Rock star

     It probably says something bad about Los Angeles, or me, or both, that when my wife asked if there were anything in particular I wanted to do in LA during our few days in the city, after visiting our son at college, the only thing I could think of was: "See the big rock at the Los Angeles art museum."
      Officially titled "Levitated Mass" —though I hope that Los Angelenos have the gumption to call it the "Big Rock," the way Chicagoans refer to our massive public sculpture, "Cloud Gate" as "The Bean." It's our God-given right to defy artistic pretense.
     I had seen a video of the 340-ton granite boulder's slow, well-planned 100-mile journey to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a rare unifying civic event in Los Angeles that doesn't involve earthquakes or riots, and something about the boulder's careful procession, greeted with exultation, tears and indifference, made me want to see the thing for myself.
     The mammoth stone is located above a concrete ditch and you walk under it, and my first thought was, "It's not so big." Perhaps the best way to encounter the work is unexpectedly, to see it on the horizon and wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. Which is hard to do when you go expecting it to be there.
     The Big Rock certainly isn't the communal experience that The Bean is; in Chicago, people crowd around, touching it, viewing their own reflection. This being LA, visitors approach at regular intervals, in small groups, encounter the thing, and leave. If somebody is having their picture taken by it, others hang back, at a polite distance, so as not to ruin their shot.

     Still, I was glad I went, glad that visitors are afforded the chance to pat Michael Heizer's $10 million sculpture (the rock itself was sold to the museum for $70,000, the rest was the cost of constructing a football field-sized transport rig, plus gas—15 gallons to the mile to run the carrier— plus the cost of crews snagging power lines, moving street lights, and generally clearing the way for the two-story tall, three-lane wide chunk of stone when it arrived in 2012.  Something makes you want to touch it, to register its solidity. (A shame the installation doesn't include a guard to shoo you away when you do touch it; that would be the perfect punchline. With art, grandiosity feasts while humor goes hungry).  And of course I had my picture taken next to it. You sort of have to.
     My wife, as always, not only read my thoughts but put them into comprehensible, concise form:
     "It's no Bean," she said. "I imagine the act of getting it here is better than the act of it being here." 
     Exactly. Or, put another way: the journey is the art. Without a story, it's just a big rock in an odd place. 

"A sea of misery"

In front of the Los Angeles Athletic Club

     My wife and I were walking across Pershing Square, a public space in Los Angeles which, like many parks and open areas here, has been occupied by the homeless.  She said she wasn't comfortable navigating this "sea of misery" and I didn't argue.  
     All things being equal, I would have preferred to stay by the ocean.
     But while planning the trip, my wife observed that we had stayed at Venice Beach a scant five years ago, plus a few days at Virginia Beach last summer, so we were practically soggy with ocean spray. I almost pointed out that half a decade is actually a longish time, and Virginia Beach was a different ocean -- facing right, at the Atlantic, instead of left, at the Pacific. But blue is blue, the salt water taffy's the same, I get that, and as she rightly points out, we are not beach people, though we are not step over the bodies on the way to the swish restaurant people either, which might make us oddities.
    The beach has its homeless people too. But not like this, to my memory.

Bradbury Building

      Like everyone else, we ignored them best we could. Our two days in Los Angeles were spent in the historic district, which, she is correct, is jammed with interesting Deco buildings that I did indeed enjoy, plus even earlier architectural marvels, such as the very Daniel Burnham-ish Bradbury Building, with its ornate ironwork, where key parts of "Blade Runner" were shot. There is a dynamic Central Market filled with food stores and eateries, the kind of vibrant place that Chicago's French Market tries and fails to be.
     We put in a lot of miles up and down Broadway—lots of Hispanic bridal and quinceanera stores, shop keepers who naturally hailed passersby in Spanish, stores buying gold to make into horrendous gold jewelry, apparently, a thriving business in phone cards and Disney towels and odd brand boom boxes.
     The place struck me as New York City in the 1970s, before gentrification took over. That's not praise, but a criticism. There were more homeless people per square foot than I've ever seen in New York, and we didn't even approach Skid Row-- I was all for marching over to personally inspect the armies of the homeless camped there, but my brother-in-law, who lives in the historic Eastern Columbia Building, assured me that was a Bad Idea. I only took one photo—the one above, as we were parking to check into the Athletic Club—but I could have taken 50 of the men scattered about, like corpses in a Matthew Brady photo of a Civil War battlefield, sprawled where they fell, eyes half crescents of white. But taking photos of them unconscious, in such a state of humiliatingly public abject ruin, seemed wrong, a final insult, and I felt so conflicted doing it once that I never could take another.
    About 10 percent of all the homeless in the nation live in Los Angeles County--more than 50,000 people, though the count is disputed. That contrasts to about 7,000 people homeless on a cold night in Chicago. The Los Angeles Times carried a story about advocates trying to change the laws so the homeless can more comfortably go about their business in public; my sympathies tend to be with the public, who deserve to have parks and benches for their use, too.
    The received wisdom about the homeless is that they are you or I without a paycheck or two, but the truth, with the Los Angeles homeless, is more they are you or I after being deprived of the anti-psychotic medicines we need for the next 10 years while being marinated in multiple addictions and some organic mental disorders tossed in for good measure. Seriously crazy people, too far gone to even beg effectively, snarling and staggering and sprawling everywhere. The narrowing of the middle class is much remarked on, but another result of the Republican War on Government is the hollowing out of social services, the results of which are only too clear here in Los Angeles. A humane society would treat its mentally ill; not being that society, we step around them while averting our eyes instead

Any time is Candy Crush Saga time!

    Most parents of seniors don't even attend mid-winter parents night at Glenbrook North High School. 
     The halls, thronged with middle-aged couples in the fall, are noticeably depopulated. Several teachers greeted us with a quasi-sincere, quasi- joking, "What are you doing here?!"
      Good question. And we have a good answer. We saw the first one off at a parents' night at Greenbrier Elementary, 14 years and change ago, and we might as well see the younger one through to the bitter end. We were glad we went, particularly when our boy's Chinese teacher started class with a video of him holding our heroic dog, giving a tour of our home in Chinese. The two other couples, both native Chinese, chuckled appreciatively, though I couldn't get out of them whether they were laughing at what he said or at the way he said it.
     The teachers, as always, were excellent—our older boy found college a breeze after Glenbrook North. I did notice this parent playing Candy Crush Saga on his cell phone. At least I think it was; I'm not an expert at hand-held games. Never played one. All these games look like little arrays of colorful dots to me. It could have been Fruit Smash, or Cupcake Chaos, or something.
     The important thing was dad was ignoring the teacher, passing the time in his kid's chemistry class by playing on his phone. To me, that's bad form, though I suppose the kids have to get it from somewhere. Still, we were only in each class about a dozen minutes.
     Not a big deal. Standards are so old-fashioned. I don't know which is worse form—him playing or me noticing. Our evolving etiquette seems to be that we ignore each other's phone habits. I can't hold him up to too much censure. At least he was there. Most parents didn't bother. They were happily playing Candy Crush Saga at home. So kudos for making the effort. I believe that a large part of success in parenting, like any other endeavor, is showing up. Though how you behave once you do show up does matter, a little, I like to think. 

Why care about El Salvador when we have problems at home?

Debra Gittler, in El Salvador

Altruism is something of a mystery to me. Here I am, hunched over, puffing frantically into the sails of my little bark of a career as it slowly settles into the water, while there are certain rare individuals who devote their lives to helping the downtrodden. I don't get it. Thus when I encounter one, I try to get at the mystery of why they are doing what they do. Plus, I don't have many readers in Central America, at least not who write in. So after I received a friendly note from Debra Gittler in El Salvador, and since I'm out of town, I asked her for a brief report about what Central America is like and why she's down there. This is what she wrote:

Hola from El Salvador!

My name is Debra Gittler. I’m the Founder and Executive Director of ConTextos, a literacy organization established in El Salvador, where I’m writing this letter, and also in Chicago, where I’m from and where I still call home.

I’m often asked, “Why should Chicagoans care about kids in Central America when we have the South and West sides to worry about?” 

Ironically, my two homes—ConTextos’ two homes—Chicago and El Salvador have a lot in common. Both are plagued by gang violence. El Salvador is now one of the most violent countries in the world with rampant gang violence that plagues kids in school and out. Experts say that if you were to superimpose El Salvador’s homicide rate upon New York City, it would be like 6,000 homicides per year.

So why would I choose to live in such a terrible place?

This is a land of contradictions. The gentle tropical breeze mixes with the third-world roar of broken mufflers. The air is vibrant with the scent of bright flowers and unregulated car exhaust. Massive digital screens advertising high-end goods loom over squatter communities that cook over firewood and have no access to water. You can get four homemade pupusas and a cup of coffee for a dollar at a local spot, or a $4 coffee at Starbucks.

El Salvador is also a stunningly beautiful country. My home in the city is only 30 minutes from the beach and an hour from the mountains. My patio looks over a volcano—one of 19 in the country—and yes, I leave my doors open to the outside all day and night, every day and night. The temperature never strays far from 85 degrees.

Right now is sugar cane harvest, and part of the process is burning the cane fields. At night, you can see the mountainside on fire. Ash floats on the air and settles everywhere. I like to pretend the ash is from the volcanoes…

Last week, Central America popped up in the international news when Vice President Joe Biden announced: A Plan for Central America: "As we were reminded last summer when thousands of unaccompanied children showed up on our southwestern border, the security and prosperity of Central America are inextricably linked with our own."

How so? I first moved to Central America eight years ago. After three years as a teacher in the South Bronx, I came here to work in education reform. You’d think that “first-world” and “third world” poverty would be so different. But in fact, I could see the connections that Biden refers to—the kids in my classroom in the States were the same that I served in Central America, the educational culture that I fought was the same in both places. I also noticed that traditional bi-lateral efforts for development just weren’t enough to make sustainable change. So I founded ConTextos to fill an obvious gap: provide books and training to schools.

Here in Central America many adults never had the opportunity to read. In schools today, kids lack access to books and learn via rote memorization, copy and dictation. ConTextos changes this paradigm. We establish school libraries and train teachers so that kids develop authentic literacy skills such as deep-thinking, analysis, interpretation and creativity. These are the skills not just to be a better reader, they’re the skills necessary to be a more active member of an effective society.

Whatever happens in US immigration reform, part of the solution must involve investing in education and the social sector in the countries of origin. That’s why ConTextos’ is seeking support to expand into Guatemala and Honduras. This region, now the most violent in the region, needs help. And ConTextos is helping.

While there are hundreds of people with profiles like mine working in Chicago and throughout the States to improve education, Central America has a terrible dearth of educational NGOs. And the best part: our work is incredibly affordable to donors and foundations. It costs just $5,000/year per school for us to create a school library and provide a year’s worth of training.

Neil, I hope you’ll reach out to your readers to help us raise awareness (and money) in Chicago. Investing in education as a tool to combat violence and create opportunity isn’t a question of either the West side or international; it means investing in both. And what better way than through a Chicago-based organization.

You can learn more about ConTextos at contextos.org and vimeo.com/contextos. ConTextos is a Chicago business making huge strides in one of the most fragile, volatile regions of the world. I hope you’ll let your readers know about us!

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I'm not sure what drew me to this chief.
     The fine detailing on the feathers of his war bonnet, surely.
     Maybe the almost-semitic arch to his nose.
     Something of a sneer, facing into the cutting Chicago wind.
     Or maybe I just thought, "This'll stump 'em."
     Which of course it won't.
     But a guy can try.
     So puzzle over this one. 
     I'm in California, bopping around the Parents Weekend events at Pomona College.
     So I won't be able to render the verdict until late in the day.
     Unless you get this very quickly.
     As you tend to do.
     The winner receives a bag of fine Bridgeport coffee. 
     Which I never get tired of drinking.
     So place your guesses below, and good luck. 

Winter is fall season

     Blame the dog.
     On our walks, I prefer she go right. Habit. Better scenery.

     But last Sunday morning she turns left. I think, "Okay, follow the dog."
     I pause in a driveway across the street, looking back at our yard, wondering whether rabbits can take down a 3-foot-tall pine sapling that has gone missing. Then it happens.
     What happens I can't tell you, exactly, other than I fell, apparently.
     Wham.
     But honestly, I didn't even feel "wham."
     One moment I'm standing, feet planted, wearing my heretofore trustworthy Keen hiking boots, looking at the spot where that tree the rabbits perhaps ate should be. Then staring at the sky, my hands curled above, the dog licking my face after, I assume, both feet shot out, there was a Wile E. Coyote moment of suspension, then gravity did its thing, with the requisite halo of stars and tweeting sparrows.
     I couldn't move. Not as worrisome as it sounds. A calm, almost a curiosity. This is a development. Using my shoulder, I angle my right hand toward my face and give my thumb a tentative nibble. Completely numb, as if asleep.
     At least I'm not dead. Falls killed about 30,000 Americans in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, making it almost as common a cause of death as car accidents. Winter, ironically, is peak fall season.
     "Falls are more common in the wintertime," said Dr. Rahul Khare, an emergency room physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He estimated NU's ER might get 10 cases in a morning on icy days, as opposed to one or two when it's dry. Falls cause a variety of injuries. "One of the biggest is what we call "FOOSH" injuries—Falls On an Out-Streched Hand," he said. "We see fractures in the bones in the hand as well as bones in the arm as well as elbow injuries, shoulder injuries."
     "With younger folk, ankles and wrists, older individuals you'll see ankles, fractures in spine, hips," said Dr. Mark Cichon, chair of emergency medicine at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. He said the costs of such falls will increase tremendously as what he calls the "grey tsunami" of an aging population rolls on. According to the CDC, the 2.4 million people whose falls required visits to the hospital in 2012 resulted in a staggering $30 billion in medical costs.
     "You go down very quickly," said Khare. "You don't even remember. It only takes half a second from standing to hitting your head on the ground."
      I can vouch for that.
     Eventually my neighbor rushes out and helps me to my feet. My head doesn't hurt, but my arms burn—electric shocks up and down. I hurry inside and climb directly into bed, consider ignoring the incident, embarrassed at the shame of falling. That horrible cheezy TV commercial. "I've fallen," the old woman whines, "and I can't get up!" But the burning worries me. That isn't good. I tell my wife, who leaps out of bed and hustles me the hospital, while I fret about adding another straw to the groaning medical system.
      At Glenbrook Hospital, the ER doctor suggests not one CT scan, but two—one head, one neck. I balk. Is this really necessary? I mention having just read "Medical Tests You Can Safely Skip" in the March Consumer Reports ("CT emits a powerful dose of radiation, in some cases equivalent to about 200 chest Xrays...That does can alter the makeup of human tissues and ... the damage can lead to cancer.") I've know people who've had facial cancer—not a condition you want to court.
      But my arms are still burning, and balancing the theoretical risk of something going wrong down the pike against the need to learn what is causing this now, I accept the risk of about $2000 worth of look-see.
     "I have this conversation at least once a shift, if not more" said Khare. "It is really important to ask your physician about the necessity of the CT scan....in your case, burning hands ... I'd be more inclined to get the CT scan on that because of that neurological finding. The important thing is to be honest with doctor to say 'Hey, could we have a discussion?'"
     And the doctors don't hate you after that? I asked.
     "No, I don't think physicians are doing that as much as they used to," Khare said. "Shared decision-making is very powerful. Nothing is black or white in medicine ."
     I leave Glenbrook with a pack of steroids and a diagnosis of "cervical strain." As far as what people should do to avoid falls...

Heroic dog

     

     "If you're going out, what are the shoes you're wearing?" asked Cichon. "If you're elderly, think about a cane, a walking stick. Not to say you're old and need a cane. Just to help steady your balance. Take small steps."
     Still, no matter what precautions you take, falls can be unavoidable.
     "The truth is, you still have to take out your garbage," said Khare. "You still have to walk your dog."
     Speaking of which, we don't really blame the dog; in fact, she is a hero. She could have left me and chased a squirrel. But she stayed with her downed man, and licked him back to consciousness. 
     "She's Lassie!" my wife exuded, when the crisis had passed.

Still in the dark on Valentine's Day

I'm heading to Los Angeles today, and as much as I wanted to hang out the "Gone Fishing" sign, I hate the thought of leaving you staring hungrily at your screen. Valentine's Day is Saturday—not Friday, as this 1997 column claims. But otherwise it holds true. 

     This Friday is Valentine's Day. In preparation for tiptoeing into the minefield, I dug into Valentine's Day lore, trying to find a clue as to why it is always such an ordeal.
     Most of the stuff was pretty tedious, the various Saints Valentine who may or may not have existed, and the colorful ways they may or may not have been slaughtered.
     There was an interesting line from Chaucer, who comments how chickens chose their mates on Valentine's Day. The word he uses for chickens is "foul," and only then did I realize that "fowl" and "foul" have the same origin, something that should be obvious to anyone who has been to a poultry factory.
     Interesting, but not helpful.
     Then I ran across a theory offered by Jack Santino, a professor at Bowling Green University, that Valentine's Day is the opposite of Halloween. "Halloween is approximately seven weeks before the winter solstice and marks the progression into the darkest period of the year," he writes. "Valentine's Day is about seven weeks after it and marks the progression out of winter and into spring." Santino points out that Halloween imagery is all about harvested crops and death, while Valentine's Day is flowers and romance and life.
     And—this struck me as most important—Halloween is outdoors and male, given to pranks and disguise, and Valentine's Day is indoors and female, given to revealing new affections and reinforcing old ones.
     Bingo. No wonder I make such a hash of it—as I suspect many men do—year in and year out. Valentine's Day is a female thing.
     Some of my worst dating nightmares have taken place on Valentine's Day. One year, I waited until the last minute to make a restaurant reservation, not realizing that Valentine's Day is Amateur Night Out, second only to New Year's. Every place was booked, and we stopped at six restaurants before we found one that had only a half-hour wait. It turned into a 2 1/2-hour wait, and we finally ate just before midnight. It's amazing she still married me. That's love.
     And love must receive its due. But what? Too small of a token — say, just a card and a single, elegant rose — would look cheap and receive scorn.
      But too much is just as bad. If I gave my wife the traditional dozen red roses — which cost about $200 this time of year — she would take one look at the flowers, then murder me and bury the body where it would never be found.
      She's frugal. Maybe your significant other has a different characteristic. Extravagant. Or traditional. Or quirky. Whatever it is, you, as the guy, are expected to have measured your lovemate's individual soul and arranged just the proper gift to resonate with that soul perfectly.
     Woe to we who misjudge. Last year was a disaster. My wife had been sick for a week. I was running the house, cleaning, caring for the baby, trying to work. This didn't seem like the time for grand romantic gestures.
     Then, about 6 p.m., she came downstairs, pale, wraithlike, sick, blinking into the light. Where, she wondered, were the Valentine's fripperies? The surprises? The chocolate delicacies? I stared at her, agog, as if I were in a foxhole in war and a corpsman belly-crawled over and shouted, above the shrieking shells, that they needed men immediately over at the firebase to dance around the maypole.
    That brings up the element of surprise. Even the perfect gift turns a little sour if you tip your hand ahead of time. If you mention to your wife today, "I thought I'd buy you some nice lingerie for Valentine's Day," she'll react as if you said you want a divorce. The perfect thing must be revealed at the perfect moment, perfectly. 
     Women.
     I almost had it once, almost 10 years ago. My girlfriend wanted to see "Cats." It was a hot ticket, playing at the Shubert Theatre. Now, I would just as soon be tied in a sack with cats as go see the musical, but, well, you know, amantes sunt amentes* and all that. So I bought the tickets. I arranged for an early dinner, close to the Shubert: the Berghoff,** a get-you-in, get-you-out type of place if ever there were. There was a long line—Valentine's Day, remember—and I almost tipped her off by absentmindedly crushing my fedora into a ball while we waited.
     But we got in, had a pleasant dinner, and were just at the cusp of leaving, about 20 minutes before curtain time. The waiter was pushing dessert. No thanks, I said, just the check.
     There must have been some revealing tone in my voice—waiters can smell fear, like dogs. This one smiled and said: "Going to see a show, eh?" I issued an immediate denial: oh no, not a show, not us, nope. Too late. My girlfriend broke into a wide grin and exulted: "Cats!"
     It's amazing that she still married me.
     This year, I have a gift for her—she knows what it is, and I know she knows, though we've never discussed it. That's love.

                 —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 9, 1997

*  "lovers are lunatics"
** Closed in 2006; later re-opened, but only patronized by tourists and the spiritually dead.