Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     The thought was there.
     A vacant city lot. A chance for urban blight or ... something wonderful.
     Whether they were successful or not, well, I'll leave that up to you.
     I am not an art connoisseur. So when I say it seemed to me like a lot of random junk jumbled together, that is not a judgment for the ages. That is jut my own individual impression. Perhaps you find it sublime. That's the beauty of art, or junk purporting to be art: we can all form our own conclusions.
     Anyway. Your task is not to pass judgment on this assemblage, but to pinpoint where in the city it is. The winner will receive one of my immensely artistic 2015 blog posters, which are flying out the door at $15 a pop, plus postage and handling, but which you can have for zippity-doo-dah if you guess correctly the location of this ... assemblage.
     Please remember to place your guesses below.
     And if for some unfathomable reason you don't want the poster ... maybe it isn't your taste ... there's always Bridgeport coffee, which has an artistry all its own.
    Oh, and a bit of housekeeping. This is the last contest that will post at midnight, because my wife points out that, given the frequency with which it is solved at 1 a.m., I'm cutting all those readers who aren't insomniac nightowls with solid Google search skills from participating. So from now on, it'll post at 6 a.m. Saturdays, to give early risers more of a fighting chance. Thanks everybody for playing.

Cindy Mayer can't care for us all

Cindy Mayer

    “Kookamonga!” Henry Radom, 86, answers the phone brightly, his opening salvo at telemarketers who are often on the other end.
      Sometimes he answers “George Clooney.” Or “Godzilla.”
     “Hi dad,” replies Cindy Mayer cheerfully. “I’m going to come by in a bit. Don’t disappear on me.”
     She hangs up.
     “He does that sometimes,” she explains, sitting in her Norwood Park living room. “Blood tests; it’s easier to take a powder.”

Henry Radom 

      Mayer is a professional caregiver for Home Instead Senior Care, which pairs her with senior citizens who need help in their homes. In her spare time, she tends to her widowed, legally blind father with unrelenting good cheer.
     “It’s hard to raise parents nowadays,” she says, heading over to his tidy home, about 15 minutes away in Jefferson Park. “With my dad I can have a constructive argument. It’s hard, because you can’t treat them like children. I don’t tell my dad, ‘You’re grounded. No smoking for two weeks.’ That doesn’t go very far.”
     Mayer is the vanguard of a new health care front in this country. As the population ages, more and more people will be called upon to care for their elderly relatives, or, barring that, will be paid to care for strangers.
     She represents an unexpected aspect of senior care.
     “Most care actually occurs in the home,” said John Schall, CEO of the Caregivers Action Network in Washington, D.C. “It isn’t in a hospital or medical clinic. It isn’t in nursing homes. Eighty percent of care occurs in the home. That surprises a lot of people.”
     With nobody sure which wire to snip on the pension time bomb, and climate change increasingly clear, even to heretofore head-in-the-sand Republicans, I hate to add another immense social problem to the list of crises we aren’t coping with. But the elderly population is exploding. For all of human history you could view population as a pyramid, with a broad base of children, a smaller, yet substantial level element of young adults, fewer people in their prime, fewer above them in late middle age, tapering year by year to a small apex of elderly atop the pyramid.
      That was the past. Now the population pyramid increasingly resembles a tower, where there are almost as many older adults as there are children. In the next 45 years, the world will add 1.1 billion people between the ages of 60 and 75, a 130 percent increase. Meanwhile, the number of children and teenagers will increase by only 9 percent.
      So expect the youth culture spawned by the Baby Boom to give way to a senescent culture. Clorox has already rolled out Care Concepts, a line of medical items normally found in nursing homes — non-latex exam gloves, hand sanitizer, stain remover, germicidal non-bleach spray, disinfecting and deodorizing sprays — now marketed to private caregivers through stores, a growing business.
     “If you took economic value of unpaid family care giving is $450 billion a year, twice as much as nation spends on all nursing home care and all paid in home care combined,” Schall said.
    Most of us will grow old. The lucky ones will have a Cindy Mayer looking after us.
    “When I’m not working, I’m trying to meet my dad,” she says, noting how isolated older people can become at home.
      “He doesn’t suffer from dementia, he suffers from LDD — long damn day,” she says. “My mom’s gone nine-and-a-half years. It was hard for him. I stayed with him a few weeks. My dad was never a social butterfly.”
     “I don’t know the washer from the dryer.” her father told her.
      “Dad, as long as I’m alive, you don’t need to,” Mayer replied.
      Elderly people prefer home care for a variety of reasons. It’s cheaper. They’re in a familiar place.       
     There are none of the social stresses that can make a nursing home seem like a junior high school, only with meaner cliques.
     “It’s pretty much an unrecognized issue, which is surprising, given the tens of millions of people who are family caregivers,” said Schall, whose group has a website, caregiveraction.org, designed to help those caring for others.
     “Families caregivers themselves don’t immediately self-identify as family caregivers. They don’t know there’s a word or a term. They think of it as just what they do for their family or loved ones.”
    Well, not everybody. Mayer has tales of seniors ignored or neglected by their families.
     “I have families who just want to write the check,” she says. Some don’t even want to do that. Mayer views the chance to care for her dad, who came to Chicago from Poland in the 1950s, as a blessing.
     “I’m very grateful that my dad is still at home,” she says. “We don’t live too far from one another. I’m there every day, sometimes more. I help him with all his banking [and] bills. Neither of our homes look how they should be. But it’s OK. You have to laugh this stuff off.”
     Mayer points out that the care she gives to her dad is the same care she gives to elderly people she visits, whether in their homes or in nursing homes.
     “I’ve been in nursing homes where the residents are lined up in wheelchairs — it’s very sad,” Mayer said. “If you could just say ‘Good morning’ to somebody, that’s all, they’ll probably talk about that little interaction for the rest of the week. It’s very important, what we do. Not the best-paying job. People think it’s an easy job, but it’s not. You’re responsible for someone’s loved one. A human being.”

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Sequel

    I read all seven volumes of the Harry Potter series, out loud, to my boys, several times, because we'd revisit the series every time a new one came out.
    Yet when J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy showed up, I got a few pages into it, shrugged, and moved on. Ordinary.
      I've read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces many times—funniest book ever written. The Neon Bible, his first stab as an author, at age 16? Released as a salve to those who couldn't bear the thought there were to be no more books from him? Pass.
      So obviously no joy here at news that Harper Lee, supposedly well into her decline at 88, suddenly had a change of heart, and after refusing to follow up her perfect American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird for more than half a century, will be offering the world its sequel in July, something called Go Set a Watchman. 
     Glancing around on-line, that seems to be the common, if not the universal reaction. Everybody smells a rat.
     Yes, books should not be reviewed until they're read.
     But that unfortunate title should be a tip-off.
     That, and the fact Go Set a Watchman was written before Mockingbird. Perhaps Lee was still learning her craft. Perhaps the book was set aside for a reason. Perhaps Lee had it right the past 55 years. 
     Usually this sort of thing happens after a famous person dies. Then their heirs, smelling money in the water, sells off every outtake, every half-formed fetal novel. All those crappy Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix albums that came out after their deaths. 
     Publishing is a business, and HarperCollins obviously feels there's money to be made: they're reportedly ordering up two millions copies of Watchman. And there is a one-in-a-million chance it could be a fraction as good as the original, the tale of young Scout Finch, her father, attorney Atticus, and the rape case that gripped their small town. 
     But don't bet on it. In fact, expect a little disappointment, at best, laughable disappointment at worst.
      Part of Lee's legacy was that, having written a superlative masterpiece, she knew when to take her cards off the table and quit. Margaret Mitchell never wrote Return to Tara. Like J.D. Salinger's long silence, it might have been frustrating for the reading public, but there was a nobility to it as well. Why produce something second rate when you've achieved greatness? Why twirl endlessly in the public eye? Harper Lee putting out a book now is like Thomas Pynchon doing another guest spot on "The Simpsons." It toys with a precious legacy, those rarest of artists who learned how to walk away from it all. That too is a gift. 
    All we can do is remind ourselves that subsequent publications do not diminish the initial achievement. They can't, or anyway, shouldn't. Walt Whitman revised Leaves of Grass throughout his life, making it worse every time.  We still have the original 1855 version, and the later ones are curiosities for scholars. Harper Lee's sister, Alice, who always protected the shy author, died last spring, and obviously the vultures have set upon poor Harper. We should not judge her harshly, or at all. To Kill a Mockingbird will remain unblemished, the way that The Sun Also Rises was not spoiled by that cobbled together Hemingway novel that bobbed to the surface in 1970, nearly a decade after his death, the one none of us read and nobody can recall the name of offhand. 
     Can you?
     Me neither.
     Checking...
     Islands in the Stream. 
     Someday...glancing at the top... Go Set a Watchman (really?) will enjoy the same fate.   

     

And the air! It's poisonous too...

     Children should not drink water.
     Water is deadly to them, and I don’t just mean drownings, which claim 700 young lives every year.
     Water is poison. Many children who drank water, whether out of fountains or sippy cups or plastic bottles, almost immediately died in car accidents and fires, or contracted cancer. One hundred percent of the children who succumb to falls had drunk water within the previous 12 hours.
     But Neil, you might argue, is this not a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy? The phrase — for those not up on their Latin — means “after this, therefore because of this.” It’s where you link event A to event B happening before it, suggesting one caused the other, when there really was no connection. I eat Shredded Wheat for breakfast and then my dog runs away? He must hate Shredded Wheat!
     Au contraire, I’d reply (French: “on the contrary”). To grasp the danger of water, just look at vaccines. For years, vaccines saved millions of lives, preventing children from contracting polio, diphtheria, smallpox, whooping cough, mumps, measles.
     Then, in one of those odd confluences when the extremes of the political spectrum wander so far afield they meet at the outer reaches of reason and find themselves in agreement, parents on the far left, squishy liberals who don’t want their babies exposed to scary chemicals, and paranoiacs on the far right, who distrust anything the government does, decided to refuse to let their children get vaccinated, both wielding the identical logic that I use to condemn water (a pose I will now drop, since it’s so annoying. How can people sincerely embrace such utter idiocy? I can hardly stand to pretend).
     For years, the trend of avoiding vaccines was largely ignored — America has a weakness for indulging stupidity when draped in the mantle of religion or sincere belief, as if sincerely subscribing to idiocy is a defense. Everything is an opinion, a belief; nothing is solid or real. The problem was allowed to simmer, since most kids get vaccinated, though that number dropped. In some states, 15 percent of kindergarteners haven’t been vaccinated; nearly 100,000 nationwide.
     And now its inevitable fruit: in January, 102 cases of measles, a once-banished childhood illness now raging back. Is 102 cases a lot? Between 2001 and 2011, an average of 62 cases were reported each year. Which means we had more cases in January than are seen most years.
     A few points to keep in mind:
     1. Vaccines don’t cause autism. You could use the same argument that anti-vaxxers use to forbid water or “Spongebob” or any common activity. There is no link. One study that suggested a link was found to be in error.
     2. The diseases these vaccines prevent are still out there — with the exception of smallpox — and the more children who aren’t vaccinated, the more will become sick.
     3. Politicians encourage this because they’re evil. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said parents “need to have some measure of choice” when it comes to the issue. Tea Party darling Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said vaccination is “a personal decision for individuals.” That is because freedom sounds good, to their unpatriotic, government-hating base. Freedom to not be vaccinated is like freedom to jump the turnstiles on the L. It isn’t freedom, it’s a free ride on the backs of others.
     What we are seeing is a shredding of American society. Where once our country had a draft, could call upon young men to give up two years of their lives and risk being killed, and their parents were proud of them, now a pinprick administered to tots is asking too much, and parents dream up a carnival of imbecility as justification while ignoring the solid medicine. Where once we trusted our leaders, trusted science, we lazily sink lower and lower into denialism, moving past a useful skepticism into a knee-jerk disbelief in any general practice. Public policy is now a plot, a delusion, and whatever daft notion we catch wind of becomes the secret knowledge that sets us apart from the gullible herd.
     Liberals ignore history to romanticize a simple past, pushing for natural childbirth, ignoring that women dying during delivery was a big part of nature’s plan. Conservatives fear science, are reluctant to see mankind doing what only God is supposed to do. God can put us in proximity to the measles virus, and then let us build up an immunity to it; man can’t. God can warm the atmosphere and cause climate change; man can’t. God can mutate genes in plants; man can’t. The left joins them here, their Whole Earth Catalog, off-the-grid mentality rendering them as fearsome as medieval villagers.
     But the fact-based world catches up. Always does. As we’re seeing with climate change. As we see with this measles epidemic.
     Freedom does not mean freedom from consequences. You really feel your kid should not be vaccinated? Fine, don’t vaccinate him. But don’t send him to school either. That’s the law in Mississippi, of all places. No measles outbreak there. Plenty of kids are home-schooled by their fanatic parents. My bet is most won’t pull their kids over vaccines. We’ve made opting out of society on a whim too easy. Time to make it more difficult again.

"Our Andrew is no more"

     Shocking, sad news Tuesday morning that Andrew Patner, WFMT stalwart, Sun-Times classical music and opera critic, and my old friend, passed away suddenly. "Our Andrew is no more," said his longtime partner, Tom Bachtell, adding that Andrew died after a very brief battle with a bacterial infection.
      He was the voice of cultural sophistication in the city, a lifelong Hyde Park intellectual, and good friend to so many.

      I owe my entire book publishing career to Andrew.  In the late 1980s, I barely knew him, but he offered me his agent, David Black, when my own agent couldn't seem to sell my stuff. Andrew was a supportive, tireless advocate. I learned to value his intelligent, delightfully world-weary opinion on all matters. He did not sneer at my amateur forays into opera, as another expert might have. Being a guest on his radio show was a pleasure. His brief biography of I.F. Stone is a classic. 

     The first column I ever wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that had my photo atop it was about Andrew, though I didn't name him. He helped me sort through the complicated view that straight men can have toward gays, particularly a quarter century ago, and if I developed a more enlightened perspective sooner than most, Andrew deserves much of the credit. He made me a better person, and I will miss him. This originally ran Nov. 4, 1990:
  
     By the time a man gets to be my age, the friendship dance card is pretty much filled. With the ceaseless grind of daily obligations, there isn't time to see the handful of friends I already care about, plus my wife, never mind letting just anybody else join the club.
     Maybe that makes me odd. Maybe most guys are like that. I don't know.
     So it was with a bit of surprise, and not a little fear, that I found myself recently becoming friends with a gay man.
     At 30, I wish I could say that I've had lots of gay friends, shared in-depth talks about their situations, participated in their lives. It would fit in with my neat, cosmopolitan view of myself. "Some of my best friends..."
     But it isn't true.
     Two years ago, when I met this guy — a journalist — I didn't know he was gay. He didn't manifest gayness in all the cliche ways I expected. If he had, I probably wouldn't have gone to that first lunch with him. Not out of prejudice. That would be wrong.
     Prejudice against gay people is not an accepted 1990s attitude. But then, I suspect that much of the Standard Party Line liberality everybody says they adhere to doesn't really jibe with their reflexive daily actions and unspoken meannesses of the heart.
     I didn't know he was gay. I went to lunch.
     He never laid his hand on my knee, but due to a tactful, unspoken inquiry, I figured it out: this guy was gay and wanted to find out if I was gay, too, so we could be gay together.
     The overture offended me greatly.
     The idea was rattling. I worried that I manifested some sort of gayness, heretofore unknown to me, that he had picked up on. Then there was an uneasy vertigo. Who can walk past the Scenic Overlook without, if only for a passing moment, imagining an impulsive leap over the edge? And here comes this guy, shouting, "Jump! Jump!"
     I was also peeved by the thought that he hadn't sought me out for my obvious fine and personable qualities. But for something dark and sexual, slithering below the surface.
     Had he not been such an interesting person, it would have ended there. "I'm sorry, but you've dialed the wrong number." However, I really liked him. He had all the admirable qualities I imagine in myself. I held my ground. Presenting my heterosexual credentials (a love of women; no attraction to men) I decided I was liberal and big-hearted enough to be friends with this gay person, who was smarter and more successful than I.
     The friendship simmered on low at first. Recently we've been talking more, perhaps because his roommate was dying of AIDS.
     As he reeled off this terrible situation — a good friend dying horribly, his office persecuting him — I was surprised by my lack of sympathetic reaction. After knowing him, and soaking up all those big Life magazine photo essays and everything, I think I was still shocked to find an actual person, suffering.
    In other words, the reaction of a bigot; the dry crust of indifference extended to people who are too unlike yourself.
     Realizing this has helped me regenerate a bit of the humanity sapped away by years of joking about fags with my buddies.
     His friend died. The last time we talked, he was fulfilling the mournful duty of bringing the obituary around to the papers. As he left, I thought: "He's at risk, too. How does he live with it?"
     Next time, I'll ask him.

"Crowded together as sheep are"

     So here's the conundrum:
     Human beings love company but hate crowds.
     We don't want to be lonely, but prefer nobody sits next to us on trains.
     We hate litter, as evidence of the lunkish carelessness of our fellows. But admire the soft patina their hands rub over the years on a brass handrail or, in Union Station, these footworn stairs, almost resembling a geologic formation.
     I never really thought about it until Friday, after a post, about how Amtrak shouldn't break its arm patting itself on the back for putting $12 million into Union Station, a figure that probably is not enough to give the filthy, smokey netherworld a good scrubbing. 
    In passing, I mentioned the stone steps. Amtrak had said they were going to be repaired, and I wrote that they shouldn't do that, that the dips that nearly a century of feet have worn into them was the closest thing Chicago has to the ancient feel of Jerusalem or Rome.
     That lone comment was what most readers focused in on. People love those steps, not only for being in "The Untouchables," but for the same quality I noticed.
    "Don't replace the worn marble stairs unless you also have a contract to rehab the Parthenon," wrote Tom Golz, in the comments section, echoing a common refrain that the Great Hall should be left alone.  (On Twitter, a reader pointed out that the steps are not "marble," as the Tribune imagines, but travertine, a form of limestone, which the AIA Guide to Chicago confirms).   
     Why do people we encounter in the present — the line in front of us in the grocery, the fellow hikers spoiling the quiet of our trail — so often annoy, while those in the past, whoever trod these steps, intrigue and inspire us?
    A pretty easy conundrum, when put that way. We are inconvenienced by our fellow citizens now: they brush against us in our seats, delay our paying for our groceries, take our parking spaces. There's something about other human beings that repulses us.
     "Of all animals, men are the least fitted to live in herds," Rousseau wrote. "If they were crowded together as sheep are they would all perish in a short time. The breath of man is fatal to his fellows."
     ("Crowded together as sheep are"—sounds like he's been to the South Platform at Union Station).      
     On the other hand, people safely relegated to the past, well, they're gone and not coming back, so thus make less demanding companions. When I wrote about why earthlings imagine UFOs are space visitors, the most common theory is that we can't stand the idea of being alone in the universe. So the same folks who would give you a dirty look if you asked to sit next to them on the train, who protest a condominium being built down the block, because the neighborhood of course reached its full saturation with the arrival of themselves, will confabulate every streak in the sky into a mothership, so as not to be alone in the universe.
    A contradiction. But one that makes sense, in a perverse kind of way, and points toward strategy we can perhaps use to improve our lives. Maybe our petty impatience with our fellows masks a deeper need, for fellowship, and if we could somehow conquer that, we would be happier. Maybe the deep truths we expect to get from outer space are available from those individuals moving in down the street, if we only could overcome our displeasure at their arrival, our fear of inconvenience and proximity, and sought them out. Maybe a bit of the romantic affection draped over these worn stairs could be expended toward those who are wearing them down right now, to this very day, the motley passengers camping out between trains on the wooden benches nearby in the Great Hall. Now there's a thought.

It's just lunch. Really.

     "Hey, want to do lunch some time?" I asked, breezing past the desk of a colleague, making her brief arc across the sky of professional journalism.
     "No," she replied.
     Years have dripped by, but that "No," still echoes.
     Lunch can be confusing.
     Maybe she thought I was asking her on a date. Yes, she's married, and I'm married, and while some guys don't let that get in the way, I wouldn't consider "Let's have lunch" as being in the same realm as "Hey baby, let's get it on" or whatever the current pick-up phrase is now.
     Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm an annoying, rebarbative person who she just couldn't bear the thought of sitting across from, never mind while eating food. That possibility is not beyond my imagining, alas.
     But I like to think it's lunch. People have trouble with lunch, particularly at work.
     "Media power lunches are out," the New York TImes declared recently "Crumbs in your keyboard? In."
     Uh-huh. Lunch being out is one of those evergreen newspaper trend stories, like hats being in, that are regularly reported despite being demonstrably untrue.
     If lunch is dead, then what explains all those restaurants serving lunch? The National Restaurant Association reports sales up, 3.6 percent last year.
     If lunch is dead, the Times has been performing its rites for years.
     "These days, more and more employees consume their lunches from the comforts of their cubicles," the Times reported in 2007.
     "As lunch has come under increasing pressures of time, budgets and health concerns," the Times reported in 1999. "The leisurely two-hour interlude has slipped back to an hour or less and, for many, into carryout at the desk or sandwiches in the conference room."
     My gut tells me, rather than lunch being out of fashion, it's the idea of lunch being dead that is eternally in vogue. We want others to think we're all too busy flinging pixels to do more than turn our heads to suck nutrition out of a catheter tube.
     Does anyone really consider that a flattering image?
     To me, it's the opposite. I'm not against homemade lunch, but usually the get-out-of-the-house chaos is too hectic to prepare one, so grabbing lunch out is faster. If I've got the morning under control, I can make a big salad before bolting for the train. It's cheaper and faster on the eating end. Though you have to have the ingredients, and instead of an hour, eating it is over in five minutes and you're back at work.
     I think you suffer, not taking that break. And I have support. A new British study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science says that walking at lunch—they used an exercise program, but it holds true for walking to a restaurant—makes you a better worker.
     “There is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” one of the researchers told the Times, which has the lunch beat sewed up. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.”
     The researchers did have trouble finding male volunteers for their study. Men have a harder time leaving the office at lunch. So maybe, as a man suggesting going somewhere to eat, it isn't the creep factor, but, rather gender inappropriate behavior, as if I were suggesting we go get our nails done.
     With technology triumphant, the risk of working 24 hours a day is already great. Skip lunch, and next thing you know you're wearing Depends to the office, because going to the restroom takes time too.
     Garry Marshall visited Northwestern, years ago, and met students putting on a musical. Trying to impress the famous director, they said how they had worked all night getting the show ready.
     "A professional goes home at night," Marshall replied, words I've taken to heart. If you know what you're doing, if you're good at it, you can eat, sleep, do all sorts of non-work activities which makes you even better when you do work.
     I hope that doesn't make me a creep. I had an interesting conversation with a colleague at the paper while we were getting our coffee, one that seemed worth continuing. I suggested lunch, and she said I should email her.
     "When can I buy you lunch?" I emailed.
     "Lunch won't be necessary as I bring it to eat at my desk most days," she replied.
     Ouch. Gee. When I read that, to be honest, I thought, "Oh God, kill me now. I've become Bob Greene, putting out some scary creep vibe, frightening the youngsters."
     Sorry about the invitation. No harm intended. But you haul yourself to Au Bon Pain enough, sit in the back in the little room all alone, reading the paper, you start to think, "This would go better with another person."
     It is not only good for you--the walk, the food, the company--but ultimately sound business. Years later, when the former columnist who blew off lunch with a brusque "No" was now rattling a cup in public relations, pitching stories -- a fate I found as satisfying as if she were rooting through Dumpsters -- she contacted me. Was I interested in writing about whatever nugatory PR pap she was ballyhooing?
     "No," I replied.