yes. The result isn't binding, but makes sense. Venues lure business. As it is now, big music festivals hijack public spaces not only while they're going on, but during lengthy preparation and even lengthier clean-up. Repairing Grant Park after Lollapalooza took a month. Restoring the damage after this year's rain-soaked Riot Fest in Douglass Park might take until Thanksgiving. Yes, the festivals cover clean-up expenses — topping $1 million with Lolla —but that adds to the already astronomical ticket prices. One assumes a dedicated festival space would suffer less costly damage.
     The devil is in the details. The question is where to put such a venue. The traditional Shangri-La for land-hungry dreams was U.S. Steel's abandoned South Works, 600 acres of windswept nowhere. I've been there; the skyline glimmers waaay in the distance, across the lake, an unreachable Oz.
     But the future Illinois Quantum and Micro Electronics Park was somehow gulled into exiling itself there, and could fill half the site. Would the other half be enough? Grant Park is only 319 acres. I can see a series of fun stoner buddy movies about glitter-spangled concertgoers sloppy on ketamine trying to get home to Buffalo Grove from East 87th Street.

    Which should give pause — the assumption is that attendees of festivals would relocate to whatever permanent ground is settled upon, convenient or not. That might not be the case. One reason Lollapalooza is so successful is that concert goers like the nearby hotels and public transportation. Nobody wants to have their afterparty on Avenue O.

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You must keep my kitsch forever!

     Occasionally, an unrepentant Trumpie will write in, their message plopping into the Spam filter, because they've been writing for years, and at some point I blocked them.

     Being a curious sort, I sometimes click on their email, just to see what they have to say, even though, almost inevitably, it is, "Aha! More Trump derangement syndrome! You HATE him!!!!"
     And if I am feeling energetic, I might send a link to this 2018 column, "Hate Donald Trump? No way. It's more a sense of luftschlossmoddermüde," where I explain that I certainly don't hate him, and for an obvious reason: he's beneath hatred. "Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?" Then coin a compound German word to describe the weary disgust he engenders, in me and I'm sure in many others.
     The column spends quite a while pulling the matter apart. He's president and rich and famous but clearly, it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough, a grotesque Midas breaking his teeth on the gold junk he shovels into his constantly flapping maw. Who can honestly say they would be him? Donald Trump makes austerity seem enviable. 

     Then, last week, the realization hit me after Trump took an unusual step: it's even more complicated than that.

     I have sympathy for Donald Trump.
     Truly. I really do. Bear with me. He's so wounded, so needy, so fragile. I started to feel that certain tingle of pity in 2018 when I drove downstate to Granite City to watch him reopen a blast furnace.
     I remember some readers being shocked by my lede sentence:
     " Donald Trump is a charming man, and people like him."
     But it was true. He was charming. The guys at U.S. Steel loved him. Why would I drive across the state just to disgorge the prejudices I'd left with?
     "... he knows how to relate to an audience, to feed their sense of being menaced by outsiders, of being betrayed by a government too stupid to live in the real world, like they do. Fifty-three minutes of praise, exaggeration and braggadocio, sprinkled with half-truths, non-truths and the occasional fact tucked in for variety's sake."
     And ... for want of a better word, vulnerable. Maybe even "broken." I wrote:

     You could feel Trump’s neediness.
    “How am I doing?" he asked, and the crowd roared.

     He had been president for over a year, yet still had to point out that he was getting all this attention.

    "Look at the cameras! It’s like the Academy Awards.”

     He reached out to the gathered steelworkers, who came in on their days off to be there with him.

    But hearing him, I better understood his appeal. He has a vulnerable charm, at times a humanity. He pandered shamelessly to his audience.“We need steel,” he said.        “We need steel plants. And to see an old, big monster plant like this re-opening — that is an honor. I look at the faces of you people; I could be one of you. I like you guys. I could be one of you.”

    Yeah, if steelworkers were rich real estate developer spawn who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
    That sense came back a few days ago when he made the Oval Office a National Historic Monument, so nobody could ever change it. A truly unhinged act. The whole White House is already a National Historic Monument, and that didn't stop him from impulsively tearing down the entire East Wing. And now he thinks the cheap Home Depot shiny gold-colored tat he's stuck up over all the walls, the line of gold loving cups, are going to be preserved past the first day his successor is in office? 
     That IS delusional. He goes around destroying what others have created, to further his own self-assigned glory, then panics at the prospect that others who follow will do the same to him. So typically Trump: every accusation a confession.

     Pressed on the issue, Trump admitted that the designation wouldn't preserve the decor. He pretended he's trying to keep anyone from — what? — making the Oval Office into the Hexagonal Office. When really, he's pleading: "Don't forget me."

     If only we could...

     That desire, that fear, so clearly motivates him as he defaces Washington piecemeal, to leave his mark. To not be sucked into the void he sprang from.

     I ... actually get that.
     Looking around my own office. At all the books, all the beloved mementos, prints and familial stuff, I can't help but relate to him. Nobody's going to want this. Not the boys. Being a journalist of minuscule reputation — to borrow Chekhov's spot-on phrase — sure won't do it. No museum here. Someday, maybe someday soon, this is all stripped out, sent Goodwill bound, or trashed, the house no doubt torn down to make way for another white farmhouse on steroids.

    To think otherwise is pure ego. And truly, when the entire arc of the Trump era finally reaches its crashing bottom most point, that is what will stand out — as always. Enormous self-regard, the great engine of history. You need some vanity to get out of bed in the morning. To fill that void on page two three times a week. So it's a balancing act. I'm proud that, finally, I learned to manifest myself while at the same time realizing, it's not all about me. None of it is about me.

      Because it's so easy to submit. Saddled with a little too much ego and suddenly you are Joe Biden thinking, "Heck, maybe I will run again." And far too much, you end up Donald Trump.  A monster. Blinded by it. Made stupid by it. Mad Midas pissing his initials on the carpet. Completely undone. 

     Though never forget, the poison that ruined him — that ruins guys like Elon Musk who accomplish something great and then make that leap to decide that, therefore, a) they are great and b) everyone else is shit — is found, diluted, in every vein. I have more than I'd like. And probably you do too. 

Flashback 1991: Jews in Ethiopia an ancient riddle

  

Photo courtesy of VisitEthiopia.et.

   Rabbi Capers Funnye died Monday. I can't recall how he got on my radar, but in 1991 I attended a service at his South Side synagogue and wrote about him and other Black Jews. What I remember most about the story are peripherals — editors at the paper were reluctant to run it, since it wasn't "news" ("It's news," I recall saying, "if people don't know about it.") And the complaints from angry Ethiopian Jews in Chicago who felt the divinity of their origins were being questioned. Anyway, I've posted the story previously, but not the little sidebar that went with it. In the years that followed, almost the entirety of the Ethiopian Jewish population were also air-lifted to Israel, that pariah of the western world. I guess those Falashas are colonizers too, moving from one part of Africa to a spot just north of the continent. 

   When French scholar Joseph Halevy made contact with the Jews of Ethiopia in 1867, he found they were skeptical about his claims to being Jewish.
     Halevy was a white man and, as the Ethiopians knew, all Jews were black.
     The question of how tens of thousands of black Jews came to be planted in a remote, impoverished region of Africa is one of the great riddles of anthropology.
     They often are called Falashas, a term they consider pejorative because the word means "stranger" or "outsider" or "no roots" and signifies a lowly place in society. They prefer to be called "Beta-Israel" or "House of Israel."
     The Ethiopian Jews claim to be descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Anthropologists guess they were converted, en masse, thousands of years ago.
     They do not practice Judaism as found in Skokie. But there is no question they follow Judaism of a sort. They follow certain kosher dietary laws, observe Jewish festivals, are circumcised, keep the Sabbath on Saturday and read the Torah translated into Ge'ez, an ancient Ethiopian tongue.      Their priests are called kohanim.
    They lived in obscurity as blacksmiths and potters until the ouster of Haile Selassie in September, 1974, when they became swept up in the civil war that devastated the country.
     In 1975, Israel's orthodox Jewish establishment declared that the Ethiopian Jews were true Jews, descendants of the lost tribe of Dan, and therefore had the right of return and to settle in the land of Israel. At the time, only several hundred Ethiopian Jews lived in Israel.
     Over the next decade, the Israeli government conducted a rescue, dubbed Operation Moses, that secretly airlifted as many as 20,000 out of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and resettled them in Israel.
     Fewer than 20,000 were left in Ethiopia.
     The airlift was kept under wraps until 1985, when news of it broke, embarrassing the various African governments who collaborated in the airlift and bringing it to a halt.
     Since then Ethiopian Jews have continued to trickle out, depending on the politics of the moment. Only a handful live in Chicago.
     The relocation to the Middle East was a jarring adjustment for both sides. The Israelis sometimes reacted with racist fear and an air of religious superiority to the Ethiopians, who had to cope with racial biases of their own.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 31, 1991

Wait a sec! This isn't the Donald Trump we know

 

     Words don’t often fail me. I wouldn’t last long in this job if they did. But Tuesday night, after sitting with a big bowl of popcorn, serenely watching the Democrats run the table in the midterm elections — a strong majority in the House, more than enough in the Senate, even the governorship of Texas — I snapped off the television, sucked my front teeth, tweeted out a clip of Anthony Quinn doing his ecstatic Zorba the Greek dance, then went to bed.
     But the clip, even without elaboration, was deceptive. I didn’t feel ecstatic, or celebratory, or even particularly glad. What I felt was calm, focused and more than a little wary. So ... after all that thundering for years about rigged elections, conjuring up will-o'-the-wisps of voter fraud and mobilizing the Justice Department to chase after them, the biggest crybaby in public life since Nero is going to just shrug and go, “Oh, right, I lost. Good for you.”
And we’re supposed to believe him? Does that sound probable to you?
     Maybe I bought a bully’s bluster. Didn’t realize that, like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” one solid bop on the nose would change him from a preening predator to a blubbering wreck, complaining that Fox News doesn’t love him anymore.
     Or maybe there’s a Plan B — they won’t certify the election. Another mob will be sicced on the Capitol. He tried it before.
     Did he really say he was “absolutely willing” to accept the election results? That he would “look forward to working with” the Democrats? That they did a “good job”? Does that sound like the Donald Trump you’ve gotten to know over the last 10 years? Can I be the only one in the country who is suspicious?
     Smarter political minds than my own seem to accept it. Wednesday I reached out to political whiz David Axelrod, the man who helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Why isn’t Trump fighting this tooth and nail? His reply might be the most succinct remark in the history of punditry since Dorothy Parker supposedly responded to the death of Calvin Coolidge with, “How can they tell?”
     “Too big to rig!” Axelrod said.
     Could that be it? Yes, the scope of the loss was enormous. Seven states flipped: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. With Mississippi — Mississippi! — incredibly, still too close to call. Governorships in Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Iowa. Why not enjoy it? Grab our skis and head for hell, because obviously it’s frozen over, every red state now a winter Democratic wonderland.

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Earthquake

     Construction on the Carmo Convent began in 1389, and the structure loomed over central Lisbon until Nov. 1, 1755, when the Great Lisbon Earthquake brought the roof down.
     Rebuilding the city was such a massive task that neither replacing the Carmo roof nor clearing the ruins was a priority. Time passed, the skeleton became something of a tribute to the tragedy, which took up to 40,000 Portuguese lives. Today it holds an archeological museum and is one of the most diverting ways to spend an hour in the city. Who doesn't love a good ruin?
     There was a lot of fallout from the Great Lisbon Earthquake, wiping out much of Portugal's wealth and sealing that once prosperous nation's decline, plus providing a stark horror that tamped down Enlightenment optimism — with a helping hand from Voltaire, who was inspired by the earthquake to pen his novel "Candide," poking fun at those who decide that this vale of woe is nevertheless the "best of all possible worlds."
     Tuesday's mid-term election was an earthquake, though not a tragedy. I hope it is an event that will restore America's fortunes, rather than doom them. We'll see. Either way, it was a seismic shift, and the truth is, I'm still chewing on what it means. The outcome seems a clear occasion for optimism though, like Candide's Cunegonde, I nevertheless find "my heart is almost closed to hope." The results were too late to opine on for Wednesday morning — I went with a column about motherhood — and while I've begun trying to gather my thoughts, which, startled at the thunderous election results, bolted in every direction of the compass, it's going to take another day to coax them back into their pen and give them a good brushing before I can consider putting them on display.

     So forgive me for buying some time with these cool photos that I took last March when my wife and I were in Lisbon.
     The news is good. I think. As Candide says, ""You see that crime is sometimes punished." But the question remains: what else is it? Because good can be fleeting; here today, gone tomorrow.

Millions of American women don't want kids — one stands up to explain why

 

Bailey Swilley

     The American birthrate has fallen to historic lows, and Bailey Swilley isn’t helping any. Which is ironic.
     “I love babies,” said the Brooklyn-based comedian/storyteller. “That’s the thing. I love babies. I like kids.”
     Fair enough. I love bread, yet don’t want to be a baker.
     “I don’t see myself as a parent,” she said. “I don’t see myself in that role.”
     She has a lot of company. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced a fertility rate of 1.6 children per American woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1. I’d been brooding on this for a while when the email from a publicist hit my inbox, slugged, “NOV 21: Hit NYC Fringe Show in Chicago — Bailey Swilley’s “A Baby For Me? No Thank You, Please!”
     Approaching random women and asking why they don’t want to have children seems a recipe for a quick trip to human resources. But here was an opportunity. About a third of young women don’t want kids. What soured Swilley on the prospect?
     “I am an older sister, my brother is five years younger,” said Swilley, who grew up in Memphis. “Older enough to remember watching my parents parent him and me, and being like, ‘I don’t think that’s for me. I just don’t see myself in this. Not what I aspire to.’”
     Inherent revulsion with parenthood doesn’t usually make the traditional list of reasons people don’t want children — jittery economy, lack of suitable partners, the generally fraught future. Swilley mentioned the term “body horror” — she has a routine about a doctor hunting for part of a broken IUD — as well as the “ring of fire,” which I thought had to do with volcanic activity in the Pacific, but is also a phrase associated with the pain of childbirth.
     Swilley is married — I assumed her husband is on board with her determined childlessness.
     “We’re on the same page,” she said. “I bring it up a lot. I ask him. All of his friends have kids, more his friends than mine. We spend a lot of time with his friends’ kids. Afterwards, I’ll check in, ‘Did you feel anything? Feel that should be something we do?’ We have those check-ins a lot, and always land at, No.”
     Other folks’ kids will do that. I distinctly remember the shock of being childless and visiting friends who had just had children, to find them sitting sunken-eyed in the middle of their shattered apartments, their padded coffee tables and plastic safety gates and gadgets, spattered with spit up and splotches of green and orange baby food, smiling these serene, exhausted, souls-among-the-damned-in-hell grins and urging us to follow them over the cliff into their zombie cult.

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