Grandmothers to the rescue, with wisdom, patience and doughnuts

     Social media tears down girls. According to a UNESCO report, there is a direct correlation between how much time a girl spends online and increased emotional damage. A Facebook study found that a third of girls say when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Girls are 50% more likely than boys to report being cyberbullied. Plus — stop the presses! — TikTok is addictive.
     How to combat such a widespread, happiness-destroying influence? In Chicago, one of the most powerful forces for good known to humanity is being sent into battle, a voice of comfort and wisdom going back to the beginnings of time:
     Grandmothers.
     "I come here every Tuesday to sit with the young ladies and do different projects — planting flowers, or making different objects they like," said Delores Durham, 62, waiting in the office at Wendell Smith Elementary School on West 103rd Street in Pullman, bearing donuts. "Just having normal conversation to see where their mind is at. What goals they have in life. I'm just trying to be an encouragement to them. I raised two daughters on the West Side of Chicago myself."
     A volunteer who joined Grandmothers Circle last year, Durham was met by Erinn Boone, a licensed clinical professional counselor and coordinator of the program run by the Juvenile Protective Association, a venerable Chicago social service agency founded by Jane Addams in 1901. Originally the Juvenile Court Committee, its purpose was to provide probation officers to the first juvenile court in the nation, founded here in 1899 to keep children from being sent to adult jails.
     She hands around a piece of paper showing various emojis: happy, angry, bored, surprised.
     "I need you all to tell me how you're feeling," Boone says. "Pass it around."
     The girls warm up. They are happy and tired. Goofy and tired. Quiet and tired. Boone detects a theme.
     "Everybody's tired — is it the weather?" she asks.
     Or maybe something else. Students at Wendell Smith face troubles beyond social media — 94% live in poverty, according to the Illinois State Board of Education, and almost a quarter are homeless. The chronic truancy rate is 32%. And layered upon that, all the usual pressures facing middle-school girls.

     "I was having a conversation with another school and we started talking about friendship, and how you can tell someone is a friend," says Boone. "Then we started talking about rumors, and how rumors get started and drama — but I know that's nothing you all deal with here, right?"
     That challenge — preventing the adult world from getting its hooks into kids — continues.
Durham and Boone go to greet nine sixth grade girls, ages 11 and 12, just finishing lunch on trays — chicken fingers, applesauce, cartons of milk. The girls barely register their arrival.
     "Y'all energy seems real low today," observes Boone. "It's a very Monday kind of Tuesday."

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'People are still funny'

      People think of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain as wits. And rightly so. But while they said a good many smart things, they didn't say everything attributed them; countless quotes are laid at their doorstep that they never said, sometimes never could have said. I'll see some powerful, contemporary thought tacked under a portrait of Hemingway, think "He never wrote that," and be halfway to fact-checking a meme before I realize that, once I plunge down that rathole there's no escape.
     But Dave Barry really did write, in a column of 25 things he learned at 50: "You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at the moment."
    I've quote that line for years, never realizing it was Dave Barry. Great advice, the general dissemination of which could spare the world countless awkward encounters, painful both for the blunderer and for the woman accused of being with child. 
     I asked Barry about it Tuesday morning, in an interview for Wednesday's column, and he said, yes, he believes he indeed coined that phrase. The conversation went all sorts of places I couldn't fit into the column and still say something about the reason we were talking: his excellent new book, "Class Clown," published Tuesday.
    What I really wanted to talk about with him was Gene Weingarten. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose collection, "Fiddler in the Subway," should be pressed into the hands of every sentient human being. Reading it made me proud to be in the same profession.
     But he also wrote this, in a blog in 2021, destroying his career:

     The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports ... and curry.
     Indian foods are the only ethnic cuisine insanely based on one spice. If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes! If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.)

     "Based on one spice." Is that ignorant? Sure, in the sense that there are all kinds of spices in Indian cuisine. I know that by direct, hand-over-fist experience. He did too. It was what we call in the profession "a joke." Not a particularly good one, true. But was Gene's crack the language of hate? I don't think so. Didn't matter — he was frog-marched out the door at the Washington Post. No party. No big farewell section. Hasta la vista, baby. It seems now a dry run for the kind of professional collapse the newspaper would do at the feet of Donald Trump.
     "That had to be scary  to someone whose written 1000 jokes more offensive than that," I said to Barry, who was edited for years by Weingarten. "It must have been sobering for you when Gene got the heave-ho."
       "Yeah, I kept going back over it," he said. "I've known Gene for 40 years. To see him shoved off a cliff over that. He makes it really clear, 'I'm an idiot but I'm pretending to be a genius.' It couldn't be more obvious. His schtick is, he starts out with this long thing how he respects Indian culture. I don't think if it happened that same thing would happen. That happened at the absolutely the height of 'Let's everybody be so sensitive that we really can't say anything,' mania. That was awful, to have Gene called a racist. Gene's not a racist." 
     I'd planned to highlight some other points we talked about, but honest, I want to shift over to something a reader in Florida, who had worked as a first responder, sent in on Wednesday. He wrote:  

     Our rescue crew were the one’s who responded to Dave’s son after he was involved in a bike vs. car crash. His column about the experience mentions us as ambulance guys. It is one of his very, very few serious ones.
     He rode with us to the hospital, certainly shaken (Who wouldn’t be?) but very humble and cordial.

     I read that column and thought, "Wow, what an excellent, excellent column." It made me regret not paying closer attention to the man's work over the past 40 years — I think it was conceited of me — and glad that I've been able to remedy that, a tiny bit, this past week. Better late than never. He's still humble and cordial.

Is nothing funny anymore? Dave Barry gets serious in a new book

     Humor's been on the ropes, for years.
     Between lingering cancel culture and an opera buffa administration that daily defies parody, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing is funny anymore. The Onion stuck in there for a while, but lately it seems to be crafting press releases for the Department of Government Efficiency.
     Even Dave Barry threw in the towel, retiring from his regular column 20 years ago.

     So the good news is that the wildly popular funnyman — once syndicated in 500 newspapers, with dozens of books under his belt — is back, with "Class Clown — The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." (Simon & Schuster: $28.99).
     I'll be honest — as heir to the sophisticated urban wit of Robert Benchley, in my own mind if nowhere else, I generally avoided Barry's column and, jeez, 45 previous books, including "Boogers are My Beat," which neatly explains why.
     Plus Barry was syndicated in the Tribune, which for many years I refused to touch, since doing so seemed like laying flowers on the grave of its former publisher, xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker Col. Robert McCormick.
     But a publicist invited me to talk with Barry and I couldn't see why not. We newspaper columnists are a vanishing breed, and I rarely get the chance to talk with one. Heck, I hardly talk to anybody anymore.
     "I never set out to be an artist," Barry told me. "I set out to be a joke guy."
     Mission accomplished. Though "Class Clown" begins seriously, with his parents — alcoholic father, depressive mother — in vignettes that are moving and real. I admired the details. A Swedish friend of his father, also named Dave, pronounces his name "Dafe," which made me think of the tailor in "The Inferno" squinting in the twilight. Making me the first critic to compare Dave Barry to Dante.
     The book surprises, practically poking me in the eye.
     His father, Barry writes, "was a fan of the great humorist Robert Benchley and owned several books of Benchley's collected columns. When I was somewhere around eleven or twelve I read those books and became obsessed with them; they definitely influenced my writing style, and I still read them today."
     Ah. Did not see Benchley coming.
     "I was a huge fan — still am," Barry said. "It's definitely a sobering thing if you are humor columnist, to realize nobody read him anymore."
     I learned some unexpected facts about Barry, such as he attended Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, once bumped into Bobby Kennedy, literally, the revered brother of JFK, not the anti-vax nutjob.
     Being a veteran journalist myself, albeit playing AAA ball compared to Barry's big big leagues, I enjoyed his recounting the profession, from his early days at the West Chester, Pennsylvania Daily Local News to his rise at the Miami Herald and the go-go 1980s. In 1987, he and a photographer spent $8,000 to rent a helicopter to get a photo of a garbage barge, adding that today "you cannot spend $8 without prior written authorization from at least three executives."
     That's not so much satire as dry reportage. Last month, in order to be compensated for a CTA bus ride, I had to secure a note from my editor, vowing that the expense is valid, and I wasn't just trying to steal $2.25 from the paper.

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Pistachio pudding

 

     Were someone to ask me about the surprising aspects of being a diabetic — and no one has, so I'll have to just jump right in — I'd say, "There's more pudding than I expected." The pancreatically-challenged can't always eat what we want, and yet life has to retain its savor, somehow. So I've been making a lot of sugar-free Jell-O brand instant pudding.

     The stuff isn't particularly low in calories, since I use 2 percent milk, for reasons too complicated to explain. But those are fat calories, which are our friends, as opposed to sugar calories — boo, hiss —  so I can use it for midday treats without having to shoot up insulin, which I try to avoid, as doing so tends to crash your blood sugar if you're not careful and, really, how careful can a person be? That's diabetics in a nutshell: being careful. All the time.

     So hurrah for pudding. Having sated myself on the chocolate and chocolate fudge varieties, I grew daring, and experimented with vanilla and banana cream, butterscotch (shunning only the cheesecake variety, out of loyalty to Eli's) and, as pictured above, pistachio. Which is one of those flavors, like almond, that doesn't actually taste like the nut itself, but some kind of confectioner's fantasy of what the nut must taste like in heaven. Though in an unexpected nod to the natural world, which doesn't have a whole lot of influence on a product like sugar free Jell-O brand instant pudding, there are actual bits of pistachio thrown in, for verisimilitude.

     At least I hope they're bits of pistachio. They're bits of something.
     There is also a lemon sugar-free flavor, which I'm keen to try, but haven't found it in the wild yet — not at Jewel, not at Sunset. I might have to break down and order it online, being a particular fan of all things lemon. I tried making the regular, full-sugar lemon Jell-O brand pudding version, cooked on the stovetop, just to see if I could eat it. 

      I really can't. You know you're reach some sub-hell of austerity when you take a cup of Jell-O from the fridge, eat a single teaspoon's worth, and put it back. I'm encouraging my wife to eat the stuff.

     Not to short-change pistachio. The nut itself is backed by no less authority than the Bible, Genesis 43:11, when Jacob tells his sons: "Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift — a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds."
     You're probably wondering about the maraschino cherry. I add them as a garnish, for festivity's sake, even though it's a more complicated process than you'd think. You can't just plop them in the setting pudding. They're wet, and the juice pools. So I dry them on paper towels while I'm whisking up today's batch. The things we do for aesthetics.

     Speaking of whisking. The box says to beat the pudding for two minutes, so I take out my phone's stopwatch app and whisk it for precisely two minutes. Not a second more, or a second less. Which my wife finds hysterical.  I suppose the daring man would just wing it. Beat the stuff until it's firm. But I am not that man. Have you ever heard the term "literal idiot"? That's me.

     The only thing left is to play my favorite game, "Name that Etymology." I guessed that "pistachio" had to be Italian, which it is, but that's just the start. The word sails off into the past. It's one of those words that cuts through time almost untouched. In Greek, it's pistakion, in old Persian pistah. There's something comforting to the thought that you could show up in ancient Babylon, ask for some pistachios, and reasonably expect to get what you've asked for. And at this point, I'll take all the comfort I can get.

A new pope? But we already have one!

     "Congratulations!" said my cousin Harry, calling from Boston Thursday afternoon.
     I frowned, wracking my brains. What had I done worthy of congratulation? Had the baby been born? And nobody thought to tell me? Now the happy news was percolating through the extended family, reaching me through this circuitous route. "Did you tell your dad and mom?" "Nah, they'll find out eventually ..."
     "For what?" I asked.
     "The pope," he said.
     Ah yes! Bragging rights to the pope. Or "Da Pope!" in another instantly classic Sun-Times headline (with an assist from WBEZ). Or Pope Bob, as a reader dubbed him, born in Chicago, grew up in Dolton.
     Chicago can use the boost. It's been a while since we've had a one-name celebrity to crow over. Michael and Oprah are specks in the rearview mirror. Obama ... well ... still fond of the man and looking forward to that presidential center. Though right now he's still the guy who walked us to the cliff's edge and coughed into his fist as we toppled into the abyss.

     Still. Isn't using the pope as an occasion for pride somewhat contradictory? With all the whoops and fist bumps, I've yet to hear anybody say, "The pope's from Chicago; we'll have to double our efforts to live justly and love our fellow man." All pomp and no obligation — is there too much of that already?
     Honestly, while there was genuine pride, news of the Chicago pope was often played for laughs. Jokes about deep dish communion wafers and baseball. Pope Leo XIV is a White Sox fan. Well, they need something. Jesus did say, "Whoever humbles himself will be exalted," and 121 losses last season is humbling aplenty.
     Harebrained, a local graphics outfit that can turn out a great logo faster then I can tie my shoe, immediately created one of their spot-on mashups.
     Innocent joy only lasted a few hours. The city's understandable pride was quickly used to revive the old "Windy City" charge of unseemly boosterism.
     "But in a place where civic pride is both a virtue and a way of life, Chicagoans need little help believing their city is among God’s favorites," the Washington Post sniffed, as if they weren't the same publication that refused to publish a cartoon that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize because it suggested their owner fell short of his own lofty self-estimation by genuflecting before the orange enormity.
     I hate to be the bearer of bad news: But you put your lips on that guy's backside once, and it leaves a stain that will never wash off. Neville Chamberlain's entire life was an asterisk after waving that piece of paper and declaring "Peace in our time." Live with it.
     I'm reluctant to suggest it doesn't matter what the pope believes in. But we live in a leaderless moment — even President Donald Trump, who spins in the wind. As much as he pushes tariffs, I don't see the MAGA crowd yelling, "Yay tariffs! Double the cost of everything we buy! Shut down the global economic system!"

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Split the difference

     Kitty and I went for a walk shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday, a fine cloudless day in May. We strolled to the corner of First and Walters. To the left, my neighbor Lee Goodman, in his homemade concentration camp uniform, and a small knot of protesters. To the right, the usual expanse of empty sidewalk. I had just about convinced myself to go rightward, avoid the crowd, but my gaze lingered a fraction too long to the left, and Lee's wife Nancy waved. I might be able to slip away from a protest, but I'm not one to cut my neighbors. I ambled over.
     Lee's new sign struck me as non-controversial in a sane world. "Northbrook stands with migrants." This being a nation of immigrants, all of us or our forebears, at one point or another, I'd say we have to.
     But alas, we do not live in that sane world. Having written on the subject Friday, and gotten an earful from readers who have lapped up the immigrants = criminals cant for years, their brains sodden with the stuff, taut like a water balloon, bulging with fallacy. To see them sneeringly feed it back, the logic being, if only they could deliver the news with sufficient vehemence, why then they would win the day. 

     On some I used my line that the fig leaf of concern for legality does not cover their shameful bigotry as well as they seem to think it does. It would help if they viewed a Venezuelan dishwasher with parking tickets and the multiple felon presidents through the same prism of love for law. But that takes time to express, and what's the point?

     Which is sort of my view toward street corner protests. I'm glad they're there, support them fully, but don't see the effect. I chatted briefly with Lee, who mused how long it would take our neighbors — some of whom are far more devoted to the idea of free speech for themselves than they are to free speech for others — will linger before throwing paint at his sign. I figure, nightfall the second day. 
     Prying myself away, I strolled up First Avenue, back toward home, and paused to press my face into the lovely lilac bush below. At first I thought, "These lilacs will make a fine post for tomorrow," planning to ignore Lee, whom I've featured here in his concentration camp uniform in the not-too-distant past. But then I realized the challenge we face is to balance keeping track of and protesting the Trump enormity, while still enjoying the good things in life that his metastasizing presidency has not yet found a way to ruin. I figure, split the difference: start with blue triangles, end with purple lilacs.

Flashback 2005: High-tech world glued to Vatican smoke signals

 

    Maybe I really am getting old. When my editor called Thursday — a Chicago pope! Opinions to firehose at the flaming masses — I did not respond to the clanging bell by stirring on my straw. Did not stagger to my feet, shamble over to my cart traces, and wait to pull professional journalism to the latest fire. The way I always do. 

     I had gotten up at 4 a.m., written a column whittling a splintery stick and shoving it up Kristi Noem's backside. That column was more topical — i.e., apt to quickly lose whatever value it had. It would be stale in three days. Plus, joining the rush to ululate the new pope seemed off-brand.
    "He'll still be pope on Monday," is what I said, passing. Tom McNamee, an actual Catholic, did a fine job and besides, nothing in the paper could top our headline, "Da Pope." Classic.
     Beginning the musing process for Monday's pope column, I thought about the welcomes given pope in the past. Twenty years ago, I did open the the firehose and rinse the topic down. Reading it today makes me glad I waited. The column filled a page and was 1100 words long, 50 percent longer than today. Bring snacks.

Opening shot

     Being in the communications business, I am constantly amazed at the co-mingling of old and new methods of getting the word out. I'll never forget standing on the bridge of a ship crossing the Atlantic and noticing that not far from the high-tech video screen displaying the multicolored radar readout and global satellite positioning system information was a brass mouthpiece for the speaking tube to the captain's cabin.
     So perhaps I was alone in savoring, amid the mass of analysis and hoopla surrounding the transition between popes, that while the death of John Paul II was communicated to the world via an e-mail from the Vatican, the selection of the new pope was conveyed by a puff of smoke and ringing bells. That strikes me as something of a marvel.

If I stop talking I'll die!

     God, I hate TV. They have such a marvelous opportunity to bring a dramatic moment to the world and they blow it, almost every time. There were a few minutes of indecision Tuesday morning as to whether a pope had been selected, whether the smoke was white. We were glued to the TV, waiting. I was watching CNN. As the bells of Rome began ringing, the talking heads kept bloviating, and I wondered if we would be allowed at some point to just hear the bells, a faint background noise. Finally one commentator said something like, "The bells of Rome are pealing, answering the Great Bell of St. Peter; let's take a moment to listen." I leaned forward, relieved, thinking "it's about time." But they didn't listen. Instead Wolf Blitzer began talking as if his life depended on his never stopping.
     Yet another, more human commentator suggested a pause in the palaver to hear the bells, and again Wolf leapt in, yammering away nonstop.
     So sad. That's the worst thing instantaneous communications does to us; it seems to demand that we instantly communicate. Though the real culprit is the media star system where a Wolf Blitzer could never imagine that the viewers might prefer he zip his big yap for a moment and let us listen to the bells of Rome.

Nor will he take up hang-gliding

     One more bit of TV stupidity and then we'll move on — as soon as the 78-year-old Pope Benedict XVI was named, one of the talking heads speculated that it was unlikely he would match the 26-year-reign of Pope John Paul II.
     Gee, ya think so? Considering that it would make him 114 and the oldest man on Earth, I'd say that's a safe bet.
     Let's take a look at the old resume
     As soon as it was announced that the new pope was the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a German hard-liner, and before the new pontiff had even made his appearance, a sweet, older Jewish lady in my office whom I view as a kind of Greek chorus, wringing her hands and voicing the free-floating Semitic anxiety of the moment, drifted by my office.
     She spoke one sentence — "He was in the Hitler Youth" and then moved away.
     The next Jewish colleague I saw was on the down elevator.
     "Whaddaya think of the new pope?" I called after him.
     "German," he said, as he descended out of sight.
     Those are code words for unease. If anyone held out actual hope that the new pope would be in mesh with the liberal American tradition, the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger put the kibosh on that. As you must know by now, he is on record condemning virtually anybody who isn't middle-of-the-road Catholic — Muslims, other Christian denominations, gays, whom he called "evil." I didn't notice any slams against Jews, but that Hitler Youth item on the resume isn't exactly comforting, though supposedly he was in his early teens and forced to join.
     "That's what they all say," said a third Jewish colleague.
     Myself, I can't get too worked up about it. Everybody has baggage from childhood — heck, I was in the Cub Scouts, but I wouldn't want people to hold it against me. As far as his strict orthodoxy, it isn't as if the Catholic Church is an engine for radical social progress as it is, so a bit — or a whole lot — of traditionalism can be expected.
     I just don't feel any anxiety toward this new pope. My central attitude toward the Catholic Church is surprisingly benign: a hope that they do well, so we don't lose any more Catholic churches or schools in Chicago. I hate to see those go.
     Sure, mainstream America wants the church to be ever more liberal, because that's what we are, and like all people we are most comfortable dealing with those exactly like ourselves.
     That would be in our best interest. But the church is a religious group, obviously, and religions face a puzzle that can be thought of as the "Orthodoxy vs. Inclusion dilemma." If they are too strict, then they alienate people in our modern world and lose membership, but if they are too lax, then membership loses its meaning and the people who do belong fall away through indifference.
     Liberalism might be popular in our modern world, but it is orthodoxy that survives unchanged through the ages. Jews used to be 3 percent of the American population, and now we're 1.8 percent and shrinking, primarily because our leaders told us it was OK to practice as tepid a faith as we liked, so as a result, too many of our children ended up inter-marrying and the faithful basically wandered off. We could have used our own version of a Cardinal Ratzinger to keep us in line.

I haven't offended the elderly yet

     The biggest downside of Cardinal Ratzinger's nomination, in my view, is his age. I know that's why they picked him, so that he would not be expected to match Pope John Paul II's amazing quarter century tenure. But after watching the late pope's agonizing physical decline over recent years, are we ready to see it again in a soon-to-be octogenarian pope?
     Perhaps it's all planned out. A few years chaffing under the lash of a fading Pope Benedict XVI's harsh decrees and the church will be ready for whatever dynamic young South American cardinal they pick next. I hope so, because in my heart I'm rooting for the church to prosper.
     At least they believe in something, and while we can pooh-pooh religion, surrounded by our vast American wealth, there are many places on Earth where faith is all they've got — faith and a goat and a few earthen jars. A lot of people are depending on the church to keep going and work out its problems, and if the cardinals think this Ratzinger fellow is the man for the job, then I hope they're right.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 20, 2005