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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'To write is to err'

    

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

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

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

     He then followed up with the Trib:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flashback 2010: Lots of innovation goes into housing inmates

     Two days on "Paradise Lost" worked surprisingly well. So when Facebook served up the memory of this column, built around "Prometheus Unbound," I couldn't help sharing it. What I remember most about it is I was doing weekly commentary with Bob Sirott on Channel 32 and I tried to get the station to send a film crew to Navy Pier. They sort of looked at me strangely and said "We don't do that kind of thing." Most of the studio cameras were automatic, and they were very few people around. A harbinger of things to come.

     Need a straitjacket? Humane Restraint of Waunakee, Wis., sells a handsome model in heavy-duty canvas with leather straps. List price $163.50.
     But don't call it a "straitjacket."
     "It's the 'humane jacket,' " corrected company rep Stacy Schultz.
     We were at Navy Pier, at the 140th annual Congress of Correction, the American Correctional Association's convention.
     Yes, 140th -- the group began in 1870 as the National Prison Association, the trade organization for the ever-burgeoning American incarceration industry.
     As I wandered the booths promoting one-piece steel toilets, digital imaging, heavy-duty locks and concertina wire, I had to adjust my vocabulary to meet industry trends. What I considered an electric fence, for instance, is now a "non-lethal electrified system."
     We don't think about jails much, and some products defy imagination, though once you see them, they make perfect sense.
     For instance, the Swintec Clear Cabinet Typewriter, which is just as it sounds: an electric typewriter made of clear plastic -- even the ribbon cartridge is transparent -- so prisoners can prepare their legal briefs without having a place to stash their shivs and drugs.
     Prisons are a $40 billion industry in the U.S. because we are addicted to punishment -- about one out of 100 adults in this country is currently in jail.
     "No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free," the Economist noted in a scolding cover story last week. "The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America's level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan."
     None of this is ACA's fault -- their job isn't to decide how many prisoners should use Humane Restraint's No-Shank Toothbrush -- think of a plastic thimble with bristles. They just have to figure out how to safely and economically warehouse the millions upon millions of people we insist on sending them.
     The corrections conference offered five days of workshops, most on practical topics like "Upgrading Suicide Risk Assessment Practice" and "The North Dakota Department of Corrections' Better Results for Therapy of Hepatitis C."
     But one session Tuesday afternoon seemed out of place: "Prometheus Bound -- A Reading of the Greek Tragedy and Its Relation to Corrections."
     The workshop is the creation of Bryan Doerries, a New York writer and translator who founded Theater of War, a group that puts on readings of ancient Greek plays for soldiers, to get them talking about the war.
     He realized that prison guards are another group under constant pressure with little opportunity to discuss it, and that "Prometheus," the tale of a god chained to a rock, punished for stealing fire and giving it to humans, might provide such an opportunity.
     He brought the idea to George Lombardi, director of the state of Missouri's Department of Corrections, where last year "Prometheus" was performed four times for staff.
     "They got it," Lombardi said. "We do lots of stuff for offenders, all kinds of programs, but we don't have a whole lot for staff.
     "Prometheus has great relevance for those of us working in correctional institutions, particularly with very recalcitrant offenders."
     A quartet of Chicago actors from the Steppenwolf Theater read four scenes, with James Meredith particularly fine as Prometheus. A discussion followed, and participants -- most weren't turnkeys fresh from the cell block, but longtime administrators -- immediately offered ways the play relates to them.
     "He was resolute," said S. Elwood York Jr., director of pretrial services for Key West, Florida's 16th District, who heard in "Prometheus" the echo of boastful gang members. "His attitude was, 'I'm taking my lumps. I'm tough. I'm proud of what I did.' "
     Beforehand, I had thought Prometheus' pride would make the play less relevant -- he did something noble, in bringing fire to man. But the corrections workers said many criminals feel exactly the same way.
     "Sometimes we forget that the person who committed the offense is committed to the cause," said York, mentioning gang loyalty. "It's a different set of priorities."
     John Gannon, a forensic psychologist, called it "a kind of heroic disorder" -- a pride in their ability to absorb punishment, a failure to see the goal of correction.
     Bringing prisoners around to a different view is more important than ever.
     "With overcrowding, you get double bunks, triple bunks, 3,200 people in a space for 1,600," said Adrienne Poteat, a federal corrections official from Washington, D.C. "That's a lot of people, and what do you do with them?"
     What indeed? Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who oversees nearly 10,000 prisoners at any given time at the County Jail, is concerned with this issue, and I asked him about it.
      "Other than a very small segment of the jail population, they're all getting out," he said. "The question is: How would you want them to be when they get out? Better or worse than when they went in?"
     He said that except for a minority who are "damn close to evil," this "other, much, much, much larger group should be handled with far more flexibility" than we currently muster, focusing more on treating their problems with programs far less costly than prison.
     "You don't even have to get into the debate whether you're liberal, conservative, tough-on-crime -- let's talk about being fiscally smart, for once," Dart said. "We cannot continue to do it this way. Our grandchildren -- heck, our children -- will have nothing left."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 4, 2010 

'Complicit in our own seduction'

    While I am the sole writer, editor, and proprietor of this blog, I'm not the only person who helps make it a success. Sometimes I forget that. Not only are there occasional contributors, such as my pals who helped tide me over after surgery, but there are readers whose comments point out errors and add valuable perspective. 

     Being a little abashed Sunday at not having read "Paradise Lost," I invited any readers who have read the book to share their thoughts. 

     I was impressed by the quality of the replies, particularly this email, which I found both interesting and beautiful, and will share with you in full. 

     Linda Clarke-Borre writes:

     Best wishes for a swift recovery. At least you are in a leafy suburban paradise. You mentioned Paradise Lost. It’s epic, and I thought you might appreciate a couple lessons I derived from reading it before life happened- and I began to understand…
     It’s a Puritan Epic for our times. Milton gives the Devil the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Milton, the failed revolutionary, writes his own fury into the fallen angel. (In Christian writings the Devil’s name is Lucifer — which means angel of light. Milton seduces readers into admiring his elaborate lies, making us complicit in our own seduction). 

     Then there’s heartfelt humanity of Adam and Eve. Their fall isn’t about an apple. It’s encoded in the conversation between them. Eve isn’t seduced by fruit, but by the flattery of her own reflection. Adam cannot bear to lose her. He looks at her and says, “She is my other self,” and chooses her over God. It’s the writing that is so moving; Milton makes you feel the bones of their relationship. When they hold hands and walk into a world of thorns, they are us.

     The third “thread” running through the epic story is the blind poet’s prayer. At the very beginning, Milton invokes a muse, calling on the Holy Spirit to illumine him, because he is blind. He can’t see the page, and dictates this entire epic to his daughters at night, as he asks God to be his inward eye. So when he describes the light of Heaven or murky Hell, he isn’t painting pictures; he is remembering light. Here, the poem becomes an act of radical faith, not in certainty, but in the very act of seeking. He dares to “justify the ways of God to men,” but in the end, he doesn’t justify them logically. He justifies them aesthetically, through the exquisite beauty of his verse. The poem is a glorious paradox: a Puritan epic about disobedience, a political tract that transcends politics, a tragedy that ends with hope. Every time I read the final lines—“They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way”—I am still much moved, not because they are punished. But because they are together.

     I don't know about you, but that makes me want to read the book.

William Blake

'The mind is its own place'

Satan, Sin and Death, by Thomas Rowlandson. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     "F… F… F… J… J… J…"

     I don't remember much about seventh grade. But for some reason, I remember sitting in touch typing class, listening to a monotonous voice on a record slowly enunciate the letters to type, starting with the above, first with our left index finger then with our right. Maybe because it was so god-awful dull. We drilled and drilled, practiced and practiced, until it became hardwired into our limbic systems. I couldn't tell you where any of the letters are on a keyboard; my body just knows.

      Why did I take typing? My wife-to-be studiously avoided it, because she didn't want to end up a secretary. But I wanted to be a writer, and a writer needs to know how to type. About the same time I also used all my paper route money to buy a walnut roll top desk, because a writer also needs one of those. It wasn't quite as useful, but it's sitting right behind me now as I talk, and it does hold a lot of stuff.

     Frankly, it's not something I think much about. Flop my fingers onto the keyboard, start to write and what I want to say appears on the computer screen in front of me. Like magic. Until a few days ago when, already looking ahead to returning to work, and with my left arm and a sling for the next four weeks, I figured I better learn how to dictate.

     You would think, being a newspaper man, I would have dictated before. When I started, there were reporters, out in the field, collecting information, jotting down notes, and what were called "rewrite men." They would sit in the paper and take dictation. They never left. Heck, I used to joke that I never saw one particular rewrite man, Phillip J. O'Connor, stand up. Though I must have, because he was very tall. I might've dictated once or twice; I remember being at some event, clutching a payphone, composing lines into the receiver. But that seldom happened.

     I'll tell you what my first thought was after I decided I had to learn to dictate these columns. It's a little embarrassing, but I thought of John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost." Any idea why? That's right. Milton was blind and dictated the masterpiece to his daughters, composing it in his head, 40 lines at a time. 

     I've never read "Paradise Lost" – an astounding lapse, I know, for all the times I read "The Inferno." Let's say the opportunity never arose. Plus, I heard it was dull – maybe you guys can help here: has anybody read it? Liked it? 

     Sorry to toss the ball in your court. I wanted to read it now, while recovering from shoulder surgery – it seemed the ideal time. But I was deep into other books and I just couldn't muster the gumption to do it. Its reputation is not one of deep fascination. Though I shouldn't criticize because, as I said, I haven't read it. Yet.

     I do recall a quote from it that I use from time to time, one very apt in my present condition: in a sling, sleeping in a chair under a wool blanket, trying to heal, day by day: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Hell of heaven, a heaven of Hell."

     That has to be true, as anyone knows who has been in a good situation, only to see it sour due to some unforeseen circumstance, or managed to redeem a bad situation by approaching it with the right attitude. 

And you think that's a good thing?

     “Help yourself to some salad,“ said my wife, pushing an attractive bowl of feta, tomato and cucumber in my direction. I gazed at the pair of salad tongs tucked in the bowl, at the ready, for a two-handed person.
     "I can't help myself,“ I said. 
     We both laughed.
      Habit a stern taskmaster. Even in my second of six weeks of having my left arm in a sling, immobilized with a foam pillow against my chest, our default occasionally still is: I can do it myself. Which, to be fair, sometimes I can. And sometimes I can't.
     The good news is the surgery went well, the torn rotator cuff repaired, apparently, and I am off narcotics and on the mend. Sleeping in a chair in the TV room — 10 days and counting — is not the brutal hardship I had imagined, and quite necessary when twisting in my sleep could rip out the surgeon's handiwork. Don't want that.

     Plus, it's a really nice chair. A blue leather electric recliner. When we bought it, I worried it was a cross between a prop from "Wall-E" and a medical device for the infirm. Now I'm glad it is.

     My wife has been extraordinarily helpful and while I don't wanna speak for her, I'm fairly confident she'd agree that the process has been generally endurable, even pleasant, generally, at least more pleasant than I anticipated it would be. 

     There's been a surprising amount of laughter. The biggest laugh came on Tuesday, when I joined Edie outside for the morning dog walk and then was invigorated enough to actually go up to my office and give writing by dictation a try. Which is how I am doing this now. Weird for a touch typist since the 7th grade, and there are definite kinks in the system. I say "surely" and it types, stupidly, "Shirley." But it works well enough.

     Toward lunchtime, I walked downstairs. into the living room and kissed her on the head
     "I feel almost like my old self again,” I said
     “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she replied, not missing a beat.
     We both laughed so hard I almost felt lightheaded.

Flashback 2009: A kernel of truth about risk obsession

     When the history of our current disaster is written — if we still do that sort of thing — I'm sure the Democrats will get their share of blame for being handmaidens to our ruin, between Joe Biden running for a second term despite his clearly being too diminished by age to pull it off and our current tendency to take our eye off the ball and squabble over secondary issues. The Republicans are buffing the golden calf of Donald Trump with their long tresses, fluttering timbrals and singing praise to the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, while the Democrats still can't seem to find their ass with both hands.

     I was looking for last week's lung transplant story when I noticed this. The second item is a sobering reminder that elevating toxic narcissists and self-dealing clowns is unfortunately not a Republican monopoly.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Popcorn is the only food that explodes. The moisture inside the corn kernels gets agitated, by heat or microwave, then blows up and turns the kernels inside out. The result is tasty and fun, the only food you'll sit in the dark and shovel into your face by the cubic foot and not worry about.
     Or try not to worry about. Sure, popcorn has its drawbacks — salt and oil and whatever. Cracking a tooth on an unpopped kernel. But I try not to think about those perils. You can't worry about everything. You have to mark out certain areas in life as worry-free zones, regions whose hazards you blithely ignore, because if you fret about every aspect of existence, then the worry itself gets you.
     So I'm wandering Sunset Foods, just killing time until my wife picks up the groceries, and my attention falls upon a box of "Smart Balance Non-Hydrogenated Light Butter Flavor Deluxe Microwave Popcorn." As if that weren't a mouthful already, a bright orange star on the box proclaims "No Diacetyl added," the word "added" in tiny letters.
     Which of course made me suspect the stuff is just silly with naturally occurring diacetyl and raised the immediate question — all together now! — "What's diacetyl?"
     Diacetyl is a chemical in artificial butter flavor linked to a rare but severe respiratory disease — bronchiolitis obliterans — also known as "popcorn lung." So far it's mostly a concern in popcorn factories; only one consumer has gotten it — some poor Joe who ate two bags of microwave popcorn a day for 10 years.
     But we are a nation obscured with tiny risks, so much so that a popcorn manufacturer would ballyhoo the fact that it doesn't go out of its way to add extra doses of something that might give you an exotic ailment cured only by a lung transplant or death. I'm no big shot marketer, but I would have gone with "tasty and fluffy" in the big orange star and left lung disease out of it.

WHAT ABOUT US, ROLAND?

     A few years back, when a heart-wrenching crime story grabbed the editorial board's attention and sparked outrage, the gears of opinionating would sometimes start to turn.
     At that point one member would snap forward and say something along the lines of, "So, you want the paper to take a position AGAINST murdering children?"
     At least in my own mind. Maybe I just mumbled. But the point is, some things go without saying. This column has turned its attention away from Roland Burris for the past week because no explanation is necessary; the situation is all too apparent.
     Blinded by self-regard, elected by nobody (worse, rejected by voters statewide in his most recent bids for office), Burris clings to his illegitimate power and blathers on about himself — I didn't do wrong; I did not lie; I will be vindicated.
     A reader of mine sometimes cuts out this column, circles every "I" with a red felt tip pen and sends it back. It stings, but also conveys two lessons, one easy and one hard. The easy lesson: use "I" less — it isn't a very colorful word, is it? The second, much tougher lesson: remember that it isn't all about me, that the footprint I'm leaving is tiny and will be washed away by the first wave. I'm only sorry it took me this long to figure that out.
     Then again, Roland Burris is 71, and with him, it's I, I, I all the time. Why can't he talk about us for once? Let's hear him say why the state of Illinois needs him to lead us through this nightmare panorama of crisis over the next two years. How his fellow citizens really are best served by watching the mill wheels of justice slowly grind him into a powder. How the Democratic Party is served by keeping this unelected and unelectable pol in power. Let him deny that almost any random Illinoisan that Gov. Quinn might tap on the shoulder during the lunch rush at Potbelly would become a better senator than Burris is going to be.
     Those are obvious points, in my mind, but sometimes I guess you have to state the obvious.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 23, 2009

Flashback 2012: Chicago museums have military kin covered

     

   This is a fun story from the summer before this blog began. Checking on the family involved, I see Peter Blake retired from the Marines a year after this was written. If you want to know more about Molly Blake, at that time she wrote an essay in the New York Times.

     You may not consider the Thorne Miniature Rooms — those finely detailed dioramas in the basement of the Art Institute — to be one of the more thrilling examples of art to be found in that institution.
     But then you are not the Blake sisters, Helen and Leah, of Yuma, Ariz., who visited there Thursday morning.
     “Pink! Pink! Pink! It’s pink!” enthused Helen, 7, clasping her hands together and bouncing, almost levitating, with excitement in front of the Pennsylvania Drawing Room.
     “Momma, look at that!” Leah, 5½, called to Molly Blake, pointing at another room. “Stairs!” Their home has none, so she identified stairs again and again, with wonder.
     The three were in town visiting Molly’s parents in Westmont. Her husband, Peter, is a Marine Harrier pilot, just returned from a six-month tour in Japan. Right now he’s back at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma.
     Blake and her daughters visited the Art Institute thanks to Blue Star Museums, a program set up two years ago by Blue Star Families, a group that supports military families. Blue Star Museums invites military personnel and their families to visit 1,800 museums across the country, free of charge, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. All they have to do is show their military ID.
     “They’re all over the place,” Molly said.
     In Chicago, the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, plus 11 smaller museums take part (but not the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum, though the Field admits active-duty military personnel for free year-round).
     “We’re really proud to participate in the program,” said Erin Hogan, Art Institute spokeswoman and herself “a military brat.”
     “My dad was unexpectedly deployed,” she said. “It can be tough on military kids, you move around a lot, especially in the past 10 years. It’s very tough.” Here museums can help. “We see it as a way for families to spend positive and enriching time together.”
     You can never predict what kids will notice at a museum. The Blake girls blew by Grant Wood’s stern couple in “American Gothic” without a glance, then stopped to study the couples dancing in Archibald Motley’s jazzy red Harlem Renaissance “Blues.”
     “They’re about to kiss!” explained Helen.
     The girls are among nearly 2 million family members of our country’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel. These families face all kinds of trouble stemming from the service of their loved ones. Blue Star Families did a survey of military families and found concern about the effects of deployment on children was cited as their No. 1 worry more often than even post-traumatic stress was mentioned. Families try to stay positive.
     “There are times of stress,” said Molly Blake. “But we’ve worked hard to educate them about why we go through these things and why Peter deployed, and try to instill pride in them. We don’t focus on the negatives. We focus on some of the fun things we do while he was gone.”
     Nor is the stress limited to children. The Harrier is known as the “widow maker,” but Molly says she tries not to worry anymore.
     “I’m used to it by now,” she said. “The ejection seats work really well.”
     The trio took in the Roy Lichtenstein special exhibit, giving his large pop art canvases of cartoon pilots a more literal analysis than the typical art connoisseur might conjure up.
     “Some of the pictures are of military pilots, just like daddy,” said Molly Blake.
     “I don’t get it,” said Helen, of “Seascape,” a 1964 field of blue dots. “It’s art,” her mother said. “You don’t have to get it.”
     This being an art museum, however, some works demanded a certain parental finesse, such as Lichtenstein’s enormous canvas of naked women playing volleyball. “Oh my gosh,” said Molly, quickening her stride. “What are those girls doing?”
     Leah didn’t notice. Helen crinkled her freckled nose and said, “I would never, ever do that.”
     Later, in the Thorne rooms, Leah skipped past Virginia Keep Clark’s oil portrait of a grand, tight-mouthed Mrs. James Ward Thorne, and tossed off an opinion that is perhaps unique in the painting’s 97-year-history.
      “That girl’s pretty!” she said.
     About 300,000 service-member families took advantage of the program this year, and while it is fitting to salute the museums that participate, it’s also appropriate to remember that not enough people even consider the families of the military and what they go through when their loved ones deploy, as Lt. Col. Peter Blake has done five times already.
     The Blue Star Families asked those it surveyed whether they agree with this statement: “The general public does not truly understand or appreciate the sacrifices made by service members and their families.”
     A whopping 95 percent said yes, they do agree, an answer that may shock, but shouldn’t surprise the public. Or it would shock, if they ever paused to think about it.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 22, 2012

I remember liking this photo, with Molly gazing into the glass, and her daughter's reflection
staring back.

Looking for something more current? Try Eric Zorn.

     For many years now I've had fun sparring with Eric Zorn, first of the Tribune, now of The Picayune Sentinel. Our friendship did not preclude him from trying to take advantage of my disability, as this post, written by the man himself, proves:

 

    Well, I guess we know what Neil Steinberg's priorities truly are -- his own comfort rather than the needs of his public. He would rather laze around his comfortable home in a leafy suburban paradise recuperating from surgery on just one shoulder -- what, he can't type with his other hand? -- than meet the needs and expectations of the readers whose attentions have sustained him for decades.
     No, no, we get it. "Every Goddamn Day" is just another broken promise. More fake news. How about "Some Goddamn Days"?
      For intellectual sustenance, amusement, inspiration and guidance during Neil's period of repose, readers will simply have to turn to the archives of The Picayune Sentinel where I deliver on all my promises and produce content even when afflicted by discomfort and anomie.

Bored with re-runs? Return to the present day with John Williams

     Not everything has gone to hell. Weekdays from 10 to 12 and then, after a civilized break for lunch, from 1 to 2 p.m. John Williams still shares his piercing intelligence and big heart via that 50,000 watt blowtorch, WGN 720 AM. I know I've knocked it out of the park in my column when John Williams calls and wants to talk about it. 
     Of course, he agreed to join my media friends wishing me well in my recovery. The floor is yours, John:

     Well…I for one am glad Neil is laid up with — wait for it - “rotator cup surgery.”  So now he can’t hit a tight end over the middle or even type on a lap top.  So he needs to take a couple months off.  Rrrrright.  I’ll never forget the way he thrilled the nation, with his “T” punctuation. 
     

John Williams 

But, assuming this really is legit, and knowing how committed he is to the city and his craft, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.  And,  I’m going to  take  advantage of the opportunity to plug my radio show and podcast.  Neil regularly guests on both and it is a marvel to see and hear his bright, sharp and often funny remarks.  Should you, his humble reader, be so starved for similar (but not comparable) commentary, I invite you to download The Mincing Rascals podcast, “…the podcast for people who care about Chicago.”  Our July 22 Ep features WGN’s Steve Bertrand, the Picayune Sentinel’s Eric Zorn and award winning journalist turned community activist Marj Halperin. This week we’re taking about the anthem slap at Wrigley Field on Sunday, who should pay — literally pay us — for the smog (Blame Canada!), illegal voters in NJ and explosive….conversation.  NOTE to Chicago Medical providers.  Fix this dude’s turf toe or whatever; keep that might as is.

Tired of this shit? Check out Chicago Public Square

Charlie Meyerson (photo by Todd Bannor)

     This blog owes a lot to former WXRT newsman Charlie Meyerson — it was he who convinced me to send out a morning email link, extending my reach to literally hundreds of readers. When I wrote that I was having surgery, he reached out to say, in essence, "Hey asshole, how'd you fuck yourself up so badly?"
     While I had his attention, I asked if he wanted to use one of the infinity of days I have staring me in the pain-twisted face to plug his own contribution to Chicago's media blogosphere, and he of course snapped at the opportunity, because that is what we do. Take it away, Charlie:

     Consider for a moment the hubris involved in promising to post something to a blog every … goddamned … day—a commitment from someone evidently unable to envision a time when rotator cuff surgery would leave him potentially unable to type for six weeks.
     Dear Reader, I give you Neil Steinberg.
     His lack of foresight has put him in a position to seek the kindness of friends and fans, like me, to slap together something—anything—to fill this space.
     As a survivor of that surgery myself—hey, 20 years ago this summer, after what I sarcastically refer to as my last skiing injury ever—I’m happy to help:
     Going through Steinberg withdrawal? You’ll find fresh news and commentary awaiting you daily (well, almost daily, because I’m not so committed as Neil) via my free email newsletter, Chicago Public Square, which has over the years been acclaimed by the Chicago Reader as the “best free daily roundup in your inbox” and by his and my former colleague Mark Jacob as Chicago’s “smartest daily news aggregation.”
     Me, I just think of it as my honor to share journalism from some of the smartest (and funniest) people tracking news of importance to the Chicago area.
      I look forward to the day when you’ll again have direct access to Neil’s insights—every goddamned day.
      Speedy recovery, sir.

     Do you have a venture you want to ballyhoo? You see how minimal it can be. Send it along and I'll consider posting it, as much as I can consider anything through a fog of narcotics.*

     * Comic exaggeration. The pain ebbed after the second day and I’m getting by on Advil.

Flashback 1998: Entertainment legend dies of heart attack at 82 - Singer's life, style set tone for millions

 

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday, so with my left arm in a sling, I'm going to take a bit of time off to let the repair heal. How long? I don't know. But I know it’s still too soon to park myself in front of the computer for any extended period of time, even typing with my right hand. Luckily, I have a deep bench. I've never posted this before.

      Frank Sinatra, the combative entertainer who always managed to change with the times, from teen singing sensation to motion picture star to jazz balladeer to king of Las Vegas cool, died of a heart attack Thursday at age 82.
     Mr. Sinatra, who had not been seen in public since a heart attack in January, 1997, died at 10:50 p.m. (12:50 a.m. today, Chicago time) at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his publicist, Susan Reynolds.
     Earlier in the evening, he had been taken to the hospital by ambulance with an unspecified distress. Mr. Sinatra's wife, Barbara, was with him when he died.

      Mr. Sinatra's songs provided the soundtrack for a million lives and loves: "Summer Wind," "One for My Baby," "All the Way" and "Strangers in the Night" to name just a few among too many to mention.

      More than just a popular vocalist, Mr. Sinatra represented a style, the entire laid-back, snap-brim, swinging 1950s of martinis and convertibles.
     Later in life, he came to represent a dark side of top-suite celebrity as well, vexed by constant accusations of arrogant behavior and ties to organized crime, mocked for a lifestyle that suddenly seemed brutal and out-of-date.
     But whether loved or hated, whether raising millions for charity or gambling millions at the baccarat tables, whether helping handicapped children or brawling in hotel restrooms, Mr. Sinatra lived life by his own standards. It was no accident that the song Paul Anka wrote for him was called "My Way."
     Francis Albert Sinatra was born Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J., to Anthony and Natalie Sinatra, a pair of Italian immigrants.
     Without any formal vocal training and unable to read music, he was inspired to try his luck at a singing career after hearing Bing Crosby on the radio. Mr. Sinatra made his debut on Major Bowes' radio amateur show as part of a group called the Hoboken Four.
     While it is often said Mr. Sinatra achieved instant fame, the truth is he struggled for many years before he found success, singing at local roadhouses and on the radio, sometimes for nothing, hoping to attract attention.
     On Feb. 4, 1939, he married his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbato. They eventually had three children. That same year, he was hired by Harry James, Benny Goodman's trumpeter, who had started his own band.
     Unhappy with the progress of his career with James, Mr. Sinatra jumped to Tommy Dorsey's band in 1940. He stayed there three years, in the process becoming a singing sensation on a scope unmatched by any other singer in popular culture except, perhaps, Elvis Presley.
     The Sinatra phenomenon began in earnest on Dec. 30, 1942, when he appeared with the Benny Goodman Orchestra at the Paramount Theatre in New York. Mr. Sinatra's publicist hired several teenage girls to sit in the front row and scream and cry and swoon, and they touched off an unprecedented national epidemic of teenage female frenzy at his appearances.
     For the next few years, throngs of as many as 25,000 fans would mob Mr. Sinatra's appearances.
     Five hundred "near-hysterical jitterbugs" were waiting for Mr. Sinatra when he pulled into Chicago's Dearborn Street Station aboard the Santa Fe Chief on March 28, 1944. He tried to flee in a cab, but teenage girls climbed over the hood, roof and running boards until he paused to sign autographs.
     He began recording with Columbia; "You'll Never Know" was an early hit.
     Mr. Sinatra performed in a variety of mid-1940s musical comedies, none memorable, while playing the top places of the day, such as the Hollywood Bowl and the Waldorf-Astoria.
     His first movie of note was "Anchors Aweigh" (1945) with Gene Kelly. He won his first Academy Award for his short patriotic film, "The House I Live In" (1945).
     While the time immediately after the war was big for Mr. Sinatra — his $25,000 take for a week at the Chicago Theatre in 1946 set a record — soon afterward, his career went into a steep decline, beginning with being dropped from his Old Gold radio show in 1947. Although the sponsor cited poor ratings, Mr. Sinatra's tempestuous personal life, including a notorious fistfight outside a club with columnist Lee Mortimer, plus his personal politics, considered radical at the time, did not help.
     Mr. Sinatra bottomed out in the early 1950s. He divorced his first wife in 1951, and, a week later, married film star Ava Gardner. That stormy relationship lasted two years.
     His films of the period were flops, and he had no hit records. The Internal Revenue Service audited him and slapped him with a $90,000 bill for back taxes. He was having trouble with his vocal cords. By 1952, he had no manager or film and recording contracts.
     He revitalized his career through the role of Maggio in "From Here to Eternity," a performance that earned him an Academy Award and put him back on top. He had two hits in 1954, "Three Coins in the Fountain" and "Young at Heart," and a hit album the next year, "Songs for Swingin' Lovers."
     More hit songs — "Love and Marriage," "All the Way" — and more hit movies — "Guys and Dolls," "The Man With the Golden Arm," "Pal Joey" — followed. He recorded a series of jazzy albums for Capitol Records.
     Between marriages, and sometimes during them, Mr. Sinatra was linked romantically with many of the great beauties of his day, including Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Gloria Vanderbilt, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Juliet Prowse, as well as an endless chain of anonymous actresses and models.
     In the late 1950s, the storied Rat Pack formed around Mr. Sinatra — Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Shirley MacLaine — and they were to share the stage, and friendships, for decades.
     "Friendship" with Mr. Sinatra was not friendship in the ordinary sense of the word. He was not reluctant to use coercion to keep his friends in line, usually by ousting them from his inner circle..
     Mr. Sinatra was close to politicians for decades, beginning with his having tea with Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was particularly friendly with John F. Kennedy through Rat Pack member Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy's sister.
     Mr. Sinatra's song "High Hopes" was Kennedy's campaign song, and Mr. Sinatra arranged the entertainment at Kennedy's inauguration party. The president soon distanced himself from Mr. Sinatra, however, after being warned about rumors of mob ties.
     The allegation that Mr. Sinatra associated with gang figures dogged him, despite his frequent denials.
     Nevertheless, Mr. Sinatra was stripped of his gambling license and forced to sell his stakes in the Sands in Las Vegas and the Cal-Neva Lodge, a Lake Tahoe casino, because he allowed mob boss Sam Giancana to reside there in a chalet.
     "Sinatra hobnobs with the Mafia's elite," the Wall Street Journal wrote in 1968 — an article that scotched Mr. Sinatra's plans to take an active role in the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey.
     Mr. Sinatra was forced to appear before a grand jury in New Jersey in 1970 after his name turned up on FBI wiretapping tapes of gangland figures.
     He was vindicated at least once in court, receiving substantial damages from the British Broadcasting Corp. for suggesting in a telecast that he used mob connections to land his career-saving role in "From Here to Eternity."
     The Vegas scene became his refuge from media scrutiny and the culture-shattering arrival of rock 'n' roll. Mr. Sinatra had only one No. 1 hit in the 1960s — "Strangers in the Night" (1966).
     Mob allegations were not the only kind of trouble that followed Mr. Sinatra. He was a pampered brawler used to getting his own way immediately, and there were countless incidents, from an elderly waiter being roughed up for getting a meal order wrong to a casino owner being threatened.
     Usually everything was hushed up, but occasionally there were repercussions. Mr. Sinatra lost his two front teeth when he was hit in the mouth by a Sands Hotel manager in 1967, after which he ended his 16-year association with the hotel, moving to Caesars Palace.
     The normally reserved Prince Charles, upon meeting Mr. Sinatra in 1974, described his entourage as "goons, creeps and Mafia types."
     In 1966, Mr. Sinatra wed 21-year-old Mia Farrow, but their stormy marriage lasted less than two years, breaking up when the filming of "Rosemary's Baby" interfered with a movie Mr. Sinatra wanted to do with his wife.
     Mr. Sinatra announced the first of several retirements in 1971. He returned — partly at the prompting of President Richard Nixon — in 1973, with the album "Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back," which rose to No. 13.
     Mr. Sinatra constantly battled the press — most famously in 1974, when his tour of Australia was interrupted and nearly scuttled after the first show, during which he called the Australian press corps "pimps" "whores," "fags" and "buck-and-a-half hookers."
     He found himself stranded: Stagehands announced they would refuse to work any more shows; three Australian unions refused to fuel his private jet; even the staff of his hotel, the Southern Cross in Melbourne, would not serve him. Delicate negotiations with the Australian unions permitted the tour to continue, though one show had to be canceled.
     Mr. Sinatra got married for a fourth and final time in July, 1976, to Barbara Jane Marx, the ex-wife of comedian Zeppo Marx.
     He had another hit in 1980, with "New York, New York," which became something of an anthem for him, and released a popular three-album set, "Trilogy," that year.
     In 1985, he received the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan, who had persuaded Mr. Sinatra to switch to the Republican Party 15 years earlier.
     In September, 1986, Mr. Sinatra reopened the Chicago Theatre with several concerts. He continued to tour throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and was always popular, though critics agreed his voice sometimes showed the ravages of time.
     Mr. Sinatra was an insomniac who would commission a jet and fly to Las Vegas for the evening, returning at dawn.
     "I'm for anything that gets you through the night," he once said, "be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
     Survivors include his wife and three children, Frank Jr., Nancy and Tina.
     A private funeral was planned, his publicist said.

         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 15, 1998

Flashback 2011: Potter’s field burial not so lonely after all

Homewood Memorial Gardens

     I'm recovering from surgery, so we're raiding the archive until I'm back in the saddle.

     Death isn't my beat, but you can't work for 39 years at a newspaper and not encounter it, whether watching a body being pulled from the river, the medical examiner performing autopsies on Harrison Street, or Loyola medical students studying cadavers at a gross pathology class. This emerged from that last story, a potter's field burial. Mitch Dudak quoted the story at the end of June in a fine obituary of Tim Kowalski, mortuary science teacher, and I realized I'd never posted it here. And as a reminder pulling one thread leads to another, it was wandering around the Homewood cemetery that I happened upon the grave of the "Martyr to Radio."

     A boxy U-Haul truck wends its way slowly along the curving roadway of Homewood Memorial Gardens, to a group waiting by a large, shallow hole in a section of the cemetery known as The Garden of the Good Samaritan No. 11. The sun is bright, the sky blue, a pleasant day for November.
     The truck backs up to the lip of the hole. The rear door opens to reveal 24 plywood coffins. A corrugated metal ramp is run from the truck into the pit.
     A smell rolls out that I’ve come to think of as “refrigerated death,” a queasy blend of meat and bleach. The bodies are fresh from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office on Harrison.
     Last month I wrote a column contrasting the dignified ceremony that Loyola conducts for its medical school cadavers, complete with poems, prayers and priests, with what I imagined to be the lonely burial at potter’s field: “the sack shrouded body is tossed into a pit with a minimum of fuss.”
     Even as I typed those words, it struck me: I had overstepped what I actually knew and launched into speculation — dangerous for a journalist — and if I was going to comment on this, I had better go see what I was talking about.
     The burials are conducted monthly. These two dozen bodies had arrived at the morgue in July, and their relatives either couldn’t be found or refused to pay for a funeral. The medical examiner, Dr. Nancy Jones, wants to donate such unclaimed bodies to science, both to fill the shortage of medical cadavers and save the county the $289 per coffin paid to Homewood. But there was a public outcry, and such donations have been temporarily suspended while she re-evaluates the procedures.
     The hole is shallow, about 3 feet. Homewood is built upon stone; anything deeper must be jackhammered out of rock. Illinois law requires only 18 inches of earth over a coffin; to comply, the soil is mounded on graves.
     Four gravediggers — Adam Springer, Michael Scott, Gregory Blackshire and Eli Martinez, who wears a kerchief over his face to ward off the smell — muscle the pine boxes down the ramp, aided by four students from the Worsham College of Mortuary Science, in Wheeling — Chris Nelson, Nikkia Brown, Addie Cassidy and Darrell Randolph, who wears a nice suit for this dirty job, which earns them extra credit. Some of the coffins are very heavy — corpses are fatter nowadays. The coffins in the truck are leaking.
     “We do wash it out and bleach it,” says Homewood’s Kelly McCarthy.
     The pine boxes squeak, dragged against each other, then rumble down the ramp, splintering as they go. As each is pulled off the truck, a number is read off a small round brass tag.
     “Two ninety-five, got it,” says McCarthy. “Oh yeah, he’s a heavy one,” grunts Scott. “He’s a biggie.”
     In 30 minutes the work is done. The grave diggers, the students, McCarthy, plus someone from the ME’s office, sent to keep an eye on things, gather by the grave containing the remains of 20 men and four women.
     Tim Kowalski, who teaches at Worsham, reads from a black binder.
     “Bless me God,” he begins, then recites the 23rd Psalm: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . ”
     “We commend to God the souls of these individuals whose mortal remains lie before us and to commit their bodies to the earth . . . ,” he continues. “We did not know these people. Many things about them will remain always a mystery to us. We do not know what were the circumstances of their lives . . . . Many may have died in poverty. Others might have simply outlived their families. Our beginnings do not know our ends. . . . We do not know any of these things, but one thing we do know, they were human beings, and at the end of their lives they deserve to be treated with respect. Our common humanity demands that these lives should not pass from the earth unremembered.”
     He asks for a moment of silence and, as if on cue, birds chirp. The 24 names and numbers are read aloud. Then we who are not dead return to our lives on this crisp, bright autumn day while the backhoe does its work.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2011

Flashback 1997: Here's the ugly truth about plastic surgery

"Janie" by Clarity Haynes (National Portrait Gallery)

     I had surgery Wednesday, and while I'm healing thought I'd share some of my surgical stories from over the years. If my surgeon finds himself reading this, rest assured that I have a far more positive view of the medical profession now that I'm carrying around a good-as-new spine, and hip and now, please God, shoulder.

     For a while I was writing a lot of stories about medical procedures. I watched a heart transplant, which was thrilling, and a lung transplant, which was less so, since the patient died.
     I sat in on plastic surgeries: a nose job, a breast lift. I spent 10 hours at the Cook County medical examiner's office observing autopsies. When they brought the baby in, I decided to take a coffee break instead of watching, a decision I'm immensely grateful for today.
     For those eating their morning breakfasts, I'll spare you the details (though there will be some graphic images later, so you might want to finish your poached egg before continuing), other than to say that the procedures were pretty grim viewing.
     Particularly the nose job, which was more than grim, it was grisly. At one point I felt myself about to faint and wanted to retire from the room with my manly decorum intact. "My pen is running out," I lied, slipping toward the door. "I'll be right back; I've got another in my clothes" (I had changed into one of those green hospital scrub suits).
     "Oh, here," said a helpful anesthesiologist, pulling a pen from his pocket and waving it toward me, "you can use mine."
     "No, no, thank you," I said, backing out in to the hall, where I sat for five minutes with my head between my knees. "I need to use my own pen."
     Imagine the comment after I left: "Now there's a strict union for you."
     Of all the procedures I've witnessed — and I'm including the young student podiatrists from Dr. Scholl's College working on the stinking feet of the homeless in a closed room — nothing was as revulsive as a liposuction, a procedure brought back to mind last week by news of a California woman who died after liposuction surgery.
     The California case took place in March, but was just revealed recently. The doctor removed 20 pounds of fat from a woman, who bled to death while the surgeons allegedly did nothing.
     In the 15 years or so it has been performed in this country, liposuction has become an incredibly common procedure — it is the most common form of plastic surgery — and, in my view, testimony to the greed of the medical profession, since it is entirely unnecessary.
     During a liposuction, an aluminum probe — a cannula — is inserted through an incision in the skin into the fatty tissues, which are sucked out by a vacuum pump. It is a very high tech way to lose weight and as sensible as a dentist cleaning your teeth by removing them, scrubbing them down, then putting them back, surgically.
     The official party line on liposuction is that it is used for pockets of fat that can't be reduced through dieting. That's a lot of hooey. The woman whose liposuction I saw was zaftig. She was heavy. Not heavy in certain isolated pockets. Heavy all over. What she needed was to eat less and exercise.
      That's how you lose weight: eating less and exercising. It isn't easy, but it sure is preferable to going under the knife.
     The California woman who died was 150 pounds on a 5-foot-3-inch frame. That isn't isolated pockets. That's fat.
      Liposuction, as the surgeon I watched performing it noted, is "an indelicate procedure." The doctor got that cannula under the woman's skin and really worked it. The table shook. In my memory, the surgeon put his knee on the gurney to get better leverage, but that has to be a phantom of my general revulsion at the procedure.
     "Doesn't that damage nerves?" I asked the surgeon, as he worked up a sweat with the cannula. "Aren't they delicate?"
     "Nah," he said. "The nerves are tough — the cannula just pushes them out of the way."
     Right, I thought. Of course it does. Absolutely.
     I wish the patient could have been awake to see just what was being done to her — the plastic surgeon, laughing and joking as he worked. "This is the schmaltz," he said, holding up a jar of reddish-yellow sludge and using the Yiddish term for "fat."
     Anybody contemplating such surgery should, at the very least, watch it performed first. Don't be satisfied with a film. Get yourself into the operating room. Dieting will suddenly look very attractive. Exercise will take on an appeal it never had before. The pounds will fly off.
     Because I can promise you: Nothing will turn you off to plastic surgery as much as watching it will. A life of obesity seems positively jolly compared with the reality of liposuction. Any elective procedure should first be observed before being considered. I've got a good-size eggplant of a Jewish nose jutting out from my face, but after watching a nose lift, I can honestly say that I wouldn't go through a nose job if my wife and the assembled array of the world's womankind gathered with their arms linked and in unison begged me to.
     Every line I see in the mirror, every new wrinkle and sag, will be a welcome visitor compared with the alternative.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 7, 1997

Flashback 1994: Keeping a last promise.

Michael Thurson before surgery (Photo by Robert A. Davis; used with permission)

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday afternoon, and will have my left arm in a sling for about the next six weeks. As for EGD, it doesn't seem a good idea to park myself in front of the computer right away, even to give you good folks something diverting to read, pecked out with my right hand, or dictated, if I can make that work. 

     Luckily, I have both a deep bench, and the ability to plan ahead. We're going to be reading chestnuts mined from the archive for a few days, and then some of my media pals will pinch hit. My apologies but, heck, you get what you pay for. 

    Regarding today's topic, naturally I first thought of surgery. This is from the days when I worked with the great photographer Robert A. Davis. I still remember the shock of standing in that operating room, learning ... well, you'll see. As for the end, that was all Bob, going the extra mile, a practice that has taken him very far.

     Eloise Heatherly made a promise.
     A registered nurse at Wyler Children's Hospital, she became friends with Michael Thurson, a slight 15-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis, struggling to breathe and looking forward to a better life with a new set of lungs.
     We'll toast with champagne, Heatherly said, when you turn 16.
     Michael was a kid who needed a promise, a reason to look ahead.
     Dragging an oxygen bottle around St. Francis de Sales High
     School, lying on a board while his mother pounded his back to loosen the phlegm that was suffocating him, his average day wasn't a cakewalk.
     It was a long wait for lungs — at 4 feet 6 inches tall and 71 pounds, not many pairs would fit his narrow chest.
     He was already sick, taking treatments at Wyler, when lungs became available after an accident.
     Around midnight Jan. 29, Michael was awakened by a nurse who asked him what his greatest wish was.
     "I want to see Jordan," said the sleepy boy.
     The nurse told him that no, Michael Jordan wasn't here. But his new lungs were on the way.
     "One out of two ain't bad," he said.
     The operation did not go as smoothly as it could have. The lungs were caught in traffic.
     "Where are they now?" a surgeon asked. "Naperville," somebody holding a telephone replied. Two nurses gasped in unison: "Naperville!?!"
     "We probably opened the chest too soon," Dr. Alvaro Montoya said afterward. "We should have waited two more hours."
     But Michael survived the surgery. He clung to life for 10 days.
     "I'm going to wait until I heal, then work out a lot, so I can get better at basketball," he had said.
     Michael Thurson died Feb. 9 from complications following the surgery. He never got the chance to improve his basketball.
     When the news hit his school, students were so upset that classes were dismissed early. The basketball team, for whom Michael was a scorekeeper, wore black bands on their jerseys and headbands reading "Mikey" for the rest of the season.
     Saturday, Michael would have been 16. Heatherly kept her promise.
     Heatherly, Michael's mother, his sisters and a few friends gathered at his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City. They took birthday balloons, flowers and, yes, champagne, the good stuff.
     Michael would have loved it.
             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 1994

A root canal AND rotator cuff surgery? Lucky me.

     My dentist's office called after a routine cleaning and x-ray. Could I, they wondered, come back? Tomorrow. I got the sense if I said, "I can rush over now," they'd have replied. "Good, hurry." It was a matter of tone.
     The news was bad. An enormous cavity, growing hidden beside my upper right wisdom tooth. Maybe even invading the jaw bone. Requiring a root canal and crown. Probably lose the wisdom tooth too.
     "I like how you're so grim," I told the dentist, after he explained the situation. "It shows you care."
     Off to the endodontist. Two hours in the chair for the root canal. Honestly, it didn't hurt — well, my left arm did, quite a lot, fallout from my ripped-up left shoulder. Holding it still for so long. I'd occasionally extend it, taking care not to upset a tray of tools or grope the dental hygienist.
     Then there was the enforced silence. Although, being me, I still tried to speak, with a dental dam plus dental instruments in my mouth. I wanted to tell the endodontist how important Chicago is to the history of fluoridation. The initial experiments held in Evanston in 1946, with Oak Park as the control. Because he's a tooth guy. He'd be interested. Shutting up is an art form I struggle to master.
     But that isn't the most embarrassing part.
     The root canal was the first act. My next step was back to the dentist, to create a crown to go over the afflicted tooth, shaved down to a stump.
     More than three hours in that chair, including the wait while the crown was being sculpted by a high-tech medical printer. When I could speak again, this is what I said:
     "You know what I was thinking for the past two hours? And this will sound like I'm blowing smoke ... but I was thinking about how lucky I am to have access to high quality medical care like this."
     I really said that. And I meant it. Some 100 million Americans don't routinely see a dentist, usually because of the cost. Half the world's population suffers from untreated oral diseases, according to the World Health Organization.
     A reminder. You know what's much worse than a root canal? Not having a root canal.
     Honestly, the root canal/crown was plenty to hone my medical gratitude. But life has a way of laying it on. A couple weeks later, I went to get an MRI on the shoulder that has hurt me since I tripped and fell on a train platform in Portugal. I was hoping the doctor would say it was strained, perhaps prescribe warm healing oils be massaged into the area while listening to whale song.
     Badly torn rotator cuff. Which I could ignore, going to physical therapy, building up the muscles around the torn and useless muscle.
     Or I could have repaired by arthroscopic surgery. Cut a few holes in my arm, poke in a camera, set some anchors in the bone, sew the muscle back in place, out in an hour. Not even a night's stay in the hospital.

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