A la recherchez du froid perdu

Just because it's cold, doesn't mean we can't have fun. My oldest son, Ross, had heard that, when it's this cold—16 below—a cup of boiling water tossed into the air will instantly become steam. QED, it appears to be true. 

     The other day I mentioned my affinity for weather stories, which sent me searching through the Nexis newspaper archive for the article I wrote containing a string of quotes from Chicagoans all describing the weather as "cold." I couldn't find that, but I found these two, both from a cold snap of exactly 20 years ago, in January, 1994.  The first revisits the city during previous deep freezes. The second does something I imagine most pedestrians itch to do on very cold days: ask that guy without a coat: "What the hell are you thinking?"

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 1994:

     One good thing about weather this cold is that it creates a kinship with Chicagoans of the past, all of whom lived in a city that is no stranger to below-freezing temperatures. Some cold days to remember:

Sunday, Jan. 20, 1985. Temperature: -27, a record low. Wind chill: -78.

Lake Michigan, 1/6/14, Photo courtesy of Bill Savage

     St. Agnes Eve, the coldest day of the year according to folklore, made believers of Chicagoans previously unfamiliar with the obscure Jan. 20 holiday. Ardie Rowe, a doorman at the Ambassador East hotel, had an especially bad day. Even the tips were bad. "The people are rude. Their cars won't start. They think it's your fault there are no cabs," he said.

Saturday, Dec. 24, 1983. Temperature: -25. Wind chill: -82.

     The day broke a Christmas Eve record that had stood for 111 years. CTA buses and trains were off schedule, with intervals between trains of up to 30 minutes. At Cook County Hospital, frostbite victims were showing up in the emergency room as often as every 10 minutes. "It's like the world is an ice slide and Cook County is at the bottom," said Dr. Larry Schmetterer.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 1982. Temperature: -26. Wind chill: -81.

      The Chicago Fire Department had one of its most difficult days ever, with frozen fire hydrants, high winds and icy conditions. More than 600 firefighters were ordered to start work at midnight Sunday instead of waiting for their regularly scheduled starting day, Tuesday. Fire Commissioner William Blair left town for a weeklong vacation in California.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1933. Temperature: -19.

     A.M. Krahl, of the Pure Milk Association, reassured the city that "Chicago's milk supply was not endangered." Farmers had been appealed to by radio to "bring the milk through" and had responded nobly, he said. Movie stars Mary Pickford and Edward G. Robinson, who were passing through town on their way to the coast, met for the first time and had a snowball fight.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1899. Temperature: -21.

     More than 1,000 homeless people sought shelter at Chicago police stations. With the 30 men working two miles offshore at the 68th Street crib running low on food, a dramatic relief effort was mounted. "Six stalwart men" dragged a sled piled with 400 pounds of food across the frozen lake, but were turned back by a break in the ice. The tug Morford made it the next day, but was crushed by ice floes after reaching the station and unloading supplies.

Monday, Jan. 25, 1897. Temperature: -20.

     On its front page the Chicago Record newspaper listed not the cold temperatures, but the philanthropy of Chicagoans. Mayor Swift appealed for donations: "The present severe weather must naturally excite the keen sympathy of every kindly disposed person for the worthy and suffering poor." Topping the list was Peoples Gas, which gave $ 1,000. Potter Palmer gave $ 200. The Northwestern Yeast Co. donated 100 loaves of bread.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 15, 1994:

     You always see him.

     On days like Friday, when the cold is like a draft from outer space; when fashion goes out the window and even the young and hip drag out their woolen long johns and Yukon mukluks, there he is: the guy walking down the street without a hat, without gloves, in a thin jacket that wouldn't be out of place in May.

     His name is Ron Holzapfel. He is 28 years old and an architect working downtown. He may not be the same guy everyone sees, but he will stand in, a sort of Everyunderdressedman.

     Of course he has an excuse.

     "I didn't think it would be this cold," explained a sheepish Holzapfel, walking west on Lake Street, his hands reddening, his head hatless in the minus 42-degree wind-chill.

     In his defense, Holzapfel pointed out that he was only walking two blocks. "I can deal with it for two blocks," he said.

     Sort of like liquid nitrogen -- you can put your finger in, so long as you pull it out real quick.

     While Holzapfel was hurrying to his office, some actually found enjoyment in the otherworldly temperature -- an official low of 8 below zero at 8 a.m. at O'Hare Airport.

     A full dozen people were on the ice rink downtown at Skate on State.

     "This is my first experience with cold weather," said Lisa Comeaux, who -- of her own free will -- left her home in New Orleans, where it was 62 degrees Friday, to visit her friend Mary Gay and the frozen world in which she lives.

     The two -- both nurses -- said the weather was not impeding their skating fun. "It's bearable," said Comeaux. "I thought about losing my toes to frostbite," said Gay.

     Another skater, Greg Hill, woke up Friday morning in Nashville, Tenn., where it was 35 degrees warmer. He then got on a plane and -- without being forced -- came to Chicago for vacation. "We said, 'Why let cold weather stop us?' " said Hill, 24, who skated for 20 full minutes with his wife, Shannon, before they decided they had had enough fun.

     Then there were those whose routines were not about to be interrupted by something as paltry as the city being plunged into an icy hellsbroth of mind-numbing cold, the likes of which has not been seen in nearly a decade.

     "I'm frozen," said Gerry Mayo, 62, pedaling his bicycle down the wind-whipped lakefront near Montrose. "(The weather) never stops me. I live on the bike."

     Mayo did admit that while on a summer day he may bicycle more than 50 miles, on Friday he expected to do about six miles.

     "This is not very bad," he said. "Just my toes."

     Jennifer Stern, 22, was one of the committed masochists who jogged along the lakefront near Fullerton, where Lake Michigan, thick-looking with the cold, surged and steamed.

    "Why?" asked Stern, not breaking stride. "Because I hate running on a treadmill."

Hot fun in the Fire Sudatorium

     When it's cold outside, why not go where it's really, really warm? Thus many cold-climate cultures embrace the idea of saunas, steam rooms and bathhouses.  The Scandinavians—Swedes, Finns and such, are especially big on it, as are Russians. The Greeks and Italians helped invent it, and the Japanese developed the practice into ritual and art. Native-Americans had their sweat lodges. The current crop of Americans...well, not so much. Which I suppose in one way speaks well of us — we're busy, making money. The descendants of Calvinists and Puritans, we spurn comfort, pleasure and relaxation. But in another sense, it suggests something bad, that we fail to pause and just savor life. Inspired by this crazy cold, I paused to do some savoring Friday in one of the warmest places around. My report:

     Americans are bad at lolling. Or maybe it’s just me; I don’t want to be one of those guys who project their own faults upon the world, one of the many men who, to quote Thoreau, “mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”

     We certainly are good at sprawling in front of the television. But lolling is different from sprawling. To loll is to idle away time “in a lazy, relaxed way.”

     I did that Friday, or tried to. It being so cold, with the promise of worse on the way, it made sense to head for King Spa.

     If you are not familiar, King Spa is a vast Korean establishment in Niles. At 34,000 square feet, it claims to be the largest Asian spa in the United States. The place is a strange mix of taste and kitsch, lovely Asian artifacts and huge cut amethysts with price tags slapped on them, granite counters and chairs upholstered in salmon Naugahyde and scrolled gilded woodwork that is half Louis XIV, half Lewis Carroll. If Kim Jong Un built a health club, it would look like this.

     You pay $30, men go one way, women the other. Stash your shoes in little lockers, your clothes in another. Off each gender’s locker room is a steam room and four pools, from quite hot to icy cold.
     I slid into the water at 10:55 a.m., thinking, "half an hour." That seemed the limit of sybaritic luxury. While the old Division Street Russian Baths, of which I was a member, could be deserted on a weekday, King Spa was hopping with a diverse mix, heavy on Asians and Russians, but with a cross section of Americans too—college kids, seniors. I closed my eyes, sank to my chin and listened to the murmur of languages.
     By 11:15 a.m. I was in the hottest pool, gazing at the clock, wondering why I am deficient in the idling-away-time, doing-nothing department. Can you even loll through force of will? That sort of wrecks it, doesn't it? As it was, I was on the clock, being paid and researching a column, so it didn't even count as true relaxation. Rest makes me antsy. Something to work on in the new year.
     I got out of the pool, dried off, put on a gray cotton uniform: shorts and a T-shirt (women wear pink, kids yellow).
     On the main floor, the spa has nine sauna rooms, heated to different temperatures (one is an Ice Room at just above freezing) and employing various supposedly healing and revitalizing materials: salt, charcoal, stone and such. Normally I'd sneer at the mystical pretensions of it all—"The pyramid-shaped sauna channels metaphysical energy coupled with the unique healing effects of 23 carat gold"—but that would lose the spirit of the place, like a visitor to Disney World observing that real elephants could never flap their ears and fly since the surface-area-to-weight ratio makes that impossible. Thanks professor.
     The hottest room is the "Fire Sudatorium," a beehive-shaped chamber where you sit, sweat and endure as long as you can—in my case about four minutes—before you bolt for the low entrance. It felt tribal.
     After 90 minutes my wife and I met at the restaurant and had a passable pitcher of some milky rice beverage, a spicy salad with walnuts and eight fried-vegetable pot stickers, all for just under $30.
     Walking to our table, I was slightly surprised to see, out the window, snow—Oh right!— and this is an indication of the relaxed mindset you fall into, between the uniforms, the burble of languages, the heat, the cold, the water, the chairs. By the time we left, 2 p.m., after three hours in the place, I felt rejuvenated; OK, maybe not rejuvenated, but not as crappy as I had felt going in.

Don't try this at home

      The media loves the weather. And why not? It's a big story, affects everybody, has its own inherent drama, yet isn't depressing or hard to report -- no need to put crews on planes and send them hurrying to distant lands. You just step outside. 
     But while the medium revels, the individual reporters themselves tend to view weather stories as dreary obligations, the lowest kind of journalism, something to fob off on interns, on cub reporters, anybody who will accept being kicked into the cold — or heat, or rain — to get a few quotes and come shivering, sweating, dripping back.
     For that very reason, I used to love weather stories, exactly because the they were scorned, because they were, in my mind, a challenge, to accept the unpopular and convey the mundane. To describe the National Weather Service details while still giving it a bit of a flair. I remember once writing a story that was entirely made up of the same quote, "It's cold" or "it's very cold," delivered by a variety of Chicagoans, with the interest being the specific circumstances of the person saying it.
     Coverage of Monday's pending deep freeze -- the high in Chicago is supposed to be 10 degrees below zero -- invariably mention the previous city low: 27 degrees below zero, on Jan. 27, 1985.
     I remember it well. Not so much because of the weather -- cold is cold at that point, and whether it feels like 20 below or 27 below is merely a matter of statistics -- but because I did something really stupid on that day, as a result of the cold, and few things are sweeter than to remember an act of frozen idiocy from the warm safety of years in the future.
     Hanukkah had passed and I, considerate boyfriend that I was, had gotten my future wife, an aspiring lawyer, what I thought she needed most: a lawyerly suit. Charcoal grey pinstriped skirt and jacket, the sort of thing women wore with a blouse with a big ruffle at the neck in the 1980s. I remember it cost a week's take-home pay, which I think was $150. And I remember it was ready to be picked up at whatever store I had bought it at, perhaps after taking it back to be altered.
     Coldest day of the year. My car, a crappy blue Chevy Citation that had belonged to my late grandmother, would not start. Frozen engine block. A sane man would have shrugged and not tried to drive anywhere. Pick up the girlfriend's outfit another day. But few men are fully sane at 24, particularly when love is involved. Plus the idea of braving the cold, of my plans dominating nature, possessed me. So I hatched a plan — I must have been at Edie's apartment, because I remember her roommates, or guys next door, or somebody, helping me come up with this. I don't believe I was daft enough to come up with it on my own. Besides, I didn't have the necessary supplies.
    I took an aluminum pan and filled it with charcoal briquettes. Then I squirted the charcoal with lighter fluid and got it going. When it turned white, I carried the pan outside — oven mitts were no doubt helpful here — and slid the hot coals under the oil pan of the car, parked on the street, and waited 15 minutes, then got in and turned the key.
     The car should have caught fire. The coals should have ignited oil on the engine and burned up my crappy Chevy. Heck, it should have exploded. But God smiles on idiots and 24-year-olds, sometimes. The engine turned over nicely. I drove to whatever department store or woman's fashion shop had my wife-to-be's first business suit. I still remember walking into the arctic breeze, riffling the dry-cleaning bag over my shoulder, a feeling of accomplishment, of having defied the odds, wafting over me along with the icy air. A happy memory, now, love triumphing over the killing cold. But also a cautionary tale — don't stick hot coals under your engine Monday — let it wait a day. Be smart, unlike myself at age 24. Or, I suppose, it could be an inspirational tale. If you really, really have to get somewhere Monday, and your car is frozen up consider a pan of hot coals. Worked for me. 
     No, seriously, don't. Although, in 30 years, you'll want to have something stupid to look back upon, to reassure yourself that you weren't a cautious sack of timidity all your life. An event that Jack London called "a purple passage," an act of youthful stupidity — in his case getting drunk and swimming off his schooner in Yokohama, his shipmates assuming he'd drown and dragging the harbor for him while he slept it off, something he viewed "20 years afterward with a secret glow of pride." On that scale, warming up a frozen engine with coals isn't much, but it's what I've got. Anyway, stay warm.

Falling temperatures and frequent gales of Rauner

     This column starts out at A and meanders to Q. That was the intention. My only overall goal was to write something funny, to mention snow, and to jab a sharp stick at Bruce Rauner. I accomplished all three, to my satisfaction. And no, I don't dislike the rich, only the contemptuous rich.

     I came to work Thursday. Yes, yes, I know, it’s the nostalgic newsman in me. I figured, you’ve got a job, you go, physically go to work, transporting your body to your place of employment. Old school. That I was making some kind of error in judgment only occurred to me at the Northbrook train station, which looked like a crowd scene from some unwritten Kafka short story: “The Train Station at Murmansk” or some such thing. Dark figures wrapped in thick coats and scarves, leaning into a blinding storm.

      The train was a half hour late. I got a seat, which wasn’t true for everybody. I tried to catch the eye of the lady standing next to me, ready to gallantly ask, “Madam, would you like a seat?” Then I realized that she was a decade younger than me, and, anyway, she never tore her eyes away from her cellphone, certainly not to glance in the direction of someone literally and figuratively below her. So I focused on my Sun-Times, occasionally gazing with mixed emotions at the diamond ring and assorted sub rings on her finger wrapped around the chrome handhold. The rings cost $25,000 if they cost a dime. Standing might be good for her.

     The less said about the trudge to the office the better. Soon I was thawing out on the 10th floor, getting my morning coffee, finding myself standing in front of a window with a co-worker. Both of us lost in thought until I spoke what was clearly on our minds.

     “Does snow ‘hurtle’?” I wondered aloud. “I’m trying to find the right verb to describe what I’m looking at. ‘Race?’ ‘Plummet?’ It looks like one of those bad 1940s Christmas movies where the stagehands are shaking big boxes of laundry detergent just above the view of the camera."
     He nodded. Snow snow snow snow . . .
     OK, enough of that.
     Do you have any New Year's resolutions? I do. I'm going to write about politics more. Looking back at the past year, I realized I stopped talking about Barack Obama, or commenting on the mayor, or the governor, and generally avoided everything involved with the vast creaking, clanking artifice of government. Why? I think it was simple revulsion. You've got the continual Punch & Judy show of party politics, with Punch Republican and Judy Democrat holding their little bats between their splayed, immobile hands and having at each other - "bap bap bap bap, bop bop bop bop." You've got career politicians, monsters of mendacity, who only say an honest word accidentally. Not looking is too easy. Must . . . force . . . myself.
     What changed? Honestly, it was Natasha Korecki and Rosalind Rossi's article a few days ago on Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, he of the deep pockets, and the latest of what will be a blizzard of campaign advertising that makes our New Year's snowfall look like a slight dusting.
     "There's no excuse for failing schools. Zero. None. Period." Rauner says. Stop right there; "excuse" is the key word, one of those freighted buzzwords, like "agenda," that Republicans love to trot out to pretend the matter they're discussing is settled. If you substitute "reason" - "there's no reason for failing schools" - you start to grasp the lack of empathy that Rauner is bringing to the table. Of course there are reasons, plenty of 'em - from shattered families, poverty, crime, you name it. Schools feed all our social problems - and reflect them.
     But the sentence that got me rising to my feet with a late middle-age groan was when Rauner, asked about his pulling strings to grease his daughter into Walter Payton College Prep after she failed to get in on her own: "It's just minor stuff. It doesn't matter."
     Well . . . yessir, Mr. Rauner sir. I guess that sets it straight. I should probably say here that I have a personal bias against Bruce Rauner, having met him on two occasions last year. Both times I tried to talk to him. Both times I found myself tossed into the same bin with his pressuring principals to give his daughter a spot earned by someone else: I was just minor stuff; I didn't matter.
     You can't buy a personality, I thought ("You mean being an . . . " insert a seldom-seen body location here "doesn't count as a personality?" a colleague asked. Point taken).
     Reading that story gave me a glimmer of hope, that Gov. Pat Quinn, with his sensible, off-the-rack suits and his weary look of dolor, is not necessarily doomed when he goes up against Rauner's money machine. The thinly disguised contempt of rich people is like spit: it only takes a little to spoil the soup. As god-awful stupid as people are, in Illinois as everywhere, they might not be quite so stupid as to lap up the blizzard of paid BS Rauner is about to unleash upon us all. Which is an epiphany worth schlepping into work in a snowstorm to experience.

Snowfall

    Snow is not actually white. It's clear, like glass; look at an individual snowflake and you will see that. But being complicated, clear surfaces, snowflakes scatter light in all directions, and as anyone who has ever spun a multicolored wheel knows, the result looks white—or under some conditions blueish, since the snow tends to absorb red light more than blue.
    It's certainly lovely to behold. "I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift," wrote Victorian art critic John Ruskin. "Its curves are inconceivable perfection."
    Optics and aesthetics aside, there is something freeing about snow. Snow blankets our world, disguises it, interrupts our usual routines. The important appointments are scrapped, the airplanes stay on the ground. By interrupting society, snow liberates us. Snow almost begs you to go play in it. No less of a thinker than Ralph Waldo Emerson noted a connection between snow and our democracy, "wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom," he wrote in 1870. 
     More or less correct. He probably wasn't thinking of Russia.
     Like freedom, snow is rarer than we think. Most places on earth don't get snow. It's something of a privilege really -- about 75 percent of the globe is almost always snowless, and Emerson has a point that the worst dictatorships—North Korean notwithstanding—tend to be sunny. Cairo had its first snowfall in over a century last month; it lasted about as long as the reforms that seemed possible in 2011 during the rebellion on Tahir Square. (Not only is snow rare, but so is atmospheric moisture. We live on a watery planet, true, but all the water in the air, condensed, would cover the surface of the earth to the thickness of an inch). 
     A little can seem like a lot, though. It didn't really snow that much over New Year's -- some eight inches, beginning Tuesday afternoon, as we were hurrying home to get ready for our New Year's Eve festivities, then steadily Wednesday, with an inch or two  to come Thursday. Not much compared to the epic snows of yesteryear -- 1967's 18.1 inches in one day. Because much of the city was shut down anyway, there was no need to worry much about getting around in the snow. So the snow could be simply enjoyed, even by us suburbanites who had to shovel it. I have a long driveway, but don't own a snowblower, since it seems stupid to belong to a gym and do aerobic exercise there, to lift weights and run, only to shuck actual productive effort when nature serves up a manageable physical task to be performed now and again. 
    The snow was pretty fluffy, the weather not too cold, and while I wouldn't describe shoveling as "fun," it wasn't so bad either. The dog was certainly delighted, crashing through drifts as tall as herself, bounding like a porpoise. It seemed for a while she wouldn't come in at all, but rocketed around the yard, chasing squirrels that weren't there, cutting a furrow through the perfect whiteness, raising clouds of fresh snow. I like to let her run, and worry less when there's snow, because I can always track her through neighbors' backyards, though toward the end we looked like a silent movie comedy act, Kitty threading the snow between the trees, me puffing through the frosty landscape after her, calling her name with decreasing good humor, scattering snowflakes uncounted.
     Looking at a flake of snow, by the way, is like looking at a giant molecule. The basic shape of a snowflake is six-sided because when oxygen bonds with hydrogen to create a water molecule, the molecule is a hexagon which, growing on all sides and crystallizing into a snowflake, maintains its shape. 
     I don't expect an argument over this. It is worth noting that religious sorts do not insist God creates each individual snowflake, despite their complexity, perfection. beauty and abundance, . Because the science behind snowflakes is so simple and clear, they don't waste their time challenging them, saving their energy for what they perceive as the shadows of science, where they expect more results, and indeed get them. A recent poll showed that about a 1/3 of Americans believe that evolution, a science as certain as the crystallography behind snowflakes, is a fiction, and instead that God Almighty created man fully-formed, and about 10,000 years ago yet. 
     Their religion teaches them this and they feel strongly enough to tell it to pollsters and insist it be taught in supposedly public schools, to children whose parents might not believe it at all. As to why they would not add, "God creates snowflakes too, designing each one with a No. 2 pencil" and oppose teaching of crystallography and chemistry, well, that is just one of those mysteries -- actually, it isn't. 
     The disappearance of human origins into time immemorial creates an opportunity, to the faithful, to impose their fanciful tale of divine will, and dismiss the careful proof plain in the fossil records. Dragging in snowflakes -- which they should do, if they sincerely believed God designed this world; in for a dime, in for a dollar -- would just be dumb. What they don't realize is that limiting your fantasizing to the creation of animal life and the Earth is also dumb -- well, "dumb" is a harsh word to apply to faiths not one's own. How about "presumptuous"? You may of course entertain yourself by playing with whatever ball of nonsense looks pretty to you. It's when you push your fairy tale upon the unwilling that it becomes dumb, since it insults others and distracts society from things that matter. So maybe "dumb" is apt — when you insult people, they get to insult you back.
    But we've drifted, blown a long way from snowflakes. The snow was very soft and quiet and wonderful Wednesday, and I hope you got out and enjoyed it. 

New Year's Day receptions at the White House

     "All is quiet on New Year's Day," to quote U2. But that wasn't always the case —  Jan. 1 was once a day of boisterous, ritual party-making across the country, as anyone with a home worth showing off set out refreshments and welcomed literally everyone who wanted to stop by, starting, for the first 142 years of this country's history, with the White House. That seems something worth remembering.

     One hundred and forty-two years is a long time, and you’d think that a cherished American tradition of that length, one that involved some 30 presidents, starting with George Washington and ending still within living human memory, would be at least faintly recalled on New Year’s Day, when it took place. But it isn’t.

      On every New Year’s Day from our first as a nation with a president, in 1790, to the last observed in the White House by Herbert Hoover, in 1932, the doors would be thrown open and any American could walk in and shake the president’s hand. Thousands did.

     Washington’s first New Year’s reception was in New York, where the nation's capital first was located, then Philadelphia. Several hundred people attended, some grudgingly.
     “Made the President the compliments of the season, had a hearty shake of the hand,” Pennsylvania’s first senator, William Maclay, noted in his diary on Jan. 1, 1791. “I was asked to partake of the punch and cakes, but declined. I sat down and we had some chat. But the diplomatic gentry and foreigners coming in, I embraced the first vacancy to make my bow and wish him a good morning.”
     That’s why you’ve got to love history, not the whitewashed, grade-school history, but history as lived by a senator keen to escape the clutches of the father of our country.
     John Adams began receptions in the current White House in 1801, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson, started the tradition of shaking everybody’s hand — a practice his successors would loathe. Martin Van Buren refused to serve refreshments, to keep the crowds down. William Howard Taft’s hand was so swollen the day after shaking 6,000 hands in 1910, it had to be bandaged.
     If you wonder why the president would even bother receiving people on New Year’s Day, the answer is easy: that’s what people did. In the days before telephones, nevermind the Internet, you visited. There was an elaborate ritual of leaving visiting cards, of etiquette, which of course was not always observed, particularly on New Year’s, when the tradition was to serve punch to guests.
    “It frequently happened that young men, after having made six or eight calls and stopping at six or eight punch bowls, became intoxicated, causing distress in the houses which they next visited,” wrote historian George William Douglas. “Bibulous young men, attracted by the prospect of free punch, would force their way into houses where they were not known.”
     As ugly as that must have been, the scene wasn’t much better at the White House. If you think it would be nice to have gone there for a New Year’s reception, think again.
     “The guests are often compelled to stand for hours in a line outside, exposed to the elements, whatever they may be, whether clear or stormy, warm or cold, windy or calm, the waiting line moving forward towards its goal a step at a time, with long intervals between each step,” Helen Hakcourt wrote in 1911. “Many reach the receiving party worn out with fatigue, and with their elaborate costumes all awry, if not actually torn to ribbons, and are shot through the door as though from a mortar by the relentless pressure behind, and in such a dazed and confused condition that they pass by the President to reach whom they have endured hours of almost danger without so much as seeing him.”
     The practice was ended by Herbert Hoover who, bitter at losing to Franklin D. Roosevelt, skipped out to Florida for New Year’s 1933. FDR never revived it “as his lameness made it difficult for him to stand in the receiving line for any length of time,” as one commentator wrote in 1937.
     Our current president, Barack Obama, has vanished to Hawaii, and as his sagging popularity is dissected, I can’t help but think of Pennsylvania Sen. Maclay. Not only was he hot to escape George Washington, but he hadn’t planned on going to the reception.
     “Just as a I pass’d the president’s house,” he wrote in his diary, an acquaintance bid him go in to the reception but, being in his “worst clothes,” he begged off. A few steps later, Maclay “had, however, passed him but a little way, when [Samuel] Osgood, Postmaster-general, attacked me warmly to go with him. I was pushed forward by him, bolted into his presence.” Of course, Maclay had served in the Continental Army under Washington, so maybe he already had his fill. He also belonged to the Anti-Administration faction that had opposed ratifying the Constitution — does that sound familiar?
     That could be our resolution for 2014: to see history, not as we wish it were, but as it actually was, and do the same for life today.
     Or heck, why expect anyone to start now?

You do something for 30 years, you should ask yourself why

 

     On Jan. 7, 1985, I visited Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, five years before the quirky palazzo was looted of a dozen paintings, one of the great unsolved art thefts of modern history. Even intact, I found the place a "weird, debilitating collection of dark, gilt baroque pieces, artlessly assembled in dim corridors and mocked by bright flowers assembled in hideous inner courtyard like Sears Garden Center."
     A hard assessment, but I was 24. The young are often unkind.
     Later that year, on May 11, 1985, I picked up my first computer, a Kaypro 2X, serial number 273997. At 29 pounds, it was considered portable.
    That fall I lost my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal, fired for something I wrote about the Rev. Billy Graham, and on Nov. 26, I visited the unemployment office at 35 S. 19th Avenue in Maywood. There were 55 people in line in front of me when I arrived at 8:25 a.m., affording me plenty of time to look around. "Plastic chairs are burnt orange, olive green, mud brown and blue. Dark brown carpeting the color of yesterday's oatmeal, walls a whitish yellow beige, as if they had never been washed."
    Never went back, never collected a dime of unemployment.
    I know this because I wrote it down, in the 1985 Waterstone's Literary Diary that my parents brought back for me as a present on a trip to London. It was a lovely gift, a rich red cover, filled with diversions -- essays, a crossword puzzle, a quiz. Every day had a noteworthy literary event (June 13, "W.B. Yeats born County Dublin 1865.") Each week had its own two-page spread, with an illustration and a notable quote or work or author highlighted.
    So began a tradition that tomorrow enters its 30th year, and, perhaps after yesterday's post on this blog's six-month anniversary, in the mood to confess what may be an alarming habitualness on my part, I am unwrapping my 30th journal. I suppose, if a person has been doing something for nearly 30 years, he should pause once and reflect upon why he is doing it.
     Why fill these books? At the time, for convenience. Appointments, interviews, birthdays, due dates. If you don't write them down, you can forget your obligations, and leave people sitting in restaurants, gazing at the door. In the back is room for phone numbers and addresses, and looking over them is a reminder of just how long relationships last. Of the dozen names on the first page of that 1985 address page, five I'm still in touch with. One I married. Otherwise, you see people come and go -- in 2006, I put Barack Obama's cell phone number down, though I can't recall ever dialing it, and it's too late now.
     But scheduling and contact information is only a fraction of what's in them. Most of the writing is from the end of the day, the basic outlines of what happened. Again, why? That's easy. Because you forget everything. All the details of your life are not only lost after you die, but before, while you're still here. I knew this even as a child, growing up, and it bothered me. I remember sitting next to someone on a plane, having a conversation, then realizing I was never going to see that person again. So I jotted down my fellow passenger's name on a piece of paper — I might have the slip still, tucked in a box somewhere. Remembering seemed important, on its own merits. I think I became a writer because I didn't want to forget stuff. Keeping a journal is a kind of control over the passing of time, a way of dipping your hand into the racing torrent of your life, scooping out a dripping meager handful of details, and saving them in a jar.
    A journal is perfect for that. You put in what was important, what is interesting, what meant something, and you tuck it away where you know you can find it. In 1985, I worked for the newspaper in Wheaton, but I had already started writing for the Sun-Times, and Chicago magazine, and other publications. The book is filled with notes to call this or that person, and lists of story ideas.
     That fall, I wrote to the Waterstone's company in London and ordered the upcoming year's literary diary, and in the years to come doing so became a Christmas treat for me. Subsequent diaries varied, they were different, having been placed into the hands of various artists and design teams, and I loved tearing open the package to see what it looked like this year.  Some I liked better than others.  At first I would write to Waterstone's, and it was always a worry, whether the diary would arrive in time for the new year. But then, one year, running late, I phoned, and after that I always phoned. It was a thrill to dial their flagship store in London and place my order, very carefully, imagining myself eccentric and wealthy, indulging this extravagance, explaining my order to the somewhat surprised clerk, who found herself shipping a diary to America. For a few years, Waterstone's had a store, just off Michigan Avenue, and I remember it was somewhat of a let-down to just clomp over there and buy it. What fun is that?  Scarcity and difficulty create value.
     Beginning with that 1986 diary, I filled in the events of the day in a tiny hand that I could never manage today. But that year, the tiny notions petered out on July 2, with a single sentence that explains why, "Hectic day trying to finish work & get ready for trip." A glance at the day before gives a sense of the freelancer scramble: "Busy workday worked at finishing up Sun-Times stories, Nostalgia stories, N.S. story, got call from WLS D.J. Larry Lujack for N.S. story. Talked to Newsweek first thing in morning about last 2 profiles. Dictated over phone, took three hours out at middle of the day and wasted it -- walked to library to mail N.S. article and book to Didi--$5 to mail a paperback to Haiti. Ate a slice of pizza, looked through bookstores, didn't get home until 2, missed surprise air express delivery of photos. Mad about that."
    "N.S." was "Northshore," a now-defunct magazine. I have no memory of ever talking to radio great Larry Lujack, who coincidentally died earlier this month, nor even what the story might have been about. That seems odd—you'd think a person would remember, but that's my point. The journals are rarely literary, in themselves, rarely structured prose designed to be read by others. They're bare facts, descriptions, impressions, salted away against forgetting and, I suppose, under the notion I might need them again. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm writing something and need to go back to a time; occasionally I find something useful, other times, just a blank. Sometimes I just pull one down idly to see what was going on.
     In 1987, I joined the staff of the Sun-Times, having freelanced for two years, and would make notes on stories, such as Friday, April 15, 1988. "Sent to the South Side, 48th St. and Wabash, for Ald. Dorothy Tillman's birthday celebration. After I got over my initial unease it was interesting to walk around the large hall & take everybody in. Many sharp sorts in small fedoras & 3 piece suits like cast members of 'Guys & Dolls.' Lot of commerce -- people selling Harold buttons, clocks, posters, records, a very thin poet was hawking his poem about Harold for $1-- the opening line was something like, 'He was the first & he was very very far from the worst.' ... Ald. Tim Evans spoke, not saying very much. He was a long way to go if he plans on filling Harold Washington's shoes."
    Prescient.
    In 2001, Waterstone's shrank their diary to 2/3 the size it had been, and the next year it vanished altogether. It hurt, but I shifted to Brownline Daily Diaries. They're spare, they don't have the literary trappings that Waterstone's did, but do have a pleasing utilitarian office supply vibe. They're smaller, but give each day a full page, and I've been pretty good about writing the events of the day, some years more than others. I've noticed that this year, with the blog, the entries are more telegraphic.
       The books are lined up, 29 of them now, a better record than anything technological. The coincidence of my old Kaypro's purchase being recorded in that first 1985 diary would look cheesy in fiction, but it is true. The Kaypro is in the basement, wrapped in plastic, a future antique, and if I wanted to read anything on the big floppy disks it used, I'd have to haul it out, fire it up, find the disks, assuming I still have them, and maybe I could read them  more likely I couldn't. Thirty years from now, who knows what kind of electronic devices we'll be using, or if these new systems will be compatible. We may be able to dip into the Cloud, or the Cloud could drift away. Who knows?

     But the journals will be as accessible as they are now, on a top shelf of my bookshelf, easily searchable, and if I want to wander off into the past, all I need to is pull one down. So what was New Year's Eve, 1993 like?  Memory tells me a bit: no kids, newly married, living on Pine Grove Avenue and ... that's about it. The journal however, for Dec. 31: "Up at 5:11—began reading intro. Read & printed it & first two chapters. Slow going," that must have been Complete and Utter Failure, published in 1994. Then I moved away from work. "Edie up singing, getting ready for party." That should have been parties, plural. It was quite an evening -- going with old friends downtown to see Steve Martin's first play, then back to our place for Mexican food and drinks, then to a party Richard Roeper was throwing at Mother Hubbard's, smoking Cuban cigars and drinking whiskey with radio and TV personality Roe Conn.
      Sounds fun, and it is oddly comforting, looking at my sedentary, sober life now to remember that fun was had, and reading other entries is a reminder of how much fun wasn't had, the experiences as inevitable as stepping stones, leading to right now. Tonight, as usual, we'll be watching movies at home with the boys, drinking sherbert and ginger ale punch, eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough and shrimp. I can't honestly say that I'd rather celebrate New Year's Eve 1993 than New Year's 2013.
      A journal doesn't take that much time, and it is a statement that your life might be worth recalling. I can't pretend that anybody else would be interested in them -- heck, I'm hardly interested, and it's my life, and half the time, when I do look at them, I'm rewarded with some stark barb that's painful to recall. But that's useful too — it's wrong to laud the joys of your past and ignore the woes. Both are necessary in the forging of your spirit. Tonight is a time for introspection, balanced on a peak between two years, 2013 gasping out its last minutes, 2014 taking its first gulp of air and letting out a newborn cry. Life is a very long time, or can be, and most people will use their time well and use it poorly, switching off, in fits and starts. It's good to keep track of life, if you can, so that when it's past, you'll know what happened, sort of. Happy New Year. See you in 2014.