Better than money

 

     I don't expect that many people visiting Los Angeles go with the specific intention of visiting the Wells Fargo History Museum on South Grand Avenue. I certainly didn't. It's small, and modest, and off the beaten track. I had never heard of it.
     But my accommodating brother-in-law, Don, took us by during a tour of his neighborhood, and I was entranced. 
     Not so much with the stage coach or the gold ingots or the other romantic Old West trappings -- the saddle bags, the telegraph, the copper scales and such. Those were nice.

     But I was captivated by the advertising promoting what is now commonplace: credit cards and 24-hour automated tellers, which were given women's names to make them less mechanized and forbidding. 
      People had to be taught how these systems worked, and reassured that their money would be safe in them. It was a long process — only recently did I stop counting the cash that an ATM spits out —what's the point? It's always correct.
     Credit cards are older than I am — they showed up in the late 1950s as a benefit for business travelers. But I remember the advent of ATMs. Edie and I still smile thinking of how, more than 30 years ago, we approached the first cash machine we had to use, cautiously and not without a trace of fear, as if it might bite us.  To see those twenties spitting out of a slot in a wall -- amazing!
    You really don't need cash much—every fast food joint, convenience store and taxicab accepts a credit or cash card. I'd hate to try to put a date on cash falling away almost entirely: five years? Ten? Fifteen, tops? The new ads, if they are even required, might say, "Better than money." 
    How will our grandchildren view the shift? Like an unimaginable bother? Similar to washing clothes against a rock? Or will hard currency and coinage seem tokens from a lost, romantic past, the way we view candle-lit homes and travel on horseback? Most likely they'll never think about it at all. 

   

All of Illinois is losing "custody."

Tuilleries garden, Paris.

     The statistic that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce is a dusty pre-sexual revolution relic. Demanding people to get married before they canoodle led to unwise, short-lived marriages. With couples getting married at older, more discerning ages, now only about a third of marriages fall apart.
     Still a lot.
     Despite the significance of divorce, I avoid the topic. Probably because it usually arrives at my doorstep in the form of an unhappy, divorcing spouse laying out his — it’s invariably a guy — tale of woe. I explain the need to present the other side, which surprises him, and he lets the matter drop. Just as well, because each divorce is unique if not strange, sad and petty, and so complicated it’s not worth the space to explain.
     Drew Vaughn is not a divorcing spouse, however, but a divorce attorney. He contacted me with actual news — news to me, anyway — that Illinois divorce law is going through a multiyear overhauling, and July 1 two key elements are changing — custody and child support — and not for the better, according to him.
     “Good in concept, awful in practice,” he wrote in an email. “This new law intends to make people believe it is more fair by considering the income of both spouses. Unfortunately, I expect that this will incentivize parenting schedules built around financial concerns and not what’s best for the children.”

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Do what the French do, but not how the French do it.

     Today is the deciding run-off vote in the French presidential election, pitting nationalist bigot Marine Le Pen against centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron.   
     All indications point to Macron winning against the opponent he dubbed "the high priestess of fear." And while shocks such as the one delivered in this country Nov. 8 are in the realm of possibility, smart money says the French, though also dissatisfied with politicians, are not willing to leap suicidally out of the European Union, like the Brits, nor hand their country over to foaming demagogues, as the United States has done. 
     They can learn from us. The hope of Americans learning from the French is a dicier proposition. We don't look abroad for answers much, and when we do, we tend to limit our thinking and cherry pick our points, as this column from nearly a decade ago reminds us. Notice the foreshadowing of this week's health care debacle. 

LE JOUR DE ENERGIE ATOMIQUE EST ARRIVE !

     Holding two thoughts in your head can be a challenge. I know -- I can't tell you how many times I've put out the flag because it's a federal holiday, then later wondered when the mail would show up, before making the connection -- oh yeah, federal holiday, no mail.
      At least the two thoughts collide, eventually. Some people, there just isn't room for a pair. They can hold tight to one idea, if they concentrate, but should a second concept arrive, well, the first one slips from grasp and is lost.
     Sunday, I wrote about nuclear power, about how John McCain, when he could force himself to pause from damning Barack Obama as a socialist, said he would build 45 nuclear reactors and put the waste, well, somewhere.
     That seemed to me to be highly unrealistic, and struck a friend in the nuclear industry as "crazy." We couldn't build that many reactors.
     Readers, needless to say, rallied behind the infinite capacity of the United States to do anything, in theory.
     "So Neil, France could do it but the United States can't?" a reader wrote. "We can't do something the French can?"
     In a word? No, we can't. Yes, France has 59 nuclear reactors generating 87 percent of its electricity. But France is -- prepare yourself for a bad word! -- a socialist state. The French electric utility, Electricite de France, was nationalized in 1946, and while shares were offered for public sale a few years back, the government still owns 85 percent of the nation's nuclear power plants.
     So nuclear power works -- in socialist France. But we hate socialism, remember? It might as well be terrorism, to hear how the Republicans throw the word around, no further elaboration necessary. Although we didn't seem to hate it when we were nationalizing banks and mortgage lenders a few weeks back.
     "This 'can't do' attitude of yours stinks," the reader continued. "The United States has done anything it has set its mind to. We walked on the moon in less than 10 years after JFK proposed it."

   Again, that was the government. The moon landing was another socialist boondoggle, right up there with Canadian health care. And the 'can't do' attitude isn't mine; it belongs to those who -- rather unpatriotically, in my mind -- believe our government is inherently bad and must be starved to death until it improves.
     It's people like John McCain who damn, for instance, any government effort to fix our tragically deficient health care system as "socialist" out of one corner of their mouths while simultaneously proposing grand, expensive new government energy endeavors out of the other. (It's a very selective habit -- farm subsidies? God's given right. Safety standards? The intrusive hand of Big Brother).
     The French -- as the reader accused me of believing -- are not "better than us." But like all Europeans, and most industrialized countries for that matter, they understand that certain areas, such as roads, nuclear power and health care, are the duty of government.
     France not only tops the world when it comes to generating nuclear power. It also has the sixth-lowest infant mortality rate -- 3.3 deaths per 1,000 live births. The United States is 29th in infant mortality, tied with Poland and Slovakia, with 6.7 deaths, twice France's average.
     And in case you think that means the United States is twice as good as France, please go back and re-read the preceding paragraph, slowly. Or ask a friend to talk you through it before writing to me.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Did you notice my restraint when dealing with the French? I was bearing in mind, as Napoleon said, "the French complain of everything and always." But let's end with Robert Morley, who sums it up perfectly:
     The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 20, 2008

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Dropping the Saturday fun activity must have been a good idea, because nobody ever mentioned it, never mind complained, and I never gave the change a second thought. 
     Until Monday. My pal Bill Savage, Northwestern literature professor, baseball scholar, and salvager of lost works, was talking about the Women's Christian Temperance Union and prohibition at the Whiskey Thief bar in Evanston. I thought I'd slide by for illumination. I enjoyed listening rather than taking notes, so can only touch upon how he wove the national drive against alcohol to class, culture and politics. 
    Let's put it this way: the goal wasn't so much to suppress booze as to thwart the sort of people who drank it. 
     The talk was to promote publication of George Ade's "The Old-Time Saloon," a 1931 celebration of drinking establishments that Bill rescued from obscurity and released, with the help of the University of Chicago Press, including his own sharp forward and notes. 
      When Bill was done, I thought I would lead the charge and buy a copy. The trouble was, I already have two copies of my own. A dilemma I brushed aside by rationalizing that I could give the book away here, by reviving the contest just this once. I asked him to sign it to the winner and he did.
     A toughie, I know. But one reason I was so happy about scrapping this is that you guys always solve it within the first 10 minutes. Not so, I have reason to believe, today. Where is this charming old car dealership sign? Because it is so difficult, I will give a hint: it is more than 80, but less than 100 miles from Chicago. The prize is a funny, thought-provoking and timeless read and well worth the effort. Good luck. 

What part of health insurance doesn't the GOP understand?

"Lamentation over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt" by Charles Sprague Pearce 

     A short quiz. Two simple yes-or-no questions, which half of the readership will nevertheless fail.
     Ready? Then let's begin.
     1: Do you want to pay the health care costs for strangers? a: Yes. b: No.
     2. Do you want health insurance for yourself? a: Yes. b: No.
     You can almost hear the thunderous "No!" to 1. Particularly the day after House Republicans finally fulfilled their dream of scuttling Obamacare. Those victorious congressmen and the citizens they represent frequently recoil in indignant horror at the notion of paying for the health care of others. As former Congressman Joe Walsh succinctly put it in a tweet: "Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care."
     He's referring to talk show host Kimmel's on-air appeal for health care, using his newborn son's heart condition as an illustration.And Walsh is indeed correct — a rarity for him. The poignant plight of others does not obligate him or anybody else to pay for their health care. But you know what does? Possessing health insurance. Paying for the care of others is the definition of health insurance.

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Mercato Centrale

     Chicago has much to recommend it. But one thing the city lacks is a thriving central market.
     Oh, they've tried,  ginning up that French Market next to Ogilvy Center. But the place seems tepid and marginal and unpopulated whenever I go there, which isn't often, as I can never think of a good reason to stop by. It suffers from ersatzness, a certain lack of distinctiveness.
     Which might be why my wife and I so enjoy visiting real markets in other cities. There's a great one in Los Angeles we've visited several times, called Central Market, and another in Philadelphia—the Reading Terminal Market.
     In Florence, it is called the Mercato Centrale, and even in our limited time, we found ourselves drawn back, to stock up on gifts and lunch for our train trip to Venice.
    Dried cherries and fresh bread, marzipan seashells and pork sandwiches, with a break for espresso at a stand-up bar. It was the place to buy gifts — small bottles of Limonchello and discs of panforte.
    I assumed the place had been there forever — the hulking iron building it is located in was built in 1874. But the truth is it opened three years ago. So not old, but certainly authentic. Maybe that's why people throng there — you get a sense of farmers and butchers stacking the food they've created. While at the French Market the vibe is of clerks heating up grub.
    I wish I could explain why theirs bustles while Chicago's languishes. Maybe readers have an idea.
       

Would this read better if Medill were accredited?

 

     Good for Medill.
     I admit, when I first heard that my alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (we'll get to its official name later) had let its academic accreditation lapse, my immediate instinct — call it "Columnist's Reflex" — was to draw back my foot and deliver a kick.
     What is college but reputation? And Medill Dean Bradley Hamm's assessment of the review process — "It's relatively superficial, extremely time consuming and doesn't lead us to a goal of significant improvement. It's sort of a low bar." — is true for college in general. And yet they still encourage young people to attend.
     Then I reconsidered. Why does a journalism school — excuse me, a journalism, integrated marketing, storytelling and whatever else they fancy themselves this week school — need official sanction? A merit badge, a Good Housekeeping seal, a kiss on the forehead from some pooh bah? Look around. The number of newsroom jobs is half what it was 20 years ago. Circulation and ad revenues hemorrhage. People get their news from three bullet points on their smartphones. While the president of the United States daily damns the entire profession to his millions of reality-challenged followers who lap it up, being the sort of people who believe the "Fast and Furious" films are documentaries.
     Do you really need to go to an accredited journalism school to slave for some obscure website? I don't think so. Fog a mirror, agree to grind out steaming piles of content for whatever Dickensian online workhouse they're running and you're in. Frankly, the higher quality school you went to, the more galling the penury that awaits. Five years after graduating from Medill, I was unemployed for the third time, telling myself that my patchwork of humiliating low-level jobs was a freelance career....

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But the clocks come with it, right?

     My grandmother was a proud employee of The May Company in Cleveland. Growing up, we bought my clothes there, at the employee discount or, if need be, at Higbee's or Halle's, the other two legs of of the triumvirate of department stores that made up respectable society.  
    To go elsewhere was to slum. I can still feel the cringing humiliation I felt when my mother, no doubt economizing, took me to J.C. Penney's to buy a loathsome polyester black suit suit at one point in the late-1970s. I couldn't have been more horrified had she given me a tambourine and told me to dance for coins in Public Square.
     As an adult, I clung to that mentality. I shopped at Marshall Field's, at Carson's if I were desperate. Toward my late 20s, I grew adventurous, and would buy clothing at Mark Shale. My wife's inclination toward discount stores I put off to a baffling cheapness.
    Then in May, 1999, I was about to leave on a six-week trip, needed certain necessities -- a lightweight tropic sports coat--and had no time, so popped into the Filene's Basement on Broadway. I still remember returning with an armful of purchases, babbling to my wife, "The prices are ... so low." 
    Ever since that epiphany, like many middle class shoppers, I haunt discount outlets like Nordstrom's Rack and T.J. Maxx, with occasional trips to Suits 20/20. Which is why the former Carson's downtown, with its ornate Louis Sullivan frou-frou, is now a Target. Or Macy's, which used to be good at running this sort of thing, announced they'll be selling off the top seven floors of its flagship downtown store to become condos or offices, or what have you.
    This, the latest step in the Great Department Store Die-Off, which will no doubt be melancholy to us folks of a certain age. 
    The spin was that the Walnut Room will remain, and that might provide cold comfort to some. But the Walnut Room never did much for me —a place where grandmothers rested their feet and ate pot pies.
     Looking to see if I ever wrote anything about it, I came upon this, about how Macy's got ripped going in the door a dozen years ago. Maybe not so savvy after all. 

  

"The Clock Mender" by Norman Rockwell

  Did you ever buy a house? What do you do if you really like the chandelier in the dining room and want to make sure the former owners don't take it with them? You write that into the contract. Because people are people, unfortunately, and left to their own devices, they'll pry off the 19-cent light plates on their way out the door. Maximizing their advantage.
     So no sympathy for Federated Department Stores, owner of Marshall Field's, which expressed "hope" that Target Corp. will give them the famous Norman Rockwell painting of a man setting the Great Clock in front of the State Street store.
     The store owned the painting for more than half a century, and Federated seems to have thought it was buying the artwork along with the 60-store chain and was surprised to find a copy hanging in the store's seventh-floor "museum."
     Out with the contracts! Either the painting was included or it wasn't. My understanding is that Target cannily made the swap—shipping the original back to its headquarters in Minneapolis—in spring of 2004, about the time it put Field's up for sale.
     In other words, the chandelier was gone long before Federated bought the place.
     Target does a brisk business in Chicago—my wife makes her second home there, and she offers Target this elegant solution: Donate the Rockwell to the Art Institute. Target gets a tax write-off and is spared any PR unpleasantness. The Art Institute will no doubt cringe away from displaying a painter as proletarian as Rockwell, and happily loan the painting, long-term, to Field's—er, Macy's. And the obscure seventh-floor museum, whose visitors seem to largely consist of Walnut Room patrons looking for the bathroom, will have its $5 million worth of original art back, and there will be joy in Chicago once more.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 21, 2006

    Postscript: The Target Corporation, no doubt coincidentally, did indeed donate "The Clock Mender' to a museum: not to the Art Institute, but to the Chicago History Museum, which proudly has it on display, where I noticed it during a visit earlier this month.

Trump is indeed making America great again

     Remember the domino theory?
     It didn't have anything to do with the pleasant game of deploying spotted oblong tiles. Rather, it was a way to view the world that believed, once a nation became communist, its neighbors would also fall under the sway of Marx, Lenin, et al., working like an infection toward the good old U.S. of A.
     The theory didn't show much confidence in our own system. But it was enough to get 57,000 American soldiers killed in the 1960s and 1970s trying to stop one tiny Asian country, South Vietnam, from being absorbed by its communist neighbor, North Vietnam.
     In the daily anguish that is the Trump administration, I've been using the Vietnam War as a touchstone, a reminder of how bad things aren't, at least not yet. Because you might be forgiven, reading the analyses surrounding Trump's first 100 days in office, for assuming that his administration represents some historic nadir of disaster in the realm of American mis-governance. Vietnam reminds us there are hells below this one.
     Yes, it's difficult to identify disaster aborning. Vietnam simmered for years. But Trump's missteps tend to be utterly stillborn, and he has fallen into a regular pattern of initial zeal for the detestable — to ban Muslims, scrap health insurance for millions, build a nonsensical wall and, most recently, bankrupt the country giving tax breaks to the rich. Each folly in turn is thwarted by the heretofore lamented but now cherished diffusion of power and creaking inefficiency of American government: blocked by the courts, by rebellious fellow Republicans, by fierce local resistance.
     Then Trump shrugs and moves on....

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Mona Lisa selfie

     

      To my credit, I did not plan to visit the Louvre during our recent trip to Paris. For several reasons. First, I saw it during my last trip, 24 years ago. Been there, done that. Second, and more importantly, my wife didn't have fond memories of what she recalled as hulking time-darkened medieval works plastering across endless, packed galleries. And third, both of us much preferred the Impressionist art at the Musee d'Orsay, which we went to immediately.
      But we were in Paris nearly a full week, and the expected exerts a gravitational pull. Something we had already noticed in Florence, when a friend of our son's insisted we visit a certain sandwich shop. The line in front of the shop was long, we waited a half hour, while other shops were empty. When we got our coveted sandwiches they were ... just okay. A reminder that the wildly popular is sometimes better, sometimes not.
    So the tractor beam of the Louvre eventually pulled us in. And once there, we shuffled, zombie-like, toward the Mona Lisa, another pair of lemmings, hurrying cliffward. You have to. There are mute signs, with just her black and white image and an arrow, to both satisfy the common urge and to reduce wear and tear on the guards. Plus, the idea of going to the Louvre and not seeing the painting, it feels almost perverse, like going to Fort Lauderdale and not seeing the ocean. 
     On the way to see the star, we enjoyed the Louvre more than we thought. It was brighter, the pictures, fresher. Maybe a quarter century of general cleaning and restoration. Maybe our tastes are more refined now.
    And it was worth it just for the shock of arriving at the large room containing the Mona Lisa. It's a madhouse, jammed with visitors, all trying to get pictures of themselves with the Mona Lisa in the frame.
    Even before you glimpse the painting, a wave of humidity, sickly sweet, slightly perfumed, hits you in the face. The moisture from all those bodies. It's like being in a crowded locker room with art.

"Portrait of a Woman"

    And why? Because the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. And why is this particular painting is the most famous of all paintings? Because ... any idea? No, not the smile. She was just another one of Da Vinci's works, no different than this "Portrait of a Woman" which museum-goers flock by with nary a glance on their way to the Mona Lisa. 
     But in 1911, a worker named Vincenzo Peruggia, hired to cut a pane of glass for the painting, instead walked out of the museum with it. The Mona Lisa was so obscure that it took a full day for anyone to notice it was missing. And it stayed missing for two years, the Da Vinci tucked in Peruggia's trunk while the theft made more and more headlines—at one point Picasso was a suspect, and the chief of the Paris police resigned out of embarrassment. It was only returned after Peruggia, who like most criminals was no Lex Luthor, tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery. 
    So that's what you're crowding to see--the after-echo of a true crime mystery. That's why the crowds are there. But why all the photos? Hard to take in a throng, the image muddied by the protective glass. You could buy a perfect postcard in the gift shop for 1.2 euros. But that wouldn't satisfy the "Kilroy was here!" impulse that has us in its thrall, the Facebook urge to document our precious selves. A manifestation of the brainless egotism that has so thoroughly gripped our times.  I'm not excluding myself, though I generally resist the urge to include myself in photos. I know what I look like.
    The Mona Lisa is so popular it almost can't be perceived. Like Grant Wood's "American Gothic." You see it and think of the parodies. To be honest, I enjoyed Da Vinci's "Portrait de la Femme" in the next room far more than the Mona Lisa. I can't tell if the painting is substantively finer, or just less familiar, which are pretty much the same thing in the art world. Nothing kills a work more than over-exposure, and attention has in essence ruined the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa's smile is famously enigmatic, but this unknown woman seemed, to me, downright chilly, even hostile. As if she's saying, "Go ahead, fawn over the bitch in the next room." I looked for a postcard in the gift shop of her, but of course there were none to be had, among the hundreds and hundreds of duplicates of M.L.
       This has to be a transitional phase, all this picture taking. A little gap between the time when we used film, which cost money, and limited our number of shots, and the time when we wear some device that constantly films our surroundings, as a matter of security. No wonder we revere the past, or at least our ragged perceptions of what it might have been.

"Another voice, then"

     It is surprisingly easy to overlook the Baptistery of San Giovanni, a plain—well, plain relative to its surroundings — octagonal building sitting in the courtyard of the vastly larger, vastly more stunning, ornate and magnificent Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, commonly called the Duomo.
     The first time I went to Florence, in 1999, I didn't even go inside the baptistery. 
     But that was before I caught what my wife recently called "your Dante thing," and on my recent trip I made a point of ponying up the 12 euro entrance fee and going inside to take a peek, even as my loved ones took a pass. 
     This is, after all, the place where Dante was baptized on March 26, 1266. It is not often you get to sit in a room 750 years old. There is a wonderful, spare beauty to the altar, which looks like this.


   
     I spent a long time looking straight up, at the mosaic ceiling. It looks like this:
    

     As I did, a thought came to me. The thought went something like this:
     You know... that ceiling. It sorta echoes the entire structure of The Divine Comedy. You've got Satan below. You've got the mortal world above, then the angels above. Here Dante gets all this credit for imagining the nine rings of hell, and the complex design of his masterpiece. Maybe he got the idea for the whole thing merely by looking up.
    Nah, I thought. That can't be. If it were possible, I'd have heard of it. Seven hundred years is a long time. Who knows when the ceiling was even decorated? 
     In 1225, it turns out. Forty years before Dante's birth.
     Okay, I would have read about it. I've certainly read enough Dante commentary. My idea of fun, embarrassing as it is to admit. This isn't some Dan Brown novel where important clues sit out in plain sight waiting centuries to be noticed. Amateurs do not discover important aspects of literature heretofore ignored. If it were at all a valid thought, somebody would have had it and mentioned it. 
    Turns out, somebody did. When I got home, I immediately pulled down my go-to guide for all things Dante, Barbara Reynolds' masterful, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. The world's foremost Dante scholar doesn't mince words while describing Dante's upbringing:

     Images of evil were depicted everywhere. In particular, the cupola of the Baptistery was decorated with mosaics arranged in rectangles, placed symmetrically, representing Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the Last Judgment and, of special importance for the Commedia, a grotesque figure of Satan, with three mouths, two protruding snake-like from the sides of his head, each devouring a sinner, an image with which Dante was familiar from earliest childhood. His presentation of Lucifer in Inferno resembles it closely, even to the sinners being crunched in his three mouths.

   Ah good, not original to me, but at least I'm not off-base either. The detail she's referring to is this.
     What I think this little episode illustrates the value of seeing something for yourself, versus reading about it in a book. I'm all for books. Still, I had certainly read the lines in Reynolds' book, then promptly forgot them. 
     But seeing the mosaic on the ceiling of the Baptistery—that isn't going to slip out of mind anytime soon.
      My wife and son had bowed out—save 24 euros, gone to get some cappuccino, leave dad to his madness. I didn't blame them. And honestly, I was glad for the time alone, to sit not only where Dante squalled as a baby, but where he yearned all his life to return.
     In Canto 25 of Paradiso, he pines for the place:

Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem
to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand
so that it has made me lean for many years, 

should overcome the cruelty that locks me out
of the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb
foe of the wolves at war with it, 

with another voice then, with another fleece,
shall I return a poet and, at the font,
where I was baptized, take the laurel crown.

     I like the "made me lean for many years." Just another frustrated writer bitching about the paltriness of his reward. Which is no doubt why I like Dante so much. Not for Beatrice, not for all the Florentine politics or Catholic cosmology. But for the swollen, aching ego, so real across the centuries. Something I relate to.
     Also the "with another voice then, with another fleece..." What exactly does that mean? There's a lot of obscure stuff in the Commedia -- to this day nobody can figure out what "between Feltro and Feltro" means. Maybe he meant that he's hoping to come back, perhaps disguised. "Vello" means fleece, but it also means "veil." Or... not to put on airs ... but maybe he was referring, not to himself returning at all—hope of that was fading as he wrote Paradiso, which was not discovered until as his death. But maybe he was thinking of other people, of strangers, speaking in other voices, wearing other garb. Of, just maybe, guys like me. Who, if the poem was as popular as Dante seemed convinced it would be, might shamble by, centuries and centuries later, to sit for 20 minutes on a bench, and think about him, and grant him the honor he so hungered to receive at that spot.

The relevant lines quoted above from Paradiso Canto 25 are carved in marble, generally unnoticed, outside the Baptistery. 

     

"This is as actual a part of living as being born"

     Concrete sounded terrible.
     "You don't sound so good," I told him.
     "I'm very weak," he replied. "I don't think I will be able to call you. I have edema all over my body. My nephew is a doctor and he says I have maybe weeks. I think that might be optimistic. I think more likely days."
     He would die the next day, April 5
     Concrete had been phoning me at the newspaper for 15 years. Once a week, once a month — it's not like I kept track. To comment on columns. To talk about stuff. He had a blunt, rounded Chicago voice, massaging his "t's" into "d's.
     "Hi, it's Concrede..." he'd say.
     He was pleasant and informed and often complimentary. But still, for years I viewed him as something of a nuisance. I had things to do. I'd surf the web while we talked. It's not something I thought much about. I had no idea, for instance, why I called him "Concrete" — his business, maybe.
     But over the past few months, he got sick — heart failure — and started to die. I began paying closer attention. A heart transplant was not an option.
     "I can't see taking a heart from someone younger," he said. "I'm not Dick Cheney."
     He could have fought harder but, at 69, he didn't see the point.
     "It's not like I'm jumping at death, but you gotta be realistic," he said. "Seventeen years ago I had a triple bypass, so I've actually outlived most people with the condition I had. Things are coming to the conclusion. This is as actual a part of living as being born. I know it's a cliche but it's true."
     I was concerned he was alone, but, the oldest of seven children, six boys and a girl, he had relatives around.
     "I feel terrible being a burden to them," he said. "My nephew carrying me down the stairs. I liked it better when I carried him."
     What's it like, knowing that you are going to die soon?
     "In a way it's almost a gift," he said. "I get to say thank you to people, to try to make amends to people I've offended by commission or omission. To forgive those who've done things to me."
     Was he worried about what might come after death?
     "Reason only carries you so far," he said. "That's where things like faith come in. I hope for some survival of awareness. I can't be sure there is. I've fallen back on Christian tradition. There are things beyond what our brains can comprehend."
     He had a lot of good memories.
     "My niece Dana on my shoulders, leaving the Auto Show, the kids waving bye-bye to everyone as they were going out of a the Auto Show. It's a nice memory. My God, I've been thinking of so many good memories, things when I was a kid, my dad, funny things. Seven kids, one bathroom, I once tried to see if the toilet would swallow a potato."
     Any regrets, besides that?
     "Oh God," he said. "I wish I had years and years, I had plans with my brothers, stuff like that. You have to let all that go. People are saying goodbye to me. I'm saying goodbye to everybody. There's a sadness to it, an anger phase, I've come to acceptance ... though I'm also still angry about it. I'll probably die that way."
     Toward the end, I thought to ask something I had never asked before
     "Concrete, what's your name?"
     "My name is Michael Rosewell," he said. "It's an English name. My great-grandfather was a remittance man. The family was paid to leave England and never come back."
     Why did I call him "Concrete"? I had written something about touring the engine room of a ship in the mid-Atlantic.
     "I told you that in Vietnam we experimented with concrete hulls for ships, and you started to call me 'Concrete,'" he said. "When it's over I'll have someone call you..."
     True to his word, the day before I left on vacation, I got a phone message from his brother.
     "He never married, never had any children," said Joseph Rosewell. "He always felt like the nieces and nephews were the children he never had."
     Rosewell died in Garfield Ridge, in the house his parents bought 66 years ago. His brother said he was greatly missed.
     "He was the leader, he was highly intelligent, you could see that, could sense that right away," said Rosewell. "He was always ready to share things. He loved to talk, loved to have us sit around and chat, hey, have a cup of coffee with me, one thing turn to another and we were having a great conversation."
     I can vouch for that. I never met the man, but felt bad, missing his funeral. The day I arrived in Rome, the first church I came upon was a lovely 16th century cathedral, the Trinità dei Monti. at the top of the Spanish Steps. I put a coin in the box and lit one of the short round votive candles and said a prayer for Michael Rosewell.

More for me

     Don't get me wrong. I like money as much as the next guy. Maybe even more so.
     If you were to say, "Would you like some more money, Neil?" I would immediately reply, "Yes, please!" and hold my cupped hands out for your to pour the money in.
     And yet. When Trump announced his big tax cut Wednesday, my immediate reaction was not: "Goody, more for me." 

     Instead, it was the same furrowed concern that greets every Trump proposal. Did he think this through? Did anyone? What gets pitched over the side so American taxes, low already, can go even lower? We've already seen funding slashed for environmental protection, the state department, the arts budget gone. What's next? 

     What about the deficit? I thought Republicans were crazed to slash the deficit, all important when it comes to funding programs that help poor kids. Not a dollar for them unless the dollar is cut somewhere else. 

     All out the windows. Suddenly we are boosting the national debt by trillions of dollars so Apple can pay a lower tax rate than it already does.

     And me too. Though, like the stock market bump, I'm not spending it yet. Given Trump's dismal record of accomplishment, there is little reason to suspect a connection between what he says he's going to do and what he indeed will do. Who knows? Today's promise is tomorrow's shrugged-off rhetoric. It's like those Jewish groups clutching themselves in relief this week because Trump uttered some reassuring words about the Holocaust. You want to snarl: "Really? He's still a liar. Just because his lies are words you want to hear, at the moment, doesn't change that."

     And how much will this widen the yawning divide, between those who struggle for crumbs, and guys like me who live in a padded world of steady salaries and health benefits and insurance and better health care for my dog than millions of Americans enjoy for themselves?
    A lot, I bet. Based on narrow self-interest, I should be glad, because my pot gets sweeter. But self-interest can be defined in more than one way.

    A young man of my acquaintance expressed what I thought was an embarrassing placidity over the advent of Trump—a common reaction of the young, I'm distressed to note, lumping Trump into the same box with the politicians and parents, the sagging old world.
     Is he not, I wondered, concerned?
     Nah, he said, he wasn't Muslim, he wasn't Hispanic, or any of the other special focuses of the animus of Trump and his administration. None of this would likely affect him. He'd be fine.
     I carefully considered my reply, and said:
     "But you are affected," I said. "You have to live in the country where it's happening."

"Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable"

 
     James Joyce hated Rome. For reasons that had much to do with him and little with the Eternal City. He was 24 years old, drifting with his new family, forced to work in an Italian bank, copying letters—up to 200 a day. “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.” he wrote to his brother.
     Harsh. Yet a damnation that echoed in my ears, not only while revisiting the wonders of the Vatican Museum, its arching gilt hallways stretching to the horizon, but to other cities as well: to Florence, for instance, at the Uffizi, with its harem of Botticellis, and the Galleria dell'Accademia, Michelangelo's David a marvel undiminished by 500 years.  

   Wondrous. But also half a millennium old, nearly. Doesn't anybody in Italy do anything magnificent anymore? Besides Ferraris, I mean. Everything of value seemed either 500 years old or baked that morning.
     As if to answer my question, as soon as we set foot in Venice, my 21-year-old, with the radar for the Happening Thing of the Moment the young innately possess, announced there was someplace he wanted to go. My wife and I tagged after him like a pair of pull toy ducks as he hurried through narrow alleys and across little bridges to the Palazzo Grassi to see the Damien Hirst show, "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable."
     Hirst is a British artist. Going in, I knew exactly two things about his work: one, he created those huge glass boxes with sharks and cows suspended in formaldehyde; and two, a decade ago he crafted a diamond encrusted platinum skull that embodies the insanely inflated values of the contemporary art world....

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The most beautiful library in Paris

    I could put on airs and pretend I knew it was there. 
    But the truth is, I didn't.
    The way I found myself in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France—the National Library of France—is this: I was visiting Paris for the third time last week, had been to the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Arc de Tri0mphe, the Opera and the Eiffel Tower. What, I wondered, did I want to do new? 
     I really like libraries. Not for the books, per se, but for some intangible grandeur they preserve. Maybe the idea of books having value, once, and perhaps still. They're just beautiful. I'm not sure I can explain it. 
    So I plugged in "Most beautiful library into Paris" into Google and came up with this. I think it was the distinctive beige ceiling, with its round skylights, that made me have to see it for myself. 
     The Richelieu Reading Room, as the above space is called, because its address is 58 rue de Richelieu is open only to researchers. Which I learned when the guard tried to turn me away. It was ironic. In many cultural institutions through Italy and Paris, journalists are admitted free—either out of respect or pity. But here, where there was no charge, I couldn't get in. I appealed to the guard, who said he didn't speak English, and summoned an administrator who did. I explained to her that I am a journalist from Chicago who wanted to step into the reading room.
    "People are doing research," she said. "They do not want to be disturbed." I realized she perhaps thought I was there to quiz people, perhaps about the upcoming presidential election. I assured here I wouldn't talk to anybody. I just wanted to see the place. She waved me in, another victory for French flexibility. I thought of the guard at the Library of Congress — who readers of my Chicago memoir might recall — who flatly refused to let my 7-year-old son see the reading room because he wasn't a registered researcher like his dad.

"Please return the books to their place."

    The room was worth the struggle. 
    If it looks extra fresh for a 143-year-old library, that's because it just reopened last May after five years of renovation work. 
     Tracing its roots to 1368, and the royal library founded by Charles V, the library has 14 million volumes, and is the repository for books published in France. Of course it has other buildings than this stupendous space, constructed in 1868, designed by Henry Labrouste.
     At the time it was the Imperial National Library, and the room was the Salle de Travail — the workroom — for the Department of Prints. Finished in 1873, it holds 80,000 books over three stories of shelves, seats nearly 330 readers, is divided into nine domes by 16 cast iron columns supporting spherical cupolas, "the successful disposition of which marks a distinct advance in the art of architecture," according to the Oct. 24, 1891 issue of The American Architect and Building News,  which noted its  "grand imperial effect."
    Indeed. Though the place was criticized when new. A British visitor in 1870 noted "the lighting of the new room is by no means satisfactory, there being too much light in summer and too little in winter. indeed, on more than one occasion last winter the reading room had to be closed before four o'clock, owing to the want of light."
     The library was not gas-lit for obvious reasons — the technology was still crude, and gas lights tended to cause fires, a particularly problem in a library holding not only the literary patrimony of France, but ancient Greek manuscripts.
    Although that was part of a general takedown, criticizing it for being noisy, poorly ventilated, lacking blotting paper, and decorated by medallions of writers exaggerating French contributions to literary, containing "three errors for which a child at school would be whipped." 
     Getting in was a challenge from the start, I was pleased to note. Though the librarians, "and indeed all those in any way connected to the establishment" were "polite and affable," those seeking admission had to submit "application at the bureau de l'administration" and show "that they have some definite object in view."
     "Foreigners are generally requested to make an application through their ambassadors, but for the benefit of English readers we may mention that the production of the British Museum reading ticket will immediately admit for the bearer a card of admission." 
     In view of that, I got off light. I spent maybe 15 minutes, tops, in the reading room, photographing it from various angles, and sitting quietly at space No. 186.  There I noted that, whatever advantages the internet certainly possesses, quite a number of young French people had taken it upon themselves to use the library on a sunny Thursday morning.

     For more than you'd ever want to know about the history of the French national library, including Jacobin leader Francois Hanriot's proposal, during the French revolution, that it be burned "partly, it would seem, because he was anxious to destroy the Fleur-de-lis and other armorial  bearings stamped on the books" plus minute observations of its condition in 1870, including a general disparagement of the new reading room, and many catty remarks on French vanity versus the unquestioned superiority of all things British, see this unsigned article in the April, 1870 Westminster Review, beginning on page 207.

Bebe Vio raises her foil against anti-vax hysteria

     You don't need to speak the language to have your attention snagged by the April issue of the Italian edition of Rolling Stone magazine.
     The cover is a fashion shot of Paralympic fencing champion Bebe Vio, dressed in Dior, her dark brown hair short, her deep blue eyes staring straight at the camera. The scars on her face are concealed by makeup, but those on the stump of her right arm are on display as her left prosthetic hand points directly at the viewer.
     "Vaccinatevi!" the headline reads.
     In English, "Vaccinate!"    

     It's tempting to think of resistance to vaccination as being a particularly American form of selfish ignorance, like belief in healing crystals or denial of climate change. But the phenomenon is, sadly, global. While some 380,000 people die each year of meningitis, mostly in Africa and other underdeveloped regions, a significant number of parents in supposedly developed countries still resist vaccinating their children. Italian Rolling Stone calls it a "real civil battle" and Vio, 20, is their poster child in the fight.
     Born in Venice, Vio was 11 when she contracted meningitis — the Centers for Disease Control suggests children of 11 or 12 get inoculated against the disease, with a booster shot at 16....

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Several columns for the price of one

Piazza Colonna, Rome.

     Computers are such an integral part of our lives now, I don't know why I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that among the joys of coming home Saturday-- seeing the house still standing, scooping up the ecstatic dog at a neighbor's—was sitting in front of my smoking hot, souped-up iMac, touch-typing and no longer having to navigate the world on the molasses-dripping-from-a-stick-in-winter modem speeds found at 19th century apartments in Rome and Venice and small hotels in Florence and Paris.
     Old school, I suppose, an echo of the scorn we used to feel for computer nerds and their Tandy motherboard projects sent away for from an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics. 
     I immediately went back and posted pictures over the past week's worth of posts, which had seemed blank, inadequate, without illustrations. It was frustrating, not being able to share photos. I had got a week's worth of posts to run, and then planned to just toss up an interesting picture and a few words: how cool it is, for instance, that the sewer covers in Rome feature the initials "S.P.Q.R"—"Senātus Populusque Rōmānus," "The Roman Senate and People," the same acronym carried into battle by centurions 2,000 years ago and found on ancient Roman coins. Well, cool to me anyway.

Marcus Aurelius's column

      Our hotel in Rome was a few blocks from Piazza Colonna, the square dominated by Marcus Aurelius's column, which we passed every night hurrying to our favorite gelato spot, Giolitti's. The square around it was blocked off and patrolled by soldiers—the valid fear, I suppose, being that somebody will ram a truck into the 1,800-year-old pillar, with its winding face telling of the victories of the emperor, famed for this "Meditations." 
      The column is one of the many based on Trajan's column in the Roman Forum. I figured, I would toss up the photo with some glib line, "Here's your column for today." Given the Romans had the technological ability to build the thing with chisels and ropes, it seemed perverse, in our modern age, not to be able to upload a picture of it.  
      Articles on such columns invariably note that it can be difficult to ascertain how much of the stories depicted on the columns are fact, how much propaganda, and that had a familiar ring to it. Donald Trump didn't invent lying about your accomplishments.
     Jump forward about ten days, and we were meeting our son in Place Vendome, in Paris, to go to lunch. There, I should have known but didn't, is found what at first struck me as yet another copy of Trajan's column, except in bronze. Luckily we had a few minutes to kill, and I went in for a closer look. Not a copy at all, except in concept. Rather, it is a completely different spiral narrative, this one celebrating Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz.  
     A reminder that, when doing a column, it's all too easy just to imitate somebody else's column.  

Place Vendome, Paris.