Mr. Happy gets a new bike basket

     So what makes you happy?
     It's a strange question, I know.      
     For me, it's a lot of things.
     I'm a pretty happy person.
     ("Ha!" I picture my wife, who is a truly happy person, saying to herself, reading this. "Mr. Morose considers himself happy. I'd hate to meet someone he views as glum.")
     But it's true. Generally, as a general condition, I'm enjoying myself and grateful for it. Sure, there are challenges. I've got a nettlesome, relentless job in an industry that's falling apart in big chunks. Two teenage boys who, if they're not Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, still can throw a wrench in the works. The usual aches and pains of a guy in his mid-50s. 
    Nevertheless, most days, most of the time, I like to think I have a certain baseline satisfaction in life, a pilot light of contentment flickering blue in the background.
     And sometimes, on rare occasion, something happens that makes me really happy.
     Often it's the damnedest, unexpected thing. Some tiny development. Big stuff doesn't do it; selling a new book, getting a fat royalty check, doesn't do it. Too many details to sweat.
     But the basket on this bicycle. Well, let me tell you.
     For 21 years, I've had this Schwinn Cruiser — buying it was so fraught it showed up in my book "Complete & Utter Failure," in the chapter on perfection, which of course is impossible. 

     I bought a bike this year, after having not had a bike for my entire adult life. My perfection jones was made worse by the extra emotional baggage surrounding the concept of a new bicycle—king in the pantheon of traditional toys for boys: the train set, the first baseman's mitt, the bicycle. It was a big deal for me, and I approached the event with a certain solemnity, the good boy getting his deserved bike, the righting of an ancient wrong.  To make matters worse, I selected the bicycle purely on aesthetics. Rejecting complexities such as shiftable gears, and new developments such as mountain bikes, I picked out a one-speed black Schwinn Cruiser with fat whitewall tires and coaster brakes.

     No basket, of course. Didn't want to wreck the line of the bike. Which also limited its usefulness, and I didn't ride it much. There aren't many places in Northbrook to ride a bike.
       Once I started riding the Divvy bikes downtown, however, it reminded me how fun and useful a bike could be.  Getting from Point A to Point B, doing errands, weaving through the heavy downtown traffic. I've ridden the Divvy more downtown these past two years than I've ridden this Schwinn in 20. 
      That got me thinking. The Divvy has this front rack. Very handy, for packages and books and such. If I put a back rack on the Schwinn, it would be more useful, zipping over to Sunset Foods. 
      So I rode it over to George Garner Cyclery, a fancy bike store at Shermer and Waukegan. The back racks were these aluminum affairs and didn't seem to fit with the style of the bike. This black wire front basket did, cost only 30 bucks, and the guy at the store even installed it for me and then wouldn't let me pay him for his efforts.
     The basket lifts out and everything, then locks in tight. Quite a piece of engineering.  
     I rode away delighted, thinking: "Wow, a basket. That worked." Having spent two decades balancing shopping bags on my handlebars, now I am properly equipped. This is progress. The bike even looks better. Not only did getting the basket make me happy, but I was even happier once I realized that it made me happy — I'm glad to be the kind of person who is made happy by a new bike basket. If you can be happy about the small things, then life holds out promise. 

Long, narrow park to give new perspective

High Line trail, New York City

     As an admirer of New York's High Line, an innovative repurposing of abandoned elevated Lower West Side railroad tracks into parkland, I was an early observer of Chicago's attempts to do something similar. The 606—a truly unfortunate moniker too awkward to last—opened Saturday, and rather than join the crowd for the opening festivities, I figure I'd slide by in a couple weeks to see how it's doing. (Tina Sfondeles reports on opening day in the Sun-Times, which you can read by clicking here.  If you look at the video, you see how bicycles and pedestrians co-exist on a quite narrow path, and you wonder what kind of trouble that's going to cause. You might also glance at DNA Info's coverage to see how easily the name "The 606" is ignored).
     This was written two years ago, when it was being constructed, and had a more user-friendly name. 

     The good news is that the City of Chicago has not only discovered 13 acres of new park, but found it in the green-space deprived near northwest side of the city.
     Unused land, just sitting there, hiding in plain sight, year after year, waiting for somebody to notice it.
     The . . . well, not quite bad news, but the challenge has been that the property for the new park is long and thin.
     Very long and thin.
     Two point seven miles in length, to be exact, and about 30 feet wide in most places.
     It's also higher than your average city park - 16 feet above the street.
     Because the Bloomingdale Trail and Park, as it will be known when it opens in 2015, is being built upon Canadian Pacific Railway tracks that head straight west from Ashland Avenue along Bloomingdale, ending at North Ridgeway.
      After years of discussion, the comprehensive plan was completed this winter, and in March the city, which purchased the land for $1 from the railway in January, transferred it over to the Chicago Park District.
     While three of the five small parks that will anchor and funnel people up to the trail are finished, work begins in earnest this summer to transform what is, right now, almost three miles of broken rock hashed by creosote-coated wooden ties and steel rails into a strip of bike path and hiking trail, surrounded by plants and trees that planners hope will connect and enhance the Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods.
     "It's actually very cool," said architect Michael Wilkinson, an associate principal at Solomon Cordwell Buenz, who in 2007 was co-president of the Chicago Architecture Club when it explored what to do with the trail. "Our involvement was to say: 'Listen, this is a great opportunity, so let's not screw it up.' "
     And to his semi-amazement, the project wasn't screwed up.
     "The city got the message. I'm really encouraged by it," Wilkinson said. "I was a little cynical that the city would be able to pull it off, but so far they have. They've done a great job."
     Not that it was just the city - getting to the point where work can begin was a complex, cooperative effort between municipal, state and federal agencies, plus private businesses, the police, local communities and residents, who had concerns ranging from security to privacy to lighting.
     "I've been in this line of work for a long time, and this project has generated more staying power and more volunteer enthusiasm than anything I've seen," said Beth White, director of the Chicago area office for The Trust For Public Land, which had a key role in developing the trail. "These types of projects take a long time to do, and the fact that people have come in and supported it and are still engaged in it is impressive."
     Then there was the question of money. Building a nearly three-mile public park 16 feet in the air upon century-old railroad tracks through dense urban neighborhoods does not come cheap - right now the expected cost is $91 million, with half raised from federal grants and private donations, including $5 million from Exelon and $1 million apiece from Boeing and CNA. Even some leftover NATO money was kicked in - $2 million the city didn't spend on security because Barack Obama decided to gather the world leaders at Camp David last May.
     The history of this project goes back to the year after the Great Chicago Fire. The city first allowed trains to go down Bloomingdale Avenue in 1872. In 1910, the high incidence of train vs. pedestrian deaths caused the City Council to pass an ordinance requiring the tracks to be elevated, and that is what the park will be set upon - a massive earthen train embankment connected by 38 viaducts completed, coincidentally, exactly a century ago.
     The tracks were largely abandoned in recent decades. Talk of doing something with them began in the late 1990s, and the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail was founded in 2003.
     The idea got a boost when the first segment of the Sauganash Trail opened in 2008, and an even bigger boost in 2009 when New York City opened the High Line, a wildly successful recasting of West Side elevated train tracks into a combination promenade, park and art installation, visited by 6,000 people a day.
     The Bloomingdale Trail will be even more frenetic than the High Line.
     "Since we will have bicycles, it's a different feel," said White. "It will be an enhancement to get people out of their cars and walking or out on their bikes."
     Bicycles not only add convenience for getting around that part of the city, but freed up Department of Transportation funds.
      If the trail ends up beautiful when it is opened, that won't be an accident.
     "Very early on, we pushed the city to include on the team an artist, even in the assessment of the bridges and the preliminary design," said White. "[The idea was] to make it a living work of art, not just adding art but making it artful, a fairly new thing."
      Thus, there are aesthetic touches, such as the old bridge piers that will be left at St. Louis Avenue, creating a Roman ruin effect for those strolling past. (As no decision is purely aesthetic, leaving the piers has an added value: It's cheaper than removing them).
      The Bloomingdale Trail is being created, in part, as a resource for schoolchildren in neighborhoods around it, to give them additional access to nature, such as seeing how plants bloom. The east end of the trail will bloom first, with spring spreading westward.
     "There is the notion of looking at the entire piece as a phenological installation," said White. "We've done a lot of work with climate scientists, their hypothesis is, because the placement of Bloomingdale, on an east/west axis, there will be a five-day difference in the blooming period east to west. Landscape architects have selected plants that will be used throughout the three miles so that we can measure whether or not that will be the case. We're working with Chicago Wildness and a climate scientist out of DePaul to have an opportunity for an outdoor classroom."  
      Not only will the trail add bike routes, trees, plants, and pocket parks, but it will open a part of the city that usually is so off-limits that most people hardly ever consider it.
     "You pass under these all the time in Chicago," said White. "But you never think what's up there. Sixteen feet isn't that high, but you get a whole different perspective on the city."
      Its planners hope the trail will not only revitalize its surrounding communities, but add yet another attraction to the city as a whole.
      "There's a need; really, really a direct need for the city - Logan Square and the area around Logan Square has the least amount of open public space in the city," said Richard Blender, principal of Blender Architecture and the other co-president of the Chicago Architecture Club when it studied the Bloomingdale. He predicted the trail has the potential to go from something few Chicagoans know about to something the whole world knows about. "I think it's up there with Millennium Park in terms of its ability to change the way we experience the city."

                                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 14, 2013

Abusers deputize us to expand the ring of harm

 

     When the Saturday Fun Activity gets solved early—as it inevitably does—I feel like the readers are being cheated. So here is something extra, a piece I wrote for the Sun-Times national network yesterday that never got used, as far as I can tell. There isn't much to say about the Hastert scandal that isn't obvious, but I didn't hear anybody exploring this point, so I thought I would give it a try.

     Dennis Hastert didn’t just damage his victims—allegedly—the boys he is accused of molesting as a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School. 

     There are more, others who are harmed as well. 

     No, I’m not referring to the reputation of Congress—no allegations necessary, here. Hastert has without question done that, years ago, through his shady land deals and ignoring the 2006 page scandal, we now suspect, because he secretly had a dog in that race.

     The Justice Department charged him with financial misdealings, trying to cover up some undefined past sins. But Hastert’s abuse—which, it must be said, even as he is condemned by general acclamation, has not been officially alleged, never mind proven—will certainly feed a bias that never gets articulated, yet is there.

    I’m reluctant to articulate it now.

    But it is a common one, that we usually don't think about, even though, in essence, we're helping spread the damage of abuse, in a low level sense.
    So here goes:

    For harried working guys, trying to scrape together a buck, who can’t imagine volunteering to coach teams and lead programs, for busy dads, overwhelmed just trying to take care of their own biological children, never mind anybody else's, there are baseless allegations of the mind, a squint, applied to coaches, scout masters, club advisors, church youth group leaders, and men of that ilk. You wonder: why do they do it? What’s in it for them? You wonder if, perhaps, something’s wrong with them. You might trust them, eventually, when you get to know them. That’s what usually happens.

     But you sure don’t trust them at first.

    That might be prudent, but it sure isn’t fair, I’ll say immediately. If more than a small percentage of wrestling coaches like Hastert was were also child molesters, we’d know about it.

     Wouldn’t we?

     But life isn’t fair, and the responsible parent, handing his child over to that middle-aged man in a khaki uniform, scrutinizing the debate coach who’s going to drive the team to another city for the night, has to wonder.  And worry. That's part of being a parent.

    Suspicion can be good, protective. I remember hovering outside of my home office, listening, while my son’s chess tutor put him through his paces. He was a Russian, and he slapped those pieces hard down on my fancy chessboard, which made me wince, a little, but not enter the room. That wasn’t what I was listening for.

     This nagging suspicion gets a little stronger with every new Dennis Hastert flushed blinking and shamed into the spotlight. And that vast majority of good, decent self-sacrificing coaches, scoutmasters, church youth group leaders and teachers of every stripe have another straw of doubt, of guilt by association placed upon their backs.  Their tough jobs get just a little bit tougher.
     Life isn’t fair, as I said. But it’s more unfair to some than others.  Each perpetrator of abuse leaves behind many victims. The vast majority he never meets. Instead, we do. We are unconsciously deputized by depravity, and act as the abusers' proxies, inflicting the corrosive damage of unspoken accusations in tiny, unmeasured doses to those whose only crime is trying to make the world a better place and our children better people.  We might want to think about that.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I am not, as a rule, a fan of modern, non-representational art.
     Especially public sculpture.
     And I'm not exactly a fan of this pair of pyramids interrupted with a ... sort of an aqua skeletal ball.
     But it stopped me enough to look at it. And I guess I could say I disliked it less than I usually dislike a thing like this. It had a certain suddenness I appreciated. 
      Or maybe I was just glad for a suitable Saturday mystery photo. A bit off the beaten track, as it were. At least my beaten track. You might walk by it every day.
      Anyway, the question is not its aesthetic value or lack of same, but where in Chicago it is located. Do you know? Have you any idea? If so, place your guess below. The winner will receive one of my high quality 2015 blog posters.

The CTA cuts through the clutter

  

      My older teen is a fusspot, who occasionally corrects my language — "Father, it's not who am I talking to?" he'll archly announce, "but to whom am I talking?"
     I suppress the natural fatherly response — "Shut up you" — and say, "I'm allowed to use the vernacular," i.e., our own native language, the way normal people normally speak.
     This was a hard-won right. Once the elites spoke in French; prayers were in Latin. Common folk were low peasants, and expected to be ashamed of their low peasant ways.
     That changed, thank you democracy, thank you mass media, thank you the general falling away of pious dogma and pointless rules.
     When I saw the CTA courtesy poster headlined, "Your maid doesn't work here," and beginning, "Please don't leave your crap behind," my first, unfiltered thought was, "Good for you, CTA." A slightly salty word, a bit of vernacular that might actually cut through the clutter and lodge itself into the mind of the rider, far better than the expected "Please don't leave your litter or personal effects behind."
     Public transit exortations almost demand a little attitude to work. New York, which invented saucy signs ("Don't even THINK of parking here") started a courtesy campaign last year on its trains that suggests its riders are strippers: “Pole Are For Your Safety, Not Your Latest Routine."
      To be honest, I considered remarking on the CTA's moment of courage, but then decided that I'm too biased. I swear like a sailor. I'm the guy whose personal blog is called "Every goddamn day," accepting that for every 50 readers who laugh at the title, there will be one person squirming. Sorry, squirming person. I think the rules keeping obscenity out of newspapers and network TV are dumb. I think the "n-word" locution is an insult to African-Americans, suggesting they'll collapse in a swoon confronted with raw history. I conform through gritted teeth, unwilling.
     Maybe a few are comforted by such niceties. But those few always try to run the show.  Rather than change their expectations, they want to force everybody to harmonize with whatever little girl's ballerina music box they've got tinkling away in the back of their minds.
     For instance, Lara Weber, a member of the Tribune editorial board, in a recent op-ed piece, chides the CTA for using its piquant word. She's too clever to do so in classic, ruffled Margaret Dumont style, quickly admitting that her qualms are more a reflection on herself and her upbringing. Still, she upbraids the CTA, anyway, because her mother didn't use the word.
     "Jeez Louise, are we really using 'crap' on official printed signs now?" she asks.
     Umm, yes, we are. And the president isn't wearing a necktie at some official functions, which would have left people a generation ago aghast.
     And — spoiler alert — Napoleon escaped from Elba. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you.
     Yes, a writer wants to keep certain words in reserve. Notice that "Jeez" at the beginning of Weber's cri de coeur. A euphemism for "Jesus," and, in this situation, an apt one. You want to reserve "Jesus," not to shield delicate reader sentiment, but for times when its verbal power is required. "Jesus, I am dying..."
     I'm tempted to chide the Tribune for being Ms. Grundy, again, the same publication that for decades tried to force simplified spelling down the throats of its readers — "thru" and "dropt" and "cigaret" — in the self-absorbed Teddy Roosevelt-esque notion that they knew better than their readers, and to bear the white man's burden of tidying up the language of Shakespeare.
     But the Tribune can be saucy, historically; it is the same publication that once emblazoned the word "C*NT" — the asterisk is theirs — across the front of its women's section, in a story of how that British cuss word for female anatomy was enjoying a certain vogue. They lost their nerve at the last moment and pulled the section. But we across the street got a copy that wasn't destroyed, and admired the ginger inspiring some ghost in the machine to even make the attempt. 
     Writers fail continually through excessive caution; they should try to fail more on the side of boldness. Someone is going to be offended by almost anything you write, if you do it correctly; the key is to hold their interest while using the right word in the right place. The garbage that careless riders leave behind on the bus is "crap," and the CTA should be lauded for taking a risk in trying to get rid of it.

We never were Mayberry

     Had you asked me, even a few years ago, whether transgender Americans would be able to scoot through the door of acceptability that had been pried open by gay and lesbians, I'd have replied, 'Probably not.'
     It was asking too much, too broad of a stretch for the only recently limbered muscle of tolerance for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack. They feel the need to loathe somebody, and with gays and lesbians suddenly freed from the penalty box and making themselves comfortable on the home team bench, then an even tinier minority, whose lifestyle is even more unfamiliar, the men becoming women, women becoming men, would have to be pressed into service as the Despised Other.
     If anything, I'd have guessed their lot would become even worse, as they moved from near-complete obscurity to drawing the attention of a public already being forced to tolerate more than is their habit.
     But it happened; it is happening, right now.
     There is Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, that icon of manliness, on the cover of Vanity Fair, in an Annie Leibowitz fashion shot, now the woman she has long considered herself to be. And the reaction is ... a kind of awe. Acknowledgement of the courage to make that leap, to be true to your inner self, wherever that self leads you. To accept the consequences. It was a trust drop into society's arms and, amazingly, society caught her.
     "Fans and family alike came out in droves to support her transition," noted People magazine, in an item castigating former child star Drake Bell for tweeting "Sorry ... still calling you Bruce."
     How did this happen?
     The explanation, I believe, is this: the progress of gays and lesbians is usually seen in terms of what the change did for them—allowed them, first, to keep their jobs, then to see their relationships respected, first in the marriage columns of newspapers and then by law and, it seems someday soon, even in bakeries in Kansas.
     But what did this dramatic adjustment do, not just for gays, but for the society making the change? I would suggest that it drew attention to the tragic and pointless oppression of certain people for being who they are. That lives were constrained and destroyed trying to maintain a template of uniformity that isn't found in nature. We were never Mayberry. We were never all like the Cleavers, and those who strayed from the Ward and June Cleaver ideal actually have the right to live their lives, too.
     It helps that transgendered people were often manifesting themselves as very young children, and society is faced with the choice of repressing and abusing these little kids because of who they feel themselves to be—society's answer up to now—or letting those kids be the people they are determined to become.
     It's astounding progress. Who knew, when we were telling kids to go for their dreams, that we'd really mean it? People are always saying there is no good news, but this is good news. It's as if combatants fighting a long, bloody, pointless war suddenly looked at each other, saw their shared humanity, and just stopped fighting.

U.S. Ranger goes to bat for Israel

Brian Mast

     People react to abuse in different ways.
     Some ignore it. Some get mad.
     And then there's Brian Mast's way.
    He is a vet, a decorated U.S. Army Ranger from Florida, a double amputee after stepping on a mine in Afghanistan in 2010.
      Back in civilian life, Mast decided to snag one honor that had eluded him—a college diploma—so took his wife and kids to Harvard University, where he's studying economics.
     There he discovered a new battle.
     As with so many campus in the United States, undergraduates at Harvard, in their undergraduate hunger to abolish the injustices of the world, throw themselves vigorously into ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through sheer public outcry, casting the complex, half-century old tragedy into a set piece Victorian melodrama with a mustache-twiddling villain, the Israelis, and a Little Nell victim, the Palestinians.
     "Being up in Boston, no question there is a lot of anti-Israel sentiment, and protests going on around Harvard," said Mast, who stumbled upon one last year while walking with his family on Boston Commons.
     "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that I'm a service member, with my Army Ranger cap and my two artificial legs," he said. "These four or five guys start saying things to me and my family. A little girl could push me over, but this is a fight I'm perfectly willing to have. I was inviting them to take me up, but in the end they left me and my family alone."
     That was not the end, however. For Mast, it was a beginning.
     "It was a very important reminder to me," said Mast. "I don't know why certain battles find their way into my life, but this is how fighting for Israel found its way into my life. This kind of torment goes on in Israel's neighborhood daily: Syria. Jordan. Iran. Egypt, doing this, day after day. It's a sign to me I need to stand up and show my support. This battle has come to me. I don't want to turn my back."
     Over the Christmas holidays, Mast went to Israel as a volunteer.
     "I couldn't have received a warmer reception," he said. "It was amazing."
     Spending time in Israel cemented his feelings for the country.
     "As I was over there, volunteering with immigrants, orphans, refugees from Sudan and Ethiopia, what struck me is these individuals skip over countries like Egypt to get into Israel, a country constantly under threat of attack. There must be a very good reason to skip over those countries, and it's the same reason immigrants from places like Guatemala and El Salvador skip over countries like Mexico to get into the United States, because the same freedom and opportunity offered here."
     I pointed out that a lot of American Jews -- myself included --have ambivalent feelings about Israel. While we don't embrace the "Give us your country" hallucinatory rhetoric of the Palestinians, we can't ignore the fact that they are indeed there, four million of them, living constricted lives, and that the hard liners and settlers aren't helping.
Mast  could understand how pro-Israel college students yield the field to Palestinian protests.
     "You're facing a mob mentality, not just mob mentality from individuals, but from the people who are supposed to be your educators. It can be extremely difficult thing to face," he said. "It's a little bit different for me. I'm a 34 year old man. I spent a good amount of time being in combat. I have that advantage. I had the life experience that nobody is going to tell me what to think."
     Mast is not ambivalent.
     "The anti-Israel protests, I just thought, 'It's completely wrong,' I literally didn't get how any American citizens were protesting Israel defending itself,," he said. "As I see this, year after year, the Palestinians fire rockets at Israel and then go hide behind the civilian population and cry the sky is falling when Israel defends itself.   It's this stupid game and it boggles me this double standard being applied."
     Back in the states, he now speaks on behalf of Israel--he was in town last week speaking at the Chicago chapter of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces annual dinner. 
     He was surprised to hear from his fellow vets.
     "Tons of my peers, fellow wounded warriors, saying, 'What are you doing in Israel? How did you get there? Can I do something similar to this?'" He said he is putting together a group of 10 to 12 fellow vets to go back and do it again.
    Mast is working for the federal government, advising Homeland Security on explosives, a job he had in the Army. As a federal employee, because of the Hatch Act, he can't say he's running for Congress in Florida's 18th Congressional district until that employment ends.     
     Which it does on Saturday. So his ability to help Israel might only grow.