Shedd fish food for thought

 © Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

     Today is my 30th anniversary on staff at the Sun-Times. Last year, I marked the day by posting a favorite story, and I think I'll continue that tradition.
     Though it does seem an apt moment to pause and ponder: 30 years at the paper. Quite a lot really. How did that happen? Just lucky, I guess. The opportunity arose, I gave it a try, and kept beavering away while the industry fell apart around me. Kind of like Sweet Pea crawling through a clangorous construction site in a "Popeye" cartoon. Whenever I got to the end of one girder, another arrived and swept me to safety.
     It's a good job—work at something I enjoy, with like-minded professionals, generally, plus good pay and benefits. Old salts rhapsodizing their own careers tend to overlook the latter, as if it's beneath notice. It's not. When my side of the political spectrum is ululating in horror at our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump—how, HOW could they do that?—I try to remind myself that I am employed, have been for decades, that whenever I jam my hand into my pocket there is money there, and how very, very disturbing it would be for me if that were not the case.  
     Still, working in the same place for nearly a third of a century can seem timidity. In my defense, I took some breaks. A year when Ross was born; three months for Kent. A few months to visit my brother in Japan. A few for a book. Some time for rehab. Close to two years away, total, which I think is beneficial in any career. Didn't earn as much as would be the case had I never stepped away, but I had a better life.
    Nor did I cling desperately to the job. I kept my eyes open. I did quit once, handing my polite resignation letter to the editor-in-chief. But he talked me off the ledge.
     I went in at 26 and now I'm 56. My whole life only to find myself on the downward slope. But not, I believe, coasting. Not yet gone too far into decay. Still pedaling hard. 
     Regrets? I am in no way a Big Cheese. No $20,000 Clarence Page speaking gigs in Paris. I bet that's nice. I would have liked to been a George Will-like player for a while, my face set in a mask of self-importance, striding into the White House to canoodle the president.  
     But as T.S. Eliot said, "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." I never phoned it in. This work was always important, to me if to nobody else. It was what I wanted to do with my life and I did it, and it was fun, and I like to think I was good at it, and am still good at it. The Trump enormity reminds us that this stuff is important, or can be, if people only pay attention to it.
     I didn't write to cause change, which is good, because I didn't. My highest goal is to hold the interest of readers, and I think I do that. To think about life, and sniff out compelling facts. An ideal story, in my eyes, has three things: a good lede, a few astounding facts, a few strong quotes. This story has all three. A concise, surprising start. One of the favorite facts of my career—what the Shedd Aquarium uses to make seawater. The "oh wow" moment when I noticed the big boxes of the stuff. And the ending quote, I'm proud of drawing that line out of her. 
    And I'm also proud of how the story came about. It didn't arrive as a press release. It was my idea. I had to badger the Shedd. The notion that someone would write about how they feed fish, well, it just didn't scan.  "Most people can't keep a goldfish alive" "I implored. "You feed tens of thousands of fish every day." Eventually, over years, I wore them down, or more likely just found the right person to ask, and someone relented, allowing me to look behind the scenes. The Sun-Times gave it the space it required, and played it prominently—pages 2 and 3.
    Anyway, to the story. Thanks for reading these past 30 years. I think I have another decade left in me. I hope you stick around.

© Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

     Fish eat fruit. And vegetables. Some do anyway. Lungfish nibble lettuce. Stingrays eat their peas, though floating peas will clog a tank's filter if you're not careful. The Shedd Aquarium goes through about 4 tons of fruit and vegetables a year.
     Aquatic creatures have a range of surprising eating habits — some turtles like bananas. If you asked which eats more, an 80-pound sea otter or a 2,000-pound whale, most people would probably guess the whale — much bigger — and they would be wrong. It's the otter. Otters have no blubber, and thus must consume a quarter of their body weight every day to stay alive.
     When you think of feeding fish, what do you imagine? Tapping a small canister of dried fly flakes over Goldie's bowl? Just doing that can be enough of a challenge. What must it be like to feed the roughly 32,500 animals housed at the Shedd Aquarium? Seven days a week, 365 days a year?
     How do they do that?
     "Everything is compartmentalized," said Michelle Sattler, the Shedd's collections manager. "We have reptiles, birds, mammals, invertebrates, fish. We have everything." (People might forget the Shedd's birds: 20 penguins, plus two owls and two hawks).
     Sattler's particular responsibility is the Caribbean Reef, a 90,000-gallon tank housing hundreds of fish, from 60-pound stingrays to butterflyfish weighing a few ounces. Divers go into the reef to feed the fish, which I always thought was purely for show, but has a practical purpose — some fish are aggressive and territorial, and if aquarium personnel just dumped food into the top of the tank, as with goldfish, half of the fish would starve to death while the other half got fat.
     Yes, fish can get fat. That's why the Shedd keeps track of what many animals in its care eat, particularly larger species, and uses clickers to train some fish to eat on cue.
     Piscine competitiveness makes hand-feeding less fun than it looks — it isn't all floating around and answering tourists' questions. Divers can get beaten up by hungry rays.
     "The stingrays in the Caribbean Reef, they're big and they're strong and they can be bullyish," said Sattler. "They weigh 60, 70 pounds and they can push you around, if they feel like they can get away with it."
     What else do fish eat? Just about everything. The Shedd uses 100,000 crickets a year. Plus tons of a seafood gel. Then there's regular seafood — the Shedd buys a quarter million pounds of restaurant-grade seafood each year — shrimp, herring, squid, mullet, mackerel. The staff checks over every last smelt in the Shedd's five kitchens.
     "We have a crew that start at 5 a.m. We do a quality sort that usually takes four hours," said Madelynn Hettiger, senior trainer, of the marine mammal department. "We look through every single fish, to check for missing eyeballs, to see there are no tears or breaks in the skin, no freezer burns" (important because bacteria that could harm the Shedd's fish could settle in the cuts).
     If you've ever grumbled about the admission price at the Shedd ­— and who hasn't, with an adult pass being $28.95? ­— think of those ravenous sea otters.
     "It costs more to feed five sea otters than all the animals in the oceanarium combined," said Hettiger.
     Increasingly over the past decade, the Shedd raises its own food for its animals.
     "If we can grow our food here, we do," said Mark Schick, manager of special exhibits. "There are several advantages ­— one, we know we always have it." Which isn't always the case when grub is jetted in. The Shedd has had some nervous moments in the past due to shipping snafus, suddenly out-of-business fisheries and the occasional gulf hurricane. It isn't as if you can serve your sea lion a few TV dinners while waiting for FedEx to track down that shipment.
     "If you want to get a cheeseburger, there are many places out there," said Schick. "If you want mysid shrimp, there are very few places out there."
     Thus hidden from visitor view, in low spaces behind the tanks, is a burgeoning effort to raise food — water fleas, crayfish, rotifers — for the Shedd's collection.
     "It's far less expensive to grow food here than to ship it priority overnight," said Schick.
     Living food is necessary, because some fish will eat only moving food and won't touch prepared food. They also have to raise food to feed the food that feeds the fish. That explains the 24 bubbling gallon bottles of algae, the various shades of green denoting degrees of maturation. (The Shedd also makes its own sea water using — what else? — crates of Instant Ocean, "The World's No. 1 Sea Salt.")        

     One mainstay of the Shedd food program has an unexpected nostalgia connection — mysid shrimp — which have the benefit of being able to stay alive in suspended animation until needed and mixed with water, a talent developed in dry African lake beds, which gave them a passing fame under a different name in the back of comic books.
     "Sea Monkeys," said Schick. "Remember when you were a kid?" He feeds the quarter-inch-long brine shrimp — which, contrary to the comic illustration, do not have faces or hands, but look like tiny translucent grains of rice — to the Shedd's sea horse and sea dragon collection.
     "If we were buying them, it would be hundreds of dollars a week," said Schick. "Raising them is a fraction of that."
     As with most people, fish crave variety in their diets.
     "Salads are great for you, but you don't want salad every day," said Schick. "With fish, it's the same way. We like to spice up their diet and enrich them with living moving targets." Sometimes food is frozen into ice blocks, or tucked inside feeder balls, just to keep it interesting.
     As much a routine as feeding fish at the Shedd is, as with human food, there is an aspect to feeding that transcends the physical. The staff, which sometimes names the fish under their care, develops attachments to certain fish and demonstrates those attachments through food.
     "I have a fish that, for me, is very coveted," said Sattler, who has been at the Shedd for 14 years. "It's a beautiful little fish, When I took the exhibit over there was one individual of this specifies, I saw it, it was smaller, hanging out in the corner, I asked, 'What is that fish?' They said, 'That's a boga.' It's beautiful."
     She encouraged the Shedd to collect more bogas.
     "I have a group of them, kind of like my babies," she said. "Even though the exhibit gets fed four times a day, I like to go up to the top and sprinkle food for them."
     Because you love them?
     "Yes," she said. "Because I love them."

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 3, 2013

© Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

Pablo Neruda, your guide to the Home + Housewares Show

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     "Amo las cosas loca, locamente," Pablo Neruda writes. "I have a crazy, crazy love of things."     

     Me too. So I seldom miss the International Home + Housewares Show, which ended its four-day run at McCormick Place on Tuesday. No one tells me to go; I just do, for the joy of wandering around, checking on old favorites — Igloo is 70 years old, and now sells coolers lit from within by LED bulbs. Noticing new trends: everything is organic, or else silicone.
     The show is so vast — 2,200 exhibitors, 62,000 attendees — it helps to have a plan to approach all these sponges, buckets, hangers, trash baskets. The great Chilean poet's "Ode to Common Things," a series of 25 poems lauding commonplace objects, sounds as good as any. The Nobel laureate begins with a general "Ode to Things" and the line above, then gets specific, fast.

     "I like pliers...."

     "One of our best-sellers," said Perrine Giacomazzo, marketing director at Kikkerland, a company founded to market Dutch design (the name means "frogland"). She explained that putting wood on the seven-in-one multitool made it into a popular gift item.

     ". . . and scissors."

     "The popular one is this one," said Naomi Ogawa, secretary at B.H.P. Industries in Japan — half of the show's exhibitors are from overseas. She is referring to the "Almighty" titanium coated multi-purpose kitchen scissors. "The five-in-one. We have five functions, like can opener, driver thing, walnut cracker. This one is for peeling fish skin."

     "I love cups, rings, and bowls—"

     "Bowls are the new plates," said Nicole Ramos, sales manager at Denby USA, the American arm of the 200-year-old British dinnerware manufacturer. "A shift on how the millennials and people of today are eating and entertaining. People don't entertain like they used to, not these big family gatherings or formal dinners anymore. We've recognized that, and shifted our focus to people who just sit and eat dinner in front of the TV, and if you eat dinner in front of the TV it's safer out of a bowl than a plate."

     To continue reading, click here.

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"It's not my wife's cooking but we have to eat"

    Given the constant tarantella of confusion and malice that is the Donald Trump administration, missteps from a few days ago take on the air of ancient history. But somehow his budget spiking Meals on Wheels, and his underlings' insane defense of scrapping such an important program, seem to epitomize the short-sighted meanness of our government. 

     It has been nearly 20 years since I went around with a volunteer from The Ark, delivering meals to the homebound elderly. But their need and gratitude are a vivid memory, and the cheery determination of the volunteers, which will continue with or without government support.

     Abe Ginden takes a gnarled, work-worn hand and affectionately pats the top of a covered aluminum pan.
     "She's nice," he says, referring to the food platter as if it's the elderly lady whose name is scrawled on top -- one of 30 shut-ins receiving meal deliveries from Ginden through a program run by the Ark, a Jewish social service agency.
     Ginden knocks on the door. "FBI—open up!" he jokes. But the woman on the other side doesn't want to open up. As do many clients this particular day, she tells him to just leave the food outside and go away.
     "I get this every day," says Ginden, 69, setting the food down. " 'Leave it at the door.' They don't want to get out of bed."
     About 31 million U.S. citizens were age 65 or older in 1990. The figure will balloon to 70 million in the next 30 years.
     For the portion of these people who become infirm, the choice will be either institutionalization or relying on home services such as the Ark's, which not only provides food but a link to the outside world which -- accepted or not -- is offered every day.
     If the rejections bother Ginden—a World War II Navy vet -- he doesn't show it. At every house he says something pleasant, either through the door or into the intercom.
     "Hot stuff!" Ginden shouts, pressing the buzzer for the apartment of Harry and Rose Goldberg.
     The Goldbergs not only let Ginden in, they are waiting—beaming—in the hall to welcome him into their modest 1-bedroom apartment.
     Harry Goldberg, 85, is 5 feet 10 inches tall and 116 pounds; he is the very definition of the word "gaunt." Still, he appreciates the food.
     "It's not my wife's cooking, but we have to eat," says Harry of the Ark's food. "She was a terrific cook, and I'm not saying that because she's my wife."
     "You can't have everything," says Rose, his wife of 62 years, who at times seems distracted, as if listening to music far away.
     "She's got her ailments," Harry says.
     Both agree that Abe Ginden is as important to them as the food.
     "The best," Harry says. "He's a doll. There's not enough he can do for us." Harry's voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper: "He'll bring in extra rolls. I don't know if it hurts him with the company, but he brings us bagels. Sometimes, a challah."
     "It's such a nice service," Rose says. "And this kid here; they don't come any better."
     Harry was with Globe Glass for 40 years, and fought as a 60-mm. mortar gunner in the Pacific. "Five hundred and seventy-five went in and only eight came back," he says.
     Ginden chats for a while, then returns to his route. Many of his customers have grave illnesses.
     "Cancer," Ginden says of a client before ringing the bell. "He's all cut up. A nice guy. It should happen to a dog and not to him."
     But the cancer patient greets Ginden at the door and updates him on his situation while accepting the foil pans of warm food.
     "Forty days in the hospital," he tells Ginden. Of the food he says: "Very good."
     The service is not free; clients pay as little as 50 cents a meal and an average of $4. "It gives them pride to pay something," says Edna Traube Feldman, the Ark program's coordinator.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 4, 1998

Not having health insurance can be as deadly as terrorism

  

     March 6. Two weeks ago. Does the date stand out in your mind? It should.
     On that day President Donald Trump signed his second travel ban, denying visas to residents of six predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days and barring all refugees for four months.
     The order was called "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States." The administration argued for its necessity using words related to protection: security, safety, risk. "We cannot risk the prospect of malevolent actors using our immigration system to take American lives," said Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly.
     Also on that day — the same day — Republicans offered up their plan to dismember Obamacare.
     No one spoke of protection or risk. Instead, Obamacare was being dismantled in the name of . . . what's that word Paul Ryan kept using? Right, "access." If the government stopped blazing a route to insurance, Americans would be free to wander into the marketplace and buy whatever insurance they like, the sky's the limit, provided they can pay for it — which many can't.
     So one measure, the travel ban, is being taken to protect American lives. The other, to give them access to options.
     But what if we took those two values and swapped them? Apply concern for access to the travel ban, and security to Obamacare. What would that teach us?

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1998—Preschool: a matter of life or debt

    With Northwestern nearly snatching victory from Gonzaga—we was robbed!—Saturday afternoon, I fell to wondering what I'd written about my alma mater over the years. I tiptoed into Nexis and found of a 1997 column that was such a bitter keel-hauling of my alma mater that I just couldn't bring myself to re-print it now, not with my kid having two years to go there. 
    But I did find this, from the summer of 1998. I would point out that the toddler we ponied up the big bucks to go to pre-school—the Apple School, in the shadow of Cabrini-Green, if I recall—is now 21 and we're still paying for his school!  Though there was a break, here in the suburbs, and the end does hove into sight, at long last. One more year, and he finally gets to spread his wings and fly into life, his tank topped with expensive education, while his mother and I, our vitality drained by paying for it all, economically and emotionally, are discarded like two dry husks. Such is life.

     There was an article in Harper's awhile back by a man who had driven his family deep into debt. Despite an income, with his wife, of $ 100,000, they had been plunged into bankruptcy and ruin. Their home was beset by bill collectors and credit card companies, all demanding, in shrill and rising tones, the tens of thousands of dollars the family owed.
     What had brought them to such ruin? Gambling? Drugs? Psychic hotline addiction?
     No; private schools.
     The family has three children and, unwilling to subject them to public schools, wrecked themselves trying to pay for private education.
     I have been thinking about that family all week, brooding, like Saul in his tent, over their fate, the first whiff of which, I believe, I have just deeply inhaled. Wearing roller skates and poised at the top of that short slope to utter financial disaster, I felt the first sharp poke in my back.
     Our 2 1/2-year-old was accepted into a pre-nursery school for the fall.
     People who are reading this on farms, with the wind rustling the willows and their children playing out back with Spot the dog and Fluffy the cat, might not quite understand the concept of a pre-nursery school. "What kind of people would send their li'l ones away so young?" says grandma, coming through the screen door with a freshly baked huckleberry pie.
     "I don't know, Nana," says Bea, drying the dishes with a patch of homespun and gazing at her children, running through the rye. "It must be a city thing."
     You're right, Bea, it is a city thing. Though for the life of me, I can't understand it either. My mother didn't pack me off to preschool until I was 4, and then I made her pull me out because there were other children there and, frankly, I didn't like them.
     Two-and-a-half hours a day, three days a week. It isn't as if we're sending him away to a boarding school in Switzerland. (Hmmm . . .) Just enough to get him to learn to share his toys and finger paint and socialize with others and be spared the life of maladjusted elitism that, well, afflicts so many people nowadays.
     Then there is the break it provides his mother. A few gasps of air; the difference between swimming and drowning.
     My wife searched for a preschool with the tenacity of a young actress trying to land her first role, and with about the same initial success. The prestigious day care a block from our house (it's in a brownstone, like an embassy) rejected us with a form letter (a form letter addressed to a different child but sent to our home, to add insult to injury). Other places turned up their noses as well.
     Finally, the call came, just when she had given up hope. I was there when my wife took the call. It was like one of those Publishers Clearinghouse commercials.
     "It's pretty expensive," she said, a little later, after composing herself. "What do you think?"
     "Well," I said, "given the fact that you wept like a baby for joy when they called, I guess we sort of have to."
     Now, with so many columnists making up things nowadays, I want to point out that the above conversation really, truly happened. We also discussed whether we should pay for the school by not paying our real estate taxes. I called out after her, as she hurried to the school to give them our check, "Honey, remember to rob a liquor store on your way home."
     The preschool tuition, I noted with horror, was as much as the tuition I paid Northwestern University the fall semester of my freshman year.
     I'm certainly not looking for pity. I just want readers to understand that, when I start writing column after column about our cute little farm 50 miles away in Harvard, Ill., I didn't move out of the city on a lark.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 25, 1998.

Hoosier Mama

      I have witnessed Muddy Waters sing the blues and Arnold Palmer nail a putt and Michael Jordan dunk a basketball and Paula Haney make pie crust. Though I was almost as surprised to see her at the back of her capacious pie emporium in Evanston late Thursday as I would have been to have been to spy any of those gentlemen, there among the mixers.
    She was flour-dusted and a bit bedraggled—it was about 8 p.m.—hauling crates of eggs from one place to another. The decent thing would have been for me to order my pie and let her be.
     But I like connection. And even though it was quite a number of years ago that we spent some time talking, in her Chicago Avenue kitchen, about her mother, and Indiana—"Hoosier Mama Pie," is both a pun and a biographical detail— while she rolled crust, and I felt I knew her, a little. And of course I've been eating her pie with both hands for years. So I waited until she looked up, and I did a small salaaming gesture, both palms outward at forehead level, then lowered with a deep nod. Respect to the master.
      She came over, wiping her hands on her apron. I said I was surprised to see her here late, doing back kitchen stuff, and she said, "This is fun. Yesterday I had to do insurance," and we talked a bit about work and careers. My younger boy was sitting at a table, with my wife and the out-of-town relations we had brought to show off the place. I told Paula that my advice to him is to do whatever he loves, because you end up working an awful lot, and it's hard enough when you love it, and she agreed. I asked if she had plans to open another place, and she startled a bit, it seemed to me, in a kind of horror at just the idea. Oh no, the two shops are plenty, though the original Chicago storefront is going to be expanded.
     I ordered the "pie flight," three half pieces to share with my wife. The chess pie, which I adore, and the pear and fig, my wife's choice, and the Earl Grey custard pie, which is sublime. They were out of Earl Grey—a bitter disappointment, but I forgave them, it was late after all—and the clerk suggested I try grapenut custard instead. I was dubious, but he assured me it was incredible and of course it was. 
    The flight was finished far too quickly, my wife gallantly allowing me to scrape up the final crumbs of crust—think Tony Bennet singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" which I once heard him perform, standing directly in front of me at a party. 
     When we were done, I looked down at the bare plate and had a thought ... I'm a little ashamed to admit what that thought was, but I will: "Let's order another flight." Shocking, I know. I did not, I rush to say, act on that very decadent thought. One pie flight is enough, thank you, and part of the allure of pie is you can never get as much as you'd like.



   

"Pornography for the blind" — the audio book adventure

     This column is, in a way, a result of my trip down to Wayne County in early January. I wanted an audio book to pass the time on the long drive downstate, and grabbed George Packer's "The Unwinding." But the rental car didn't have a CD player—outdated technology—so the box sat mute on the passenger seat. I began listening to it when I got back, driving around town. It got so I looked forward to any errand, the longer the better. But I just don't drive that much, and at disc 10 I crossed the Rubicon, copied the remaining CDs onto my iPod, and listened to them while walking the dog, folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen. Something about audio books migrating from the car, where they had always belonged, to the rest of life, seemed to magnify their importance. It got me thinking whether I was processing the book in the same way, listening to it, as I would had I read it. Which put me in the right frame of mind to be interested in the book below. 

     Before Scientific American even published Thomas Edison's letter announcing his plans to to mechanically reproduce speech, the press was predicting the end of reading.
     "Why should we learn to read when, if some skillful elocutionist merely repeats one of 'George Elliot's' novels aloud in the presence of a phonograph, we can subsequently listen to it without taking the slightest trouble?" the New York Times mused on Nov. 7, 1877 after hearing of the device.
     A century later, "Cannonball Run" star Burt Reynolds recorded "Moby-Dick."
     In between, much debate over whether popular fiction should be made available to those with impaired vision or was that "pornography for the blind?"
     We are in the golden age of audio books, the fastest-growing sector of publishing. About 125 new audio books are released each day.

       One of those new titles, "The Untold Story of the Talking Book" by Matthew Rubery (Harvard University Press: $29.95), was also published in printed form, luckily, because that's how I noticed the book's cool dove gray cover and grabbed it.
     This is one of those books that keeps flinging marvelous facts: "in the fourth century, St. Augustine memorably recalled his astonishment upon finding his teacher St. Ambrose reading silently to himself." As it does, the book raises intriguing questions:
     "What exactly is the relationship between spoken and printed texts?" Rubery asks. "How does the experience of listening to books compare to that of reading them? What influence does a book's narrator have over its reception?"For the first 50 years of recorded sound....

     To continue reading, click here.

Rachel Maddow fires at Trump, blows off her toe

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. Alaska Hawaii (detail) by Nam June Paik

      Like a lot of people, I noticed Rachel Maddow's tweet Tuesday evening, the one where she ballyhooed having Donald Trump's tax returns. Something smelled wrong about it, but it didn't cost anything to turn the television on at 8 p.m. and see what was up. 

       I have to admit, I've never tuned into her program before, though I've caught snippets, online, and she seems an intelligent person, good-hearted and thoughtful. 
     But generally, getting your news from television is like trying to breathe through a straw: a lot of effort for a little result.  Fox News is unwatchable agit-prop for right wing zealots, and CNN's reputation died when Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared in 2014, the network veering into some weird Twilight Zone of round-the-clock speculation, time-filling and tap-dancing. It was closer to performance art than reportage, with crazy speculation and holograms, a stain that can never be removed.  MSNBC, well, I really didn't have a preconceived notion about them. Somehow related to NBC. 
     So my expectations were not high. Maddow began by ... well, I can't say exactly what she was doing. "Setting the stage" someone tweeted, when I began urging her to get on with it already. Establishing that yes, people were in fact interested in Donald Trump's tax returns. And those returns could show all sorts of interesting things, like being indebted to some Russian gentleman who paid more for one of Trump's houses than it was worth. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The same couple ideas, worn to a nubbin like a toddler's adored blankie. Then a commercial break. We were introduced to David Cay Johnston, who won the Pulitzer Prize -- not the gold standard of excellence she seems to imagine it to be -- who has a book on Trump out, and received the two-page photocopy in his mailbox. Twenty minutes into the show ... nothing.
     I went to the kitchen for a snack.
    Eventually, after much waving of the photocopied return, it was revealed that, in 2005, Donald Trump earned $158 million and paid $33 million in taxes, and it was so obvious, at least to me, that Maddow had been played— by Trump. You want taxes? I can see him sneer, here's taxes. The few pages that don't show the depth of his enslavement to the Russians, or his miserable cheapness at charity, or any of the dozen deficiencies that make Trump an unfit president and are the reason he wouldn't release them. He earned a lot of money in 2005 and payed a defendable share of tax. This wasn't a revelation, it was a blow job under the desk, the tax return version of that New York Post headline "Best Sex I Ever Had." You could tell it was a plant because the White House confirmed its authenticity, and the pro forma howl of outrage was just a wee bit muted. 
     I understand there is time to fill and eyeballs to attract. But the Donald Trump presidency is a true crisis, and goofy shit like this minimizes it. Maybe, in my ignorance, I gave Rachel Maddow a stature she didn't deserve -- a friend who watches MSNBC said the entire three hour block on MSNBC is always talking heads hyperventilating about every Trump nuance "like their hair was on fire." 
    Our nation is in danger. This is not the time for publicity gimmicks and cheap stunts to hook an audience. A hundred and fifty years ago, newspapers would print melodramatic fiction. You'd get to the end of the story and there would be a line, "And that is what it might have been like had all the animals escaped from the zoo Tuesday!" The modern world killed that, supposedly, and Maddow's tax return PR grab was a step back toward P.T. Barnum because what she claimed, while literally true, wasn't true in the way she pretended it to be. She didn't actually have what she pretended to have: something significant. It was like my claiming I have a new Ferrari when what I really have is a new Ferrari tire. 
     Whenever I write about Trump or anything related to Trump, my readership goes up 50 percent. So by that logic, I should write about Trump continually. I don't because a) some days a half dozen outlets say everything there is to say about that day's outrage and I don't see the need to pile on or echo; b) four years is a long time, and we need to take a break from just gazing in horror at the calamity; and c) other interesting and important stuff doesn't stop going on just because our country is on fire.
     If the sun were suddenly about to explode, but we had a month to live, we would not want to spend it reading "New Details on Sun Exploding" every single minute. We'd get it, and only want to hear truly significant stuff ("Here's the Date the Sun-Will Explode.") Nobody wants a list of stars that aren't blowing up in a month.
      That's why I avoid the "orange Chee-to" cheap jabs at Trump. I don't care that Melania is staying at Trump Tower, or that he golfs every weekend even though he promised he'd never take a vacation. That lie has to get in line behind all the others and it's a long line. What I care about is that he is a deeply un-American hate monger, in thrall to the Russians, who is working to undermine the country morally, economically, physically -- yanking away health insurance from 24 million people, many of whom are so out to sea they voted for the man. That every day he works to undermine the legitimacy of the media, the courts, the idea of truth itself. He's a liar, a bully and fraud. The rest is just window-dressing. 
     That's what's important. And Maddow yelling "Fire!" Monday night, well, it makes battling the blaze that much harder. It gives Trump the chance to say, "See, the media scum saw the taxes," when we didn't see anything at all. It casts an important voice into disrepute -- she could say she has Steve Bannon's head on a pike, details at 9 p.m. EST, and I'm not sure I'd tune in.  Rachel Maddow is still one of the good guys, but less an asset today than she was Monday. And the worst part: it was a self-inflicted wound. Someone dangled a few photocopies at her, she drew too fast and blew off a toe. 

"Pain is the great destroyer of language"

Gold Star Monument, "I gave my best to make a better world,' Nashville, Tennessee.

   
    This is one of those columns where writing it was the easy part. The daylong trick was cutting it from 1100 to 679 words. There was the poetry aspect and the head trauma aspect and the VA botching its job aspect, with the very quotable Dawn McGuire saying things such as "I feel like I'm married to Wittgenstein" of her time getting her masters of divinity at the Union Theological Seminary. It wasn't on point, but how often do you get to use a line like that? 
    I somehow managed. If you want more of McGuire, do get her new book, American Dream with Exit Wound, which I've read and recommend, or her previous one, Aphasia Cafe. You can hear her reading a heartbreaking and smart poem from it, "Aphasia Breaks the News," originally published, mirabile dictu, by the American Academy of Neurology Journal, by clicking here. 

Dr. Dawn McGuire

     Neurology, the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology, publishes papers on brain science with titles like "Vesicular acetylcholine transporter defect underlies devastating congenital myasthenia syndrome."
     It also, marvelous to relate, prints poetry. And yes, the poems are peer reviewed.
      In 2012 it published "Poems from the Aphasia Cafe," from a book by Dawn McGuire, a San Francisco neurologist and poet. McGuire's poems echo her work with shattered minds, particularly wounded veterans — "aphasia" is a term for loss of speech through brain injury. McGuire, who grew up in Appalachian Kentucky and studied at Princeton and Columbia, does not mince words when talking about the vets under her care.
     "They come back and are expected to reintegrate without any attention to the fact they are often very young men who have been asked to really split their psyches and do things that the culture and family they grew up in would find abhorrent," she said. "There's nothing like boot camp for reintegration, where they can see they've been split by these experiences, by what they've done, what's been done to them. There's no way for vets to re-enter the regular community."
     Boot camp for returning vets is a great idea. We put soldiers through intensive training before they serve, but they're left on their own when they come home and often need help most.

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A pocketful of seeds

     Well, Northwestern's basketball team is in the NCAA championships for the first time in its 78-year history, leading to an interesting question.
    Do they stand a chance?

    "No," said a Wildcat sophomore of my acquaintance, showing that school spirit is hereditary, "they're just not that good."
    Though that was not the interesting question I have in mind. That's coming up.
    "Even if they win Thursday," he continued, "they go against the No. 1 seed, Gonzaga."
   Which leads to a more interesting question. What's Gonzaga? I had never heard of it in my life. It sounded like a type of cheese.
    Gonzaga University founded in 1887, a Jesuit school in Spokane Washington. Proof that: a) you can have a really good basketball team, the best in fact, and be obscure. and b) sports is good publicity, since, assuming I am not the only one who hadn't heard of the school, people are sure hearing of it now.
    But even that isn't the really interesting question, at least to me. Here it comes. 
    "How did 'seed' get to be a term for ranking in sports?" I wondered. Seeding is when, in a championship, the best teams or players are paired against the worst, early on, so that the top contenders don't knock each other out early in the tournament. 
     The boy had no idea regarding its etymology. I guessed it might be a corruption of "seat." 
     Back at the office, the mothership Oxford English Dictionary offered a full page plus of definitions. The word itself is a thousand years old, the first meaning given over to varieties of grain, bran and plants. The second definition seemed promising."The germ or latent beginning of some growth or development." That might fit with participants in a championship ranking. Then on to lobster roe and bubbles in glassmaking. 
      On a hunch, I turned to the Oxford Supplement. Latecomers that didn't quite work their way into the main show. To cease flowering, small crystals in liquid ... bingo! "Sport, esp. Lawn Tennis. [f. sense *II of the vb]. One of a number of seeded players in a tournament." 
    The first usage is from 1933, from The Aldin Book of Outdoor Games. "'But why put my beloved lawners last?' wails the Thibetan 'seed.'"
    The quote marks show it's a novel usage, at the time.
    The reference to a verbal form sent me back to the main dictionary to scour closer, in case I overlooked something in all those seeds. Yes, the II usage of the verb. "To stock with inhabitants" and a 1627 reference, garbled with age, "Here bigines at noe pe ledepe toper world to sede."
    Hmmm, that's not very satisfying. I looked online. Zip, except for this NPR segment from yesterday that said, in essence, "it's from tennis." Nice digging guys! 
     H.L. Mencken's three-volume The American Language had nothing except "seed" as a charming dialect past tense of "see." Fun, but not exactly on point. 
    Then I turned to Wentworth and Flexner's  Dictionary of American Slang, which did offer this definition of seed: "A young man with little ability or promise of future success."
   Ooo, tempting. A slow pitch, right down that pipe, to mix my sports metaphors. No! I'm not going to say it. We do not traffic in the obvious. But a good point to end. Go Cats!
     

All together now: "Thank you Congressman Shimkus!!!"

     Apologize? Why would anybody want Rep. John Shimkus to apologize for scoffing, during last week's debate over the GOP gutting of the Affordable Care Act, at the idea that men should be required to pay for prenatal care? The issue is, he said the next day, "simple."
     He's right. It is simple. We should all thank him and I will, right now: Thank you Congressman Shimkus.
     Because in this swirling political era where the chaos at the top of government sends out echoes of confusion, where today's baseless charge or policy enormity can barely be grasped before it is replaced by tomorrow's, Shimkus' question provides a simple moment of clarity, a line you can be either on this side of or that.
     Why should a man be made to buy insurance that includes prenatal care when a man obviously cannot have children? Why is it his business?
     You can see the thinking behind the question. It shows through like a tadpole's guts. Are we not free people, each caring for his own private affairs? Isn't suggesting otherwise just squishy liberal it-takes-a-village-collectivism?
     It's a trick question, because it involves women, whose rights are so automatically trampled by society that we hardly notice. Bearing and raising children is women's work. Thank you Rep. Shimkus, Republican of Illinois. If we flipped that question around, and asked what business it is of any man whether a woman gets pregnant or not, or ends her pregnancy or doesn't, Shimkus' party would have a very different answer. Of course it's his business. It's everybody's business except, perhaps, the woman herself, who can't be trusted to make that moral choice.

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Spring forward

  

      It is perhaps the most useful mnemonic phrase: spring forward, fall behind. 
     At least it was, back in the day when we set our clocks. Now clocks -- on our computers, our cell phones -- pretty much set themselves.
     Still, helpful to bear in mind, as twice a year, once in the fall, and once today at 2 a.m., we try to wrap our heads around the complexities of Daylight Savings Time. 
     Expect a bigger hoopla next year. It was in March, 1918 when the House of Representatives voted 252 to 40 to pass a law "To Save Daylight and Provide Standard Time for the United States."
    Well, Standard Time had already been enacted, by the railroads, in 1883. Before then, each locality had its own concept of time and there was no particular need to synch them up. Noon was when the sun was directly overhead on Main Street. 
    It was only when the option of Daylight Savings Time—begun in Germany, a fact its opponents milked to maximum advantage—that Standard Time, set by the Union Pacific, suddenly became "God's time" set in the Book of Genesis and untouched ever since. 
     Columbus politicians might fan their soup with their hats, James Thurber once wrote, but they had enough good old-fashioned horse sense to know fiddling with the clocks was "directly contrary to the will of the Lord God Almighty and that the supporters of the project would burn in hell."
     There is such comfort today, when half the country seems lost in unreason, rejecting the science of climate change and vocally backing an unfit liar and fraud, to look back a century and realize that the American people have always had trouble with anything the least bit complicated.  Daylight Savings Time moves the clocks forward an hour in the spring so that when June 20 arrives, instead of the sun rising in Bangor, Maine at 3:49 a.m., as it would under Standard Time, the clock will read the relatively luxurious 4:49 a.m. instead. So the hour of daylight that most people would be sleeping through is shifted to evening.
    That would seem a bonus, but Americans (and Britons, and Canadians) fought it like a rend in the fabric of reality.
     "It prevents people from enjoying the air in the morning, when it is fresh and healthful, by compelling them to go in shop or office one hour before it is necessary one New Yorker wrote to Congress. "It upsets the schedule of all large manufacturing plants, as their working hours are arranged so as to take advantage of the summer daylight hours. It is the direct cause of overcrowding of transit lines during rush hours, as it causes everybody to go to work at the same time, where as under normal conditions different factories have different arrangement of working hours, thereby lessening the overcrowding of cars."
    Congress passed it, but some Americans simply refused to comply.
    "I'm fooled enough," a Charles Gale was quoted saying in the New York World, "without fooling myself on purpose."
    The move had been sold as a war expediency, and as soon as it was over, Congress sprang to end it. As usual, Southerners led the way backward.
    "God's time is true. Man-made time is false," said Rep. E.S. Candler of Mississippi. "Truth is always mighty and should prevail. God alone can create daylight."  
     "I am opposed to Congress undertaking to usurp not only the powers of the Executive and the States, but those of God almighty and seeking to fix the time when the sun shall rise and set," said Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi. 
    In July, 1919, Congress repealed Daylight Savings Time, twice, and President Wilson vetoed the bill, twice. But Congress overrode his veto.
    But as so happens when the federal government drops the ball, localities stepped in.
    "The Big Apple had taken a shine to Daylight Saving,"  writes Michael Downing, in his engaging book on America's struggle with the clock, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time, from which much of this account was cribbed.  "If this hadn't happened, residents of North America would have been permanently spared the annual stem-winding ritual and its attendant controversies." 
    Among the advantages of Daylight Savings, it gave the 9 a.m. open of the New York Stock Exchange an hour jump on London, allowing traders to take advantage of the London markets before they closed at 3 p.m. London time.  In 1920 New York City went back on Daylight Savings, and--pushed by stock and mercantile traders--Boston followed suit, pressing the Massachusetts legislature to draw in the whole state. As did Philadelphia and Cleveland, though Cleveland's law moved the clocks in the exchange and nowhere else.
    The split—with urban centers, plugged into the global grid, embracing daylight savings, while farmers, worried the cows would become confused, shunning it. Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, was famously a crazy quilt of varying time zones.  It was not until 2006 that, after much debate, the entire state decided to tamper with time as God intended it. 
     
         

$20,000? No? How about cookies?

     When I wrote about Leonard's Bakery in Northbrook earlier this week, the most interesting part never made it into the piece. The owner was not particularly chatty, so I ran Leonard's through Nexis, thinking there must be press on it. There wasn't. Not a word, ever, by anybody, over the past 20 years. Which is a shame because the place really is a treasure. Maybe I'll spend the day there for its 30th anniversary in August. 
    Well, there was one thing. This, written by me four years ago. I like how I contrasted my real-life emails with the upper echelon moral squishiness of a Tribune panjandrum. 
    There is an interesting typo in this—what I call a "brain cramp." When I refer to "rugellah," which are sweet little pastries of cinnamon and raisins, I'm actually thinking of "mandel bread" which are, like I describe them, soft versions of biscotti.  

     Would you be interested and available to speak to the JCC Women's Auxiliary Luncheon on Wednesday, September 5th at Birchwood Country Club in Highland Park? The topic would be politics. Love to have you! Please let me know.
     A funny 2006 "Saturday Night Live" bit begins with Steve Martin on his cellphone. "I'll be home by morning," he says. "I'm just doing this, uh, corporate gig . . . I don't know, some corporation." Then his hosts enter the room. "We are so excited to have you here," says one. "This is a great day for Hamas!"
     "Hamas?" says Martin, in a small voice.
      Martin isn't so sure he's the right guy to perform at "Hamas — a Victory Celebration." But the money is so huge he can't say no. And his hosts try to reassure him. "You are a hero here for your comic genius, your ability to play tender moments, and your well-known hatred for the state of Israel!"
     Life imitated art this week when Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial board member Clarence Page found himself in hot water for accepting $20,000 and a trip to Paris to give a three-minute speech before a suspected Iranian terrorist group. He says he had no idea whom he was talking to until he got there.
     That seems curious to me, having just gone through my own delicate if infinitely more low-rent negotiations for a talk. Forget Paris. I wouldn't go to Highland Park without knowing what I was getting myself into.
     "Politics" is sort of a broad subject. Anything else you can tell me about the talk? How many people do you expect?
     I should mention that, on rare occasions, I've gotten what I considered a hefty amount of money; Elmhurst College once paid me a few thousand dollars to deliver a lecture.
     We usually get about 50-70 to attend. Although, you could be a big draw. We'll give you lunch if you like. The food is very good
     Though I prefer to get paid, I often end up speaking for nothing, or whatever token the group wants to give. The Rotary gave me a lovely date planner. Twice. I've been given potted plants, paperweights. A synagogue once offered a plate of ruggaleh — think biscotti, only softer and Jewish — which then became my gold standard of excellence.
     Hmmmmm . . . I try not to speak for free. Do any of your ladies bake? I'm a sucker for ruggaleh . . . if you can have someone bake a plate of ruggaleh, we have a deal.
     The key question is whether speaking fees constitute bribes. People doing unethical things try to ritualize them — in the old days, crooked pols ran insurance agencies and anyone wanting to corrupt them bought a hiked-up policy. A similar scam would be: speak to us, we pay you a huge fee, and nobody has to accept envelopes stuffed with cash.
     The issue isn't bias. You can argue that Page — who, I should add, I've never met and rarely read — is in the bias business. He isn't paid to be neutral, but to give his opinions. The question is transparency — the idea is those opinions are based on his honest analysis of the world, not a $20,000 check cut to him in secret. That's why the Tribune has its policy, although it seems odd — they aren't against their writers taking money, per se, they just want to sign off on the transaction.
     To me, bias is on the page. You can be Simon Pure, you can send back the promotional pens sent to you at Christmas, and still let your personal prejudices ruin your work. Or you can be a cauldron of rigid notions, but set aside your own feelings — I wrote Ronald Reagan's obit for the Sun-Times and I despised Reagan. But the piece was fair and respectful and nobody complained.
     Ingratitude is a writer's best friend. I like to think that if Elmhurst College started, oh, refusing to admit black students, I'd leap upon them with a snarl, and not pause, thinking, "Gee, but those are the nice folks who asked me to give an Andrew Prinz Guestship Lecture for Political Awareness." I'm hard on Northwestern, and it gave me a scholarship.
     Neil — We will pay you! We are not asking you to speak for free. I will get you a pound of ruggaleh from Leonard's Bakery in Northbrook. Would $300 do it?
     It seems odd to even have this controversy in the era of Citizens United, when corporate money is deluging the American political process. I have sympathy for Page. One moment you're living the high life in Paris. The next your boss has you kneeling on a rail. Par for the course, that journalists still get in trouble for the crumbs that come our way. Of course, $20,000 is a very big crumb. A lot of money, though still too cheap a price to sell your reputation. But isn't that always the most shocking aspect of scandals? The smallness of the stake. Postage stamps, crystal. My guess is that 20 grand will look less and less to Page as the years go by. Not to be on a high horse. I might have grabbed for it, too. People tend to take what they can get.
     $300 is good. I've written you guys down for Sept. 5. You can skip the ruggaleh if you like.

                                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 6, 2012

As American as baseball, mom, apple pie and Jews

     It's the last Monday in February and 20 teenage boys are waiting in a gym in Deerfield. It could be any high school gym anywhere, except for the big silver mezuzah on the cinderblock doorway, an Israeli flag next to the American flag, and the banner reading "Rochelle Zell Jewish High School."
     Paul Chanan gathers the boys in a circle and begins the traditional start-of-practice pep talk.
     "Today represents the first day of what will be a real long journey to reach some very lofty goals," says Chanan, an options-trader-turned-teacher. "Coach Zouber and myself are incredibly proud to lead this team of great guys, of great competitors and of great community. This is going to be a joy for us, and we are honored to be your coaches. But we are going to ask a lot of you. ... We are going to ask that you give us everything that you have. ... We are going to absolutely 100 percent demand 100 percent from you, all the time. We are going to compete with great hustle. With maximum intensity. With aggressive style of play and with an unyielding passion for the game of baseball and for your team."
     "Yes coach!" the boys reply.
     Not realizing that Rochelle Zell is a new school — founded in 2001 — whose students range across the spectrum of faith, I went to practice expecting a scene out of Chaim Potok's The Chosen — earlocks and fringes flying as guys round the bases, outfielders punching their gloves and razzing the hitter in Yiddish.
     In Potok's novel, baseball is pushed by teachers because "it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important."
     Rochelle Zell's team was started four years ago — not by teachers, but by a pair of freshmen, Jon Silvers and his best friend, Adam Gilman, both now 17 and co-captains.

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We're still here? Great, let's eat.

Marc Becker

      Purim begins March 11 at sundown. A joyous holiday, in case you aren't familiar, a rare break from fasting and mourning and general fretting about life. Purim celebrates the Jews' escape from doom — in Persia, officially, at the hands of the evil Haman, adviser to King Ahasuerus, but also a general thumb-to-nose-and-wiggle-fingers "We're here and you're not" at adversaries from Pharaoh to Hitler to, well, Donald Trump.  We've victims, sure, often, periodically, but also survivors. The faith is a direct living link from now to ancient Babylon, which is incredible, or would be, if anyone besides ourselves valued that kind of thing.
     Purim is, alas, extra timely this year, as we have a president constantly giving winks and dog whistles to the anti-Semitic, white nationalist fringe of the Republican Party. Emboldened, the haters are crawling out of their basements and troll holes to kick over headstones in Jewish cemeteries and phone bomb threats into Jewish day care centers, and other acts of alt-right bravery. How far will it go? As far as they can without consequences. Bullies, remember, are also cowards.
     You don't have to squint too hard to see Trump as a modern day Ahasuerus, with his own twin Hamans in the form of Stephens Bannon and Miller. Among the most pitiful remarks I heard from Jews mulling over this turn of events was the hope that Trump's daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism, will "be our Esther" -- the hero of the Purim story, Ahasuerus' wife, who intercedes on behalf of the Jews and saves them.  
     Is that your escape plan? Purim? Purim is just a story. It never really happened. If  the fate of American Jews is in the hands of Ivanka Trump we are truly screwed.

     But we've strayed from the point of this: hamantaschen, the delightful tri-cornered pastries that Jews eat on Purim because, well, we can. They come in cookie-based and yeasty cake-based forms, and when I brought some of the hard cookie-type from Mariano's last week, my wife dispatched me to Leonard's Bakery for the soft puffy cake version, which she prefers.
    A word about Leonard's. I have to be sent to Leonard's. I never go to Leonard's on my own volition, because if I allowed myself to entertain the thought, "I think I'll go to Leonard's today" then I would go every day and weigh 400 pounds. So I can only go a) when requested by someone else or b) to pick up a bobkha cake to wow a dinner guest or host.
      Rolls. Breads. Cookies. Cakes. Goodies from Leonard's illustrated my wildly popular "Steinberg bakery" post. It's heaven. 
     While there, picking up yeast hamantaschens for my wife and, heck, a few cookie types for me, I chatted with Marc Becker, the owner.
     "Have you tried the chocolate?" he said. I admitted I had not, being a traditional type, and limited myself to apricot, poppy seed and raspberry. He handing me a warm cookie-type chocolate hamantaschen and I bit into it on the spot. Rapture.
         I expressed admiration, as I do, for the bakery's graphics, specifically for the bottom of the box, which has the word "Ouch!" and their trademark baker, not beaming as on the top of the box, but his mouth an "O" of distress. It's a small touch recommended, Marc said, by his friend Michael Krasny.  Leonard's celebrates its 30th anniversary this August, and while the excellent quality is what brings you there, I have to admit I like the extra little touches, like the message on the bottom of the box. 
     Opening tucked in a remote corner of a strip mall on Dundee Road, just east of Pfingston, seemed an iffy proposition back then. Marc wondered, "Who's going to come to see me in this corner?"
    Obviously people who want really, really good rugellah. And cookies. And coffee cake. And hamantaschen. People complain that the suburbs lack authenticity, and for the most part they're right. But Leonard's is the real Megillah, as my people say.

Northbrook murder close to home but not close to heart

Murder scene

     I live in a village. As villages often do, Northbrook has its own set of quaint local traditions, like the annual pancake breakfast at the Village Presbyterian Church. When the boys were younger we'd never miss one — they have raffles, puppet shows and the Boy Scouts put on a display of knots, a tent and a canoe. One year we used a device to twirl strands of hemp into rope, an important scouting skill, apparently.
     So my wife and I go Saturday, to the 61st installment of what has been deemed a "pancake festival," I assume, because now you can have seconds. We do not particularly want pancakes, but do like to support the community — the breakfast benefits Northbrook's various holiday celebrations through the year.
     We're there, gobbling flapjacks. Sandy Frum, the village president, is pouring coffee. She moseys over, sits down and we chat. She has just been to New Zealand. I steer her toward a more local topic: that new building being constructed on Shermer; what is going to go in it? Another paint store? We've already got two. No, she says, another real estate office.
     I consider asking her about the murder. On Dec. 7 a lawyer, Jigar K. Patel, was strangled in his office, not a block from my house. The police assured the public there is nothing to fear but didn't arrest anybody. Which seemed ominous. If they know who did it, why not arrest the guy? If they don't know, how can they be certain we're safe? Maybe a maniac is stalking Northbrook.
     She would know what the true story is on that.

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