A lovely day in the city

Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2025

      I'm not a spot news kind of guy. Not anymore. My years of racing to a breaking story are long past — the paper has kids doing that. I thought of toddling over to Broadview to inject myself into the chaos. Then thought better of it. Judge me harshly if you wish.

     Truth is, most days I don't go into the city. But my pal Tony is not feeling well, so I wanted to visit him at Rush hospital on Wednesday. Since I was venturing downtown, it made sense to go eyeball the supposed war zone that Donald Trump claims demands his sending in the Texas National Guard, already in Illinois and on their way, to do ... God know's what.
     A plan was in order. Search for troops, then troll for ICE. So I patrolled Wacker Drive, from Union Station to the Wrigley Building, hoping to encounter soldiers. Only there weren't any soldiers. Not on North Michigan Avenue, up toward the Water Tower. 
     Realizing I was drawing a blank, I turned around, cued up Gang of Four's "I Love a Man in a Uniform" on iTunes — that seems apt — and headed south, to Lake Street. Not so much as a lone sentry leaning against a rifle. 
     Just lots of tourists of every description on a glorious sunny October day. Which might be itself be news, maybe even important news. The media has an idiot capacity to all look at the same thing, the same block of discord and nowhere else. Don't get me wrong, regular Chicagoans blocking ICE operations in Broadview is significant and needs to be reported, day after day after day. 
      But also important is the rest of the city going about its business in relative peace and harmony. That doesn't seem to get mentioned as much. We need to remember that this is oppression for oppression's sake, a practice crackdown built on lies. The city is fine.
      Onto the Pink Line at the Thompson Center, or whatever Google calls the place now. A quiet ride to 18th Street, scanning the streets for squads of soldiers, or for menacing vans disgorging faceless militias. Nothing.   

     To Panaderia Nuevo Leon, with its quaint glass-doored wooden cabinets.  I took the traditional metal tray and tongs to load up on marranitos — ginger pigs — for myself, and a big bag of sugar cookies, muted pastels and dun browns, shaped like hearts and watermelons and oblongs, for Tony. Or rather —  I suspected, correctly as it turned out— his nurses, important too, as they work long hours, need a steady supply of sweets, and appreciate a good freshly baked cookie. A happy nurse is an attentive nurse.   

    I wanted to ask the two ladies behind the counter, "Are you afraid?" But there was a language issue and, besides, when I asked if I could take their photo, they said no, which itself is an answer.

     Quickstep over to 5 Rabanitos, where I bumped into State Senator Celina Villanueva and exchanged greetings and a few words about The Situation. I urged her to get in touch with me so we can have a formal conversation for the paper. She probably won't. But maybe she will. Stranger things have happened. I'll give her a call today and try to prod the process along. But politicians aren't battering down my door anymore. I'm sure they have their reasons.

     The place was packed, by the way — a good sign. I got what I usually get — the grilled chicken in a garlic honey marinade with vegetables. O...M...G! Initially, I thought I might take half of it home for later, but failed in that intention. 

     Then into the National Museum of Mexican Art — free, as always. There was something new — the doors had "THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY" signs designed to prevent ICE from storming in and arresting the Mona Lupe, the museum's wry rendition of the Mona Lisa by Cesar Augusto Martinez. To be honest, I like it better than the original. You don't look at her through thick lucite in a crowded hall that smells like a high school locker room either. 

     "Carlos Totolero isn't around, is he?" I asked, signing in. The high school teacher who founded the museum and first invited me here, years ago. Otherwise I'm sure that, like most Chicagoans, I'd have never set foot in the place. Just not on the radar, embarrassingly.

     "He comes in sometimes," the receptionist said. "But not today."

     "Well, he can do whatever he wants," I answered. "He's earned it."

"Farmer Skeleton" by Jorge Rosano

      I spent a long time checking out the 39th Day of the Dead show, "A Celebration of Remembrance."  Always colorful and beautiful and especially poignant, keyed toward victims of the Texas and New Mexico floods over the summer. I found myself wishing that ICE could be forced to file through here, the way Eisenhower made the Germans walk through concentration camps. "Look, these as the people you're randomly plucking off the street, you assholes."
     The plan was to walk the 40 minutes to Rush. I started east along 19th Street. High school students were playing on the swings in Harrison Park. A couple fussed over a baby in a carriage. I paused, considered pressing a few questions. "Is ICE worrying you?" I decided against it — heck, ICE is worrying me. And I just didn't want to intrude. They didn't look worried. They looked happy.

     Past the Peter Cooper Public School, just letting out. Lots of security in bright vests shepherding the kids. Pigtailed girls, wearing pastel backpacks dangling small stuffed friends, escorted by a parent or two. One very small girl waved at me, "Hola," she said, smiling. "Hello," I replied, touching my cap, and she echoed it back. "Hello," she said, carefully maybe a little amused, as if trying out the word to see how it sounded in her mouth.

"Mona Lupe,"
 by Cesar Augusto Martinez

     But at Ashland, the No. 9 bus was approaching, and I decided to give the old bones a rest and hop on. People of various races and nationalities go on and off. Nobody shot anyone else. I snaked my hand into the brown paper bag of my private stash and broke off a few chunks of marranito. 
     Tony is in better spirits than I would be, and I'll talk about our conversation another time. I handed the bag of cookies to him, he looked inside, admiringly, then gave it to a nurse, and various nurses over the next hour popped in to thank him for being so considerate. We talked about migratory birds. He shared a friend's poems. I brought him up to speed on the situation at the newspaper.
     An hour passed, and, not wanting to overstay my welcome, I made my exit and popped over to the Blue Line Racine station. Another quiet car of regular folks. I got off at LaSalle, met my wife at her office, first chatting with the guard while waiting for her to sign out and come down. We walked a few blocks west and met our younger son for an early dinner at Bereket Turkish Mediterranean Restaurant, 333 S. Franklin. I'd never been there; our son had birddogged it. Service at the family-owned restaurant was warm and attentive, the kabobs were juicy, and something happened at dessert that literally had never happened to me in a restaurant before. We ordered a square of flan and a chocolate baklava, to share,, and the waitress brought the flan and three baklavah. 
     Oh no, we protested, just the one. We just want to taste it. We tried to make her take the extra two back. That's okay, she said, they're on the house. We tried out baklavah; it was fresh and fantastic — not too sweet. I called the waitress over and insisted we must pay for the three pieces — they were so good, we enjoyed them so much, it was a revelation. 
     "No, it's impossible," she said. "The bill is already made up." We yielded; I tipped 30 percent, and left wondering if that were enough. Our son headed to his car, and my wife and I hit the Metra. 
     Chicago isn't perfect. There is crime and struggle, like every other city on earth. Terrible things are happening now— people are being plucked off the street, families torn apart, immigrants who came here in good faith and worked hard and built lives being victimized out of malice and spite. That's all going on right now, with troops coming to help the grindstones crushing up lives turn more quickly.  We should never lose sight of that.
     But do not let the president's clonic lies poison how we view Chicago. The city is still wonderful. The people are wonderful. The food is wonderful. Protest with all your might. Resist resist resist. And one way to resist is to go about your ordinary business, to still enjoy your life, somehow, and revel in the world they are trying to take away. It's still here.   

"Reinterpretation of a Tumulo," by Alexandro Garcia Nelo (National Museum of Mexican Art)

Patricia Smith, a Chicago poet 'who writes screams'

Patricia Smith

     A great poet forges a world, then invites you in. Open "Leaves of Grass," and Walt Whitman grabs you by the shirt front and draws you down beside him in the sawdust of some 1850s lumberyard. Robert Frost puts you in his sleigh, pausing in a wintry New England forest, watching the flakes fall in frosty silence.
     And Patricia Smith. Having read "The Intentions of Thunder," her selected life's work, plus new poems, published by Scribner last week and named Tuesday as a finalist for the National Book Award, I see her as a kind of heretofore unimagined superhero: WordWoman perhaps. The door explodes off its hinges, and there she is, in cape and purple tights, blasting the reader with her flamethrower of language, leaving us a Wile E. Coyote-shaped pile of crumbling ash, hesitant index finger frozen in air.
     Even the little intros to each section are concise marvels. At her start in 1991, Smith confesses: "She don't know line break. She don't know iamb. She don't know envoi. She knows stage and slam and people's faces when she poems."
     "When she poems." A three-word phrase to pop in your cheek and nurse all day, like a butterscotch candy.
     At least I could. You might draw back, objecting, "poem is NOT a verb!" Then this book is not for you.
     Pity, because you'll miss her heartbreaking evocations of her murdered father, who sired "a daughter who writes screams." Her mother, Annie Pearl Smith, "the sage of Aliceville, Alabama," unimpressed by the moon landing. "My mother saw the stars only as signals for sleep." Smith can pack a lot into a few words.
     Her own maturing, musky self, then a prolonged subterranean journey through the hellscape of America's racial past — and present — that makes Dante's "Inferno" seem like "Pat the Bunny."
     Widely acclaimed ("the greatest living poet," the Guardian wrote, and who is the competition? Billy Collins looking at clouds?), Smith once worked at the Sun-Times, and snatches Chicago, "city of huge shoulders, thief of tongues," away from Carl Sandburg's overlong embrace. The work reflects her raw, slam poetry origins — more menstrual blood here than you'd get from, say, Mary Oliver. There's a surprisingly stark rendition of the Olive Oyl-Bluto-Popeye love triangle that makes me wish Smith strayed far afield more, though I suppose it could be viewed as more sex, displaced onto Miss Oyl, "a stick interrupted by knees."
     The first quarter is mostly fun, which, like all fun, doesn't last. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, Smith serves up a threnody on race that spares nothing: "When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes ..."
     Being a white guy reading "The Intentions of Thunder" is like crashing a wedding of people you don't know. You sneak in, help yourself to the buffet and the bar, join in the unfamiliar dancing. Then suddenly a funeral breaks out for a child you also don't know. A red-eyed relative leans in and and hotly tells you who's in that coffin and exactly what happened.

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'It can all end today'— Chicago's Israeli consul general on the war in Gaza

Cain killing Abel, by Johann Sadeler (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I initially declined an invitation to talk with the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, Elad Strohmayer. Consuls general are not traditionally fonts of valuable information. But Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks that cost 1,200 Israeli lives and the beginning of the war in Gaza that has killed 67,000 Palestinians and spurred a worldwide shift against Israel.

With nations lining up to recognize a Palestinian state, and social media echoing with full-throated condemnation of Israel's continuation of the war, I felt obligated to hear what the nation's officials have to say. This interview was done before President Trump's 20-point peace plan was unveiled, but with talks going on in Egypt now, the Israeli position is even more relevant. Our interview was edited for space and clarity.

Q. What's happening in Gaza? What are you doing?

A. Our goals are very, very simple. We want the hostages back, and we want Hamas to lay down its arms so it would never be able to threaten Israel. ... We cannot end the war knowing that Hamas is still in power or Hamas has the ability to threaten Israel. That's why we're operating in Gaza now.

Q. Why doesn't Hamas surrender? Wouldn't that end the bloodshed?

A. That's a question you need to ask Hamas. The reality is that they have a murderous ideology, and that ideology was known from the start, and they are very, very persistent in sticking to this ideology. They actually care nothing for the life of people in general — Palestinian life, Israeli life, Jewish life. Their murderous ideology is not going anywhere. That's why they're not surrendering. I might not be able to fight their ideology, because ideas are very strong. I just want to make sure that their ideology doesn't have the military power to threaten Israel.

REFLECTIONS ON OCT. 7, TWO YEARS LATER: Crisis in Gaza 'did not start two years ago,' leading local Palestinian activist says

Q. You've got Donald Trump talking about exiling Palestinians from Gaza and building a new Riviera. What's going to happen to the Palestinians?

A. I speak for the Israeli government. I don't speak for President Trump and his administration, but I think his plan is being mischaracterized. He doesn't want to exile all the Palestinians. The reality is we want to have as minimum casualties in Gaza fighting against Hamas. Look at what's happening in Ukraine. Ukrainian people could leave and go to neighboring countries. Why doesn't Egypt allow Palestinians to go into Egypt so we can do what needs to be done to clear Gaza of Hamas? Then anyone who wants to go back can go back. Prime Minister Netanyahu said it: We want to give them the opportunity to leave so they'll be out of harm's way, then anyone who wants to be back can come back. I'm saying this on the record.

Q. Let's talk about the famine.

Yes, there are hungry people in Gaza. It breaks my heart to know there are hungry people in Gaza. But there is no systematic famine in Gaza. That's the campaign against Israel. We made sure from the start that enough humanitarian assistance, enough food, enters into Gaza that there won't be famine in Gaza. But Hamas looted the food, the food was not distributed to the right people, and that's what created hungry people in Gaza. ... I don't want to see hungry people in Gaza. It's not moral, and it's also wrong for Israel. Everybody's talking about the famine in Gaza. But again, nobody talks about the famine of our hostages. ... The famine campaign is false.

Q. Is the two-state solution still viable?

A. A Palestinian state is not relevant at the moment. It's a futile conversation to talk about a Palestinian state, because we need to make sure that if there is going to be, eventually — some political entity — that won't be able to threaten Israel. We're not there yet. They don't recognize Israel as the homeland of all Jews. If we now create a Palestinian state, we have the fear extremists will take over that future so-called Palestinian state and then they will be able to do to central Israel from the West Bank what they did on Oct. 7.

Q. Talk about the PR war. You've got a terror group. You've got America's closest ally, a democracy. Why is public perception so strong against Israel? What you call an "operation" is denounced as genocide.

A. I reject that term. The only one that wants to create a genocide is Hamas. They said that from the beginning. They want to kill all the Jews and throw us to the sea, that there should be no Jewish state. They're the one that tried to commit a genocide Oct. 7. ... The claims that we are committing genocide are preposterous, and they are false. These are lies being spread against Israel. On Oct. 7, Israel was attacked. But also on Oct. 7, an orchestrated campaign against Israel was started worldwide. If we wanted to commit a genocide we would not let humanitarian aid be distributed. We would not let people be notified before the [Israeli military] is going to be striking.

Palestinians are suffering in Gaza. I am not oblivious to their suffering. On the contrary. My heart aches when I see pictures of children suffering. But the reality is, this is the outcome of war. We don't have a good PR. Justice is on our side, but the pictures coming out of Gaza are difficult. I understand. But who's responsible for these pictures? Hamas.

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Fallen angels

"Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

     Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, many young people enjoying a music festival. Plus the 250 Israelis taken hostage, sparking the War in Gaza. About two dozen of those hostages are still being held.

     That the war's subsequent bloodshed has eclipsed the initial horror hardly needs to be said. Very little energy in the world was spent sympathizing with the Israeli loss. Just the opposite. The Palestinians position — that Israel should never have been created in the first place, so any attack upon any Israeli, or any Jew anywhere in the world for that matter, can be rationalized as "resistance" — dominates much of the conversation. Sophomores who won't eat meat out of sympathy for the suffering of animals unquestionably accept that.
     Many Jews, for whom the existence of Israel is woven through their religious liturgy, looked on increasingly aghast as continuing warfare caused the loss of 66,000 Palestinians, a third of them children. Israel's argument — they need to destroy Hamas, the terrorist organization that sparked and continued the war, the elected leadership of Gaza — could not compete with the jarring photographs of grieving mothers and emaciated children. It is rejected in Israel itself, which has been riven by demonstrations against the war. Being a democracy, they allow that. Gaza is not a democracy, and any ill-feeling about Hamas can be lethal to express. Israel's continuation of the war was denounced as genocide, with few observing that if that is indeed the case, it's the rare genocide where the suffering party could end the bloodshed at any time but doesn't.

     Even though I am free to comment on the situation, I generally don't. Mostly because I've expressed myself on the stalemate repeatedly through the years. The situation hardly changes — though the past two years have cranked up the bloodshed by several orders of magnitude — and my position has not changed. I'm against killing. I'm for people living in peace. I want the Palestinians to live free, unencumbered lives. I'm also for Israel, conceptually, as the world's one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of Jews living in a place, a centuries old dilemma where the Jews neighbors periodically decide, vis a vis nothing, that the solution for all their problems is for all these Jews to go live somewhere else. Even if the place they're living is where they've lived for 3,000 years. Even if the people claiming it never lived there, themselves, but believe they ought to inherit it from their displaced ancestors. Every inch of Chicago is also land that was stolen or swindled away from Native Americans. Yet if what Potawatomi remain started shooting up schoolyards, demanding it back, I doubt they'd be received so enthusiastically on campuses across the world. Though maybe I'm being overly optimistic here. 

      Public reaction to the war is an eloquent rationalization for the existence of Israel, as is the world's lip service toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Talk is cheap.
     What else? I wish Benjamin Netanyahu, a self-dealing nationalist cast in the Trump mold, had never been elected. Israelis who feel he cynically prolonged the war to cover himself politically are probably right. I don't know. But my wishes are immaterial here. 
     Attempts at peace since Israeli occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 have been chimeras, and I imagine this latest attempt will vanish in a similar fashion, just another trick of the desert heat. When the conflict eventually ends, it will will end the way all such strifes ends — when one side destroys the other or, as in Northern Ireland, when both sides tire of killing each other and mutually decide to try something different. The lack of creativity applied to this situation is astounding. The Palestinians have two tools: violence and world opinion. Their strategy seems to be to lash out at Israel, then cast Israel's reaction as inexplicable barbarism. Give them credit: it works. The world buys it. Nobody says, "Gee, if the Israeli's are such murderous barbarians, then why do you keep attacking them? Is that a good idea?" Do that, and they sound the liberation buzzer, drowning you out.

     Second, I don't write about this much because the subject is an agony to me. I was raised in the Six Day War era when Israel was bold and smart and beloved. My colleague Bill Mauldin depicted Israel as a spunky sabra soldier, David versus Goliath, threatened by enormous Arab countries. 

    The point of the column at left still holds, though the scale has changed. Just as 9/11 provoked the United States to constrain its own freedom in the name of security, so the Oct. 7 attacks engaged Israel into betraying its humanitarian core. Israel literally lost its mind. The country pull offed feats of intelligence such as the raid on Entebbe. Now they seem brutal and dumb — the exploding pager piece-de-resistance notwithstanding. That was brilliant. 

     Otherwise, that seems part of a past as distant as the United States when it was a force for good, at home and abroad, not twin giants of oligarchy and authoritarianism, supporting each other, growing in power and recklessness, to howls of approval from a mob too stupid to realize that, when laws and norms are simply cast aside, they could be next, at the tyrant's whim. And even if they aren't, the people who are being abused will be missed. As bad as ICE seems now to Americans who think and feel, it'll feel worse when the strawberries are rotting in the fields. Even the Germans eventually had reasons to regret banishing all those Jewish physicists, who happily developed the atomic bomb for the Americans.

     You can support a country without approving what it is doing right now — every Democrat knows that. Love of what America represents, what it has been and might yet be again, is only strengthened seeing how easily millions would trash it all for nothing. Love of what Israel represents — a safe homeland for Jews, one that has a quarter of its population non-Jews, living in peace, generally. That said, Israel has similarly gone down a dark path — Netanyahu left the door open for the Oct. 7 attacks, and his rage against the Palestinians that Hamas hides behind is neither smart nor will it be effective, except for perhaps, finally, pushing all involved to push for a solution which, now that I say it, strikes me as the most extreme optimism.

     Sunday's blog post was about mourning my mother and my cousin, and I've already strayed too far into politics — I'm doing it here because I have no Monday column in the paper, having chosen to interview the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, slated to run in the Sun-Times Tuesday, on the anniversary. The war is such baffling folly, to me, that I wanted to hear an Israeli official try to explain it. I hope you'll read that in the paper tomorrow. 

    Until then, I just want to draw attention to all the lives lost, on both side. I had a niece in Israel Oct. 7, a bright young rabbi little different from those slain. I see her, I think of them.

    And when I'm holding my new granddaughter, and she cries because she's hungry, I extend my hand for a bottle and someone quickly hands one to me. Even a few seconds are frustrating. But during that wait, it often occurs to me how horrible it would be to be holding a baby in some Gazan ruin with no bottle to give her and none coming. I don't see how anyone of any stripe can accept that. When I was talking to the consul general last week, I pointed out that the situation in Gaza was the sort of disaster that Israelis used to pride themselves in leaping to help fix, publicizing the teams they rush in to respond to every earthquake and tsunami, all over the world. Yet this one is done by them for purposes which they insist are rational.

     I don't like politics because it isn't real. You can't hold politics, or touch it. It's important, but notional. People are real. They can suffer, and be lost, and be missed, and grieved. We need to focus more on that, and the politics will unravel themselves. 

     The bas relief above is "Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia. Crafted of glazed terra cotta about 1475, in 2008 it inexplicably fell from the wall above a doorway at 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and shattered on the stone floor. It took years to meticulously reconstruct the artwork and return it to public view, in 2016.
     The consul general mentioned a Jewish value, tikun olam, repairing the world. Not everything can be fixed — the dead stay dead, the traumatized might never heal, the past can be hidden, or distorted, but never altered. Yet fixing the world today, despite the horror and loss, is always an option. Working to make something better than this. It's hard work, far harder than blame and condemnation. But not impossible, unless you never even start. I truly believe there has been enough breaking stuff. It's long past time to start trying to fix things. 

"Like the generations of leaves..."

      My wife and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, went to Starved Rock on Wednesday for Yom Kippur. We've done so once before in the past, but not recently. The park, two hours southwest of Chicago, has a certain serene glory that goes well with the solemn holy day of repentance. And you don't have to dress up.
     We picked a quiet spot in a canyon to perform a yitzkor service — a memorial for the dead. I lost two of the most important people in my life this summer — my mother died June 21. I said the mourner's kaddish for her the night before, at Kol Nidre, where we unexpectedly — for me, anyway — found ourselves at a small, century-old synagogue in Utica. I'll write about that later.  
     My cousin Harry died Aug. 31, so I said kaddish for him. I don't hold many rituals to heart, but a loved one dies, you're supposed to say kaddish — a prayer that never mentions death, but celebrates the greatness of God — for them. Because ... well, it's what you're supposed to do. Because, I guess, you die, you want someone to notice, and to do something, and saying kaddish is both.
     Two quotes came to me. The first one was a snippet of verse from the back of some reconstructionist prayer book that I read, flipping through the pages in some previous hours-long service, waiting for it to end. We have the book, and while I went looking for it before the trip, I couldn't find the lines, which didn't matter, because I knew them. In a passage about lost parents it said, "once we were their dream, now they are ours." Or words to that effect. I liked that.
     The second quote came to me standing in the canyon at Starved Rock, looking at the ground, which was surprisingly covered with maples leaves — brown and dry, from last year. "As a generation of leaves, so is that of men" Homer writes in the Iliad.

     We finished our ad hoc yizkor service, hiked around a bit, and I found myself in different canyon, where the leaves were oak, not maple. Maples are pretty sturdy, but oaks are even more long-lasting magnificent. It occurred to me that the leaves fall and die, but the tree remains. Our loved ones fall and die, but we remain. Then we too fall and die, but life — the tree — remains. Judaism is big on the "tree of life." I never quite got it before. Now I do.
     Later I went looking for the exact Homer quote.
     Book Six, lines 146-149. The original Greek:

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη·
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.

     A 1990 translation by Robert Fagles puts is this way:

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

    I'm okay with that. Which is good, because I have to be, and if I weren't okay with it — which sometimes I'm not — it would still be exactly the same.

Mixed message

Starved Rock State Park, Oct. 1, 2025.

     My first instinct was to simply post this photo without comment. Let the headline be the punchline.

     But that seemed perhaps a touch too wry, for the matter at hand. Death by falling is a perennial problem at Starved Rock, whose dramatic precipices make it a place of beauty and danger. Accidentally and intentionally. In 2022 the Operation Disrupt Signs went up, in Starved Rock and 16 other locations around the state. But the signs — which are not just at this overlook — did not prevent two people from committing suicide at Starved Rock in 2024. 

    So I thought a few words were in order. The boardwalk helps a lot — stay on the wooden paths, behind the rails, and you won't slide off any precipices. Not unconstrained nature in the usual sense, not the deeply-ravined woods you got in the pre-boardwalk days — which I remember, scarily, and not just out of fear of falling. But better to stay on the pre-approved route than boldly forge your own path off a cliff.
    I was mildly curious as to whether there was any history to this "Lover's Leap" — I assume it's a common mythic local place name, like "Dead Man's Curve," and is a reflection of danger more than any association with specific death. None presented itself to me but, then again, I didn't look that hard. This is one of those moments in our nation's history when to reflect on anything other than gathering doom feels terribly beside the point. Twiddling your thumbs on a sinking ship. I'm not a believer in leaping to one's death. Life is but the once, and we should all tough it out, no matter the hardships of our public or private conditions. But I understand why people do it. 

Survivor's plate

 

     The problem with vanity license plates is that, typically, they're more vain than clever. "CAR4MOM" or "VROOOM" or whatever. I can't recall seeing one and thinking, "'Yes! That's very cool."
     Which sums up my thinking when I saw this plate in the parking lot of a trailhead at Starved Rock State Park on Thursday. While I've never had a mammogram, the process has been described to me well enough to know exactly what "Smush" refers to, and in case there were any question, the plate has the pink ribbon of breast cancer prominently displayed.
     As I was admiring the plate, the owner arrived, and seemed nonplussed to find a stranger examining her car closely. That's the beauty of surviving an ordeal — you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
    Karen Aldworth, of Shorewood, laughed when I asked if I could take her photo and told her the name of the blog I intended to post it on.  She said yes but, being a thorough, considerate sort, I explained that once a thing goes online, you never know how people might react.

     "I don't care!" she exuded. That's the beauty of...well, you get the point. She explained the process behind coming up with the plate.
    "I thought,'breast cancer survivor,'" she said, of herself. "It's a mammogram plate. I wanted something to go along with a mammogram plate."
     "You immediately know what you mean," I said, citing the mark of good writing. 
    "You do!" she said. "Men and women both know what I mean." 

    And she was was gone, off into the woods, hiking briskly.