The first step with guns is education

    Clarity can be a long time coming. I've been writing columns on gun violence for nearly 20 years, lately slipping into a kind of exhausted hopelessness, just like our politicians and public.

      But writing yesterday's column, it came to me, and since I only approach it in the column, I thought I should say it clearly. The answer isn't law, at least not now. The answer is education. Americans have a right to bear arms, but they also have a right not to to bear arms, and they need to understand where their safety lies. Smoking was banned in restaurants because people learned enough about second hand smoke that they realized how dangerous it was to employees who work in smokey environments. Americans need to be told just how threatening guns are, to the gun owners and to everyone else. How baseless the "get the drop on the bad guy" fantasy really is. How the idea that we should have guns everywhere isn't the solution to the problem, it's the cause of more problems. 
    Not that it'll be easy. We're up against impassioned believers such as the gentleman in the exchange below. But education doesn't need Congressional approval. It doesn't require laws to be changed. The truth is out there.  It'll take a long time, but it's a way to start. 
     In the meantime, this is just one thread in the mass of response I got yesterday. The emails are quite long, but they'll give you a sense of things, and if you lose patience, skip to the end as the last one is a welcome surprise. There is hope. It'll take a long time. But in the end, Americans solve their problems.

Neil,
      Not really sure if you'll even read this email, but I am writing to briefly show you the other side of the coin after reading your rather narrow sighted partisan article on the so called "gun crisis". You liberals act as though people that support gun rights area bunch poorly educated redneck hillbillies who want to shoot everything. Nothing could be further from the truth and chances are the gun that was used by that 6 year old boy to shoot the 3 year old boy was not obtained or owned legally. The fact is all the gun control measures that liberals propose, which no doubt are stepping stones to a mass government seizure of guns that obama advocates citing Australia and Great Britain successes, will only succeed in disarming law abiding responsible people. The bad guys who use the guns to commit the crimes you cite in the stats will still get guns and still commit gun crime. The  difference is, if you liberals ever get your way, that the criminals will know that no one can defend themselves and it will therefore increase, as it does when they know they are in a gun free zone. Notice no one walks into a shooting range to commit a mass shooting, it happens in known gun free zones. Liberal policies keep our southern boarder wide open where drugs, guns and criminals flood across daily. The drugs lead to gangs, who use the guns in the hands of the criminals to commit gun crime. So as long as you liberals and your policies keep us in danger, we will fight for our rights to defend our families. Australia can get all the guns off of their streets because they respect their own sovereignty and don't have illegal drugs, guns and criminals flooding into their country. And by the way calling Ben Carson idiotic is really one of those "I know more than you" liberal statements that show an inability to shed the brainwashing all liberals seem to have gone through. Maybe if you and your children had been marched onto a train by a bunch of armed nazis you would have appreciated having a gun and a chance to defend your family instead of walking quietly into a gas chamber. Maybe one family could not fight them all off, but every family working together could have had a chance to prevent something like that, why else would hitler have started out by disarming the country if it would have made no difference. Besides I would have rather died fighting for my family rather than walking quietly to our deaths. And really?????? citing the French as an example of why guns wouldn't have helped, that is idiotic, haven't you ever heard of the French rifle for sale........good condition, never fired, dropped once. Doubt you have open mind enough to consider any other points of view, liberals rarely do, but food for thought. If you read it thanks for reading it, if not I'm not surprised.                                              Craig  

Craig --
     Well, I tried to read your email, but you seem to be responding, not to what I wrote, but to your own general biases about "liberals." I think people should be educated about how dangerous guns are. You, I take it, do not. You imagine that you would have fought off the Nazis with your guns. Of course you do. As I point out, gun advocates are so passionate because they are people lost in fantasy.              Generally, I try not to cross a man's fantasies. But in this case, it's too important. Ben Carson is an ahistorical idiot, and you are carrying water for an idiot, which strikes me as something worse. Still, thanks for writing.
NS   

     As I expected you do not have an open mind to others points of view, and nothing in what I said states that I do not believe people should be educated on the dangers of guns or that I did not respond to your article and you are wrong on both counts. I believe that in the hands of a well trained person who owns and maintains a firearm is not dangerous. Guns are dangerous in the hands of reckless criminals who fully intend to use them for evil. The laws and restrictions proposed by liberal politicians would do absolutely nothing to change that, because criminals do not abide by laws and the point of our wide open southern boarder, highlights the fact that illegal guns will be readily available on our streets and in the hands of criminals. A car can be dangerous and have the same effect as guns in the hands of reckless and lawless people, like drunk drivers who kill innocent people all the time, but there is no liberal agenda to ban cars. Responsible gun owners are educated and trained to handle firearms safely, just like responsible drivers. As someone who has likely never owned or operated a firearm I highly doubt you should be a source of reference on how a person trained to use firearms would react. I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone break into my house while my family was asleep. I grabbed my 12 gauge and engaged it where the intruder could hear it and the sound of my 12 gauge shotgun sent him running, and had it not and he proceeded any further into my house he would have gotten a full 12 gauge round square in the chest, because my family comes first. Sorry if yours does not and I feel sorry for you that you don't think enough of yourself to have the ability to defend your family by any means necessary, besides would you have a problem with someone beating an intruder down with a bat, what is the difference? The real fantasy is that someone who has never owned, been trained on or even seen a real firearm has any idea what someone who has fired one many times and is well trained to use one would do. Your narrow minded thought process is imagining yourself in that situation knowing you have no idea what your doing or talking about and therefore would be unable to use it. The fact is that firearms are used by citizens across the country everyday to defend their homes and families, but the media will not report on it. I'm sorry but you come across as an angry liberal who has no idea about the subject he is rallying against and sounds out of his league talking about it. Why did hitler disarm germany if it would have made no difference and no I'm not saying I would have single handedly fought off the nazis, but I am saying I would rather die defending myself than marched quietly without a whimper, and you who has never fired a gun can not say what I who has fired one thousands upon thousands of times, and is well trained to use one without fear and with tremendous respect would do, you are the one who lives in a fantasy.

Craig--
     Hmmm, I should probably not respond. Because it's a waste of time, at least for me. But you're just making stuff up, because it sounds right to you. For instance, you write, "You who has never fired a gun." 
     What makes you say that? Attached is a photo of me firing a gun, at the FBI range in North Chicago. I have fired many guns. Another one of those facts that you might have trouble wrapping your head around. 
     It isn't my job to fix the world, person by person. And yet, it's hard to see such a bolus of delusion and not reply. 
     One more thing — really, responding to you is like eating candy; it's hard to stop. When you refer to a "liberal agenda to ban guns," that's another hallucination. Seven years of Obama has lead to absolutely nothing on the gun front. Not only aren't liberal changing gun laws, we don't even have hope that gun laws might be changed. 
     But I'm just curious. Can you really not perceive that?  Thanks for writing; answer my question if you can. 
Best,
NS

           I assumed that would be the end, but there was one more email, which just goes to show, if you treat people with respect, they do begin to come around, sometimes.

Neil,
       Rest assured it is not a waste of time to respond to my emails, your article has generated a healthy civil debate between two people who don't know each other and have opposing views, but may be able to find common ground in the end. I want to start by thanking you profusely for responding at all, I have a ton of respect for that. I have written to other writers and have never received a response, I guess that's why I didn't expect to get a response in the first place. Secondly I guess that I came out "guns blazing" (no pun intended) because I thought I had one chance to say it all and that would be it, because I did not expect to get additional responses, and for that I am again very grateful as well. Now you are absolutely right, I should not have assumed that you have never fired a gun, I do apologize for that, that is not typical of me and I was wrong. I guess that would be rooted somewhere from the fact that most of the people I know in life being from Chicago are in fact liberal (yeah I know big surprise) and we of course get in heated political debates because we are all political junkies, but are also in the end all good friends and although I am outnumbered I love and respect them all as friends and wouldn't change a thing about them. And in those debates I find them to be often angry and passionate about their various causes, as am I. In particular though when it comes to the gun debate, the people I often debate have never seen a live firearm let alone used one and often have no idea what they are talking about, and so to answer your question, I guess I made an incorrect assumption that anyone against guns has never been trained to use them, and for that I do again apologize. Clearly you have had some training so will you not at least concede that people who are properly trained and know how responsibly own and maintain a firearm,  should be allowed to continue to do so. I am particularly sensitive to that because my family was in fact saved by my firearm and I don't want to think of the things that could have happened if I didn't have it, I get overly sensitive and I say things I don't mean on this subject because of that experience in my life and I am also sorry about the other things I said about you defending yourself and your family, also very out of character for me and I apologize. I have three beautiful daughters that  I do not want see become a crime statistic. It just seems to me that the policies put forward by the left target (again no pun intended) responsible law abiding gun owners rather than the illegal guns that are responsible for the horrible crimes we see. I see liberal political pundits portray conservatives raving lunatics who want to shoot children and in fact the exact opposite is true. I also feel very strongly that obama's boarder policy has opened up out streets to even greater amounts of illegal drugs, guns and gangs all in the name of getting votes. And his response is to target law abiding people. You must concede I have a point. Something else you should know about me is that I am not a raving right wing lunatic, I am a physician and surgeon and I specialize in limb salvage surgery. I work hard to prevent amputations, in mainly patients with PVD and diabetes, but it unfortunately also puts me on the front line of the other end of the "illegal gun problem". I am a patriot who loves this country and everyone in it, my brother served in Iraq and I always try to be a good person who does the right thing. I don't think you wasted any time in writing to me and I really am thankful that you have. You may not have changed mind on the gun debate, but you have reminded me not to make assumptions about people, which is something I do pride myself on, so thank you and you can hang your hat on that. I hope that maybe you can see that there is more to the gun debate and that people like me are just as saddened and horrified by the illegal gun violence these days in America, especially in our great city of Chicago, it hurts inside because I love this city so much, to see what is happening here. We just disagree on the cause and solution. Maybe a better title of your editorial would be "Case symbolic of U.S. illegal gun crisis" and that would get some attention on both sides of the isle. I am glad you choose to engage me on this topic and hopefully we are both learning something. One of these days both sides have to figure out how to come together because the country is becoming more and more divided and it isn't good for us. I have to say I have a ton of respect for you and will now be a regular reader of your work.
Cheers,
Craig

Craig --
     Well, that's more like it. Remember, I'm not suggesting we change laws at all. Just that we educate people as to the risks so they can make their own decisions.
I thought I might post our exchange on my blog. Would you feel ill-used if I did that?
NS 

Mass shootings aren't the problem

     A 6-year-old boy shot his 3-year-old brother to death in Chicago last Saturday.
     Leading to no public soul-searching, no local, never mind national, catharsis. People hardly noticed.
     Which is strange, because this kind of tragedy — or, if you prefer, crime, since the child found the gun left atop a refrigerator by his father, Michael Santiago, who is now charged with child endangerment — is symbolic of our nation's gun crisis.
     We snap to attention at mass shootings, with round-the-clock coverage, and intense thumb twiddling.
     But mass shootings are not the problem. Not close, not compared to everyday gun violence.
     According to the FBI, 486 people were killed in mass shootings in the United States between 2000 and 2013. Or between 30 and 40 a year.
     Now lets look at the numbers of people who intentionally shoot themselves: about 20,000 a year. An additional 11,000 are murdered by others wielding guns. And 600 more, like the 3-year-old boy, are shot and killed in accidents.
     So why the sound and fury after mass shootings? And the cough-into-the-fist at individual shootings?

     Mass shootings are scary. We can imagine someone bursting in and shooting us. Hard to imagine shooting ourselves, even though the odds are 1,000-to-1 in favor of the latter. The media is run by human beings, and like all human beings we have a tendency to ignore what's important in favor of obsessing over what's shiny, or novel, or scary, or dramatic.
     The common wisdom — and I've written this myself — is that nothing will be done toward adopting a sane national approach to guns because gun owners are so passionate in their support of gun rights. Their solution is always more guns, not fewer. The National Rifle Association has Congress in the palm of its hand to such a degree that it stripped funding to the Centers for Disease Control that went to gun violence research (a reminder of how wrong people can be — false patriots claim their guns protect our freedoms, when the exact opposite is true: the gun lobby undermines the basic American freedom to investigate the facts of our lives).
     Yet there is hope. There is a model for success, the story of a formerly huge national problem, worsened by rich interests and entrenched public delusion, eventually made less huge after decades of hard work: smoking.

      Fifty years ago, half of the adults in this country smoked. Smoking was cool. Even after the Surgeon General's report linked cigarettes and cancer, it took decades for attitudes to change. If you had told people that smoking would be banned in offices and bars, aboard airplanes and even on some streets, they'd have laughed at you. Go to a bar and not smoke?
     Now only a quarter of adults smoke. Millions of lives have been saved. How? Facts are sticky. No matter how much hype and spin gets sprayed at them, the facts remain. Smoking really does kill you. As do guns. Arguments for their value are delusional, like Ben Carson's idiotic imagining that arming Germany's Jewish population would have prevented the Holocaust. (The French army had guns; didn't help them). Or episodic: Someone, somewhere occasionally uses a gun for a legitimate protective purpose. But that is an extreme rarity, the comfort hiding the peril. Cigarettes make you more relaxed, so you ignore the danger. Ditto for guns. They help you feel safe, the illusion of protection masking the hard reality: that you don't usually shoot the gang-banger coming through the door; what happens, usually, is one of your kids shoots another.
     With cigarettes, before laws changed, perceptions had to change. Slowly smoking went from something desirable to a personal flaw.
     Ditto for guns. The NRA is trained to snarl against anyone proposing laws, but it's too early to push for laws. What we should push is the unvarnished truth, supported by the overwhelming evidence. Buying a gun makes you more imperiled, not safer. It increases the risk you will kill yourself, that you will kill your family members, or they will kill you — or each other.
     Those are just the facts.
     The father of those two boys bought his gun for what seems like a valid reason — he had testified against a gang member and was worried that the gang might come for him. But they never did. And now they don't have to. But let us not focus on this case. Because someone else will be shot tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that . . .

What to Do With Louie, Revisited

   
     A family on the next block put up this sign in their yard — actually a number of them. Which made me think of Louie Herrera, a 28-year-old man who lives in Elmhurst with his family who, coincidentally, have a similar sign in their yard. 
     I met Louie and his family six years ago, after his mother wrote to object to a piece I had written about Misericordia, the home for people with developmental challenges. Those kids would be fine, she suggested. But what about her son, who had just turned 22 and thus was no longer eligible for state services? I think she was surprised to hear back from me, and even more surprised to find me in her kitchen shortly thereafter. 

     If Louie Herrera's parents beat him, if they abused or abandoned him, then he'd be all set: The State of Illinois would be able to swoop in and see that Herrera, who has Down syndrome, was placed in a large, public facility that could offer structure -- supervision, classes and work experience -- to help him live a full life.
     "That, unfortunately, is true," says Lilia Teninty, director of the Division of Developmental Disabilities for the Illinois Human Services Department. "We have 'crisis criteria,' where, if people need that, we immediately put them into services. Beyond that, we don't have a lot of flexibility in adding services."
     Alas, Herrera is not in crisis. He is the "heart and soul" of a tight-knit, loving family in Elmhurst, which, unfortunately, happens to be in Illinois, thus creating a further difficulty.
     If Herrera lived in another state, he might be able to avail himself of services from a small group home or shelter workshop located in his neighborhood -- in Michigan, 82 percent of people with developmental disabilities are served in such settings. In Illinois, the figure is 30 percent, making it dead last -- 50th out of 50 states, right behind Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas -- when it comes to supporting community services for people with disabilities.
     Scarce Illinois resources are focused on large facilities, and even those are hard to get. People with disabilities who are trying to find whatever help is available in Illinois go on a waiting list to be evaluated. That waiting list currently has 16,000 names on it.
     "We don't have enough money to serve them all," says Teninty.
     That's the bad news.
     The really bad news, for Louie Herrera, is that his name isn't even on the 16,000-person waiting list. His family has been told that now that he has become an adult -- his 22nd birthday was Friday -- he is officially on his own, and the state cannot give him even the hope of any kind of assistance.

                                                                - - -

     Louie Herrera is a broad-shouldered, sturdy young man with a ready smile. Though some of his tastes mirror those of his peers -- he plays and coaches basketball and enjoys cooking -- his musical preferences are unconventional for someone of his age.
     "I like watching the Wiggles," he says, sitting in his mother's tidy kitchen, with its rooster motif. "I like 'Hannah Montana.' "
     Herrera was born with an extra 21st chromosome, a condition commonly called Down syndrome. Because of that extra chromosome, he exhibits a range of traits, including almond-shape eyes, a percussive manner of speaking and an IQ of about 50.
     I met Louie because his mother, Cheryl, wrote to me after I ran a column about Misericordia, the large Catholic facility on the North Side for people with developmental disabilities. She said that such places are fine, if you can get into them. But what about all those thousands of people who can't get in? Or those who don't want to go to a large setting and live with hundreds of people?
     The Herreras would prefer Louie to stay at home, where he has always been, and where most people with disabilities -- where most people, period -- prefer to be. But finding someplace nearby that welcomes someone like Louie Herrera can be next to impossible.
     "We've been finding a lot of these shelter workshops have been closed down as a result of funding," says his father, Louis Herrera. "Even if you do find a slot, you have to pay for it."
     Their search has been mirrored statewide. The struggle between a system that favors large institutions and the trend toward small community homes is a central concern for the disabled community.
     "This is not just about service, not just about a system that supports institutionalization vs. community living," says Marca Bristo, CEO of Access Living, a Chicago advocacy group for the disabled. "This is at the heart of our civil rights struggle."
     "Civil rights" may be a phrase not much associated with the disabled, but courts have increasingly viewed their situation in that light — the landmark 1999 Supreme Court Olmstead decision said, basically, that forcing citizens to receive care in large facilities when they prefer not to is a form of discrimination.
 

Louie Herrera, in a recent photo

   "We see so many people, especially young people, who have no business in nursing homes, ending up in them," says Bristo. "Some go in for short-term stays because they have some medical issue that needs to be addressed, and they never get out — and they never get out because of the way our public financing system is set up. It doesn't support community-based living. It's an individual's battle to find their way out."
     Battle is the word. Cheryl Herrera gave me a thick stack of photocopies of the letters, forms and reports she either sent or received trying to find a place for her son once he turned 22 and could no longer go to Elmhurst schools. She works as a substitute teacher, her husband as an accountant, so paying for Louie's care themselves is not an option. Yet leaving him at home would be like parking a 7-year-old in front of the TV for nine hours a day and hoping for the best.

                                                                                 
                                                                 - - -

     Those who are not related to someone who has Down syndrome, who have never met one, might automatically be put off by their outward appearances and thus may fail to grasp how loved they are as individuals by their family and friends.
     "Louie is the heart and soul of the family," says his father. "He has an outgoing, extraverted personality and is so pure in his nature and how he views things. So many people are touched by him when they meet him."
     One of those Louie Herrera touched most deeply is his younger brother, Doug.
     "People have misconceptions about everything having to do with special needs," says Doug, who's 19. "They look at them and see someone who's different, someone who drools or walks funny. They're too timid to actually get to know them."
     A sophomore at Illinois State University, Doug Herrera is studying special education and plans to spend his career working with people like his older brother.
     "I've always looked up to him," Doug Herrera says. "Through him, I've gotten to know a whole bunch of people with other disabilities, growing up and meeting his friends, hanging around his classrooms. I was always involved with people with special needs, always able to work with them. It's a rewarding job, and I really developed a passion for it."

       —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times Feb. 8, 2009

     Update
    The deep cuts to state programs since this was written have not affected the life of Louie Herrera. 

    "He's actually doing pretty good," Cheryl Herrera told me Monday. "He does a couple of programs; right now he's doing one through Gigi's Playhouse, out in Hoffman Estates, three days a week.  It's a little far, but we're managing. Two other days he's at Monarch, through Ray Graham, and in that one, he's really out and about in the community." 
     When we spoke on Monday, they had just gotten home from the library.
     "Louie likes the library," she said. "We go once a week."  
     Louie also works one day a week at a local camera shop, Elmhurst Photo on Spring Road, helping to clean and handle small tasks.
     "He feels very useful," his mother said. 
     His brother, Doug Herrera, who was studying to be a special education teacher in 2009, is now 26 and doing just that.
    "He works with really significantly-challenged kids at the Kirk School in Palatine," his mother said 
     

Cubs doomed

     A grim Monday morning.
     The Cubs down, two games to zip in the National League Championship Series. Last week's carnival air of inevitability turned to gloom or, more likely, completely forgotten. An embarrassing, temporary mania.
     Of course, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, the Cubs have as yet only lost the first game to the Mets Saturday night. But I'm going to go out on a limb, take one for the team, and brazenly assume they've lost the second too, because a) it's the Cubs and they probably will b) it might be the best chance of ensuring they'll actually win Sunday night.
     How can that be?
     Baseball is not just bats and balls, throws and catches. Baseball is our most spiritual sport, sometimes more of a religion than a display of athletic prowess. It's karmic. The Cubs and their famous curse are only the beginning. In our age of the dominance of flashier, faster, more TV-friendly sports such as football and basketball, the mere survival of baseball is a true miracle.
     The baseball gods demand caution, modesty, and they must be appeased. When they are ignored, when you cross the Great Wheel of Baseball Fate, there are consequences. I saw this disaster looming last week, when the whole city started skipping around Wrigley Field as if it were a maypole, glorying in the team's surprising victory, like Israelites driven mad by the golden calf. They did things they shouldn't have done, and said things they should not have said. I kept my mouth zipped shut -- well, one tweet on Friday:
     "Chicagoans are so excited about the Cubs, I'm reluctant to whisper, 'Isn't this the point where they collapse and break your hearts again?'"
     No one noticed or replied. No one wanted to face the truth.
     Then came what was to me — averse as I am to challenge a colleague — the Kiss of Death, Saturday morning.
     "THEY'RE GOING ALL THE WAY" screamed the headline on Rick Morrissey's column.
     Oh no, I thought, aghast.
     "They look unbeatable."
     No!
     "A force of nature."
     No, no!
     "The Cubs have become America's team."
     No, no, NOOO!     
     I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that Rick Morrissey is not Jewish. So he is not familiar with a concept that in Yiddish is called the "kine hora." The evil eye. I suppose the closest equal in English is "counting your chickens before they're hatched." I think of it as "Flipping off Fate."
     I suppose its a result of all the "Moneyball" sabermetric number crunching that has so afflicted baseball in recent years, as if you could measure Rizzo's bone density and the humidity of the air blowing in from right field and call the series for Chicago. You can't. Baseball isn't math, it's poetry. Not science but philosophy. Baseball breaks your heart ("It is designed," baseball commissioner A. Bart Giamatti once wrote, "to break your heart.")
     Although the Cubs droopping the first two --if that's what they have done -- might be a secret kindness. What makes the Cubs such a special team, such a valuable commodity? Obviously not their string of championship victories. Just two things, really, in my estimation: 1) They play at Wrigley Field. and 2) their incredible World Series drought, which grows year by year.
     The two are not unrelated. A winning team would have moved out to DuPage County years ago. The Cubs are like Naples--success eluded them, they were spared the ravages of economic progress, and now failure is their success. When the Boston Red Sox ended their streak in 2004, it was a moment of joy, yes, but the joy that comes from leaping from a high place. Then they hit hard reality, won two more championships, and are now just another winning team, a sort of New York Yankees Lite.
     Is that what you really want? Fine. Consider this column my sacrifice on the Sacred Baseball Altar. The illusion of the fan is that they matter. That if they wear their lucky hat, and cheer loud enough, the team will win. I'm not a fan, I've only been to one game this year. But I know how important this is to people, and want to do my part. Boldly predicting defeat Sunday night and standing by that prediction, even if wrong, is the best guarantee that they may somehow win. If they lose, when they lose, then I will have been correct. And if through some miracle they somehow manage to win, well, I'll look bad, but I'll also know that I've played my part in their victory.  It worked for Br'er Rabbit.
     And if this all sounds crazy well, remember, it's sports commentary. It's supposed to sound crazy.

"Crawl across the floor to me."

Photo: Richard Chapman, Chicago Sun-Times

     This is one of my favorite columns, and I'm reprinting it today simply because I happened upon the photograph, and thought it might amuse you. I was savvy enough not to have had a picture taken of my own session with Mistress Lilith—didn't want THAT floating around the Internet—but this one, featuring one of her customers. He showed up because he was commanded to, and never spoke. The difficulty of finding customers who would go on the record about their experiences was part of the reason I decided to go through the process myself. I'd like to say it caused a commotion when it was printed, but it really didn't. I think I got three emails. 



     "How should I address you?"
     "You may call me 'Mistress.' "
     "Thank you, mistress. What would you have me do?"
     "Take off all your clothes and put them in the basket."

     Less than two blocks from the Thompson Center, in a small, older building in the North Loop, is a plain glass door facing the L tracks. Press No. 3 on the buzzer, climb a long staircase, and you will find yourself in the dimly lighted confines of the Continuum Dungeon, where Chicagoans of a certain stripe go to act out their fantasies. The main room is large, with a black floor and light gray walls festooned with chains and manacles. There is a floor-to-ceiling case displaying whips, riding crops, paddles and flails; a padded table with restraints at the four corners; an oak coffin; stocks, and various ropes, pulleys and leather devices.
     
     "Kneel in front of me, slave. You may show your devotion by kissing my shoes."
     "Thank you, mistress."

     Within the dungeon, Lilith, 21, sits upon a wooden throne and issues commands. She is wearing a $400 black leather corset with steel stays, purchased for her by an admirer, a brief miniskirt, mesh stockings that stop at mid-thigh, and a dramatic pair of 8-inch stiletto platform shoes. She keeps her gaze politely in the middle distance. Her feet are faintly perfumed. Lilith is a student at Oakton Community College, where she is studying psychology.

     "Now kiss each buckle."
     "Thank you, mistress."

     Domination is a variety of fetish -- a fetish being where people are sexually attracted to physical objects, such as shoes and leather, ropes and whips, or to scenarios -- the nurse, the teacher, the dominatrix. The Continuum has a small, faux clinic for those attracted to medical procedures, complete with a stainless steel tray of surgical instruments, and a special room for cross-dressers.
     None of this is my cup of tea, personally. But the opportunity presented itself -- over Thanksgiving, ironically enough. I was standing in our kitchen, helping prepare the holiday meal, and my sister-in-law mentioned that an employee of hers is a professional dominatrix.
    "Now that's an interesting profession," I replied, explaining that I once tried to find a dominatrix to interview, and phoned up a few. But none of them wanted to be in the newspaper.
     "I'm sure she will," said my sister-in-law.
     She was right.

     "Come over here. Stand on this platform."
     "Yes mistress."

    Lilith is waiting beside a large St. Andrew's cross, made of sturdy wooden beams, with hand restraints chained to eye bolts. She buckles me in place. There is a mirror, to the right, and I catch my reflection and smile -- strange job, this. She gives me a preliminary slap on the butt, and I flinch involuntarily. "Twitchy," she says, with a trace of bemusement in her voice, reaching for a paddle with leather on one side and fur on the other.
     There are between 50 and 100 dominatrices in Chicago -- it isn't as if they have a union that keeps track. They are not prostitutes, generally, though as with so much on the periphery of human behavior, definitions tend to blur. Think of the profession as a spectrum, with one extreme being women who consider themselves priestesses, to whom being a "domme" is part of a complex lifestyle of tattoos, music and philosophy, blending into those whose focus is on the subculture's obvious theatrical aspects, and ending up with hookers with deep closets.
     Lilith, her hips tattooed with snakes, considers herself on the priestess end of the scale. She is proud of the college paper she wrote, passionately defending domination as an appropriate profession for feminists, and views her work with a considerable professional pride, a work ethic I come to appreciate.
     "People are always telling me, it must be a great job -- you get to take out your aggression on clients," she says, later. "But if you have that mentality, you're not going to be a pro domme. You're exploring a fantasy. You're not actually angry. If you're blinded by rage, you could seriously hurt someone. In order to be safe, you have to know what you're doing."
     We began by sitting together on a Victorian sofa and talking about what I wanted -- since all of this was new, I ask for a Whitman sampler of the sort of things that people typically request. My only stipulations were that I don't want to be suffocated, don't want to be permanently injured, nor was I interested in her ridiculing me.
     "I work at a newspaper," I told her. "I get enough of that already."
     We established a safe word -- "yellow" if I'm feeling at my physical limit, "red" if I want to stop. There were no waivers or paperwork to sign, which is more than I can say about the paper.
     "You requisitioned a $200 advance," a nervous secretary had said the day before, coming into my office. "You need to sign for that."
     "Right," I said, signing my name. "I'm being beaten by a dominatrix."
     "So I heard," she said. "What GSL code should I put for that?"
     "I don't know," I said. "7410 -- research?"

     "Lie on the table, on your back, with your head over here."
     "Yes mistress."
     "Scoot forward a bit -- that's it."
     "May I ask you a question, mistress?"
     "Yes."
     "What is that device?"
     "It's a purple wand -- an expensive Tesla coil."

     She arranges the electrical device, tucking a long metal probe into her decolletage, so that the blue sparks come from her fingertips -- the shocks are unpleasant but endurable. The dripped wax is also uncomfortable yet tolerable -- she holds the candle high, so that by the time it reaches my arms, it's not that hot. She is very poised and methodical, with one hand on her corsetted hip, occasionally giving an order, occasionally saying "Hmmmm," almost to herself, as if trying to figure out a puzzle.
     Lilith became interested in domination when she was a student at Evanston Township High School. "She's just following in the family tradition," said her mother, 47, who decided to have children -- Lilith and her sister -- without troubling herself with a husband. "Her grandmother is an out lesbian. My grandfather -- her great-grandfather -- fought in the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. We're a family of revolutionaries."
     Lilith's mother was born in Chicago but settled in Israel, where Lilith was born. Her mother -- who works as a quality auditor and so doesn't want her name used -- moved back to Chicago when Lilith was 7. As a girl, Lilith was, by her mother's account, of ordinary sensibilities. "She was very into Barbies," her mother said, speculating that her daughter was first attracted to the clothing of domination. "I think it was the wardrobe," she said. "She was making her own corsets in high school. She's always been kind of out there."
     I asked Lilith's mother if she worried about her daughter being immersed in this lifestyle.
     "I personally think it has been very empowering for her," she said. "She isn't normally a dominant human being. When she's not in the role, she's the opposite."
     Lilith's mother is proud that her daughter has found this cause.
     "She wants it to be more accepted," she said. "It's the next thing that society needs to get over, like racism was, once upon a time. It's a stigma, at the moment, but it's just as normal as anything else."

     "Crawl across the floor to me."
     "Yes mistress."
     "Get into the coffin . . ."
     
     "Submissives get into an altered state of consciousness" said Lilith, later, and that sounds about right. It did not feel upsetting, nor humiliating, just a calm interplay of instruction and compliance.
     I'm sure some readers might find it odd that I actually underwent this, as opposed to watching someone else do it, but I didn't see the harm, and it seemed the most effective way to absorb the experience. Of course I asked my wife ahead of time if she minded and, after a conversation that can be imagined, she set aside her objections.
     Lilith's boyfriend of 18 months or so also looks askance at her profession. "He hates it," she said. "But he's not going to stop me from doing it."
     For me it might be a lark — an interesting way to get out of the office on a Wednesday afternoon. But what about people who go to these places sincerely? Who are they? Lilith says that many of her clients are businessmen. "They have so much control in their professional lives," she said. "Here, they don't have control."
     She won't go into specifics — confidentiality is very big in domination. But she said I would be surprised by her list of customers. ("The mayor?" I asked, hopefully. But she demurred).
     "The type of people who come to sessions are the last people you expect to show up," she said. "The kinkiest people I know are accountants."
     Sigmund Freud traces this phenomenon to early Oedipal urges, of course. In a 1919 essay, he writes about boys who, feeling guilty about their sexual impulses toward their mothers, welcome punishment as their just due and, later, grow to associate the pain of discipline with the pleasure they believe they are being punished for. It makes as much sense as anything else, and there probably is not one single reason anyway.
     "It differs for every person who's doing it," says Dr. Domeena Renshaw, a psychiatrist at Loyola University who specializes in sexual abnormality. "It isn't a cookie cutter or a rubber stamp. Instead it depends on many things — early experiences, curiosity, what they're reading, and of course stuff on the Internet titillates and teases them and they explore the exotic of erotica."
     This once-remote world is certainly now a few keystrokes away from anybody. The Continuum has its own Web site — continuumchicago.com — as does Lilith, who lists her profession as "Dominatrix" on her MySpace page. It would take you two seconds to find it on Google.
     
     "Now lie on the table, face down this time."
     "Yes mistress."

     The coffin was actually restful. She secured it with a chain that clanked ominously, but there was a crack that let in light and air, and I'm not claustrophobic.
     Toward the end of the session, there was a moment—bound to a studded spanking bench, hand and foot, with elaborate knots which Lilith tied with extreme care—that I had a surprising realization: I was bored, somewhat, even buck naked, being straddled by a pretty woman hitting me with a riding crop.
     In my view, an hour with a dominatrix could be most readily compared to attending a Bears game at Soldier Field in winter — novel, yes, but also uncomfortable, expensive and ultimately more thrilling to anticipate than to experience. In both cases, I was glad I went, once, but it was obviously something that other people enjoy a whole lot more than I do, and I doubt I'd go back, particularly if I had to foot the bill myself.
     Part of that might have been my fault — I told her I didn't want to be hurt too much, and she never did anything particularly extreme, never got out the major league whips.
     "I was tempted to," she said, later. "But I thought, 'No, I should make sure he enjoys himself.' "
     Perhaps for that reason, the experience did not seem disgusting or perverse. The place was very clean. They seem thorough about cleaning and disinfecting between sessions. Philosophically, I could see being offended, if you view it as mock torture — this is not a real dungeon, these are not real whips, and to pretend they are could be seen as an affront to those actually subjected to these things, to real prisoners actually being abused against their will.
     But that's a stretch — we don't condemn actors performing Shakespeare because they don't really die. When I think of people who seek this out, for their pleasure, I do not feel revulsion so much as sympathy. If one's idea of a good time necessitates hiring someone like Lilith for $200 an hour and repairing to a place such as this, it would naturally tend to limit one's ability to derive satisfaction out of their lives.

     "Our hour is almost up -- was there anything you particularly liked?"
     "Liked? The paddle with the fur wasn't bad."

     Boredom might not be the standard response however -- at the very end, she asked if I needed a few minutes alone with myself and a few paper towels.
     "Umm, actually no," I said, feeling quite deflated. "No offense intended, but it was not what I would call an erotic experience."
     Nor is being a dominatrix, though it is not without its pleasures.
     "The job itself is not erotic," she said. "But I enjoy it. The point is to have fun. To relax, and enjoy yourself. When you think about it, why would anyone want to come in and be tortured, to have something truly painful done to them? There has to be some appeal. What you normally think of as pain can turn into pleasure, and that is the appeal."

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 23, 2007

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Maybe because it's new — since it's just now being built, it would kind of have to be — and off the beaten track, I saw this construction and thought, "Maybe...."
     I couldn't be confident, since you've cracked absolutely everything I've thrown at you, including last week's carpet bagger from Philadelphia. But this might prove something of a challenge. That's the hope at least ...
     Anywhere, where is this thing? The winner will receive one of my last 2015 posters, whose stock, I am happy to report, slowly diminishes. Post your guesses below. Good luck.

Does the law help or hinder?

     PHILADELPHIA: George Washington didn't want to attend the Constitutional Convention, never mind be its president. But duty called, again, and the weary general left his beloved plantation over the summer of 1787 to sit for three months in a mahogany armchair that is still there, a gilt half sun carved into the back.
     My wife and I found ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love last week, to attend a wedding. We had the chance to do a bit of sightseeing. I chose the Barnes Foundation, the eccentric private museum gone public. More Renoirs than you can shake a stick at.
     And my wife, officer of the court that she is, chose Independence Hall, the former seat of the Pennsylvania legislature, now shrine to the idea that Americans, at one point in our national story, could, if not exactly set aside their selfish interests, then bend them a little toward a national unity in such short supply nowadays.
     Visiting Independence Hall, like visiting the Liberty Bell, is free, but for the former you need a timed ticket. Requesting a ticket at 9 a.m. got us one good for 11 a.m., and I scanned nearby attractions, looking for one that might be worth two hours.
    "What's the 'National Constitution Center?" I asked a ranger, who said in essence, "it's a center dedicated to our nation's Constitution." Not much to go on, but enough to send us shuffling there to see what it was about.
     We ended up in "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government's Effect on the American Diet," and if that sounds like traffic school to you, it's good you didn't marry me or my wife, because it was a toss up which of us were more delighted. How could you not love an exhibit that tells you, right off the bat, that Thomas Jefferson smuggled rice out of Italy in his pockets, risking a death sentence, to see if it could grow in our nascent country?
     "This is so cool," my wife gushed. "I love this."
     The centuries-old relationship between our government and seeds mirrors the national schism we have now. In the 19th century, the idea was to kick start agriculture and get the hardiest plants into the hands of farmers. So the government not only gave seeds away for free, but sent scientists around the world to find more. Eventually putting the government on a collision course with the seed industry, which couldn't turn a profit selling what the government gave away, one of the countless ways business and government clash.
     Chicago is well-represented, alas, in the section on tainted foods, which included a series

of South African postcards mocking tainted canned meats.
     Just before 11, we pulled ourselves away, with great reluctance, and bolted for Independence Hall, where we met our guide, park ranger Helen McKenna, a 21-year National Park Service veteran. You would think her talk would be a bored recitation of Founding Fathers minutia. But other than pointing out Washington's chair, she explained that guides to independence Hall get to write their own presentations, and proceeded to deliver a short tutorial in American freedoms that probably was more challenging than many college classes.
   

Not happy to live in a nation of laws.

 McKenna asked our group to consider whether we think that the law protects our freedoms, or limits them. Then she asked that we divide ourselves accordingly and explain our choices. I joined the 50 or so people on the side who feel protected by the law, facing seven on the other who feel hobbled by it, which augurs well for the Democrats, since the belief that law maintains and supports our social order is a distinctly Democratic notion, while the idea that it hobbles our God-given freedoms and must be pared back in all places, is the Republican mantra.
     Afterward, I quizzed McKenna on how the groups usually divided themselves, and she said it varied widely. She's had entire school groups of African-American students gather on the "limited freedom" side and when she asked them to explain why, they said, "Trayvon Martin."
     I wasn't used to tours of historical locations being mini-civics lessons, and wondered how that came about.
     "It is a new thing," said Jane Cowley, public affairs officer at Independence National Historical Park. "It's called 'facilitated dialogue.' Our park rangers interpret history, interpret the resource for our visitors. It's a technique used to engage the visitor, as you experienced."
     It is not a practice limited to the rooms where our nation was born.
     "The interpreters (or tour guides) research, prepare and present their own programs both in Philadelphia and throughout the country," said Kathy Kupper, the park service's national spokesperson. "This practice allows the material to be fresh, not feel canned to the interpreter or the audience. They do have guidelines to go by such as the theme of the tour must be consistent with the overall goals and themes of the site, for instance at some point during the tour of Independence Hall, the ranger will let you know that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed in the building. From there, the ranger could craft his or his tour and go in several directions. A good ranger is constantly adapting the tour to fit the audience, tying in facts and ideas that can help connect that particular audience to the resource."
     Does this ever present a problem? Intellectual analysis of our history is not very popular with ... umm ... certain sections of the electorate. 
     "It's definitely received very positive reviews from all the visitors who have taken the tours," said Cowley, adding that some 3.6 million people come through the park, which includes the building where the Liberty Bell is housed, the Ben Franklin Museum, plus several other sites.

      "The National Park Service also interprets all of our history, the good and the bad and the sometimes controversial," said Kupper. "Our sites include Japanese internment camps, Pearl Harbor, cold war sites, a Confederate prisoner of war camp, battlefields, places where people were enslaved, etc. All the information provided must be accurate and properly sourced. A good tour also presents multiple points of view. However, sometimes a tour of one of these sites or a tour of any site that is particularly thought-provoking or presents different points of view might not appeal to a visitor."
    I bet. Though it certainly appealed to this visitor. 

  McKenna left us by holding up a enlargement of the sun at the back of Washington's chair, and quoting Benjamin Franklin.
     "I have often looked at that behind the president," Franklin wrote, "without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting."
     Franklin decided that it was indeed a rising sun.
     But that was 228 years ago. What about now, McKenna asked? Would you agree with Franklin? Is the American sun rising or setting?
     "What would you say to him," she asked, "and what examples would you cite?"
     That's easy. I know what I would tell Franklin, and the example I would offer: the tour I had just taken. As I was both pleased by the agriculture exhibit and doubly-pleased by the fact that the woman I married loved it too, so I was both intrigued by the issues that McKenna raised, and delighted that we live in a country where a government tour guide is free to raise them. For that alone, I side with Franklin: rising, still.

Flashback: All Summer Long

     
     Pans are more fun than praise. My column Wednesday on Leonard Pitts' new novel, "Grant Park," was hobbled by the fact it is a pretty good book. The review referred almost wistfully to another novel by another columnist—"All Summer Long" by Bob Greene. I couldn't resist the urge to dredge up my infinitely more satisfying treatment of it, which ran in the Reader 20 years ago. I loved the fact that it was presented deadpan as a review that just happened to be written by Bob's nemesis, Ed Gold, as if it weren't the latest link the clanking chain of malice that was BobWatch. The bit of publishing gossip beginning the third paragraph was possible because Bob and I shared a publisher at the time.

All Summer Long
By Bob Greene
(St. Martin's Press; $5.99)
Reviewed by Ed Gold

     There were moments while reading this unremittingly awful novel that I just wanted to close the book, turn my face to the wall, and die.
     Staring hour after hour into the Freudian cesspool of Bob Greene's psyche, delivered in a septic stream of 437 pages of predigested prose--devoid of a single metaphor, sharp image, or fresh idea--was practically a soul-shattering experience.
     All Summer Long was said to be the coveted novel that Bob extracted out of Doubleday, his pound of flesh in return for Hang Time, the highly lucrative kissy-face to Michael Jordan. The two years that passed before paperback publication, plus the novel's devolving to the inferior St. Martin's Press, point to its vanity press nature. As do the blurbs from publications such as the Cape Cod Times, the Flint Journal, and the Muskogee Phoenix and Times Democrat.

   The plot is pure Bob wish fulfillment. The thinly disguised Bob character, an aging TV journalist named Ben Kroeger, dragoons his two best friends into abandoning their families and spending "one last summer" in a journey across the country. "We had said that it was going to be the best thing we had ever done," writes Bob/Ben, as if the three men were bringing vaccines to impoverished African villages instead of lounging around motel pools.
     Bob's fake premise is further undermined by his insistence on presenting the lark as a pure, shimmering quest, a search for the grail that everyone immediately grasps and then reveres. The irony of these three boobs trying to regain the sort of magic summer now being denied their own cast-off and fatherless children never occurs to anybody, least of all the author.
     Falsity sprouts on every page. The wives of both friends have obligatory little scenes where they give their blessing to Bob/Ben. One wife, with two small children, says, "I think it's important that he gets out for a while and sees some things. . . . I want him to have this summer." The other says, "Ronnie works hard. Ronnie deserves to relax." Bob's ersatz women are fake in a way seldom seen outside pornography, but then again, so are his men. In fact, the book has only one character—Bob Greene—given different aliases and manners, but all reflecting back, hideously, to the same pulsing pathology.
     Mercifully, only a hint of the book's complete wrongness can be conveyed here. Much will be familiar to Bob readers: the scenes whose sole purpose is to recycle old columns, making patties of the regurgitated mash of past fixations—Elvis, television, baseball, television, the Beach Boys, more television. I kept waiting for Baby Richard to toddle past.
     A special warning must be added: Bob procures a love interest for himself. Mary, a 23-year-old "really beautiful" tanned athlete jogs up to Bob/Ben on the beach and breaks through his natural midwestern reserve with a fusillade of praise for his high-caliber journalism. She's hip—she listens to Taylor Dayne. She calls him "chief." They go through a high school romance, holding hands. Mary, laughing, pokes Bob/Ben playfully in the arm. Bob/Ben solemnly explains the magic of Brian Wilson.
     They hop into the sack, but not before Bob/Ben mercifully draws the veil, so to speak, as Mary is taking off her shirt and rubbing her bare chest against his. Only the numbness caused by the preceding 200 pages kept me from leaping out a window at this point, the way young men were said to do after reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.
     Heck, perhaps Bob has established a new genre here: unintentional horror. Parts of All Summer Long are as terrifying as anything Stephen King ever wrote, grotesque enough to make the most blood-drenched P.D. James novel look like Pat the Bunny.
     Read it at your own peril.

'Grant Park' mixes racial history, thriller

     Had Leonard Pitts Jr. entitled his new novel "Central Park" or "Golden Gate Park," had he set it in New York or San Francisco, it never would have touched my hands.
     But he called the book "Grant Park," prompting an editor to pluck it out of the endless slurry of galleys that flows into the newspaper, and jam it into my mailbox, where petty local pride made me agree to read it, if only for the pleasure of flagging the howling errors that Pitts, who lives in Maryland, would try to pass off as genuine Chicago color.
     Pitts is a syndicated columnist, and my first thought was: columnists can't write novels. I sure can't. They create a supercharged version of themselves and jiggle the resultant marionette through some improbable adventure. My sight was no doubt clouded by painful memories of Bob Greene's execrable "All Summer Long," with its cuties blundering up to SuperBob and confessing their admiration for his high-quality journalism.  Then I thought of Pete Hamill — his novels are nearly literary, meaning that they carry a whiff of actual existence. And Bill Granger's skilled thrillers. And Carl Hiaasen's funny Florida gothic.
     Hope bloomed. I possessed exactly two facts attached to Pitts' name when I opened the book. First, he wrote a strong, defiant column immediately after 9/11. And second, he's black, and it's an indication of the sort of white obliviousness so infuriating to Pitts that, even knowing this,  I was still mildly surprised to find his novel is about black people.
     At first it seemed like Pitts had fallen into the Bob Greene trap. His hero, Malcolm Marcus Toussaint, is a successful, almost adored columnist who has two Pulitzer Prizes, one more than Pitts himself. His newsroom includes people like Amy, a "20-something white girl" who tells him, "You're the whole reason I'm here," as if a career in journalism were a good thing. (I've had students share a version of that sentiment, closer to, "You led me to believe I could get a job," hissed through tears).
     It is Election Day, 2008. The book serves up surprise after surprise, and it's difficult to relate the plot without spoiling what, I'm glad to say, is an enjoyable cliffhanger. But I'll try.

Leonard Pitts Jr.

      Toussaint is tired of "white folks'
 bullshit" and writes a column saying so. Most papers in America would wave it into print it with a sigh and a few dashes, but the column is rejected, so Toussaint contrives to have it published anyway. He and his boss Bob Carson are summarily fired from the Chicago Post, the newspaper Pitts conjures up, perhaps not realizing that doing so risks pushing his book into the fantasy genre (while he's giving Chicago a third major newspaper he might as well add orcs and flying brooms and complete the effect.)
     Then Toussaint vanishes and Carson sets out to find him. There are too many coincidences—how did the guy on the tour boat wind up in that bar so quickly?—and the writing never soars, though Pitts does a solid job of navigating the perilous dilemma, heartbreak, frustration and irony of  being black in 2015.
     What redeems "Grant Park" is  Toussaint's backstory, delivered in textured flashbacks of Memphis, 1968, where his father was a garbage man in the midst of the sanitation workers' strike. Toussaint is there, at Martin Luther King's elbow, and so is Carson—his interracial love affair with fellow student Janeka unfolds poignantly. Their lone sex scene—we journalists are squeamish about sex—conveyed with all the fumbling and humiliation of real life.
     Back in 2008, we meet a pair of Carl Hiaasen-grade white supremacist low-lifes, one named Dwayne, which seems a requirement of some sort, who have a mad scheme to kill Barack Obama at Grant Park that night.
     Speaking of Grant Park. I did find my howlers, most geographical. "A place on Michigan Avenue," is described as being "about two blocks from Grant Park" which is akin to describing somewhere as being on Sheridan Road, two blocks west of Lake Michigan. In an afternote  Pitts claims such mistakes are intentional, and one does nudge the plot forward, but most have no use, plotwise, so that seems disingenuous. Chicago is a lot bigger than the shoebox diorama Pitts seems to have in mind.
     The Chicago Post newsroom also doesn't jibe with newsrooms as I understand them. As the popular Toussaint is abruptly shown the gate. I kept thinking of the stern don't-do-that-again finger wagging the Chicago Tribune gave Clarence Page in 2012 after he accepted $20,000 and was flown to Paris to speak at a rally for an Iranian terrorist group. His Post bosses never pause to worry about Jesse Jackson picketing the paper, a reminder to Pitts that it isn't only whites who can have trouble recognizing their own privilege.
    But those are quibbles. The bottom line is that ... here comes the money shot ... Leonard Pitts has written a taut thriller that weaves together a stark look at America's tortured racial past with a fast-paced tale of terrorist conspiracy and love rekindled.  

Leonard Pitts, Jr. will be speaking at the Harold Washington Public Library, 400 S. State Street, Wednesday, Oct. 14 at 6 p.m.

Fall color

Fall, 2014

     "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago," the Chinese proverb tells us. "The second best time is now." 
     On that scale, planting a  tree a year ago seems the worst of both options. Not long enough to show much discernible progress. Not recent enough to carry any afterglow of the optimistic act of planting a tree.
     But planting this sugar maple 20 years ago was not an option; the proper time travel technology is not available.  Besides, I lived in East Lake View then, in a walk-up condo. I wasn't planting any trees anywhere.
     I moved to the suburbs, inheriting a bunch of trees, including a mammoth sugar maple that was perhaps 150 years old. And it was only last year that I finally came to grips wit with the idea that our beloved old behemoth was really going to go, that all the arborists in the world could not save it. That even even trees get old and die. So it was in the fall of 2014 that I  planted a sugar maple across the walk from the doomed tree in our front yard.  The new tree didn't even have leaves.  I considered the sapling not so much an act of hope as a rude gesture at cruel nature. You're taking this one? Fine, Mother Nature, fuck you, I'm just going to plant another one just like it. Howdya like that? 
     It was, by comparison, a broomstick of a tree, a pathetic pole I could fit my hands around. 
    "It'll be really something," I told my wife, "...in about 100 years. We won't be around then of course. But someone will." 

Photo by Shelly Frame

     To be honest, I sort of forgot about it. The thing wasn't much to look at, more of a reminder of what was lost than anything else. 
     Winter came and went. Then summer—I reassured myself that it was alive,  kept it watered so it stayed that way.  My expectations were minimal.
     As mankind so often does, I had underestimated nature. 
     We were on the East coast last week, traveling from Boston to Philadelphia, when one of our neighbors—we have wonderful neighbors—emailed us this photo of our new tree, which marked its first full autumn in our yard with a spectacular display of the deepest, richest orange I have ever seen on a tree. 
     I can't tell you how comforted I was by that blaze of fall color that popped unexpectedly from our new stick. A reminder that nature is neither cruel nor kind, it just is. Cruelty or kindness are human constructs that we layer upon nature's regular and perfect activities. 
    It is humans who label, who interpret. And what that little tree's virtuoso display reminded me was while individual trees, like individual people, certainly grow old and die, that trees and people, as a class, both endure, and the new generation, though smaller, at the moment, still has wonders aplenty up their sleeves, and will deal them on their own timetable. We just have to be patient and wait for them. 

Your flight's canceled, but you can set a spell

     A line of white rocking chairs are scattered along between Terminals B and C at Boston's Logan airport. Giving people a place to sit, and relax, and momentarily escape the exhausting slog of air travel. My eye was caught by this older couple, watching the planes come and go. There was something incongruous about them, the white haired man and wife, I assume, turning an anonymous airport causeway into their front porch or local Cracker Barrel, watching, not the mule nibble on kudzu, but a phalanx of vehicles through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window. 
     Turns out that rocking chairs in airports is common, as documented on the web site, The Verge, which traces the phenomenon back to 1997, when a photo exhibit on front porches at the Charleston Douglas International Airport included rocking chairs as props. When the exhibit ended and the chairs were removed, flyers complained, and the chairs were returned. 
      The chairs took off, so to speak, after the 9/11 attacks, as a low cost, low tech way to encourage calm among travelers.  Now they are found in a number of airports around the country. Sacramento's are made of teak. 
     This is really a new twist on an old practice. Introduced in this country in the 1700s, rocking chairs found their way into institutions in the 1800s—"Rocking Chair Therapy," it was called. 
     There is some science behind the idea of rocking chairs to battle stress. A 2005 University of Rochester School of Nursing study found that seniors who rocked in rocking chairs grew less anxious, and calmed down more quickly when they were upset, cried less, and asked for less medication. 
     "Our goal is to keep people out of institutions," said the program director at an senior day program that participated in the study.
     Not that the chairs help keep anyone out of the institutions of airports; just give them something to do when stranded in one.
     I didn't sit in the chairs—I had a rental car to pick up—but will give them a try next time I've got a few hours to kill waiting for a delayed flight.
     So, a charming idea, but a charm that might also be worth resisting. It's as if the airport is saying: We can't spare you the time-killing TSA security theater. And we can't keep a third of the flights from being delayed. But we can set out a few rocking chairs to blow off the stress our poor performance causes. I'm not sure if that's something to feel good about.

Book Week #8: "Upon breach of my late vows"

     Book Week concludes today with a glance at my upcoming book. 
     The day before we left on vacation, I handed the copyedited manuscript of "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery" over to my co-author, Sara Bader. The book will be published next fall by the University of Chicago Press. It's an unusual book—we use quotes, from poems, from literature, from songs, movies, letters, journals—to walk the reader through the recovery process. The quotes are not just grouped, but mortised together, one leading to the next, so they form a mosaic, tell a story. Historical figures also appear, almost as characters, to help explain certain aspects of recovery. For the key issue of relapse, we use Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English writer. This is the beginning of the introductory essay starting the relapse chapter, called "Upon Breach of My Late Vows." When we began writing the book, I didn't know anything about Pepys except his diaries contain a candid account of his life. I assumed there would be drinking, and I was right. This is the first sample of the book to appear anywhere; I'm interested to hear what you think of it.

                             . . . and so the pewterers to buy a poore’s-box

                                   to put my forfeits in, upon breach of my late vowes

                                                    —Samuel Pepys, diary entry, March 5, 1662

     The vows that Samuel Pepys, the famously frank English diarist, had solemnly made to God a few days before, and would make time and time again, were to stop drinking wine and attending plays, two pleasures entwined in his mind. Putting aside the lure of the theater—then considered practically a mortal sin—Pepys offers ample evidence that long before there was the word “alcoholism,” there was the snare of drinking and its damaging effects, the struggle to resist and the tendency of that resistance to eventually collapse.

 

Samuel Pepys

   Two and a half weeks after buying a slotted box to hold the coins he fined himself for submitting to wine, Pepys is back at it. “And so to supper and to bed,” he writes, on March 22, 1662, after reveling with several ship owners, an alderman, and a captain, “having drank a great deal of wine.”

     The problem started early with Pepys, as it often does. Almost all that is known of Pepys’s college years at Oxford is a written reprimand chiding him and a classmate for being caught “scandalously overserved with drink the night before.”

     The lure of the wine shop would dog him well beyond his college years. In his diary, which covers most of the 1660s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, he presents a detailed portrait of a busy bureaucrat—he was a high official in the British navy. Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) was a prominent figure in Restoration London—acquainted with both Charles II and Isaac Newton—a man consumed with desires: to earn a lot of money, to grope every pretty maid or underling’s wife who crossed his path, and to engage in a steady rondo of drinking then swearing off drinking. No detail was too trivial or too self-absorbed to escape Pepys’s attention, and shame seldom caused him to halt his pen, creating not only an invaluable historical record but also a unique portrait of a man in the throes of addiction. If there were ever a writer who conveyed the maddening, tiresome, head-on-a-board repetition of relapse, it is Samuel Pepys.

     Then and now, relapse is perhaps the thorniest problem in recovery. To acknowledge that it happens—that addicts routinely toss away their hard-fought-for sobriety—can sound to the desperate drunk trying to pick the lock on the cellar door like a kind of permission: Oh, I’m supposed to do this? It’s expected of me? Thank merciful God.

     But to ignore relapse invites the user to completely surrender after a single aborted attempt at sobriety, when usually it takes more than one, if not many tries. The mountain trail is steep and slippery. Few get it right the first time. And having gotten it right is no guarantee of future success, which is why people generally say they are “in recovery” and avoid claiming to have “recovered.”

     So the trick is to learn about relapse, then tuck the knowledge away and forget about it, like an insurance card in your wallet to be taken out in case of emergency. Hopefully you never use it. It’s far easier if you don’t have to. Then again, “easy” is not a concept of much practical use in recovery.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    This is why I hate most modern public art. The impulse to embellish public spaces that once created this amazing tableau, today would be channeled into some kind of irregular surface of broken chunks of concrete with plastic dolls embedded in them, wrapped in concertina wire and given a fey title intended to be evocative.
     I suppose it's easier, and cheaper that way....
     That said, where is this thing? I'll state the obvious: it's not in Chicago, but somewhere else. Normally I'd harbor hopes that it being outside of Illinois would be enough to gain me a few hours. But I know my Hive, and my hunch is, you'll solve this before breakfast, alas.
     Place your guesses below. Winner gets one of my 2015 blog post posters. Good luck. Have fun.