Foods I love #5: Bolo de cenoura

      Carrots and I go way back. To the days when my mother would serve frozen peas and carrots and I would instinctively go for the orange cubes. Who wouldn't? The peas were mushy and green and gross and I hated them. But the carrots — bright, sweet, and encouraging.
      Later they were crinkle cut and, even better, roasted. Glazed with brown sugar at Thanksgiving.

     Carrots are root vegetables, meaning they grow underground. But compare them with their cousin, the potato. Tubers are big brown lumps of mundanity that must be enlivened by ketchup or sour cream or cheese. Carrots are slimmer, sexier, yet harder to find, as if the great mass food manufacturers can't be bothered coping with their complexities. Carrots are more colorful, more exciting, yet it is potatoes that McDonald's fries in enormous quantities, some nine million tons a day, worldwide. Mickey D's only sells carrot sticks in a few niche markets, like Ireland. 

     To be honest, I am not a fan of carrots in their raw form. I will eat them, and even enjoy them if you heap enough humus on one end. But a carrot stick is work, crunchy in a bad way, grainy in the mouth.

     But what wonders can be done with them with the application of heat, ingenuity and fat.
     When my wife and I got married in 1990, my sole contribution to the wedding dinner menu was to suggest we start with cream of carrot soup with ginger. I've ordered many a main course simply because it came with carrots.  One River North eatery served a carrot salad, with pine nuts that drew me in regularly. Then it was gone. I complained, and after the waiter explained that carrots were not in season, I objected. "They sit in cellars for months," I believe was my exact words, and didn't go back for years. A head of lettuce will last three weeks in the fridge; a fresh carrot will be good for three months.

     I can't say I am always on the look-out for carrots — that would lead to too much disappointment. They're that rate. But carrots have a way of finding me.
     Earlier this week, at the excellent Padaria Ribeiro bakery in Porto, Portugal, my attention was drawn to dense orange triangles, covered with chocolate sprinkles. 
     "What are those, sweet potato?" I asked, tapping on the glass case.
     "No, carrot," the clerk said. That focused my attention like a star flare. The magic word. I ordered one, with coffee Americain, and took a seat at one o the little tables outside, watching the university students, in their colorful top hats and canes, parade by.
     English is prevalent in Portugal. But when I went back into the bakery, after we consumed the orange slice in a delirium of pleasure, and asked what it was we had eaten, she said, "bolo de cenoura."  Simply Portuguese for "carrot cake," but this was not like the traditional American carrot cake with cream cheese frosting you'd find at Gibson's. It didn't have pieces of carrots. This was almost more like a pudding. The carrots are pureed. 

      What histories I could find said that the dessert was created in Brazil, Portugal's former colony, in the 1960s, based on American carrot cake, then filtered back to the mother country. 

      To my delight, my wife enjoyed it as much as I did, and immediately found a promising New York Times recipe. Which we will have a chance to whip up now that we are home — today, if all goes well — after our near fortnight in Portugal. I appreciate your patience, with last week's metaphor series and this week's favorite food series. They were fare I could whip up ahead of time and leave sit until it was time for them to be consumed — well, except for this one, pounded out in a guest house room in Porto Tuesday night, with memories of a superlative slice of bolo de cenoura still very fresh in mind. 
      

Food I love #4: Fresh challah

Fresh challah at Masa Madre, a Mexican Jewish bakery in East Garfield Park, now, sadly, defunct.

      True story.
      Once I stopped by Tel Aviv Bakery on Devon Avenue for some ... I don't know what. Hamantaschen maybe. And while I was buying whatever I was there to buy. Could be bagels, though those should really be gotten at New York Bagel on Touhy, I detected a smell, a tantalizing aroma: warm challah, fresh from the oven.
      So I bought one. How could you not? Dense, rich, ever so slightly sweet bread, the crust shiny with egg white. 

     At the car, I put whatever I bought — does it matter? — and began to drive. Proud of myself, thinking of how surprised, and pleased my wife would be with the fresh warm challah that I was thoughtfully bringing home to her.  
     But it's a long drive — say 25 minutes — from Tel Aviv Bakery to our house. And it was late afternoon. A loaf of challah, it's big. A lot for two people. What harm would there be from a pick-me-up, just a hunk of challah, from the end? Yes, it would detract from the complete braided purity of the loaf. But it was just a taste. Surely, she would not begrudge me that.  

     God it was fantastic. If you haven't eaten a chunk of warm challah — and that's the ideal way to eat it. Not sliced; cutting it with a knife commits violence against the bread. Challah is braided, by talking three fat strands of dough and weaving them together, and so pulls apart, naturally, along those original fault lines (and really, how many foodstuffs are braided? A sign this is something special).

      At Sabbath, when the Hamotzi — the prayer over the bread  — is said, the challah is passed around and everybody breaks off a hunk. It might even be a commandment somewhere. I'll have to check.

    So I'm driving, and eating this warm, really superlative challah. Time passes. I'm basically in a fugue state, lost in reverie, communing with the challah, as retrospective as a mollusk. I'm glad I didn't drive into the back of a truck.

     And now I'm home, and I gather up whatever it was I bought — it could have been cookies, I really have no idea. And I pick up the white paper bag with the challah in it. And the bag is weirdly light. Like there isn't an entire loaf in there at all. I look inside. A pathetic heel. That's it. Something had happened to the warm loaf of challah. All that was left was ... a scrap, a remnant I was embarrassed to share with my wife. Though I must have. Frankly, my mind is blank of how that went over. Nature can be kind sometimes. I'd ask her, but I'm too afraid of what she might recall. 
      I'd eaten most of the loaf in the car — I shouldn't feel the need to point that out, but this is also read by people slow on the uptake, and I don't want people writing in say, "So what happened to the bread?" Nor do I need to be told that eating 1,500 calories worth of challah is not a smart move.
      You'll notice that today's subject is not "challah" but "fresh challah." That's because they are really two very different types of food. Challah, regular, not fresh challah, the kind usually sold in grocery stores, can still be good — you can make a sandwich out of it. But fresh challah, no more than a few hours, less than a day at most, from birth is entirely different. Because over time a dryness, a stiffness, a subtle change that is both slight and enormous. 
     The thing to do with un-fresh challah is to make stuffing — I've written about that. Or French toast. Add cinnamon and a cap of vanilla to the egg batter — the vanilla is the secret. I was known for making absolutely nothing in the years my boys were growing up, but challah stuffing and challah French toast.

     I feel almost guilty writing about fresh challah as a favorite food, because I really don't get it enough to qualify. I really should stop by Tel Aviv Bakery more often.

Food I love #3: Hot dog cart dogs

      So here's the question: if the ideal hot dog is charbroiled — and it is — then why would anybody ever want a hot dog that has been floating in hot water for a few hours?
      If you want your bun toasted on the grill — and you do — then why consume a hot dog slapped in a roll that has been steamed over the self-same hot dog water?
     Answer: it's a mystery. You just do. A hot dog cart dog is a gestalt — the boiled dog, the warm moist bun, the cheap mustard, eaten from a sheet of wax paper or, as above, crinkled paper nest, standing up in some strange city.
    That has to be a factor — just as a crowded ballpark ennobles a hot dog in a shiny foil-like wrap that you'd be hesitant to touch, never mind eat, in any other situation, so hot dog cart franks have a built-in romance and a splendor. 

     And rarity. Chicago has virtually no hot dog carts, another mystery, one I delved into 30 years ago, in a column that ran under the way-dull headline, "A New York Tradition we're healthier without." 

     NEW YORK CITY — Within an hour of arriving, my wife and I celebrated our being in Manhattan by sharing a potato knish bought from a cart at 46th Street and Broadway. It was great.
     So, too, were the hot dogs from a metal wagon in front of the Plaza. And the hot, sugared almonds from a nut stand on Fifth Avenue. And the big, salty pretzel purchased minutes later.
     Frankly, we would have gotten more food on the street — falafels, Mister Softees, cream sodas — but we also were eating three meals a day in restaurants. And more. We went directly from dinner at a funky restaurant in the West Village to the city's single outlet for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, a southern institution that has just invaded Gotham to great fanfare.
     I am not ashamed to say that eating a 45-cent original glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut, hot from the oven, was one of the outstanding experiences of my life.
     Well, maybe a little ashamed.
     Food on the street is just one of the many things that makes New York very different from Chicago. Writers are always wringing their hands over loss of diversity. They see the Starbucks and Gaps and Hard Rock Cafes popping up everywhere and conclude that all cities are now all the same and the entire world is merged into one vast Anyplace.
     But this is simply not true. Uniqueness still exists. New York is so different from Chicago that a glance at any 10 feet of storefront is usually enough to tell you which city you're in. Even the garbage cans are different in New York, and they're at curbside because the city doesn't have  many alleys. The little stores are different — New York has its bodegas, with ziggurats of fresh fruit out front. The street signs are different — New York has all those barking signs, "DON'T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE" and this simple, almost lovely one: "Don't Honk."
     In general, New York has a tougher, more armored look — more sliding metal grates, steel doors and security cameras.
     New York certainly sounds different. In Chicago, certain streets are filled with foreign languages — French tourists, Russian and Hispanic immigrants, whatever. But in New York half the time when I overhear foreigners, I can't even figure out what kind of language they are speaking. Again and again I puzzled over some mushy blast of whirling verbiage, all harsh consonants and spittle. What is that? Macedonian? Urdu? Pathan? No clue.
     Since New York drivers don't pull over to let firetrucks pass, the way we do here, they have a lot more of that piercing, pulsing death scream strobed out by emergency vehicles as a desperate last resort.
     Which is perhaps why people stay up all night in New York, packing the streets. In Chicago, we sleep, because we can.
     Lest someone misunderstand, I should stop right here and state, clearly, that I am not praising New York. I have this image of walking by a softball game and hearing somebody yell, "That's him! The guy who likes New York! Get him!" then being chased by 20 big guys waving aluminum bats.
      For the record: Nothing about New York is better than Chicago.
     Different, yes. Particularly those street food vendors. I kept wondering about them. Why so many in New York — four at a street corner, in places — and absolutely none in Chicago?
I took a deep breath and plunged into the bureaucracy.
     "There is no such thing as a hot dog cart with a wash-up sink," explained Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health. "Where does the food handler wash his or her hands?"
     Another city official speculated that a strong Chicago restaurant association had something to do with our lack of food carts. He, of course, didn't want to be named.
      I then wondered, if food vendors are so pestilential here, how do they pass muster in New York?
     Taking two deep breaths, I plunged into New York's Health Department. Spokesman Fred Winters said that New York vendor carts have sinks and running water and precautions are taken.
     "Our vendors use rubber gloves or wax paper," he said.
     Winters couldn't let that bit of naivete float in the air too long, however. He quickly added, "They don't always do it."
     The vendor who sold me a hot dog in New York certainly didn't. I had flinched when he lifted a bun out of the package with his bare hand and used his thumb to split it open. Where had that thumb been? And I flinched again as Chicago's Hadac waxed poetic on the perils of food carts.
     "The person is handling money and currency, which is soiled," he continued. "The person may be shaking hands with someone. And then there is the issue of where does that person go to the bathroom?"
     So why, in his opinion, do they permit them in New York?
     "Maybe this is a quaint tradition," he said. "Maybe if New Yorkers want their hot dogs and sauerkraut they're not going to let anything get in their way."
     "Not going to let anything get in their way" – that's the motto on the city seal of New York, isn't it?
               — Originally published in the Sun-Times Oct. 13, 1996

Food I love #2: Pork chops

     Confession time.
     In the years I regularly patronized Gene & Georgetti with my pals, the check was inevitably picked up by someone else, a Springfield lobbyist type, or law firm partner, or utility bagman, or top Sun-Times editor with a bottomless expense account. Whatever my regular dish, the "Schultz Special," aka filet mignon on a piece of toast, cost — say $35 — was not my concern. Nor the bottles of wine, nor the carrot cake dessert. My problem was getting back home in half decent condition after spending an long afternoon with Steve Neal and Dan Rostenkowski and half a dozen other hale fellows well met. A bar I did not always clear.
     But sometimes, on rare occasions, I would find myself the host of my own lunch at Gene's — thanking a colleague perhaps. And then, knowing the knee-weakening check arriving, eventually, would be my responsibility or, worse, I would have to try to expense it, I would rein in the dogs of appetite. Sometimes I would get their garbage salad — an oval platter piled high with lettuce and cocktail shrimp — or their pork chop.
     A pork chop is both steak lite and a bargain. At Gene's 20 years ago they were $19.99, which seemed less of a gut punch, bill-wise. On the lunch menu now, a petit filet mignon is $67, a double pork chop $38. Twice the food for half the money.
     Much cheaper and honestly, still quite good — a pork chop is the love child between a t-bone steak and a chicken breast. 
     Now that I have diabetes, I run through pork chops. Zero carbs. Zero sugars. Toss a couple on the grill. I'll have them for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, though not all three on the same day. Not yet anyway. The cheapest steak you can find runs you $7.95 a pound, on sale at Jewel. Pork chops are $2.99 a pound, and if they're trying to unload them, they'll give you two for one. As I said before, I'm a man who likes a free chop.
     I don't want to give the impression that cost rules my culinary habits. I am still employed, and would not eat as much L. Burdick's chocolate as I do if that were the case. But there is ... treading carefully .. a certain Stockholm Syndrome effect at work, and over the years, I have gotten more practical. So I enjoy a thick pork chop, dusted with tarragon, both sides, eaten along with a nice cup of all natural applesauce.

     And yes, I know at this point there is one reader, or a dozen, who is scratching vigorously behind his ear thinking, "Heyyyyy, wait a sec. A pork chop? Ain't ya, you know, Jewish?"

     Yes I am. And I've addressed this before, and recently too. Too many times — there must be some kind of perverse pride at work. I must like poking the empty stereotype. But for you newcomers, despite what you read on the Daily Caller, Jews are not a mass of conformity, with our beards and black coats and secret handshakes. Jews get to be individuals — it's one of the redeeming qualities of the faith. 

     Actually, everyone gets to be an individual; Jews just are less good about ostracizing the oddballs — if we were, there'd be no one left. I'm speaking of the more liberal branches. The Hassidim seem to have no problem imposing uniformity. No pork chops for them. Which is fine, in my opinion. That means more for me. 

    

Food I love #1: Beef and broccoli

     I'm still on vacation. I could have easily extended "Meet my Metaphors" for another week, but thought, "enough already," and decided to tack in a new direction. Writing about food is fun and easy. As for reading about it, well, you tell me.

     Business took me to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab last month — that story is coming. My appointment was at 2 p.m. so, responsible journalist that I am, I of course had one thought: get downtown early, swing by Star of Siam for lunch.
     The Star of Siam has graced Illinois Avenue, tucked just west and below Michigan Avenue for ... I'm going to hazard a guess before checking: ngggg, 32 years.
     Not close: 42. The Star of Siam opened in 1984, the same year I started writing, freelance, for the Chicago Sun-Times. Fashions come and go, but we icons soldier onward, defying time.
     When with a group, I'd start with chicken satay and peanut sauce, and am passionate about their Pad Thai. But by myself, and with Mr. Diabetes standing over my shoulder, clucking disapproval, I went with my. go-to: beef and broccoli.   

      Fresh, firm, bright green broccoli. Succulent marinated strips of beef. Shards of ginger. An oyster sauce. Eaten with chopsticks — that's part of the fun, and I have my pride. A splash of red sauce to keep things interesting. Meat and vegetables — I can tell myself it's healthy, ignoring all that oil glistening over it.
      No rice, of course, no big glass of super sweet Thai iced coffee. (What's the Stones song? "Dancing, dancing, dancing so free/Dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me/Dancing with Mr. D..." A song not up to the Stones' elevated standards, critics felt at the time, but I'll take my symbolism where I find it. I should have put it on my list of diabetes songs — Mick is singing about death, not elevated blood sugar, though the two do intersect, uncomfortably.
     Beef and broccoli is not Thai, but Chinese — well, Chinese-American that is, concocted in California chop suey shops about 100 years ago, according to what little is known. Just as spumoni is unknown in Italy, so beef and broccoli isn't really a thing in China. Or so I'm told.

     I order beef and broccoli 90 percent of the time I'm in a Thai or Chinese restaurant. Maybe 95. Which is a point of amusement for my wife and of concern for me. Where is the adventure of life? And I do occasionally order something that is not beef and broccoli, just to show I can. But am inevitably disappointed because, well, if you really want beef and broccoli, anything else is something less.
     Speaking of which. I probably should add that, last time I was at Star of Siam with my wife, she felt the place was not up to their previous standards. I demurred. It was fine. Was she right? I'm not the one to tell. I tend to like what's put in front of me, particularly when it's beef and broccoli. But even if she is correct — and she usually is — well, even noble Homer dozed, and the best can have an off night, like the rest of us. I'm hoping to get her to go back. This most recent visit, I found it especially good, cleaned the plate with gratitude and appreciation, then headed off to my appointment.

Flashback 1999: Crudity in eye of beholder

 

Uffuzi Gallery

     In looking up M.C. Escher references, I reread this column. Note the unashamed pointy-headedness of the opening. Young, and showing off. It also ran on a Tuesday, in the features section, where my columns were briefer: only 550 words, compared to the column today at almost 800 words.

     When the subject of the crudity of our day arises, as it so often does, I like to tell this story from Herodotus:*
     An Egyptian army mutinies, fleeing toward Ethiopia. The pharaoh, Psammetichus, finds out and confronts the soldiers, begging them to reconsider. Think of your wives and children back in Egypt, he says.
     At that, a deserter pulls aside his tunic** and says, "Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children."
     That's a crude story — charmingly crude, in my eyes, because the macho bluster resonates over the eons and makes the anonymous Egyptian foot soldier seem very real.
     I tell this as introduction to a letter I received this week. A lone person who wrote to object to my defense of Niles North presenting the risque musical "A Chorus Line" and to argue that vulgarities in school are wrong.
     "Please tell me, how is that supposed to be helpful to our young people?" he asks, listing the various off-color details of the play. "It seems that there is a complete loss of any kind of standards here."
     My purpose is not to embarrass the reader, whose letter was erudite and well-reasoned. I believe that he speaks for a large number of people who look around and see a world in 1999 very different from the world in which they grew up, and who aren't pleased with the changes.
     And "A Chorus Line" isn't the half of it. We see things now that we would never see, even a few years ago. For instance, Simon & Schuster is publishing a book, aimed at teens no less, with the newspaper-unprintable title of "The - - - - -Up."
     This is far from what our letter writer wants schools to teach. He quotes Samuel Johnson:
     "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit." He adds: "There is nothing in Johnson's words about barnyard epithets."
     Or is there? This is where he lost me. I would argue that, as in the case of our anonymous Egyptian soldier, or "A Chorus Line," there are instances when, to be good and genuine, to reflect real people, a work also needs to be somewhat obscene.
     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.
     Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.
     It doesn't bottom out because standards do tighten, though we seldom notice. For instance, certain words that could be sung out on a high school stage in the 1940s — say in a minstrel show — would not be sung today. Our sensibilities changed.
     The most important thing, whether you find something offensive or artistic, is to remember that being crude and being bad do not always go together. Sometimes evil hides in the guise of high culture, as the great Dr. Johnson himself noted:
     "Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly; he may cheat at cards genteelly."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 6, 1999

*  From "Speculations about the Nile," Herodotus, II. 19-31, translated by D. Grene, quoted in Michael Grant's "Readings in the Classic Historians." 

** The exact phrase is, "...one of their number showed him his prick and said, 'Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.'" I don't recall if I tried to get that published and failed, or didn't bother. But it remains unprintable in the Sun-Times, then and now. Their loss.

Meet my metaphors #6: The M.C. Escher staircase

"Ascending and Descending," by M.C. Escher

    When people find out I am that most exotic of beasts, a newspaper columnist, the common reaction is an uncomprehending stare, as if I said that I shave butterflies for a living. No, I exaggerate. The common reaction is to not even process that I've said anything. The expression never changes. It's as if I muttered some garble: "I flemulate klaxons." 

     Every now and then, though, the first word, "newspaper," does register, and in order to say something, they latch onto that familiar first word and roll with it, managing a question along the lines of, "So how is the newspaper doing?" 

     At that, I pretend to think, then deploy the following well-worn observation, almost a koan: "Journalism is like that M.C. Escher staircase that keeps going down and down but somehow never reaches the bottom."

     It's true. Newspapers have been collapsing like so many ancient towers since my senior year in high school, when the great Chicago Daily News was liquidated because ... well, I'm still not sure why.

     By the time I've finished invoking the above staircase, my audience, who wouldn't know what i was talking about even if they had been listening, has already turned and gratefully fled. It isn't as if they really care about the answer. So I never get the chance to explain that I am thinking of "Ascending and Descending," a 1960 lithograph by the Dutch master draftsman M.C. Escher, who was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s.  I certainly was a fan, so much so that as a teen I bought two expensive books,  "The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher" ($6.95) and "The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher," ($5.95) which have sat on my shelf, barely touched, for 50 years, waiting for their moment to shine.

    In the second book, Escher explains the image in "Ascending and Descending" with charming detachment, as if he had come upon a real scene instead of inventing it himself:

     The inhabitants of these living-quarters would appear to be monks, adherents to some unknown sect. Perhaps it is their ritual duty to climb those stairs for a few hours each day. It would seem that when they get tired they are allowed to turn about and go downstairs instead of up. Yet both directions, though not without meaning, are equally useless. Two recalcitrant individuals refuse, for the time being, to take any part in this exercise. They have no use for it at all, but no doubt sooner or later they will be brought to see the error of their nonconformity.

    Given that, it seems I've misunderstood the image all these years. Most of the monks aren't going down. They're going up. Not like journalism at all. 
    In a letter to a friend, Escher is less whimsical:

    That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd. With similar questions on his lips, our own Albert Camus has just smashed into a tree in his friend’s car and killed himself. An absurd death, which had rather an effect on me. Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring – and where does it all get us? Nowhere.

     Oh, I don't know about that. Fun was had. The lithograph is still intriguing. As a young man, I believed Escher's work hinted at life's secret connection and essential mystery of life, the hidden world of unknowable complexity and beauty, the unseen gears spinning. A natural partner to a profession spent probing beneath the shiny surface, glancing behind the backdrops and stage scenery.

     I found the Camus letter in a 2015 Guardian article prompted by a Scottish show of Escher's work. The article said that Escher was inspired by a classic 1958 paper published n the British Journal of Psychology "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion," by Lionel S. Penrose and his son Roger. Though the paper cites Escher on its first page, so perhaps they were inspiring each other. They triangle they discuss is known as the Penrose Triangle, not the Escher Triangle, so the Brits are probably the true pioneers here.

     Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in the Netherlands in 1898, the fourth son of a civil engineer. He became a somewhat successful artist in his 30s, traveling the continent, including Spain, where the tiles at the Alhambra influenced his work, which was to include elaborate geometric surface divisions, along with his growing fascination with reflections, Möbius strips and other odd takes on the world as befits a left-hander.

     Journalism isn't the only quality I set upon Escher's endless staircase. In 2007, when Dennis J. Hastert driven from Congress, I noted, "While politeness in politics is like that M.C. Escher staircase that always goes down and yet never reaches the bottom, it's obvious that things are even worse now than a decade ago."

     I had no idea what was coming. In 1999, in a column on crudity that I'll repost tomorrow, I noted:

     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.

     Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.

     Escher himself was not only a meticulous artist but a fastidious person. He was in his mid-60s when his work was embraced by the counterculture, a hug he did not return. When Mick Jagger wrote him a fan letter, suggesting he design a cover for a Rolling Stones album, Escher wrote back tartly to the rock star's assistant, "“Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.” He died in 1972.

     Now that I think of it, I have never seen an M.C. Escher print in a museum, not that I recall, not even in the Netherlands. In that regard, he's a Dutch Norman Rockwell — a master craftsman shunned by the art world, perhaps for being too popular. Though the Art Institute just got its first Rockwell, so maybe Escher will get his due. Doing that checking thing, speaking of journalism, I see The Art Institute does own a variety of Escher prints. Perhaps they'll get around to putting one on display someday. I'd like that.

     
   

      

     

Meet my metaphors #5: ConAgra

     Most people leave few traces. An heirloom vase. A nice watch. A self-published family memoir that slumbers in a drawer unread. An amateurish painting. No great tragedy. Even the most famous person quickly sinks into obscurity. To the upcoming generation, Bruce Springsteen is an old guy occasionally glimpsed on YouTube video chuckling with some talk show host they also never heard of.  Probably not even that. Long-lasting fame beyond a person's life doesn't help the actual person. Mark Twain isn't happier in heaven than Petroleum V. Nasby because his books are still read.
     While I can't say I am pleased that my writing leaves the smallest ripple the day it's published, sometimes, then sinks to the bottom of a very deep pool and is promptly forgotten forever, I do accept it. There's not a lot of choice in the matter. Plus I've known too many guys, particularly older men, who spend what's left of their lives blowing off their big bazoos about what a big honking deal they are, if only in their own minds. It's a bad look.
     So it's fitting that a favorite metaphor of mine is one that speaks to this very situation. I wish could have reached some kind of currency, but didn't, because nothing I write does.
     It was in the post on Dec. 30, 2017, recounting "The State of the Blog," a particularly self-indulgent flop into the stats of this web site. I was pointing out that a post comparing a song by Amanda Palmer to a song by Pink got 50,000 hits. Without — I almost said "shamefully without" but I hope it was an oversight and not obfuscation — my mentioning that the reason it got 50,000 hits was because her then-husband, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, retweeted it to his two million followers. I tried to move on, talking about how the Metropolitan Museum of Art had enhanced the blog's visual presence by putting 375,000 images "available for free and unrestricted use." Then I circled back to the subject and uncorked this confession:

     I'm painfully aware of what small ball the blog is, on the scale of kid toy testers raking in millions on YouTube. I must admit, when I see Sheldon Cooper taping his poignant "Fun with Flags" on "The Big Bang Theory" I squirm a bit in recognition. Counter-intuitively, the big numbers generated by the Amanda Palmer post were more disconcerting than encouraging, because they reminded me what the blog isn't: a significant cultural force. It's a whisper in a hurricane of screams. Then again, my vegetable garden is not ConAgra either, yet I still plant tomatoes every spring. Small is fine if it makes you happy, and in general, EGD does.

    The "whisper in a hurricane of screams" isn't bad either, and a reminder that it's best, when coining metaphors, to limit yourself to images the reader is familiar with. But I particularly like the garden metaphor, even though it depends on knowing something about Conagra Brands (they lowercased the A in 2016, ahem, the year before I wrote this, when the company moved to Chicago, as an attempt to deemphasize the "agriculture" part of their operation), a $20 billion food processing behemoth employing 18,000 people. 

     Started in 1919 as Nebraska Consolidated Mills, it milled grain and sold cake mixes, founding the Duncan Hines brand in 1951, then branched out into a dizzying array of brands and products, from processed turkey to tires. They changed their name to ConAgra in 1971. (It's Latin, meaning "With Soil.")

     Headquartered in Chicago, I see — I really should phone them up, invite myself over, arrange a field trip to a farm. How would they respond? Silence, probably.

      See, that is the value of being known. Yes, popularity is a salve to the old ego. But it is also practical, a sort of grease to help slide you into ConAgra and out to the farm, which would be fun. Without it, we push forward, our sagging undercarriage scraping against the bare concrete, throwing sparks, the binding gears shrieking and seizing up. To coin another metaphor.

    Let's not end on that note. Before I let you go, I want to underline a sentence in the above that is too easily overlooked, especially by me: "Small is fine if it makes you happy." Your choice, not theirs. If you need applause, you put control of your mood in the power of people sitting with their hands in their laps. Can't blame them — they never noticed you, way in the back, holding a spear, singing your heart out.

     The smart path is to focus on the work, how good it is, how doing it makes you feel. Not the professional approach, true. But one that works out far better in the long run.

    

     

Meet my metaphors #4: Smack into the mitt

     Not being a sports guy, I don't use many sports metaphors. It's never fourth and long in my world. I seldom swing for the fences.
     That said, I do have select favorites, as revealed in this 2012 column that artfully dances around something that would never get near the paper today, for a variety of reasons. First, because we have to buy our own phones now. And second, well, you'll see.

     A batter who decides to not swing at a ball lets it smack into the catcher's mitt — I don't have to explain that, right? The beauty of sports metaphors — everybody understands them.
     The original headline was "A smart phone king of the hill." Make sure to notice the game metaphor in the last sentence.

     "Can I turn Neil on?” she asked. I contemplated her ­— blonde, expectant — while weighing my response.
     Sometimes your whole career can teeter on a knife edge. The person to whom she was posing the question — a technician standing by me — said nothing. I gazed at an imaginary spot floating in the air about a foot above my head and to the left, and simply waited.
     “I’m going to let that one smack into the mitt,” I said, taking refuge in sports metaphor. They both looked at me blankly.
     “Sometimes you have to just leave the bat on your shoulder,” I elaborated. Another long pause.
     “Ohhh...” she sad, getting it, or pretending to. “Turn on” — an antiquated phrase that old people use. Shades of “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.” An inappropriate 1960s drug/sexual reference. All three of us busily turned our attention to the device that she had called by my given name. Its actual name is a Samsung Galaxy S II or, to use the vernacular, a phone.
     Smart phone week at the Sun-Times, and we all trooped up to the 10th floor to meet our new devices — our second selves, apparently. I don’t want to make too big of a deal about this woman calling my phone by my name. Lots of products have been anthropomorphized over the years. Hats, for instance. Freud wrote an essay arguing that hats are symbols for men, a common sentiment a century ago. “Your hat is YOU!” one company advertised.
     We aren’t that direct about our phones, but their impact on the murky nether worlds of the id and the ego are the same. Some of my colleagues received Apple iPhone 4s, the rest of us got Galaxies, and, vain as newspaper columnists tend to be, I instantly focused in on the pecking order aspect — was this an indication of status? Am I “out”? Have I been slighted? Apple of course is the platinum, ne plus ultra electronic device. I could see a sleek white iPhone 4 box with Rick Telander’s name written on it. Of course. The best for the best. The Samsung box, meanwhile, is half yellow with rainbow discs. It looks like something made to contain a cat toy. Was I not Apple-worthy? If my phone is going to be me, shouldn’t it — shouldn’t I — be the best possible? I raised a weak protest ­— could I not just take Rick’s iPhone instead? He doesn’t care. He doesn’t need status from his phone. I do.
     No, no, the tech folk said, obviously used to such pleading. These decisions have been made high above. The Apples are for people ... well ... who need Apples. The Samsungs....
     “Yours is bigger!” the tech guy said brightly, subtly returning to the object-as-a-man motif. Indeed it was but .... well, let’s move on.
     I was booted over to a third tech person, an earnest man in his 20s who had the tech guy outfit right out of Central Casting: blue jeans, plaid shirt, unshaven, newsboy cap. He pointed out the button used to turn the phone on, instructed me how to press that button, then became lost in trying to link to the network.
     I watched. An odd moment — the phone wasn’t even mine yet, but already on the fritz.
     “For the record, I haven’t done anything to it yet!” I announced to the room.
     “Play with it!” he enthused, continuing the metaphor, shooing me out the door. “Try new apps!”
      A few pokes and the apps popped up. Books. Lewis Carroll. “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.”
     You and me both, Alice, you and me both.
     An hour later, back in my office, the new phone surprised me by ringing. I took the Galaxy out of my pocket, fumbled to the phone screen, and tapped the green button. And tapped. Yet it didn’t answer. Later, my 14-year-old son — who has had this phone for a year— explained, “You have to SLIDE it.” Oh, of course. Why didn’t anyone tell me that? Seriously. At least tell us how to answer the phone. At lunch, I met my brother.
     “Got a new phone!” I bragged, then told him about the Apple v. Samsung crisis.
     “This is better,” he said, and gestured down to his phone ­— a Galaxy S. Now, I don’t know much about phones, but I know that the S II is better than the plain old S. His has a tiny keyboard that slides out — obviously a technological dead end.
     “The S3 is coming out,” my brother said. “I’m not sure when, but I might get it.” Until then, I have the best, most up-to-datest. I immediately checked to see how long I’ll enjoy the Alpha Dog Samsung. Until June 21. That’s when the new S3 arrives. Two weeks. This technological king of the hill is a losing game.
    — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2012

Meet my metaphors #3: World War II

     If I had to point to one history book that completely changed my thinking, the first one to come to mind would be Studs Terkel's "The Good War." Not as a famous as his classics like "Division Street America" or "Working," "The Good War" is a oral history of the Second World War.

      Of course I knew about the war already. Growing up in the '60s, I was brought up on it. My father had been 12 when the war ended, the prime age to absorb all the romantic details of battle without running the risk of getting killed. Though I doubt he was guiding my education, not pressing the tales of men, battle and equipment upon me, so much as I was living in the post-victory air of triumph.
     So I read books like "Air War Against Hitler's Germany" with crippled B-17s fighting off the German Messerschmitts on their way to bomb the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt. (And the fact that I can unspool that sentence without checking 50 years after reading the source tells you something). On my bedroom door I had, not a rock star poster, but one from the Air & Space Museum called "Know your enemy" show the silhouettes of military aircraft. I knew what a dihedral is (the upward angle of a plane's wings). I not only knew the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, the Enola Gay — everyone knew that — but the island in the Marianas it took off from on its run over Hiroshima, Tinian, and the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets.

     All of this thanks to "Hear it Now," a boxed set of 45s of Edward R. Murrow's aural history of 1933-1945. I played it so much I had it memorized.
     I start reading "The Good War" and met an amazing crew of pacifists, war resisters, deserters, factory workers — the cream of Terkel's leftie world. And I realize that yes, we won the war, but humanity was then as humanity is now, a broad spectrum of belief. I had bought a story that was somewhere between a fantasy and a lie. We defeated the Nazis — that was good. But it didn't make us saints, before or after.

     Even seeing the truth, or the truth as curated by Studs Terkel,  I was slow to surrender the romantic myth.
     When I wanted to say I was outnumbered, I'd evoke the pair of Navy pilots who raced to a small airfield at Pearl Harbor and took off in two fighters, rising to meet the onslaught. Here I am in 2002 writing about remodeling our decrepit farm house:

     The actual buying of the house wasn't precisely a surprise attack — I mean, we knew what we were signing. But the repercussions certainly were unanticipated, with wave after wave of repairs and set-backs and projects sweeping over us, while we dove behind barrels and tried to get our pathetically inadequate remodeling forces off the ground at Hickham Field.

     Note that, 61 years after the fact, I assume the reader will know what I'm talking about or, more likely, didn't pause to consider they might not. Although, in those pre-Google days, I should point out that George Welch and Kenneth Taylor got their P-40s off the ground at Haleiwa Field, 11 miles away from Hickam, no "h." Their squadron was originally based at Hickam, but had moved to a smaller field, which is why the planes weren't destroyed in the opening attack.
     Ten years later I was still at it, commenting on Chicago's response to a front page pan of my Chicago memoir and two others in the New York Times Book Review, posting this on Facebook:

     There are other examples — in 2019, I began my South American diary this way:

     The solidly-built young man had a full red-beard and was dressed all in black, from his watch cap to his sneakers. His new bags — hip, if luggage can be hip — were also black, as were the clothes and luggage of his friend, who wore a Dutch cap.
     A quip occurred to me.
     "Are you lads on your way to blow up the bridge over the Remagen?" I thought, but did not say. Shutting up is an art form, and mentioning obscure bits of World War II trivia — capturing the Remagen bridge over the Rhine was vital to the Allies forces drive to Berlin in the spring of 1945 — to young strangers is not a practice embraced by those aspiring to be au courant. Okay, hipsters try to look like commandos when they're not aping lumberjacks; deal with it.

     Notice that I felt the need to explain what I was talking about. That is considerate, but leaches the power from a metaphor. If you say, "I was in hell — which is very hot and unpleasant," maybe you need to find another way to describe where you are. I believe it's time to retire all World War II imagery, put it on the shelf along with the Civil War and the Battle of Hastings. A third of millennials can't say who won World War II, and I assume a significant number don't realize the war occurred.  One duty of a writer is to be understood, and while it may be satisfying to deploy a well-worn, well-loved metaphor, if it's met with a puzzled shrug, what have you accomplished? Nothing.

     That said, as with Lord Jim, freeing my mind of the Good War might not be so easy. After I wrote the above, I needed a headline for a column about Ozempic, and my first, immediate thought was, "Praise God and pass the Ozempic."  Another Pearl Harbor reference. Chaplain Howell Forgy, on the USS New Orleans, despite his non-combatant status, encouraged the line of sailors passing ammo to gunners with "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which became a 1942 patriotic song by Frank Loesser.

    And yes, when I saw I'd mis-remembered "The Lord" as "God" I did fix it. Though there was no need. Nobody other than myself was ever going to notice.

    Not quite true. The very next day, Facebook memories served up a column from 2018: "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Beto O'Rourke," about the need to support Democratic candidates, such as the guy who for a moment seemed like he'd defeat Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. Well, that's one headline trope I'm never using again. I hope.

     

Meet my metaphors #2: Richard Scarry

  

    I'm on vacation for the next few weeks. To give you SOMETHING to read, I've prepared a self-indulgent look at some of my favorite metaphors. Feel free to add your own in comments, such as "Neil's foray into butter-churning made me feel sad that, with so much momentous news going on, he'd decided to turn his back on the news and wander off into the fading past."

   The Boston Marathon Bombing occurred on gorgeous spring day in 2013. Before news of the awful crime hit me, I was strolling happily around the leafy suburban paradise of my hometown, Northbrook, taking in the splendid weather and nature reborn.

     In the solemn-though-resolute column that appeared two days later in the Sun-Times, I tried to convey the sense of comfort of that stroll, the sense of security that such terrorist attacks are intended to shatter: 

     Pedestrians smiled at the cute dog, a little girl on a scooter cast a longing look. We paused to let Janet, the always-friendly crossing guard, pet her. If you gave the people kitten faces and piglet tails, it could have been a page from a Richard Scarry children’s book.

     Perhaps that's asking a lot of the average reader. If I say my basement is the setting of a Stephen King short story, there's a good chance most people will at least have some idea what I'm talking about when I deployed that metaphor. 

     Then again, I should probably define my terms. A metaphor uses an image to explain something — my daily walk is a spread in a Richard Scarry book. As opposed to a simile, which uses "like" or "as" — my routine is like a Bear's in a Richard Scarry book.

     That said, who is Richard Scarry? Not an obscure reference, surely — the man illustrated 150 books, selling 100 million copies. But not a household name either. Chris Ware, the genius cartoonist whose work has settled into art — think of him as this generation's Saul Steinberg, to employ another metaphor — wrote a tribute to Scarry last year in the Yale Review. He describes the "big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever" this way:

     The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
     The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”  

     "Didn't seem to picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves." That's metaphor in a nutshell. Ware is seven years younger than I am, and while Scarry's books were essentials in his deep childhood — he would carry them around, mirroring his activities to the animals in the book — to me, they were a step removed, books for my younger brother, two years older than Ware. As with Sesame Street, which debuted when I was 9, I could coolly appreciate Richard Scarry from the relative maturity of being 10, but it wasn't embedded in my heart, though I agree with Ware that, "Richard Scarry somehow made me feel safe and settled."

Policeman Small

     In my pre-kindergarten years, my formative text was Lois Lenski's "Policeman Small" (1962), the last in a series of books that began in 1934 with "The Little Auto" and moved through "The Little Fire Engine," and "The Little Airplane," and such,  starring Fireman Small, Pilot Small, etc. Stories that also modeled regular life, such labelling parts of a hook and ladder truck. To compare the two artists is to realize just how complicated, how busy, crowded and diverse life can get in only a decade. Everybody in Lenski's world is white, for instance, and her books have faded compared to Scarry's work, which benefits from the characters being pigs and bears and rabbits. "Policeman Small" stood out from the others for another reason, beside its star finally making it into the title. There was music to a song at the book's beginning, "Oh, Do You Know Policeman Small." My mother would play it on the piano and we would sing together, but I would still never use Lenski's world as a metaphor — how many readers would know what I am talking about? 

     A situation I struggle against — employing an image that sails over 99 percent of readers' heads. A writer has to please himself; but, ideally, not only himself.

     With Scarry, there's at least a shot of people getting it, though I imagine most know nothing of his life and never bothered to find out — I didn't, until I read Ware's piece.

     The man himself was born in Boston in 1919, Scarry's father ran a department store, and when his son, an indifferent student, began to study drawing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, delivered this classic and very wrong prediction: "“You will live in a garret and eat nothing but spaghetti.”

     Drafted, Scarry drew his way through World War II, enjoying "the best war ever," with posts in Oran, Venice and Paris.

    Scarry was so successful that by 1967 he could take a three-week ski vacation in Switzerland and decide to never come back.  He died in 1994 in Gstaad.

    Ware makes an interesting observation related to how Scarry's ex-pat status colored his work:

     A decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it. By "un-American" I don't mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there's a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized...the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman's guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which American was barreling in the late 1960s."

      Toward the end of the Yale Review piece, which I encourage everyone to read (It's worth the price of admission just for Random House fretting pre-publication over the title, "What Do People Do All Day?" soon to be a massive best-seller for half a century, because there were no people actually in it). Ware lets loose this glorious sentence: "Like it or not, just as adulthood runs roughshod over childhood, words chew images to shreds, and it's up to the artist — or the writer or the cartoonist — to put those images back together again."

     I certainly view my reality as far darker than Scarry's lovely world, and at times the two collide, as in this 2014 post, when I try to step out of my own jolly self-perception and imagine what my neighbors might actually think of me:

     While most suburbanites don't visit their neighbors without getting in a car, I like that we live cheek-by-jowl to downtown, or to what passes for a downtown in Northbrook, and can walk everywhere. Doing so makes me feel like a character in a Richard Scarry story, if you remember those brightly colored children's books where friendly animal characters are always going about quotidian tasks, bakers baking and police officers directing traffic and such. My self-image during these strolls is not precisely a bear in a fedora waving his paw at a pig in a white apron. But very close. (I won't speculate on how I'm actually perceived, the likelihood of Northbrook mothers cautioning their naughty children with, "Now you behave, or I'll turn you over to the Scary Wandering Man and he'll put you in a pie and eat you for his dinner.")

Frontplate of "Policeman Small" by Lois Lenski (Walck, 1962)

Meet my metaphors #1: Lord Jim

Hedy Lamar as Tondelayo in the 1942 film "White Cargo."
Thurber, writing in 1933, was referring to the book.

     I'm not in the paper for the next two weeks — taking time off. So as not to leave you in the lurch, I'm starting with a series I'm calling "Meet my metaphors." Why that? Honestly, I'm the type of writer who would rather coin a sharp, original metaphor than break real news. Assuming that's a "type" and not solely me. Is that a good or bad thing? Probably both. As always, your indulgence is appreciated.

     Lord Jim, Conrad's haunted wanderer, seemed the natural place to begin.

     Growing up, I loved James Thurber. Loved "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." Loved "The Catbird Seat." Loved the cartoons. Loved the man himself, half blind, often fully drunk, early on pairing up, quite improbably, with the trim, generally upright E.B. White. As a young man, I wanted to be James Thurber.
     I particularly loved his similes. Nearing 40, his "faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening." He worries about heading to his publisher and disappearing "like Ambrose Bierce." Both found in the second paragraph of "Preface to a Life," at the beginning of his classic "My Life and Hard Times."
    That slim volume's "A Note at the End" contains this passage that has never left me:

    The mistaken exits and entrances of my thirties have moved me several times to some thought of spending the rest of my days wandering aimlessly around the South Seas, like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable. But the necessity for frequent visits to my oculist and dentist has prevented this. You can't be running back from Singapore every few months to get your lenses changed and still retain the proper mood for wandering. Furthermore, my horn-rimmed glasses and my Ohio accent betray me, even when I sit on the terrasses of little tropical cafes, wearing a pith helmet, starting straight ahead, and twitching a muscle in my jaw. I found this out when I tried wandering around the West Indies one summer. Instead of being followed by the whispers of men and the glances of women, I was followed by bead salesmen and native women with postcards. Nor did any dark girl, looking at all like Tondelayo in "White Cargo," come forward and offer to go to pieces with me. They tried to sell me baskets.
     Under these circumstances it is impossible to inscrutable, and a wanderer who isn't inscrutable might just as well be back at Broad and High Streets in Columbus sitting in the Baltimore Dairy Lunch
     There was, of course, even for Conrad's Lord Jim, no running away. The cloud of his special discomfiture followed him like a pup, no matter what ships he took or what wildernesses he entered.

      I thought about, and referred to, this passage for many years — I think it kept me from ever even being tempted to become one of those adventuresome young people who travel for long stretches, spend a long time staring at some distant horizon, considering themselves thus ennobled. Now that I reread the above, I realize that one of my favorite similes I believe I coined — that certain annoyances follow me "quacking like a pull toy duck," is just a reworking of Thurber's tagalong pup.

     Eventually I read Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim," and was surprised at how dense and difficult it is. 

    But a handy metaphor — that is, an image useful in explaining something. In 2020, trying to fathom the collapse of Republican leadership in "Struggling to understand GOP cowardice," I summarized the plot — and you know a metaphor is on its last legs when you have to explain it:

     But when reflecting on the moral repugnance of men like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — four powerful Republican senators who know better, who see what Trump is attempting, yet do nothing, or worse abet him — I search history in vain for similar craven cowardice.
     Literature offers a few: “Lord Jim,” by Joseph Conrad. Jim is a British sailor on the crew of the Patna, a ship on the Red Sea. The ship founders, and the captain and crew — and after some hesitation, Jim — abandon the ship and its 800 Muslim pilgrims.
     Only the Patna doesn’t sink. It’s towed into port, and Jim and his shipmates are publicly vilified. He wanders the world, fleeing his shame. But that’s fiction.

     The book, if I recall properly, is narrated by an admirer of Jim's, Captain Marlowe, with more homoerotic notes than I had expected in a novel written in 1900.
   Asked in 2015 to wax eloquent on the plight of Steve Bartman (have we finally forgotten?) the man unfairly blamed for the Cubs' 2003 collapse against the Marlins in a decisive game in the National League Championship, I supported his careful silence:

     What could Bartman possibly say that would reward the media for its dozen-year quest? He could have lived the existence of Job, squatting in dust at the gates of the city, and express it with the eloquence of Joseph Conrad describing Lord Jim's wanderings around the South Seas, trying to escape his shame, and frankly it would still be inadequate. Silence is his best option.

     Being a meek man afraid of rigors, of course I embrace Thurber's self-assessment, even if it means grabbing a 126-year-old character most readers have never heard of. This, from last year, writing about getting a passport of an upcoming trip aboard:

    I am what they call "a worrier." You probably already figured that out. And I knew as the cab pulled away from my house, heading off to our big trip, in addition to my worrying about the toaster coming to life and setting fire to the drapes which we don't have, and the refrigerator door hanging open, and everything else I conjure up to mock the idea that I am Conradian wanderer out of Lord Jim, I'll also worry until we get back that every checkpoint we pass would snag me on my passport. "Oh sorry Mr., ah, Steinberg, your whole trip is ruined because your passport expires five months and 27 days after this trip is scheduled to end..."

     Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Time to retire Lord Jim. Yes, I will do so. If I can. I know he's loitering languorously somewhere along one of the dusty, narrow back alleys of my brain, in white hat and linen suit, flipping through a small volume he has picked up off a stand. It will be no easy task to find him and flush him out.