"The mind may be at rest...."

    "What moves you if the senses do not spur? Light moves you."                                                                         —Dante, Purgatorio

    Driving south on 57, just before Champaign, I noticed the engine light was on. The engine light had never, to my memory, come on, not in the 11 years we've had the Honda Odyssey. I had driven about 150 miles and had another 100 miles to go. The last thing I wanted was to break down in Southern Illinois, land of pick-up trucks, both Chevy AND Ford.

"With this, my mind withdrew into itself, with what imagining might bring to it."

     I got off the highway at University Avenue. At a gas station, I plugged "What does the engine light on a Honda Odyssey mean?" into Google and found a bunch of articles damning the vagueness of the signal. It could mean anything from a faulty oxygen sensor to a balky catalytic converter to a loose gas cap. I got out and tightened the gas cap. The light stayed on. But none of the meanings seemed to be something serious enough to strand a person in downstate Illinois. That was reassuring.

     "Ye shall gather some useful fruit from our delaying here." 

     Still, better safe than sorry. I used my iPhone to locate the local Champaign Honda dealer and phoned their service department. The mechanic could, he said, run a diagnostic. It would cost $110 and take 90 minutes. That 90 minutes was the problem. I had a story to sniff out, and didn't want to take the time.
    "But it's not something pressing?" I said, half asking, half suggesting. "It can wait until I get back to Chicago. It'll last another couple hundred miles?"
     He said that yes, it could wait. "If the engine light isn't flashing, you're okay," he said. I was reassured—there was a level of warning more dire than this one—and decided I would continue on my way, and let the Odyssey fall into the strong arms of Muller Honda when I return.

    "Everyone apprehends dimly, and craves a good at which a mind maybe be at rest."  

    Tell it, my brother. I was listening to Heathcote Williams read Dante's "Purgatorio" -- Dante is always relevant. "Promise much, but deliver little," a sufferer tells Dante in "Inferno," summarizing the advice that landed him in Hell. (Maybe his timing was off; the same strategy landed Donald Trump in the White House).
     But I smiled slightly, hearing the faintest echo of my engine light saga in the Divine Comedy — Canto 17, for those keeping track. It made me wonder whether the relevance is there at all, or something that I layer over it, trying to justify the time spent listening.  Not that it's necessary. The words are enough. 
  
     

     
   

Pearl Harbor memory lingers, an echo of love and loss

    Stanley Swiontek played the clarinet, and it might have cost him his life.
     The Chicagoan was a cook on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor which, like many ships, had a band. On Dec. 6, 1941, there was a contest, and the Arizona band came in second, earning Swiontek the right to sleep in on Sunday morning.
     So when the Japanese surprise attack came, and a bomb hit the Arizona, sinking the battleship in nine minutes, Swiontek, instead of being at work and perhaps safe, was in his bunk, deep below decks.  

Rick Martinotti

     Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Five out of six sailors aboard the Arizona died that day. Swiontek’s family never learned what happened to their Stanley. His body was never recovered — it is still entombed with 947 shipmates aboard the sunken Arizona, now a national shrine.
      Franklin D. Roosevelt famously dubbed Dec. 7 "a day which will live in infamy." And it has. But 75 years is a long time. Even infamy fades. The remaining Pearl Harbor survivors — a few thousand — are in their 90s. The smallest child to hear the shock of that Sunday afternoon radio bulletin is at least 80 now.
     Which is not to say that subsequent generations are untouched. For the families of those affected, the attack and the 2,403 American lives it cost resonate still, a lingering echo of love and loss.
     Begin with parents like Swiontek's mother Victoria, a Polish immigrant, who saved every letter Stanley wrote home, in cursive.

To continue reading, click here.

Stuff I love: Red Wing boots

     Six inches of snow fell on Chicago Sunday, a record for Dec. 4. Much of it was still around Monday, slushy and wet, and I decided to break out my Red Wing Boots for the first time this season.     

     The boots helped. Not so much navigating downtown, which was fairly clear. But with the psychological boost a good pair of footwear can bring. Monday was also the day that the nascent Trump administration announced it is naming Dr. Ben Carson, he of the mumbled, almost gnostic idiocies, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. Another grim milestone in the reckless administration of a reckless man loading up on idiots for our collective tumble over the cliff. 

     Or not. We've been in ominous times before and somehow struggled through, intact. The boots harkened back to another worrisome year, 2009, when the economy had cratered and the new president, a novice senator who talked a good game but had not yet proven himself, had yet to bring it back. I was expecting the paper to close at any moment, and the time seemed right for a sturdy pair of boots. I wrote about it, in a column that, in retrospect seems surprisingly candid, almost fragile. Anyway, now, at a similarly bleak — aw heck, at a whole lot bleaker — moment in our national saga, seems an apt time to revisit it. Back then my column was divided into sections, and I've left those section markers in, including the concluding joke. I figure, we could all use a joke about now.

OPENING SHOT

     "Why don't you wear jeans?" my wife suggested, as I stood puzzling in front of the open closet. "You're a writer, you can wear jeans. You look good in jeans."
     It was a few hours before I had to appear on a panel at the Printers Row Event Formerly Known As a Book Fair (I just can't call it a Lit Fest).
     Even I wasn't going to wear a business suit to an outdoor fair on a Saturday morning in June, but was thinking maybe khakis, a sports coat.
     But why not blue jeans? The world's falling apart anyway. And if my wife says it's OK, it's OK. I stood there pondering, which she must have taken as paralysis.
     "Why don't you wear your Red Wing boots?" she added, soothingly. "Then you'll be ready for anything."
     That shocked me. It's one thing, I thought, slowly reaching for the high black jump boots, to nurture an irrational private notion. It's something else entirely when your significant other catches your odd occult beliefs from you, and begins repeating them back as if they made sense.

'DOWN THE DARKENED HALL'

     A person should not let his actions be dictated by song lyrics.
     I know that. Songs are not speaking to you, directly. They are written by people you don't know, under vastly different circumstances from your own. They are made up, and not guides to behavior. I know that.
     And yet.
     Once, decades ago, I was driving alone down a deserted stretch of southwestern highway, when I saw a sign announcing Winslow, Ariz. -- I impulsively took the exit and soon found myself in the center of a small town where I parked and stood, briefly, on a lonely street corner. No girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me, as happens in the Eagles song.
     But had one wanted to, I was right there.
     And then. A few months ago, I drove to Rogan's Shoes in Buffalo Grove because the Web site for Red Wing Shoes says Rogan is a Red Wing dealer. I had decided to buy a pair of Red Wing boots because . . . God, this is embarrassing . . . because in the Tom Waits song "Ruby's Arms," he says, "All I need is my Red Wing boots, and my leather jacket."
     I had just bought a leather jacket — brown, simple, no buckles, something Woody Guthrie might wear — so the boots seemed the next logical step. Then I would have all I need. And with the coming economic apocalypse, one never knows when one might be, oh, part of a line of refugees walking west. A good pair of steel-toed boots might come in handy.
     Red Wing boots are made on the banks of the Red Wing River in Red Wing, Minn. Or so I assumed, figuring that would explain the $180-a-pair price tag, twice as much as boots made by slaves in China.
     At that price, it couldn't be an impulse buy. Not for me. I tried the boots on, wandered the store for 20 minutes. Then went home for a week and thought about it, then came back a second time, with my wife for moral support. She has none of the psycho-buying-stuff hang-ups that I do.
     "They fit? Buy 'em," she shrugged. So I did, thinking that between the boots, the leather jacket, and the bracing narrative of the Tom Waits song, now I was indeed ready for anything. Let the economy totter.
     It was in the parking lot, heading for the car, box of boots in hand, that I ran "Ruby's Arms" through my mind one more time for reassurance. "All I need is my railroad boots," he plainly sings, "and my leather jacket."
     "Railroad boots" -- not "Red Wing boots." What was I thinking? I stopped cold. I almost whipped around and hurried back into the store to return the boots. But what would I say? "These aren't the boots in the song"? Besides, I have a rule that I don't do that kind of thing anymore — I make decisions and stick with them, lest my life devolve into a nightmare of action, regret and retraction.
     Tell me this lyrics idiocy isn't a unique failing of my own. Please. There must be other people who do things because of songs. Who happen to be in Memphis and beeline — as I did — to Charles Vergo's alley restaurant, The Rendezvous, simply because John Hiatt sings: "At least we can get a decent meal, down at the Rendezvous" in "Memphis in the Meantime."
     Who finds satisfaction the way I did in realizing that Tom Waits does mention the boots in a different song, "Mr. Siegel" ("I shot the morning in the back, with my Red Wings on. . .")
     Frankly, I write the entire episode off to stress over the economy. I can't control what's happening in America. My pair of boots was made in the good old U.S. of A., though Red Wing informs me that about half of their footwear is now made in China. Nothing to be done about that. But you can make sure you have good boots. Maybe that'll help.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

      The little boy put on his own shoes for the first time and ran to show his mother.
     "Sweetie," she cooed. "That's wonderful. But you've got your shoes on the wrong feet."
     He looked down in confusion and horror, then up at his mother.
     "But mommy," he said, his lower lip starting to tremble. "These are the only feet I've got!"
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 8, 2009

Refute Trump's lies with force and alacrity

Samuel Johnson

     George Berkeley was an Irish cleric — the Bishop of Cloyne — and philosopher. His 1709 "An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision" promoted "immaterialism," the idea that physical objects do not actually exist but are merely perceived. The world isn't all houses and stones, just light and color.
     I mention this as part of my broad-minded attempt to give Donald Trump and his supporters the benefit of the doubt. The idea that there is no reality, no facts, that all is subjective perception was not invented by them, though they certainly have seized the Berkeley viewpoint in what is already being called our "post-fact world."
     Last week, Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN contributor and Trump supporter, phoned a Washington, D.C., public radio station that was discussing Trump's baseless claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election. Hughes argued that these deliberate fabrications were not "lies," but merely differing views. She said:
     “I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other hand, there are many people that go, 'No, it’s true.' And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. "
     How to reply? I could point out that this is patently false and give an illustration: millions of children believe in Santa Claus, yet that does not will him into physical being.
     But Trumpian thinking — and remember, his logic is not about perceiving reality, but obscuring it — dismisses this as just another opinion, and one from the mainstream media at that. (His whole lying media schtick is not based on any media lies, but on a kill-the-messenger attempt to shut up those pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.)

    To continue reading, click here.

No Royko

     On Friday, Mark Konkol wrote a column about "Out of the Wreck I Rise," and on Saturday Scott Simon featured it on NPR, and suddenly the book rose to No. 36 among top sellers on Amazon. OMFG, as the kids say. I wanted to link here to Mark's column, and link to Scott's interview. I figured I should also write something, though what I ended up with is only tangentially connected with either of these pieces. What's the connection? I suppose it's that I know both guys, and that their drawing attention to my book and me trying as a matter of policy not to be a jerk to colleagues, or at least my struggling to restrain my jerkish tendencies, are not unconnected.

     Mike Royko hated younger columnists, because he viewed them as competition. Which was silly, because they certainly were not competition, given the singular place he occupied—and occupies still, almost two decades after his death—at the summit of Chicago journalism. 
     Among the many blessings in my life is the insight that you don't have to try to be Mike Royko—some guys never grasped that, and their misfortune is on the page. When readers, as they sometimes do, write to snidely inform me that I'm no Mike Royko, I surprise them, I imagine, by thanking them, and pointing out that, given Royko was a mean drunk whose son ended up robbing a bank, not being Rokyo isn't the stark fate they imagine, certainly not as rough as being him seemed to be.
     It has also made me reflexively nice to new writers and reporters, because I remember the disappointment I had the handful of times I actually interacted with Royko, how I would have given anything for a kind word, and never got anything close. Just the opposite. Once he threatened to break my legs. Not in a joshing way, but as in an I'm-the-guy-who'll-break-y0ur-legs way. A story for another day.
     Trying to avoid that, I say hello to young reporters, compliment them on their writing when possible. Their good work doesn't diminish me, it enhances my experience as a reader and makes the profession we're all in more valuable. As I once told my late pal Jeff Zaslow, success is not a pie—your getting a bigger slice doesn't make my slice smaller. I'm glad there are so many good columnists in Chicago. Over at the Tribune, Eric Zorn, always a thoughtful and engaging writer, has been on fire since the advent of Trump. Lately, in my column, I'm torn between the need to raise the alarm and the need to comfort the alarmed, and when I'm doing the latter, I feel less guilty knowing that Eric's concentrating his fire on the target undistracted. Rick Kogan is the city made human flesh and among my most reliable friends—and, I should point out, someone who was very good friend of, and a golfing partner with, Royko, a reminder that Royko could be very kind to people who weren't me and frantic little would-be parvenues like me. Others at the Trib: Mary Schmich is ruminative, Rex Huppke often manages that toughest of tasks, to be genuinely funny. 
     How could admitting that be anything but a sign of confidence? There are more. At the Sun-Times, I appreciate Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, the obits of Maureen O'Donnell, the reviews of Richard Roeper, the celebrity insights of Bill Zwecker, Rick Telander in sports—I could go on and on, and hope my colleagues forgive me for not including them, but I have to think of the reader first, and lists tend to grow tiresome.
     I haven't even mentioned online. There are years when I turn my head and spit when speaking Robert Feder's name—he did once compare me to the lunatic Jay Mariotti, which is the height of unfairness—but he still owns the media beat, and if I walked past Tribune Tower and saw workmen tearing it down with crowbars I would hurry to Feder to find out What the Hell Just Happened. 
     Which leads to my former colleague, Mark Konkol, now at DNA Info, whom I remember back to when he was one of the youngsters on the staff at Red Streak, the free training wheels newspaper we rushed out, in a truly dramatic show of Front Page daring, to steal the thunder from the Tribune's new kiddie paper, Red Eye. Konkol had the fire—most people, even most reporters, just phone it in. You could just tell he wanted it, whatever it was. During the last mayoral election, he did a column—he was in Chuy Garcia's house, chatting with him, that I remember reading, and thinking, "Wow, that's how it's supposed to be done."
     Anyway, I haven't been able to hang with Mark as much as I'd like, since he's off scaling the heights of Hollywood, and several times I had to manfully suppress the urge to pick up the phone and snarl, "Where the fuck are you?" My patience was rewarded Friday, with Mark's spot-on column about my book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. I'll let you in on a secret. Sales are nice. But what an author really wants is for someone to Get It. And while the page 4 notice in the Sunday New York Times Book Review was nice, and the full page review in the Toronto Star was nice, those authors did not grasp the book in front of them. Especially the Star, whose review called the book "a pub crawl," which left me pounding the heel of my hand against my forehead.
    Mark got it. He really did. If you haven't seen his Friday column from DNA Info, here it is.  The only thing better than reading a really good column by a fellow columnist is reading a really good column by a fellow columnist about a book that you wrote and love. 

Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake

Proof that we not only talk the talk, we walk the walk: Eli's cheesecakes set out for Ross's high school graduation party.

    Howdy folks. Enjoying the blog? Good, good. Glad you like it. I certainly enjoy writing it.
    Although. One drawback of the quality journalism you've come to expect here is that people tend to start reading, immediately, just jump right on in, and then are carried away, rapt, into my column, and perhaps never notice the advertisement on the side.
    Can't blame them. There's only the one. But it is an important one.
    So I'd like to direct your attention to the left, to the new December ad by the blog's sponsor, Eli's Cheesecake. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the company site where you'll be able to order tasty, wholesome, nutritious Eli's cheesecake for yourself, your friends and your family.
    Why? Well, because it's delicious, for starters. But more than that. We live in perilous times. And as our nation deteriorates into a disordered, Manichean and uncivilized place, we are going to increasingly rely on the relief offered by basic creature comforts such as Eli's cheesecake. As difficult as it is to see Trump naming a Mardi Gras parade of fanatics, wash-outs and incompetents to his cabinet, as painful as it will be to see environmental regulations cast aside, Medicare gutted, and the civil liberties of Americans and hardworking immigrant residents ignored, the route ahead will be all the more challenging if there is nothing good in the house for dessert. The quality of our national discourse, our American pride and our cherished freedoms might slip, precipitously, but the quality of Eli's cheesecake? Never.
    So stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into by stunts such as talking to the Taiwanese president in contravention of 40 years of tradition. We might all be living on canned food and squirrels caught in snares in 2018. But right now you can survive on peppermint cheesecake — doesn't just the thought of that make the four-year infamy that our nation must endure just a little less of a doorjamb-gnawing flash of unspeakable woe?
    If not for yourself, think of your friends, perhaps in distant cities, still reeling at the stab to the soul that the past election represented, frightened folks whose bleak December days could be enlivened by a dark chocolate banana cheesecake from Eli's, or a salted caramel halavah cheesecake, or red velvet cheesecake.
    Wait. Back up. My God. Did I say salted caramel halavah cheesecake? I did. You've never had that in your life, have you? Admit it. You never even heard of it. But now that you have, you won't be able to get it out of your mind. Salted. Caramel. Halavah. Cheesecake.
    Though the enticing effect might be lessened among those who don't quite know what halavah is (fantastic candy made of ground sesame seeds adored by us swarthy Semitic tribes).  Just the thought of salted caramel halavah cheesecake is the spark relighting the beacon of hope that was recently extinguished by the political micturition of 60 million fellow citizens. America didn't reach this point by caving into tyrants, foreign OR domestic. We approach life with the same sense of possibility that lead us, in only 50 years, from the bland yellow disc of a Sara Lee cheesecake to the multi-cultural splendor and deliciousness of an Eli's Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake, which you can order right now by clicking here. Do it for yourself or, if not for yourself, for a friend or, if those two imposing beneficiaries don't shake open your wallet, do it for me. I write this stuff every day without asking you to do anything but read it and, now, to buy a cheesecake. For yourself. For a friend. Or hell, for me. Send me the Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake. 
    Because even if you can no longer rely on the president or the press, on Congress or the basic decency of your neighbors, this blog and Eli's cheesecake will never let you down. And that's something.

Rising of The Chicago Sun in 1941 casts shadows today

     

     The most surprising thing is how familiar it all feels.
     Not the cover price: 2 cents. Nor the mobs of Chicagoans who waited in the streets at midnight to throw their pennies at harried newsboys and strip bundles of newspapers off the trucks before they stopped rolling. Certainly not the mayor and the governor and the three newsreel cameras on hand to watch the presses roll.

The known world, according to Col .McCormick

     But 75 years ago this Sunday, when The Chicago Sun, the predecessor of this newspaper, hit the streets in the early hours of Dec. 4, 1941, war might have been raging from the British Isles to Moscow to Malaysia. But people were still people, Americans were still Americans, cynical, divided, contentious, patriotic, devious concerning what was not yet called The Mainstream Media, treating it as both quarterback and tackling dummy.
     The Sun was a paper with a purpose: to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his conviction that we had to get involved in a war that Americans wanted to avoid. A Gallup poll found 88 percent of Americans were against fighting the Nazis. What debate there was focused on how much we should help our allies and how prepared we should be -- half felt we needed to mobilize for the inevitable; the other half felt that doing so would only antagonize Mr. Hitler.
    In Chicago, Col. Robert McCormick ran his Tribune as the voice of isolation, a kind of 1940s Fox News. The Trib was "savage in its attacks upon all liberals and everyone with whom it disagreed" according to media critic Oswald Garrison Villard, who noted the Tribune endorsed the Klu Klux Klan while taking a dim view of these unwashed foreigners some thought we ought to  shed American blood to protect.
     "On international questions the Tribune has generally been cynical, reactionary, militaristic and jingo," Villard noted in 1943, explaining how McCormick's idea of sane foreign policy was to annex Mexico "without hesitation" in order to "impose our superior morality upon the Mexicans," and that a United Nations was unnecessary since other countries could merely join the U.S. as new states — white countries, of course.
     The Trib was only the most extreme of the four Chicago papers. At the august Daily News, the publisher, Frank Knox, backed the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee, a front group secretly backed by the German government, insisting, in a very Trumpian fashion, that European nations settle the $14 billion they still owed the U.S. from WWI before any further assistance was considered. The Chicago Times was a scrappy, pro-FDR tabloid, but considered a photo-driven lightweight. And the American was a Hearst rag obsessing over ax murders and love nests.
     Into this strode our unlikely hero, Marshall Field III. Inheritor of nearly $200 million in 1940 dollars, he had a 13,000-acre plantation in South Carolina, a six-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue, a summer home in Maine, a yacht, a third wife, and a guilty liberal conscience. In 1940, he founded PM, a New York city newspaper that raised eyebrows by being printed on quality paper stock and refusing to accept advertising.
     A newspaper needs a name, and a contest was held. The winner, Russell Trenholme, received $5,000 for "The Chicago Sun," explaining his entry: "When morning comes you look for two things to make your world right: you look for the sun and sunlight, and you look for your morning paper for the truth of what's going on in the world."
     The paper was greeted with delight in Washington. "Isn't this wonderful?" FDR gushed, waving a copy — and with fanatical opposition by the Trib, which not only threatened news vendors who dared carry it, but blackballed the Sun from joining the Associated Press, a case that went up to the Supreme Court.
     Others were less hostile, though noting that neither international news nor editorial direction were what made or broke a newspaper.
     "The future of the Chicago Sun might ultimately depend upon some little comic-strip twirp presenting as much nauseating morality . . . as Little Orphan Annie," Edwin A. Lahey wrote in the Daily News.
     That first issue sold 263,000 copies. Three days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That edition sold 896,000 copies, but the Sun's main reason for being vanished overnight, as the Tribune spun on a dime and was as enthusiastic for war as it had been for accommodating Hitler.
     The Sun soldiered on, though it never made money, a reminder that hard times in the newspaper business are not new either (the Villard quote comes from a 1943 book entitled "The Disappearing Daily"). The Sun merged with the Times early in 1948, making this paper, through its second bloodline, older than the Tribune, since the Times is a descendent of the Chicago Journal, founded in 1844.
     One more point before we let the Sun set for another 25 years.
     The headline on that first edition of the Sun, a broadsheet, was "REVOLT GROWS IN SERBIA."
     The Tribune's headline that day was: "F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS!"
     An isolationist Army captain had stolen contingency plans from the War Plans Division and passed them on to arch-isolationist Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, who gave them to the Tribune, which brandished them as "irrefutable evidence that that American intervention in the war was planned and imminent." The Germans adjusted their own strategy accordingly.
     Which eerily echoes WikiLeaks, with one very, very important distinction. After the war plans were published, the White House was asked what action would be taken against those publishing the state secrets.
     "Your right to print the news is, I think, unchallenged and unquestioned," White House press secretary Stephan Early said. "It depends entirely on the decision of the publisher and editor whether publication is patriotic or treasonable."

Coercion won't create respect for Old Glory

     

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, July 4, 2009

     There is sincere debate whether Donald Trump goes on these Twitter rants because he lacks impulse control, or as a fiendishly clever ploy to distract the media from his more significant lapses. 

     I vote for the former. Donald Trump is many things, but a genius he is not. Nor is he disciplined. He manipulates the media merely by being who he is, not by pretending to be who he's not.  To suspect otherwise is to confuse result with intent. The media loses focus on what's significant—assuming anything matters at this point, which might be a false assumption—the way a dog is distracted by a darting squirrel. It isn't as if the squirrel darts for the purpose of catching the attention of dogs. 
     Not that you can blame the media too much for noticing what the president-elect says. His suggestion that flag burners lose their citizenship or go to jail is jaw-dropping, or would be, if our jaws weren't already lolling on the floor. We settled this issue years ago. I don't even have to write about it anymore. But it is an interesting issue; here's a column nearly two decades old. 

     In Boy Scouts, they teach you the flag rules. How to hoist a flag. How to lower it and fold it so it doesn't touch the ground.
     The rules are based purely on respect. If the tip of the flag touches the ground, they don't kick you out of scouting. That would be dumb.
     This is the only way the rules could work. If failing to properly fold the flag into a little triangle could get you sent to jail, nobody would touch a flag. And anyway, there is no coercion necessary. You honor the flag, willingly, because it is the right thing to do.
     This isn't enough for some people, apparently. Honor is a delicate idea, and they would rather put some muscle behind it, to nab the few deviants who don't follow along. It is a craven and cowardly way to think.
     But popular. Last week, 310 Congressboobs in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to belch forth yet another proposed flag amendment to the Constitution, to punish those who "desecrate" the flag.
     The showboat patriots and fascist wannabes let out a whoop, while those who cherish American ideals dropped their heads in shame and prayed for the Senate to bail us out, again, just as it did two years ago.
     Supporters of this bill are like the men who, wanting to be admired by their wives, go home and say, "Honey, show me respect or I'll belt you in the mouth." That's one way to do it, but odds are it won't raise their status at home and most likely will hurt it.
     Every statement made by supporters of the flag amendment disintegrates when reason is applied to it.
     "It is an act of contempt," said Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.). "Flag burning is no more free speech than a child's temper tantrum."
     Exactly. And a child's temper tantrum is free speech. Only an idiot would try to ban them. First, because such a ban wouldn't prevent a single child from throwing a fit in the supermarket when Mom won't buy fudge Pop-Tarts.
     And second, there isn't a problem. Tantrums are a speck in the fabric of life, momentarily embarrassing but without lasting consequence.
     Ditto for flag burners. A tiny, pathetic handful of unwashed radicals burn flags, to show that they've never been abroad and don't realize what a wonderful country this is. It is such a rarity that, when TV grabbed for clips of flag burning last week, half of them were in black and white.
     So, the geniuses behind this flag amendment suggest, to solve this non-crisis, we're going to mess with the Constitution. To fiddle with something so important over a triviality boggles the mind — it's like having your garage door opener implanted in your chest, next to your heart, so you don't lose it.
     Why not legislate against bad breath? Write a constitutional amendment barring hairy fat men from wearing strap T-shirts. They're objectionable, too, and far more common than flag burners.
     This amendment isn't American. Burn a flag in Saudi Arabia, and they might cut your hands off. Burn a flag in China and you might never get out of prison. Are their flags grander than ours, because we protect ours only with an intangible such as respect? I don't think so.
     Freedom is a mixed blessing, but it beats the alternative. As bad as it is to find a wad of Doublemint stuck to your shoe, it is worse to live in Singapore, where the jackboot "democracy" bans chewing gum.
     The worst thing about this bill is that its only result will be a spate of flag burnings. People who would never dream of burning a flag — myself included — will wonder if perhaps their patriotic duty now demands them to take the extreme step, lest some other form of speech be banned next year.
     That's why I'm grateful for the idea suggested by my friend John Scalzi, the resident wit at America Online. He reacted to the last flag amendment by proposing to market a flag with 49 stars and call it I Can't Believe It's Not the American Flag. That way, people could protest the law by burning this near-flag while not forced to burn a real one.
     Would burning a Not the American Flag be a crime? It isn't the flag, because it's one star short. But it would look very much like the flag. Once it was on fire, nobody would count the stars and the message still would get across.
     The beauty of the Not the American Flag concept is that it shows the moral emptiness of this proposed flag amendment, the idiocy of those who argue that burning a flag isn't speech, protected by law.
     The U.S. flag is not an object with 50 stars. It isn't a thing, but rather an idea. It's the idea behind a flag that makes people upset when flags burn; not the cloth, not the stars.
     What the dolts in Congress don't realize is that you cannot burn an idea. America is fireproof. You can't diminish her with a match.
     This isn't the first time people have eroded liberties in the name of freedom. In the 1950s, we were so afraid of the Soviets, we imposed Soviet-style repression to combat them. As if we already had been conquered.
     It was shameful then, and even more shameful now, since we aren't faced with a powerful enemy. Just ourselves, and the truth that there are people who hate their own country and feel the need to denounce it. A hundred new amendments to the Constitution won't change that.
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 15, 1997

 

"You shall not follow the masses in doing evil."

     Bigotry is bad but not for the reason people assume — or not just for that reason. It isn't bad merely because innocent people are harmed by the irrational hatreds carried around by the prejudiced and by the random cruelties those hatreds inspire.
     Bigotry also harms the bigot, since it is a form of ignorance, a misapprehension of the world. They see not what is in front of them, but what is in front of them filtered through the distorting lens of the disdain they grew up with or slid into. Their world is colored not by what's before their eyes but by the jumbled mess behind them.
     So they make mistakes.
     For instance: eliminating the DREAM Act, which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to do on his first day as president — Jan. 21, for those keeping track. That would keep up to 5 million young Americans off the path to success, in school and employment, for a very Third Reich reason: because their papers aren't in order. It will, of course, hurt them, making their lives harder, more complicated, more anxious. It would also hurt the country. A country which, contrary to the bigot's skewed perspective, is not burdened by foreigners but benefits from them. A country that needs every capable person it can get its hands on. Otherwise we end up like Japan, in a demographic death spiral.
     Cutting off your nose to spite your face is a hallmark of bigots. The classic example is after courts ordered public pools integrated in the 1960s, Southern towns closed their pools, even filling them in with dirt rather than risk whatever horror was supposed to come from letting blacks into the pool — interracial dating, I suppose.
     That's the bad news. The good news, if any news can be considered good in this perilous moment of our national saga, is that, because of their myopia, bigots screw up and overlook important considerations....

To continue reading, click here.

Give to The Night Ministry

     Our Illinois leaders have been trying to balance the state financial crisis on the backs of the poor and disabled, which means cuts for vital social services and long waits for charitable groups to get paid.  I don't support many social services, but The Night Ministry is different: they are the last defense, the final safety net between Chicagoans who have nothing and utter misery. It provides the most basic needs: food, water, medical attention.

     November 29 has been dubbed "Giving Tuesday" and I hope you will consider visiting The Night Ministry's Giving Tuesday page and making a donation.  

    I already have, and it feels good. This is a time when individual participation is even more important. The situation is only going to get worse as a particularly heartless and brutal form of Republicanism takes over in Washington. How many homeless people have you passed by where you wanted to give them money, but weren't sure it would help them? Money given to The Night Ministry directly benefits homeless people, particularly LGBTQ youth, who are especially vulnerable, as outlined in this story from 2012.

     It's 9 p.m., and 26 young men and women have shown up at the Crib, a shelter for homeless youth in the Lake View Lutheran Church at Addison and Halsted.
     Which is a problem, since there is space for only 20 foam mattresses on the floor of the cinderblock community room where they will sleep.
     "Most nights we're full," says Nate Metrick, the Crib coordinator. "Especially in winter, we're pretty much full every night."
     Or in spring when it feels like winter — it's 42 degrees outside tonight. So staff from the Night Ministry, the nonprofit organization that runs the shelter, along with many other outreach services, feeding and providing for Chicago's downtrodden, does what they are forced to do most cold nights: turn people away.
     "There's a lot of you here tonight," announces staffer Hope Benson, after quieting down the commotion. "We start a new intake process today. When I came outside I noticed there was a lot of running. There's no need to run. Intake is between 8:45 and 9 o'clock. You can be here between that time and we'll still let you in. Okay? If there's more than 20 people, then we're going to do a lottery, like we're going to do now."
     There is a burst of protest, excited conversation and drama, with nearly everyone speaking at once.
     "Yesterday was first come/first serve," says one. "What happened?" "This is messed up!" says another.
     They are black, white, Hispanic, male, female. All under the age of 24. They sit on chairs, stand against walls, slump on the floor, their possessions piled around them.
     Darnell, a powerfully built 19-year-old with aqua-painted fingernails, clutches a pink stuffed monkey to his chest. "This is J-Moe," he says. About 70 percent of the youth who stay at the Crib are gay, lesbian or transgender, and there is a direct connection between homosexuality and homelessness among the young.
     "Youth are coming out at a much younger age — 12, 13," says Paul Hamann, the Night Ministry's CEO and president. "Youth see society being more accepting and are willing to come out early, but the family might not be ready for that, which sometimes puts their housing in danger. It's a little paradoxical."
     Nor does anyone have an idea how many homeless youth are in Chicago or in the country. "There are no numbers out there," Hamann says.
     Benson draws slips of paper out of a white plastic bucket and reads off 20 names or nicknames: John. Phillip. Diggie. Romeo. Izzy. Desiree. Darnell. Ryan. Dee. Temper. Knox. Cory. Conrad. Red. Dan. Leo. Homary, Dougie. Adrianne. Cain."
     "Can I say something please?" says Leo, 19, standing up. "Motherfuckers who have somewhere to go, who think the Crib is just a hangout spot, get the fuck out, because there are people who really need this place. I'm just saying. You all being selfish."
     A common complaint: Other people don't need it but I do. Also theft.
     The six whose names don't get picked get CTA cards with $2.50 — one fare — on them, and they're lucky to get that; somebody has to donate the cards to the Crib, which began as a pilot program with the city of Chicago in January 2011, ran for four months, was closed, then re-opened in September. Its future is uncertain.
     "We are trying to come up with additional funds to keep it open year-round in a very, very tough funding environment," says Hamann. (The Crib receives donations at the Night Ministry, 4711 N. Ravenswood, 60640, or at thenightministry.org).
     The fare cards are last-resort housing. "Most homeless people, at night time they sleep on the train," explains Conrad Burnett, 22, who sometimes does that. "It's an hour and half, two hours from 95th to Howard, back and forth and back and forth. It's warm on the train. You get used to it, sitting up sleeping. You gotta hold all your bags. They'll cut your pants and take what's in your pockets. They took my shoes one time."
     Though warm, a night on the train isn't an appealing prospect.
     "I have nowhere to go!" complains Tobias, 22, a muscular young man with a slight beard and an earring. Homeless almost a year, he stops at the door to argue, loud and long — they shouldn't use the lottery, they should keep the old system. "You knew I was here!" he shouts over staffers. "No! No! You're not listening to what I'm saying! The first 20 who got in are the first 20 who are supposed to stay in!"
     "We only have 20 spots," says Benson, explaining the need for a change. "People push past others. It's dangerous. People get hurt."
     Getting nowhere, Tobias kicks angrily at the crash bar on the door. It locks behind him and he is standing on Addison Street, holding a bag of pumpkin seeds.
     "I don't know what I'm going to do," he says.
     Joddy, 18, kisses her boyfriend, Dougie, 24, hard, then quietly leaves — he was picked; she wasn't. She walks a block west, uses her fare card to get into the Addison Street L station, where she stands on the platform, a slight girl in a red-plaid hooded sweatshirt, pressing herself against the wall, looking scared.
     "What am I going to do?" she cries, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I don't know where to go."
     She won't say why she's homeless. "That's confidential to me."
     Nor will she risk riding the 'L' all night. She's done that before.
     "It's sometimes dangerous, especially if you're a girl," she says. "There's a lot of guys, who'll just hit on you. It's dangerous. It's not easy. You get scared, because it's late, and you don't know where to go."
     Joddy grew up in Humboldt Park. "I'm mixed, I'm a lot of races — Native American, Puerto Rican, Irish." She has been homeless since she was 16 and went to Evanston Township High School. "I couldn't finish. I had to drop out," she says.
     She insists that she and her boyfriend watch out for each other. "We have each other's back." But she couldn't let him pass up his spot at the Crib to stick with her on the streets. "He can't — I can't let him do that," she says. "He suffers more than I do."
     So what is she going to do?
     "I don't know. Walk down North Avenue. It's actually a lot safer there than a lot of places.... I tend to walk a lot. Every day. Once I walked almost eight miles."
     She talks about the various Northside youth services and shelters she uses, and how homeless youth are sometimes treated.
     "I been in Chicago my whole life, and I've been growing up around here, and I've grown up to see everything," she says. "I'm a very observant person. I see everything. I don't have to say anything. But I see it. And I see how they disrespect everybody. Everybody who doesn't look rich or doesn't have class."
     She has ambitions. "I'm a really good artist. I can draw," she says, hoping to be "an artist maybe, a comic book artist." But she sees how she and her friends are viewed by many in society.
    "Homeless people are human too," she says. "We got lives, too. Just 'cause you have money in your pocket, just 'cause you have clothes on your back and a job doesn't mean that you can go ahead and say that a person's not human. That person has feelings, too. That person went through bullshit too. We went through abuse. We went through all this shit, and you know why? Because it's people that hurt people. It's not people who do this to themselves. Especially the young ones, who don't even deserve this. And that's coming out from some real experiences of my own. You can't just say people are not people because they don't have anything. Nobody has everything in the world. Nobody is perfect."
    The train arrives. "Belmont is next" the canned voice calls. "Doors open on the right at Belmont." She walks onto the train and is gone.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 30, 2012

C'mon, pitch in, I can't buy presents for ALL these kids!

  

     Modesty demands that we truly generous individuals refrain from bragging about our good works. So I've never written about founding the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust's "Letters to Santa" program, nor about my purchasing countless presents for Chicago children, nor about prodding my reluctant colleagues to get off their kiesters and pitch in which, to their credit, they generally do, eventually.
     But it's a big city, and we need help. Last year the program gave more than 10,000 children Christmas presents. I can't buy them all. So while I'm gathering gifts for the, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six ... 27 needy kids I've taken under my wing this year, I'm hoping that you'll pause from staring, stupefied with distress, at the day's political headlines and make Christmas brighter for just one child who, believe it or not, has it tougher than you do.
     Oh, that isn't true. Well, the getting gifts for 10,000 kids part is, as well as the hoping you'll join part.
     Otherwise, for the record, a) I did not start the Letters to Santa Program. b) My colleagues leap to help, far quicker than I do. And c) it's a big deal for me to buy a few gifts for one child, never mind tackle 27.
     But I figured, blatant lies are in vogue. If Donald Trump can hold a gala promising veterans millions of dollars, ballyhooing his supposed generosity, then fail to cough up a dime of his own until the lying media points out the lapse, and almost half the country votes for him anyway, then why not puff myself up as a philanthropist? Worrying about the actual truth has become an antique pastime, like churning butter.

To continue reading, click here.

Sweet gratitude

      Thanksgiving's over—it really worked at the old Steinberg household this year. About two dozen people, including two I'd never met before, a friend of a relative and a friend of a friend of a relative. I love that. It makes me feel like Papa Hemingway, to have this big old house filled with people, talking and eating and drinking and laughing. 
    Sure, we were all a little shell-shocked over the past election. But not too much. I latched onto a Comforting Historical Fact: the election of Lyndon B. Johnson as president in 1964 more or less doomed 50,000 American servicemen to die in Vietnam. Only nobody knew it, then, and we don't really view it that way now. And Johnson was a pretty good president, and Nixon, Watergate notwithstanding, is credited with going to China and such, and neither man is blamed for this incredible loss of young American life over a fear that did not prove valid. 
    At least with Trump, we have eyes wide open—goggled-eyed in sheer amazed horror, maybe. But certainly forewarned, for all the good that will do. 
     Though let's not get lost in the political weeds today. I really wanted to talk about thanks, giving thanks, not just to God or some unspecified good providence, but to specific people. I was so occupied trying to set the proper It's-still-a-country-worth-giving-thanks-for-even-if-we-elected-a-boob tone when I gave my speech of thanks, I forgot to thank my wife, who worked for three days preparing the feast. Sorry honey. Though I suspect that is a common oversight—we're so worked up over the big picture we forget to focus on the important stuff right in front of us. 
    So if you are having a hard time in the year to come—as I imagine most thinking, caring, patriotic Americans might—considering making yourself feel better by thanking somebody.
    In words, if nothing else. But also consider a more tangible thanks. During the two years my co-author Sara Bader and I were locking down legal permissions for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the mountain of paperwork, the contracts and rights payments, were handled by Rodney Powell at the University of Chicago Press. It really was our responsibility, but he just stepped in and gave us a hand. So Sara and I tried to express our gratitude in a tangible way, by dispatching brownie hearts from Misericordia's Hearts & Flour Bakery, and sour cream coffee cake from Zingerman's and macarons from Botega Louie in Los Angeles.  I can't speak for how it made him feel, but it made me very happy.  I came to think of it as "Dispatching the Gratitude Sweets."

Young Charles Percy

    Not to forget our holiday advertiser, now in its fourth season on Everygoddamnday, Eli's Cheesecake. I have a reader who points out typos almost every single day, and as thanks I offered to send him a cheesecake. He demurred, but asked instead that I send it to his grandson in Seattle, Charles Percy, great-grandson of our late senator of the same name. So I sent the lad a cake.
      I don't know how this world is supposed to be, but if even a tiny part of it involves babies being dispatched cheesecake by grateful strangers in distant cities as thanks for their grandfather's grammatical and orthographic skills, well, that's getting to be the sort of world that meets my approval. 
    What if you have nobody to thank? That is a puzzlement. Maybe you aren't thinking hard enough. Maybe you need to expand the range of ideas that can be conveyed with sweets—they're also great at apology. I wrote something unfair about a neighbor last month, and decided to deliver my apology note in one of BasketWorks gift baskets, which seemed a sign of sincerity, and was gratefully accepted as such. Dispatching the basket was one of the highlights of an otherwise dismal year. 
     And if you have nobody to thank, and nobody to apologize to? That is worrisome. Maybe you need to send the basket to yourself. 

Being white helps ... a lot.

Kevin Lavin at Guildhaus

     The complex, unvarnished truth and a feel-good finish are enemies. Which is why sometimes space limitations can be a reader's friend, if not a writer's.
     Earlier this week, when I finished saying all I wanted to say about my interview with Kevin Lavin, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict and the executive director at Guildhaus, the Blue Island halfway house, I had a column 1,300 words long—the length of a two-page spread. Knowing that would probably never happen, I cut it back to 940 words and hoped it might get squeezed onto a page on Wednesday. But my bosses wanted to save it for Page Two Friday, meaning it had to be 700 words long, which is how long the finished column ran.
      When you have to cut a piece of writing that much, you lose nuance. Tales of Guidlhaus' colorful founder, Jack King, for instance, or how difficult a heroin habit was to overcome: an average of five rehab stays and 10 detoxes, according to Lavin. Didn't make the final cut, because I had to preserve the thrust of the story—Lavin's dramatic flight from the cops, and the caring officer who was more interested in helping than busting him.
     You also lose entire avenues of thought. As soon as Lavin started telling me about phoning his guardian police officer every Thanksgiving, I knew that would be my hook for the holiday. But I also had a qualm, which I raised even as he was praising the police officer.
     "...every Thanksgiving I call him," Lavin said. "He's just a great guy. He didn't charge me for fleeing and eluding. He had me for four or five felonies. He threw the drugs out I had."
     "Why do you think he did that?" I asked.
    "Because he saw me as a human being that was hurting. He saw me as a father and a decent guy. This guy stayed and talked to me for 13 hours. We talked about life."
     I couldn't resist: "And being white helped."
     Lavin, plain-spoken and not one to mince words, didn't argue.
    "If I were a black guy, I'd be in the system still," he said. 

Kevin Lavin

    Later in the conversation, the subject came back up, again discussing the heroin epidemic. 

     "We're finally coming to attention, prevention, and not detention," he said.
     "And a reason for that is it's happening to white kids in the suburbs," I pointed out.
     "It's the only fucking reason," Lavin said. "Because Tommy who lives in Orland in a $3 million house, got caught. Tommy ain't going to jail. He's going to get bought out. But if it's Lil' Tommy in Englewood, he's going to jail because he doesn't have the measly thousand dollars to bond himself out. It's insane."
    To be honest, that was not quite the "It's a Wonderful Life" ending I had hoped for. But it seemed too true to leave out.  "Insane" was the word. 
    But we weren't getting to 699 words with it there. So I cut it, feeling bad about polishing reality to perhaps too bright a sheen. And I felt worse when the most common reader reaction was celebrating seeing a story that paints cops in a positive light, often from readers pausing first to point out how they never read me because of my blistering biases but had somehow stumbled upon this column anyway and were pleased to see me straying into the realm of reality as they understood it.

     "The policeman in Alsip upheld his oath to serve and protect by giving a young man a 2nd chance by analyzing the situation and realizing that by intervening he could do more by counseling him then charging him," a reader in Homewood observed. "I always believed that the main issue with crime is not race but relationships between police and the public.
     Which is not what this episode, laid out in full, really illustrates. Kevin Lavin's police officer savior certainly deserves praise. But he isn't evidence the system works. The bad thing isn't that Kevin Lavin was treated as a person and given a break. The bad thing is that guys with black skin, guys who are as human as Kevin Lavin but who find themselves in crisis, often don't get that kind of break. They get a bullet. 

    

Giving thanks to the cop who didn't shoot

Kevin Lavin, Executive Director of Guildhaus in Blue Island; above him is a photo of founder Jack King.

     Everyone has a Thanksgiving tradition: the kindergarten crayon hand outline turkey decorations, the touch football game in a nearby field. Me, I made my famous challah stuffing, a big warm pan of savory comfort. It was a hit, as always.
     And Kevin Lavin called the cops, as he has every Thanksgiving Day for the past 13 years.
     Not just any cops; one particular Alsip police officer named . . . well, I can't say, for reasons that will become clear.

Guildhaus is next door to the Maple Tree Inn,
a popular Blue Island bar

  Lavin is the executive director of Guildhaus, a Blue Island residential treatment center for recovering alcoholics and addicts — or, lately, make that for recovering addicts and alcoholics, as the heroin epidemic has flipped the recovery world around.
     "Things have changed," says Lavin, sitting in his office at Guildhaus, in the shadow of Western Avenue, across from the Cal-Sag Channel. "From 1987 to 1995, there were alcoholics, for the most part, a little cocaine. From '95 to 2002 it was crack cocaine. Insane. A few alcoholics here and there. Now my demographic is heroin addicts: 80 percent. You know where they're from? Everywhere. Not the picture you think: 22 to 28, from well-to-do families, good families."

To continue reading, click here.

Members of the Guildhaus have their own coffee mugs.

Family: Thanksgiving's mixed blessing

     This Thanksgiving is going to be a strange one. Then again, they're always strange ones. I dug back into the closet for this chestnut from 1998 because, well, I didn't feel like writing anything. Try not to fight about politics. We always go around my Thanksgiving table and give thanks, and while I typically go last, this year I'm going first, to set the tone, because I don't want a bunch of pouty faces giving thanks that they live in a country that would clamp its eyes shut and elect a fraud and a liar who is going to take us on a tour of the darkest regions of the American nightmare. 
    None of that! I'm going to start by saying that I'm thankful that I live in the United States of America, a great country where the people living there always, always, always had to struggle to see who gets to steer. A country that is not great because it never erred, never went sailing off into the deep weeds, as it has done now. But stayed great because we always found a way back. We survived the Civil War and the Red Scare. We'll survive this, and for that I am thankful in advance. 

     Maybe the whole Thanksgiving feast is a bribe. That wonderful home-baked turkey? Bribe. The savory fresh stuffing? Bribe. The pies? Bribe.
     Why else is this particular feast denied to us all year long? Why, if a friend served you that same menu in August, would you find it very strange?
     The reason, perhaps, is that it would be puncturing the longed-for prod that gets us moving, almost unwilling (and in some cases, definitely unwillingly), toward home.
     Going home is often hard. That's worth saying despite all of the opposing hype, the smarmy TV ads showing joyous embraces at airports, happy shouts of welcome ringing out in the crisp New England air.
     Nice work if you can get it. If that's you this season, if you are reading this at the airport, tapping the crystal of your watch and wishing the minutes would go by so you can find yourself again in the warm soup of love that is your family -- well, then count yourself among the blessed. You have more than just turkey to be thankful for.
     If that isn't you, don't feel like a freak. Lots of people are in the same boat. Almost everyone I know returns to their families with a certain hesitation, like a person reaching into a dark space to see if there are snakes.
     Me, I've been lucky these past 15 years to go to Thanksgiving at my in-laws in Skokie, who actually do have one of those Kodak home-for-the-holidays clans, with everybody going around the table and saying why they are thankful, and no ugly episodes to regret, and no misbehaving black sheep to worry about.
     Unless that's me. I sometimes worry that I'm the scary uncle, frightening my nieces by quizzing them about school, exhibiting a little too much gusto at the feast and a little too much interest in the wine, then sprawling on the sofa, flushed and sated and slightly grotesque.
     I hope not. I remember that sort of uncle from my own Grim Thanksgivings Past, heaping Cool Whip on his pumpkin pie while his soon-to-be-ex-wife gave him a look that would bore a hole through a steel plate.
     Am I the only person who, even in happy times, feels the need to grope back toward dismal Thanksgivings past?
     There was one classic Thanksgiving of Doom I remember, cringing, every year.
     My Grandma Sarah had just died. She was the star around whom the solar system of my own family revolved. She had always made the feast. She served it. You could barely get her to sit down. My mother and her sisters would beg her, "Mother! Mother, sit down!" But she would keep bustling until, it seemed, someone grabbed her and held her in her chair.
     The year she died, the star went out, and the planets just flew off into space. There was one disastrous attempt, by my mother, at a Thanksgiving. It was like a horror movie. My central memory of that meal is the sound of clicking silverware punctuating the oppressive silence. Every now and then, someone would lob an attempt at conversation, but it would disappear into the heavy mist.
     What's important to remember this time of year is that things change, from good to bad and back again. If you are not having the best Thanksgiving, if you are reading this to drown out the argument in the next room, have hope. Who knows what a year will bring? Next year could find you in that happy place you've always wanted to be.
     Or if you are one of the lucky ones, enjoying the dream Thanksgiving we all want to enjoy, then I'll tell you what I do at every Thanksgiving dinner.  
     I wait until all the ingredients are assembled on the plate -- the turkey, the stuffing, the sweet potatoes, the cranberry sauce. I gaze down at the plate, then around at each of the faces at the table, hard, trying to fix them in my mind, to remind myself that they're here, and I'm here.
     And then I give thanks.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 26, 1998.