The hidden link between Rail Safety Week, Lord Byron

     Metra tries not to kill its customers.

The actual fine, $250, is half the posted fine. 

     It really does. Say what you will about our commuter rail service: its jaw-dropping top-level mismanagement, creaky equipment and seasonal surprise at finding itself once again in a cold climate. But when it comes to sparing the hectic, harried, charmless lives of the commuters who travel its length, Metra is outstanding.

      If a train is in the station, say going north, and another is going south, the northbound train will linger in the station, deliberately, to the puzzlement of passengers, until the southbound train arrives in the station.

     Why? Because the engineers know, if they were to pull out of the station when another train was about to arrive, passengers who disembarked would surge across the tracks and be killed by the incoming train.

     Considerate of Metra to spare them, I’ve always felt, even though they are not helping me, personally, since I am the one person, alone it seems, among the 150,000 who take Metra every day, who does not wait between the lowered gate and the train, in a runner’s crouch, eyes fixed on the moving rear of the last car, timing my lunge forward so that I am out of the blocks when the train has not quite passed, accelerating as the stainless steel wall clears the space in front of me.

     Usually, invariably they’re fine. There is no incoming train, no Amtrak express thundering by from the other direction. In the 14 years I have been doing this, only a few times do the people surging ahead see another train coming, and half go forward, and half go back, some doing an uncertain little dance on the tracks before choosing.
     Then, this week, something different occurred. The train cleared, commuters surged forward, to confront a lone man on the other side, Northbrook Police Traffic Officer Chris Lacina, in the baseball cap and shades that give suburban officers that coveted SWAT look, his SUV parked nearby.
     Sadly, I couldn't see the expressions of concern on the faces of the herd hurrying away from me. A trio of men froze in front of the gate and conducted a nervous little impromptu conversation. The mass parted around Lacina like a river around a rock, until they realized he was not issuing tickets, just handing out white warning slips. Off the hook, they scurried away.
     This has never happened, in my memory. I sought explanation from Metra. "It's Illinois Rail Safety Week," said Michael Gillis, Metra's spokesman. "Metra is partnering with various suburban police departments for enforcement actions, to encourage safe behaviors around tracks and trains." The special week ends Saturday.
     When the gate lifted and it was safe to cross, I strolled over and asked for a flier. "WARNING: YOUR ACTIONS COULD HAVE JUST COST YOU A FINE OF $250.00 OR EVEN WORSE, YOUR LIFE." Lacina said he gave one ticket, the only one Northbrook issued this week, according to police Chief Chuck Wernick, whom I later asked a question that bothers me. If crossing around lowered gates is dangerous and illegal, yet hundreds do it daily at this spot, why not have officers there regularly?
     "Well," he said with a laugh, "I wish I had 500 policemen too. We don't have the staff to do it. This is a special detail. I only have so many people working, and with all the accidents we deal with, we're stretched thin."
     In other words, it's not really that important. Hmm. Maybe he's right. Maybe it's me. When I moved to Northbrook my boys were 3 and 4. I worried about them living a block from the tracks and vowed they would never see me being unsafe. I've seen parents drag their reluctant toddlers around lowered gates, and it's all I can do not to run after them and hiss, "Are you insane?!" But I don't want to be that guy, and maybe there's a Darwinian, thin-the-herd aspect to it.
     There certainly is a psychological aspect. You can't stand behind a gate for 14 years, watching your neighbors rush away from you across busy rail tracks, despite it being both dangerous and illegal, and not reflect.
     Usually I savor the separation, musing on Lord Byron's "Child Harold's Pilgrimage:"

I have not loved the world, nor the world, me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coin'd my cheeks to smiles,
Nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them but not of them.    

     But that's pompous, right? Maybe the error isn't theirs. Maybe it's mine, by holding back, being aloof, arrogant, separate. Maybe the thing to do is to blend in, utter a complacent "moo" and surge across the tracks with the mob. And if we all get flattened by a train some day, well, we gotta go eventually.

Old Stuff I Love #3: Steiff Lobster

 
     See the lobster? With the bright orange, red and golden yellow claws? Little beady black eyes? Half cute, half realistic, you don't know whether to hug him or draw some butter.
     He's 52 years old. Ancient for a toy, particularly one that looks so good. The only wear he has shown is, he used to have long red stringy whiskers, like a real lobster. But those got chewed off over the years.
      All told, in surprising condition.
     Well, maybe not so surprising. He's a Steiff.
      If you know something about toys, you know that Steiffs are German mohair animals—well, they make regular soft stuffed animals too, but classic Steiff's are hard, dense toys like this lobster -- he feels packed with sawdust. The company was founded in 1880, and still makes old-fashioned toys. The bear's arms and legs and neck move. That's really their claim to fame, along with the brass button in their ears displaying a serial number, and the fact that the company invented the Teddy Bear in 1902 (with a crucial assist from the United States, where Theodore Roosevelt, in the same year, refused to shoot a black bear that had been tethered to a tree by his over-zealous hosts. The incident became a Washington Post cartoon, a Brooklyn toymaker got the ball rolling and then Steiff invaded these shores in 1906, setting off a veritable Teddy Bear mania. The song, "Teddy Bear's Picnic," for instance, dates to 1907). 
      None of which has anything to do with why I love them. My father was a nuclear scientist and, as such, traveled the world, giving papers and attending conferences. In 1962, he travelled to Germany, where he noticed these colorful, realistic, lovely toy animals. He had two kids at home: me, then 2, and my sister, 5. The dollar was strong then, and he bought back Steiff toys—a turtle and an elephant, this lobster and giraffe ... and a lion, a camel, various birds, including a penguin, and ... a squirrel, a big ladybug, a goat—so many that he bought a small case to carry them home.
     The part of the story that I cherish is when he gets home, after his long overseas trip, happily opens the case, with its stuffed treasure, and tells my sister to take what she wants, and her toddling brother can have the rest. My sister surveys the bestiary and bursts into tears: "Didn't they have any dollies?" she wails. She wanted baby dolls, not a lobster, which went to me. He's been a boon companion, lo these many years.
      Maybe that story isn't much, as far as family traditions go. But it was what I had, so I hung my hat on it. When my younger brother Sam's daughter Rina was born, I showed up at the hospital, Steiff in hand. Ditto for his son Ryan, and Sam reciprocated for my kids.
       The day my oldest boy, Ross was born, when Edie beeped me to tell me to get home now and whisk her to the hospital, I was in FAO Schwarz on Michigan Avenue, looking at a little Steiff German Shepherd that ended up in his crib. The cat was a gift for Kent from his Uncle Sam.
      And the Teddy Bear ... was a gift from me to Kent.  Ross later demanding the exact same bear, and when FAO Schwarz let me down, I plugged the serial number into this new Internet machine—this was about 1998—and found a toy store in Coon Rapids, Minnesota that sold it to me, via mail, for $30 less than what I had spent on Kent's. A miracle. 
     What I remember most about Kent's bear was when I bought him, 17 years ago, my frugal wife looked in the shopping bag and was aghast, horrified at the cost—$160—and gave me one of those are-you-mad!? keel-haulings that wives are so good at. "A hundred and sixty dollars?! For a Teddy Bear?!?!  Are you out of your MIND? Spending THAT on some TOY? Why do you always do this to me...?"
     As fate would have it, the perfect retort came to me, and I smoothly sidestepped the crisis with a matador's grace. 
     "When you see it in your grandchild's crib," I parried. "It'll seem like a bargain."
     She, like my sister, started to cry. Game, set, match.
     The bears, to be honest, were never favorite toys of either boy; I think they somehow knew they were special and treated them gingerly. The bears spent a lot of time on shelves, observing. Or maybe they just weren't cuddly, they were hard, and got shunted to the side. I let the lobster be part of their scrum—I dug him out of the toy chest for his portrait—not seeing the point of holding him back, particularly since nothing could hurt him short of a machete. He's still good to go for the next generation. The bears too. That doesn't come for a while, but if Steiff is here, and if I'm here, and have a few dollars to scrape together, Steinbergs unborn be outfitted with beautiful mohair toys, good for the rough and tumble long haul of a life well-lived.

Could the bad news about women be good?

     When Sally Armstrong's book "Uprising: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter" first crossed my desk, I looked at that subtitle—"A New Age?" Really?—and tossed it on the free pile. But a friend raved about it, and her, so I got another copy, actually opened the cover this time and started to read, and found the book impressive and provocative.

     Hundreds of girls in Nigeria are kidnapped by insurgents. In Eastern Europe, women are raped as a strategy of war. An NFL star slugs his wife in a jarring video.

     Women worldwide fight for basic rights — to drive, to go to school. Meanwhile, 130 million young women in 28 countries have been sexually mutilated in crude religious rituals, with 6,000 added every day. Taken together, you might easily think that the rights of women are ebbing.

     You’d be wrong, according to Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong, who travels the world reporting on women’s issues and sees this pervasive bad news about women in a different light: as good, in that it represents events historically left in the shadows now being dragged out into the light to wither.

     “None of this stuff came to light before,” Armstrong said.

     Those kidnapped girls? Note that troops including U.S. advisers are looking for them.

     “No military has ever gone anywhere to rescue girls, ever in history,” she said. “Obama checked off a box never checked off before. Message: Girls count.”

     Armstrong and I had lunch recently to talk about her new book, “Uprising: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter.” The book begins in dramatic fashion:

     “The earth is shifting. A new age is dawning. From Kabul and Cairo to Cape Town and New York, women are claiming their space at home, at work, and in the public square. They are propelling changes so immense, they’re likely to affect intractable issues such as poverty, interstate conflict, culture, and religion, and the power brokers are finally listening.”

Bold words. But Armstrong backs them up, pointing out that the very elements that would seem to undermine women, such as AIDS or the rise of radical Islam, instead are mobilizing them, with a key assist from pervasive social media.
     "Women wearing blue jeans discovered that women in hijabs were not subjugated, voiceless victims," she writes. "Women wearing hijabs found out that contrary to what the fundamentalists said, women in blue jeans were not whores and infidels."
      If you admired the chiasmus of that, you'll appreciate the sharp writing in the book, just as Armstrong, in person, has none of the eat-your-peas dreariness often afflicting those concerned with international issues. She seems to have come through witnessing the starkest abuses with good humor intact.
     The stories are indeed thrilling. Khadia, 10, is yanked from class by her uncle in a village in Senegal, on her way to a forced marriage with a 22-year-old cousin. The school leaps to her defense, with girls besieging the chief's office. Enter the media - heroes, for once - and suddenly Khadia is back in class. In Kenya, 160 girls sue the government for not protecting them from rape - and win.
     In Armstrong's view, the way nations conduct themselves will change as women take an even greater role on the world stage.
     "I'm not saying women know better than men — women know different than men," she said, "and society doesn't work well when half the population is kept under."
      To play devil's advocate, I wonder whether the book leans too heavily on U.N. resolutions of dubious value and stunts like Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising, which had women around the globe dancing for their rights. Good PR, but a "revolution?" Really?
     To Armstrong's credit, she doesn't sugarcoat the bad news. "Rape is on the rise," she notes. A quarter of the girls in Kenya between 12 and 24 lose their virginity to rape.
     But the general tone of "Uprising" is positive, almost celebratory. Could this progress be a blip, until society returns to old habits?
     In her book, Armstrong says "No."
      "I believe the shift in thinking about the role of women and the issues that women deal with in the first decade of the third millennium will go down in history as a turning point for civilization," she writes.
      Again, bold words. But bold words and bold deeds by women have helped drag the world toward a less cruel, more humane civilization since we were all hunter/gatherers. There's no reason to suspect this process will stop. The genie of freedom, once released, never goes back into the bottle.
     We equate hard news with bad news. Often they go hand in hand. But Armstrong has seen the worst and finds it encouraging.
     "It is a very optimistic book," she agreed. "That's why I wrote it. In 25 years of reporting on what happened to women in zones of conflict, I suddenly realized the earth was shifting. At first I thought I was being wistful. Then I realized, Holy smokes! This is really happening.' It's exciting, really exciting."

Old stuff I love #2: Haitian drapeaux

     If you were to visit our house — please don't — you would notice that much of the artwork — no, really, don't, I mean it. I'm sure you're a perfectly fine person, but it would be unsettling to have random readers blithely bursting into my home and ...
      Sorry, I'll start again. 

      If you were to visit our house, you would find it cluttered with Haitian art. Oil paintings of historical figures, rag dolls, a sequined bottle, painted metal or paper mache animals — tigers, fish, cats — a box adorned with a leopard, and four drapeaux, sequined flags that were meant to decorate the peristyles of voodoo priests.
      They are relics from two trips there; first a two-week adventure on my own, to visit my college buddy Didier, who was working with Catholic Relief in Port-au-Prince, and then a second weeklong visit, a year later, with my wife-to-be, Edie. It was on that second visit that we really loaded up on artworks. We put up everything when we got home, have moved twice since then and never thought to not put them back on display. I can't tell if they're beautiful or just very familiar at this point.
    My favorite is this plump red heart, representing the loa, or goddess, Erzulie Dantor. "The goddess of love and luxury" — at least in the version I was told; there are a number of various explanations when it comes to voodoo symbolism, some of them contradictory. I was researching voodoo on my first trip — I had convinced The Atlantic magazine to consider a story on the subject. Erzulie Dantor, I was told, "gives a lot, but she expects a lot." Sounds like love and luxury as I understand it. To the left, the candle, to the right, the bottle of rum, with a kitchen knife poised at the center.
     Voodoo is sort of a funky folk Catholicism, and though it is the stuff of horror movies here, there it is taken very seriously. On the first trip, I was in the office of an American professor at the ethnographic institute‚ Ira Lowenthal, married to a Haitian woman, if I recall. A lot of Americans are blase about their faiths, I said  — they belong, and go through the motions, but don't necessarily believe, in their hearts. How real is voodoo? Its pantheon of gods and goddesses like Erzulie Dantor, and Baron Samedi—how real are they to Haitians?
     "As real as if I were to walk around this desk and punch you in the mouth," he answered, one of the more memorable replies I've ever received to a question. That was the same trip where Max Beauvoir, the head houngon of Haiti, summoned his maid by clapping his hands together, twice.

Waiting for the drapeaux to be finished in Haiti.

       Anyway, this hanging is a quarter century old.  I never thought sequins could fade, but they're fading, a little, at least the pink ones are. Edie and I found it on a street in Port-au-Prince, at a residence where they were being made. It wasn't quite finished, but we waited while it was completed. I snapped these two photos of Edie while we were waiting. I suppose the romance of the trip, the situation where we got the drapeaux, as much as the image itself, is why it's still up, as soon as you walk in our house. Our trip was quite the adventure.
    That first night we landed in Haiti, we ended up in a small outdoor bar -- think a wooden platform, no ceiling, a couple curtains for walls, and strings of red lights overhead, very dim, a bottle of Jane Barbancourt on the table. Edie and I got up to dance, slow, slowly, with the darkness and the hot Caribbean night stretching all around our little island of soft light and music.

University of Illinois dodges a bullet, is hit by thousands more

     The media can have terrible tunnel vision, such as when it focused on the question of whether the University of Illinois was right in retracting its job offer to Steve Salaita, who used the Anti-Semitism Empowerment Act, aka the Gaza War, to ladle contempt on Israelis and, by proxy, Jews. (Spoiler alert: they were correct).

      I resisted the impulse to jump in. Academic squabbles are so bitter, the saying goes, because the stakes are so small. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized that the problem isn't this guy. Oh that it were. The problem is he represents the standard lazy, evil-du-jour activism always popular on college campuses, with a healthy dose of good old-fashioned ivory tower anti-Semitism thrown in. As readers know, I hate playing the anti-Semite card: God knows there are reasons aplenty to criticize Israel and its frequent missteps. But Salaita plunged over the line into hate speech, as so frequently happens, which is not guaranteed speech, but shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater. We've seen this before. The far right tries to put a fig leaf over their hatred by claiming religious freedom. The left, no better, cites academic privilege as a shield for their noxious bigotry. Too bad for Salaita that he didn't wait three months to spout his hate; then he could have just blended into the crowd. 

     Kudos to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees for yanking back its invitation to would-be professor Steven Salaita, whose Twitter rants during the Gaza war said, in essence, that all Israelis living in the West Bank — different place, but close enough — should die, and that Israel’s existence justifies anti-Semitism.

     To be frank, I thought the board would wave him in to avoid a lawsuit and mollify the restive students, many of whom support Salaita, in the rampant ignorance that only half-educated young adults can muster.

     A tiny victory. Does anyone believe keeping Salaita off campus is going to squash the blindered myopia and easy hatred he represents? Jeez. Condemning Israel is a classic American college phenomenon, like binge drinking and date rape, and the U of I’s vote Thursday will have about as much effect as administrative acts against those problems.

     And no, I’m not saying it’s anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. I can criticize Israel all day long, and do, right here in print, so strongly that the consul in Chicago gives me the cold shoulder because I don’t echo their own simplistic friend-or-foe thinking. Israel is in the grip of right-wing hawks, its religious fanatics exert far too much influence (just like ours!)      They were too long viewing the occupied territories as spare land and too slow to see them as the poison pill human-rights disaster they without question are.
     But let's talk about killing children, since that's the focal point of Salaita's fixed gaze. Why was Israel bombing those schools and neighborhoods in Gaza over the summer?
     Salaita's tweets clearly map out his answer: Because Jews are bad people and should die, or at least quit Israel and go somewhere else, the solution that anti-Semites from today through Nazi Germany and back to Babylon serve up as a fresh solution.
     Let's pretend that we were intellectually rigorous. Let's pretend we were, oh, a professor at a great public institution. Is it possible that Israel was trying to stop Hamas from shooting missiles at it, just like every other nation on earth would do? Could that, in theory, have been a factor?
     That's why I'm comfortable playing the anti-Semitism card. Because campus critics never ask that. A person who cared about children could just as easily rally against Hamas, demanding it stop using children as human shields. You don't see those rallies on campus much, because it doesn't play to the wet-from-the-womb student view of the world as consisting of innocent victims to be helped and malign evil to be fought.
     Ever see a slasher movie? A villain is built up as evil so, by the end, the audience can guiltlessly enjoy seeing him receive all the cruelty that supposedly we found so objectionable in him. The difference? He deserves it, and we are freed to be vile. We don't want to understand. Thus Salaita and his like-minded colleagues and like-minded students don't want balance. They want an evil to guiltlessly vent their full-throated, privileged, middle-class frustration upon, and Israel is it. I wish the board of trustees could vote that away, but it's a permanent condition. Jews were unpopular on college campuses in the 1920s for just showing up. For being someplace they didn't belong and weren't welcome. Guess what? Still are.
     While I have your attention: Free speech means the government doesn't harass you for expressing your beliefs. It doesn't mean that nobody can react to those beliefs. If I am hired by the U of I math department and then start tweeting that pi is really 3.0, even, it is not censorship if they revoke their offer. It's prudence. Those who opposed Salaita—including U of I student government leaders, I should point out—said they were concerned with students feeling unease at sharing campus with a hater. To be honest, that is not my concern. The world is silly with haters. Having just sent my older boy off to California to college, my worry, after earthquakes, is his encountering the casual condemnation toward Israel and— oops!—Jews in general that I know infects his campus because it infects every campus.
     Had he been hired, Salaita would have been just another academic preaching to the choir. The point of education is not to echo what kids already believe, but to challenge those beliefs. The question I have for those worked up over Gaza who aren t themselves Palestinians—you get to support the home team, unquestioned—is why this tragedy and not another? Why, in a world of atrocity, where your own country just booted 50,000 children back to their Central American hells just because we don't like how they look, have you fixated on this? Too bad those refugee kids weren't being hounded by Jews. The world would bleed for them then.

Old Stuff I Love # 1: Newspaper holder

     One advantage of pushing this blog into its second year is that I get to have annual traditions. In September, 2013, I did a weeklong series, "Stuff I Love," about objects that were valuable and meaningful to me. This year I thought I would reprise it, but with a slight twist, to differentiate the two: "OLD Stuff I Love," being a look at objects that I've been looking at for at least 25 years. They're so familiar I barely notice them, and I thought sharing them might be fun, interesting, and a chance to look at them afresh. I don't think I'll run it for seven straight days—that's a lot—but let's say three days this week, when I'm not remarking on the news.

     Newspapers used to be dirty. Not as in smut, alas, though the Hearst newspapers certainly made a run at it. But in the ink would come off on your hands. Before the New York Times coined its famous slogan "All the News that's Fit to Print," they ballyhooed "It does not soil the breakfast cloth." Yes, that was mostly an arrow aimed at the supposed depravity of The World and The Journal, a way to say, "we're better than they are." The Times, as it bragged in 1908, shielded its readers by refusing to "put before them the untrue or the unclean or to affront their intelligence or their good taste with freaks of typographical display or reckless sensationalism."
     But I've always believed (I couldn't find any documentary evidence) that there was a literal sense to that as well, in an era when newspapers would give away pairs of cotton gloves, to wear while reading, so as not to turn your fingers black.  Another solution were these metal stands, to both prop up your daily at a readable angle at breakfast and to reduce the time you spent touching it. In a way, they're the precursor of iPad stands. 
      The circumstances where I bought this are still sharp in memory. It was the summer of 1979. I was going through the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio, with my former high school classmate, Esther Otterson, a girl of overwhelming prettiness. There was a flea market section, where people sold old stuff, Fiestaware and chrome toasters and such, and this was on one of the long shelves of cast-offs. I picked it up and examined the piece of brass. It cost 25 cents. I remember standing there, musing, "Is this worth 25 cents?" A quarter meant a little more then, but not too much more. And I did want to be a newspaperman. There was something Front Pagey about the stand, not that I had seen "The Front Page" at that point. But you didn't have to: just the snub-nosed newsboy, his newsboy's cap turned backward, that lightening bolt cracking across  the paper he was hawking. You could almost hear his "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" I decided to be the big spender and maybe impress Esther, so I forked over the quarter. 
       I've seen these holders on Ebay, sometimes without the ligthning bolt, for $25, so it was a  good investment. Other newspaper holders have a roosters and a "Good morning" theme.  They remind me that technology has always dogged journalism.
     For years I kept it on my desk. It made a good holder for pages being retyped. That's how you improved what you had written before computers. You took your draft, scribbled over it in pen, cut it apart and taped it together, and when the pile got too indecipherable and worn, you piled it next to your typewriter and typed a fresh copy, changing it even more in the process. Loss of that process is no doubt a loss to writing we don't even perceive. 
      It's always something. Decades ago, newspapers were dogged by ink rubbing off on readers' hands. Now it's the pesky physical nature and cost of the ink itself, not to mention the paper, not to mention the salaries of people doing well and consistently what people now will do haphazardly at times for free. 
     The brass stand is located directly above my iMac, in a long thin window above the desk in my home office. Usually I see it in silhouette, as it's meant to be seen. Well, actually, it isn't meant to be seen at all, but to be hidden behind a newspaper, keeping it steady and readable. Which is probably why I love it; we both share a certain kinship.

     

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

    "Voyeur" is a negative word, implying some kind of illicit sexual gratification or cruelty in observing others. Which is a shame, because there is an innocent pleasure, too, in watching other people go about their business. It seems to call for a word of its own: "observer" is too neutral, "witness" too legal.
     Whatever the term, I was taken by this office tableau, viewed from an interior courtyard during my wanderings this past week. I didn't watch them long, but there was something serene in seeing these people silently applying themselves to their tasks, oblivious of me.
     Where is this grid of windows? What business are we glimpsing? The only hint I'll say is, well, it's one of Chicago's more famous companies, and if you look closely, there's another hint.
      A special prize this week—oh, if you are the guy who is supposed to collect the Kup street sign, email me back; I noticed you sent a query, trying to set a time and then the email vanished into the aether. The sign is still yours for the taking.
      Where was I? Ah yes, a special prize. This little guy. No need to pick him up; I'll mail him to you. He's something you just can't buy in stores, at least I've never seen it. A teddy bear, dipped in wax—cinnamon-scented wax. It has been gracing my office for the past eight years, usually in its protective plastic bag, to keep me from suffocating on his aroma, but I liberated him for photographic purposes. He really is quite distinguished, and has an interested provenance, as you can read from the clips below.
     So place your guesses in the comments section. Good luck.

May 3, 2006

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

     God, I love this job. Sometimes, anyway. Because you can start out one place, and quickly be projected somewhere very, very different.

     As you can imagine, my columns on immigration provoked a blizzard of feedback. I read most everything -- unless the author was being too much of a jerk -- and generally found them thought-provoking.

     One reader, in the middle of a lengthy analysis of the immigrant situation, offered up a paragraph that leapt out for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

     "Now, I wouldn't feel so bad about illegals if they worked a fair wage like everybody else, in other words, even the playing field. If they spoke English, so when I go to the thrift store and ask a Spanish lady, 'Where are the teddy bears' she would know what I'm asking instead of saying, 'I no speak English.' "

     The obvious reply, which I sent to the reader, was: "You buy teddy bears at thrift stores? For whom?"

     I had the image of Aunt Betty, the family crank, showing up at her nieces' birthday parties with one of her famous ratty Salvation Army teddy bears, wrapped in an old newspaper comics section. Reality dwarfed my pallid imaginings, however.

     "Occasionally I do crafts . . ." the reader wrote back, with what I felt was a trace of sheepishness. ". . . and I needed teddy bears (cheap) for waxed dipped bears."

     We had sailed off into uncharted waters, at least for me.

     "Wax-dipped bears?" I wrote back to her (I assume the reader was a woman. At least I hope so). "I can't imagine that. What are they used for? Can you send me a picture?"

     The reader sent me a link -- www.wicks-wax-scents.com/wax-dipped-bear.html -- that teaches you how to dip your own teddy bears in hot wax, to create decorative, nice-smelling wax bears that you can then dress in party clothes and whose scent you can refresh with a hair dryer.

     Make no mistake. I'm not ridiculing the practice. That would be too easy, not to mention cruel. There's something about crafts -- about making angels out of folded-over copies of Reader's Digest topped with Styrofoam balls and spray painted gold, or pebbles decorated as owls and glued to driftwood -- that removes them from the realm of criticism or even of objective thought.

     No, I'm sincerely amazed. I've been living my life all these years, brewing coffee, raising children, writing stuff, riding the train. And all this time, unbeknownst to me, people have been melting wax in enormous vats, pouring in the cinnamon and clove, then lowering cut-rate used teddy bears into the bubbling brew. God bless America.

June 2, 2006:

WAX TEDDY BEAR UPDATE 

       I must admit, after I wrote about the phenomenon of dipping teddy bears in wax as a craft project, I assumed somebody would send me one—it was the kind of marvel that cried out for what Othello called "the ocular proof."

     When the weeks rolled by and no bear arrived, I felt a pang of disappointment. Then . . .
      "Package for you," said Rich, who handles the mail for the editorial page.
      "Probably a bomb," I muttered, standing up to open it. "Cover your  face."
      It turned out to be a wax bear.
      The bear was nothing like the waxy ursine horror of my imaginings.  Quite delicate, a color and texture as if it were made of cocoa-flavored coconut.
      Of course, this was no stovetop amateur effort, but the work of Ash-Leigh Acres Candle Company, which is actually Stephanie Loitz  of Grant Park, Ill.
      "No, we don't live in the park," she said laughingly, from her home  50 miles south of the city. "We have a little farm."
      She sells the things -- the smaller version, which is quite cute, costs $12, and can be had by e-mailing her at jlsl95@sbcglobal.net.      

     But I should warn you: They're scented. I'm keeping mine in the bag.