$3.22

 

       Cities are proud of themselves and rightly so. They have an energy, and crackle with creativity. 
      But that doesn't mean small towns are without their excellence, their innovation. All is not sleepiness and tradition.
      I was in Danville a few weeks back, as you know, reporting on the enormous sign that Watchfire Signs is creating for Las Vegas' Fremont Street.
     Before heading to the factory, my hosts took me to a charming eatery inside what was once a private home, Charlotte's Coffee and Tea.
      Typically, I avoid salads outside cities—you tend to get iceberg lettuce and half a hard boiled egg. Usually, the cheeseburger is a better bet. But I really felt in the mood for a salad, and theirs was excellent. As was their lemon meringue pie. And their coffee—surprisingly good. Sometimes these small towns have lousy water, therefore lousy coffee. 
    But the coffee at Charlotte's Coffee and Tea was really good.
    I know, it should be, given the name. But city or countryside, an establishment dedicated to coffee and coffee you can drink do not always, or even often, go together.
    Draining my cup, I excused myself from my two table mates and returned to the counter, where an array of sandwiches and salads were offered on a chalk board. The young lady behind the counter was on the phone, but eventually accepted my glass mug and tried to fill it from a pump urn that only wheezed emptily. So she headed in the back, to what I hoped wouldn't be too long an adventure, while I gazed back up at the board.
     "Cottage cheese," I noticed, thinking of a small white curdly pile I seem to remember eating more often than I wished, as a child, and haven't tasted in years. Then the price: "3.22."
     Three dollars and 22 cents? What's that all about? And a sandwich cost $4.08. 
     I asked the clerk. Her face did that thing that the incurious do when confronted with a question of incomprehensible origin. The price? Of the cottage cheese? Why was it ...? She had no idea. The owner set the price.
     Was he around? No.
     I returned to the ladies I was lunching with, finished off my pie and second cup, we lingered in conversation, then it was time to get to the factory I had come down here to visit.
     "Just a second,"  I said, as we passed the counter, noting a different young woman now behind the country. "I have to give it another try." I put my question to her. She said that would a matter for the owner, and disappeared to find him. Nope, just stepped out. I set down my business card.
    Ask him to call me when he gets back.
    He did, not a minute later And explained the mystery like this: Charlotte's gets busy. It slows things down to fumble with change. By pricing the cottage cheese at $3.22, that comes out to be $3.50 with tax. Less fussing with coins.
      I've eaten in restaurants from Bangkok to Belize. And I've never seen an off-pricing system like that. Maybe it's common and I'm admitting to an embarrassing ignorance. But I don't think so. It struck me as clever, and worth mentioning.  Of course a place trying to make their pricing easier would also have good food—if you worry one detail, you probably worry them all.
     I don't imagine I'll be going back to Danville anytime soon—so far, 58 years of living have required a single visit. But if I do ever find myself having to make the 120 mile drive, I'll think, "At least I can stop by Charlotte's for some pie and that good coffee." 



     

Taking apart a watch is easy; putting it back together, however . . .

Eric Buth, a radiation oncologist from Grand Rapids, Michigan, disassembling a mechanical watch movement at a class recently in Chicago. The Horological Society of New York has been holding watchmaking classes in major cities to give collectors a better understanding of how watches work.

     Taking apart a watch is not difficult. You need the right tools: a magnifying eyepiece and pointed tweezers, to see and handle screws the size of mustard seeds and springs as big as eyelashes. To turn those tiny screws, three jeweler's screwdrivers. Plus a pointer to nudge parts into place, and an elevated tabletop, to lean your elbows on, to get your face close to your work. Don't forget to slip on pink rubber finger cots, to keep the oils from your fingertips from corroding delicate parts.
     There is one more tool whose purpose doesn't immediately reveal itself: a round metal tray with ten compartments. 

     To understand the role of the tray, you need to know what you are doing or, barring that, have the guidance of someone who does, such as Steve Eagle, director of education at the Horological Society of New York. A few Sundays back, Eagle led seven novices through the removal and return of most of the 78 gears, wheels and springs of a Unitas ETA 6497 watch movement.
     "Welcome to Horology 101 to 103," said Eagle. "You're in for an intense four hours of watchmaking."
     The survival of the mechanical watch half a century into the era of quartz watches — the 50th anniversary of Seiko introducing the Astron is this Christmas — is a miracle of savvy marketing.
     "We've seen this resurgence in the last 15 years where people are circling back and starting to appreciate the longevity of mechanical watches," said Eagle. "The artistry behind them, the history, these little miracles that will work under their own power. Such an analog product in such a digital world."

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Steve Eagle

"Asparagus will not bear too much winter"

 

    Asparagus. Now there's an interesting word. If I had to guess, I'd guess French. The things seem French. But no, I'd be wrong. In medieval Latin it was sparagus which the common folk in England, rather delightfully, turned into "sparrow grass," where it had currency for centuries.
     "Sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry," John "Elocution" Walker wrote in 1791 in his "Critical Pronouncing Dictionary."
     Not that asparagus aren't big in France. They are. Asperges. Particularly the white version, grown with dirt piled on them, so the shoots are never exposed to the sun, and photosynthesis doesn't begin. Manet painted their pallid stalks, and Proust studied them in "Remembrance of Thing's Past":
     “What fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.”    
     The word is almost unchanged by time or distance. σπαράγγι in Greek "sparangi." You don't need to know Latin to notice the citation leaping out in Juvenal's 11th satire: "...montani asparagi, posito quos legit villica fuso"—"some wild asparagus, gathered by the bailiff's wife when she is done with her spindle," part of a modest rural meal of his, along with goat and grape leaves, which he contrasts to the wretched imperial excess of the banquets of today that he isn't invited to anyway, where the deeper the flabby  and indifferent host is in debt, the richer the provisions groaning on the table to his insulted guests.
    Cato and Pliny also praise the vegetable (Pliny says that the best comes from Ravenna which, being a Dante fan, I nodded at approvingly, even though the dour Florentine wouldn't be planted there himself for another 1300 years).
     The Romans dried them, then dropped them in boiling water as needed, a quick process that led the Emperor Augustus to say, when he wanted something done fast: "Citius quam aspargi coquentur," or, "Do it quicker than you can cook asparagus." (So fond was the emperor of the vegetable he created what was known as the "Asparagus Fleet" to rush it to his table).
    There are about 3o0 varieties of asparagus, and yes, they were grown decoratively.
    "The asparagus makes the strongest appeal to our sense of the beautiful," writes Charles Ilot, in his 1901 The Book of Asparagus, noting it belongs to the same order as lilies and tulips. (True then; but even plant families have their ruptures, and asparagus stalked off and formed their own family, asparagaceae).
     Yes, there are poems about asparagus.
     "Asparagus will not bear too much winter," Greg Kuzma writes, in the opening line of his brief elegy "Asparagus Beside the Road."
     Neither will we. Not too much more winter anyway. Two below on Monday. Time for spring to rattle the bushes a little. Just to let us know it's coming.
    Oh, and finally, yes, Edie prepared them for dinner Sunday, to go with t-bone steak that I grilled outside. Broiled, with a little olive oil and kosher salt, pictured above, which struck me as prettily green. Worth taking a picture of and, having the photo, a topic I hope might be worth delving into. 

Flashback 1999: Murders in Naperville hit too close to home

Detail of "The Slaughter of the Innocents," Vatican Museum, Rome

  
   There's a lot of sorrow in the world. As a columnist, I spend a good deal of time processing it for readers, or trying to help them process it, giving voice to something that, I hope, helps somehow. 
     Today is the 20th anniversary of a notorious Naperville crime, when Marilyn Lemak killed her three children. Why? Maybe because she was depressed. That's what she said. Maybe, as prosecutors insisted, she was trying to get back at her ex-husband. I suppose it doesn't matter now. I was curious what I wrote, and this is it: notice the date: 10 days after the crime. Even then, I was a fan of  waiting. A helpful strategy not only in writing, but in life in general. Time is our friend, until it's not.

     The murder of the Lemak children is the sort of crime that echoes. It sneaks into your safe and warm home, folded into a newspaper or leaking through the television, and it stays there, for a good long time. It is an evil vapor, a poison cloud in the corner, which you strain to ignore while trying to figure out how to make it go away.
     The Naperville neighbors, of course, are shocked. But parents in general are also shocked. For all parents, this is not only a hideous crime but also a betrayal of the cause. How could one of us have done this?
     It isn't that children are never murdered. They are. But we have, in the backs of our minds, a filter, a cast of usual suspects we expect to do the deed—selfish 15-year-olds, babbling crack heads, longtime lunatics. We understand it then.  

Marilyn Lemak

    But this one just doesn't fit. Forty-one-year-old Marilyn Lemak, with her cranberry Victorian house and her active-mom schedule, doesn't seem cut out for the role. She's miscast, unqualified, which magnifies the horror of the crime she is charged with committing. So we search, as experienced processors of such terrible stories, for the key that makes this one understandable. To explain it, or rather, to explain it away. To get it out of the house.     
     We could blame the struggle over a divorce, but the evidence is mixed. In the Lemaks' house, a small knife was found plunged through a wedding photo. Yet Mrs. Lemak's attorney said it "seemed like a garden-variety type of divorce," and the couple had worked out visitation and custody.
     We could blame mental illness, though there is a circularity to that reasoning. Anyone who could do such a thing must have been mentally disturbed at the time, obviously. But what about the day before? Or the week before? Was it there all the time and nobody saw it? Or was it not even there?
     That's why this is all so extraordinarily chilling. Being a parent is hard, at times very hard. It flays you down to a single raw nerve. I remember my wife, when our second boy was a sleepless newborn, stepping into the bathroom to pound the radiator and scream, out of exhaustion and frustration. I would have done the same thing, but I was too tired.   

     This is not to say that parenthood is grim. I tell my childless friends, when they survey the wreckage of our formerly elegant lives and ask what the appeal of this intrusion could possibly be, that having a child is like giving somebody the world. Literally, the great big spinning globe, handed over free in a gift box. There are tiring times, but the reward is that you can slap your knee one morning and announce, at your whim, that today carousels will come into being. Then you head down to Navy Pier and plop the boys on a couple of gaily painted horses and take videos while they go up and down, delighted, and if you didn't actually conjure the carousel from thin air yourself, then the result is exactly the same.
     If having a child is like giving somebody the world, then killing a child is like destroying the world. It has the same finality, the same terrible tragedy. The staggering senselessness defies understanding, but we go over it again and again anyway, looking not, I believe, for understanding, but for reassurance. We want to locate a comforting fact that shows us that we ourselves are not capable of this act, that it came from some foreign, alien place, the land of the psychotic. But if a nice soccer mom could just crack, spontaneously, then what is to say that any of us—all nice, all normal—couldn't someday crack, too?
     Our view of these murders is skewed because they happened here, not in France, not in California. They loom huge in our views because they took place down the road, in that nice house, the house everybody aspires to. Proximity means something. The Internet be damned, distance is still real. Half of a sub-Saharan nation can rise up and slaughter the other half, and we don't have the energy to raise a yawn. But even an area as big as the Chicago metro region is still a community. The same identification that lets you feel pride when the Bulls win a championship forces you to feel the proximate horror of this act. As if we all lived on that street.
     Now that understanding is slow in coming, I want to suggest that, if the comforting explanation is finally revealed, we not embrace it too eagerly—that we recognize that the gulf between those who crack and those who carry on is not as wide as we might desire.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 14, 1999

End of an era, probably. Last Ford Taurus rolls off the line.

Last Ford Taurus rolls off the line at Chicago Assembly, Friday, March 1, 2019.

     Today's subject is unusual for me, perhaps. The short answer is: someone at the paper asked me to do it. The plan was to actually be at the Chicago Assembly plant when the last Taurus rolled off the line. But Ford wouldn't allow that, despite my pleading. Nor would they allow me to talk to any workers. Nor was the union any help. Still, I had to fill the column SOMEHOW, and all that delightful information about what a lemon the Taurus was when it first was produced was sitting in the open palm of Our Friend History, just waiting for me to pluck it out. I think the story would have turned out shinier, from Ford's point of view, had they let me into the plant, where I've visited in the past. But I think it is also interesting to remember how this American success story struggled at the beginning.

     All good things must come to an end, and Ford Motor Company's good thing, the Taurus sedan, came to its end Friday as the last of what was once the most popular automobile in America rolled off the Chicago Assembly Plant.
     "Taurus broke new ground at its start and we're thankful for its role in our portfolio," said Mark LaNeve, Ford's vice president for U.S. marketing, sales and service.
     That's one way to put it. What the Taurus did at the start, when the new 1986 model was introduced, was stumble out of the blocks, badly. An innovative car — the first vehicle Ford with front-wheel drive — "the latest in Ford engineering and design" was initially plagued by problems.
     A week after it debuted, 4,500 Tauruses and Sables — its twin sister under the Mercury nameplate — had to be recalled due to faulty ignition switches. More recalls followed to replace window glass, which had a tendency to shatter. Followed by problems with surging and stalling engines. And transmission troubles. Not to forget a smell of rotten eggs that took Ford months to solve.
     In all, 80 percent of buyers of new Tauruses and Sables reported significant problems, J.P. Powers & Associates reported at the time. One owner, picking his Taurus up from having its power steering fixed at the dealer, had the transmission fail on the drive home.

RoboCop

      Yet the flagship survived its difficult birth, for a variety of reasons. First, the car just looked cool. Based on the Sierra, introduced in Europe in 1982 — some called it a "spaceship" — the Taurus seems futuristic, with headlights and fenders flush into the body and a sleek, aerodynamic look — to see how radical it was, compare it to the sharp corners of the Ford Granada, the car it replaced. The       Taurus' look won the car a starring role as a Detroit police cruiser in "RoboCop" (the story is that the police car designed for the movie drew guffaws of derision on the set, and director Paul Verhoeven was just starting to panic when he saw a new Taurus drive by).

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The Saturday Snapshot #29

     My wife being a lawyer ruined the Shedd Aquarium for me, for many years.
     I probably should let you puzzle over what the connection could be for a little while, one of those links utterly mystifying until revealed, when it becomes obvious.
     The answer: her white shoe law firm would have its Christmas party at the Shedd. A band, a bar, a dinner—I always ordered the fish, it seemed an amusing perversity.
      Because of this, when there wasn't a lux party going on, the aquarium seemed plain. Just fish. I'd go back to do a story—my look at the enormous backroom operation feeding the fish is one of my favorites—but unlike the Art Institute or the Field Museum or the MCA, it just wasn't someplace I was going to swing by on my own volition.
     Years went by. 
     That changed over Valentine's Day. My wife and I didn't have any plans to go out-of-town this winter, so decided on a "staycation"—a morning at the indulgent Ancient Aire Baths, lunch at RL, and then a visit to the aquarium.
     Somehow, I knew I would like it more than previously, and I also knew exactly why: my iPhone. Somehow, taking photographs of the colorful fish made it more real than just looking at them. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, it just is.
    We spent two hours there, took in the whale show, bonded with an octopus to such a degree that I don't believe my wife will ever eat them again, not even perfectly broiled at Pstaria, though knowing myself I will find a way. I learned more about fish in those two hours than I've learned in the previous two decades, with plenty of intriguing species I want to explore more fully at a latter time, such as the swirling vortex of "false herring," a spinning sphere of fish which, given the name, must be something else masquerading as herring though, alas, the Shedd guide narrating to a group about fish in the tank could not illuminate the situation. I'll get on that.

Sea nettle

     

Is Chicago as open-minded as we want to believe? We’re going to find out

Two Draped Females, Etruscan, 3rd century (Met)

     What do Burr Tillstrom and I have in common?
     Partial credit if you said “an inordinate interest in puppets.” Tillstrom created “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” a Chicago kiddie TV show in the late 1940s that broke into national popularity.
     And I’ve written about more puppetry than I have about football, certainly more than is wise for a man supposedly trying to align his work with the interests of his readers. Though in my defense, I missed the International Puppetry Festival this year because, frankly, I forgot. So safe to say that my passion for puppetry is far below Tillstrom’s.
     But puppetry is not the answer I’m looking for. No, Tillstrom and I are both members of Chicago’s Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame — inducted in the same class in 2013, in fact.
     I’ve never put that in the paper before. Not that I’m ashamed of it — I’m proud. I’ve got the three-inch tall chunk of crystal they give members right here, with the Seal of the City and my name and “Friend of the Community” lest anybody suspect that being inducted means I’m gay — Seinfeld fans, all together now: Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Portrait Busts of Two Women (Met)

     No, I haven’t mentioned this before because I’m modest, or pretend to be, and don’t like to tout what scant honors I receive. Plus it wasn’t germane to whatever I was talking about. Now it is, I think, because I want to put into context my reaction to a certain aspect of our historic mayoral election.
     Wednesday morning. WBBM radio was reporting the scene from the Lightfoot campaign headquarters the night before, and noted that Lightfoot’s wife and 10-year-old daughter joined her at the celebration.

     At “wife” I sorta … the word I first thought was “flinched,” but the truth is something far milder, not at all physical. Ten times milder. A shift, like hearing the single peal of bell, far away.

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