On the big 5-5, looking back at the big 4-0

Age 40, in Vilnius, Lithuania

     Today's my 55th birthday. I was puzzling over which column to drag out of the vault—a guy should get a break on his birthday— when my former colleague, Kara Spak, posted something on Facebook about the column below, saying it made her want to work at the Sun-Times. I had just looked at it and decided to pass—a bit ominous, in light of later developments in my life—but figured, if she remembered it after 15 years, then it's probably worth revisiting. And heck, as creaky as I sometimes feel at 55, I think I'm doing better than the guy who wrote this. 

     We parked at the curb. People were streaming into the party. A fine, elegant, North Shore home. The big door opened. There was a flash of tuxedo. I froze in my tracks.
     "This is black tie?" I said to my wife. "You didn't say it was black tie."
     My tux was hanging in the closet at home. I was wearing black jeans and a gray golf shirt under a $3.99 Old Navy vest. Casual, yes. But it was a surprise birthday party for a friend. I figured pizza. Lowered lights. "Surprise!" Not this.
     "Don't be so inhibited," my wife said, dragging me toward the door. "Be proud of yourself."
     She did not add, "Stop cringing, you worm, and be a man," but that's the meaning I took. Head bowed, I shuffled toward the door, feeling very naked, fashionwise.
     The tuxedos were, it turned out, on the help. The people taking coats at the door. It was that sort of party. A harpist played in the dining room. Fancy bartenders. Piles of shrimp. A singer at the piano.
    It was the surprise birthday party for a friend. Her 40th birthday. Turning 40 is hard, and I can't imagine entering that bleak year in a more upbeat way than our friend did: surprised by her husband, surrounded by their friends and children, reveling in the trappings of material success.
     I couldn't help but be reminded, of course, of my 40th birthday, last June. I knew the sad tale would find its way into print, sooner or later, but thought it would take years until the sting subsided. But six months seems to have done it. I regaled anyone I could corner with the story, until my wife made me stop.
     My 40th birthday was spent working, in a bass boat, watching Gary Klein pull bass out of Lake Michigan. For some guys this would be heaven, and for the first few hours it was diverting. But the day ground on, the fish piled up, and I was very happy to reach shore.
     Happier still to get home. Nobody was there. We still lived in the city, so I strolled on over to Friar Tuck's, the neighborhood saloon. Slumping against the bar, I raised a glass and toasted my birthday.
     "On your birthday, you get a free drink," the bartender said. "What'll you have?" I said a shot of Jack Daniel's would do wonders. She disappeared for a moment—I should have known something was up—and returned with a big inflatable sheep, the product of some novelty shop, whose original purpose I shudder to imagine. There, balanced in the, ummm, anal cavity of the sheep, a shot glass filled with whiskey.
     I looked around. Another bartender had a camera. The place grew quiet. The patrons turned to watch.
     There comes a time when a man has to make a stand, to calculate his position in the universe and make a dramatic statement of the sophistication, grace, dignity and decorum he brings to his life.
     I took the inflatable sheep in both hands and drank. The camera flashed. The photo, for all I know, decorates the bar to this day.
     This sounds like a sad tale, and it may be. But I'll tell you, if I live to be 100, I'll never mark a birthday in such an apt fashion again. We get the birthdays we deserve. Our friend, with the surprise party—the harp and the singer and the shrimp and the household jammed with friends—was a perfect expression of the world she has carved out for herself. And my encounter with the sheep, well, let me tell you: The whole damn year has been like that.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 12, 2000

Just the same old low

   

     By now you’ve heard of CBS’s new hit reality show, The Briefcase.

     The one that dangles $100,000 in front of struggling families and gives them the dilemma of keeping the money to salve the grinding gears of their own difficult lives, or give some, or all, of the money away to another family also in dire straights.

      Last week's debut episode (it airs Wednesday at 7 p.m. on Channel 2) cops out by introducing a second family, also in need, also given $100,000, and the families, after argument, tears and a bit of stress vomiting, end up giving the 100 grand to each other for the requisite happy ending, a reminder that these so-called “reality” shows are carefully stage-managed, and reflect actual reality in the same way that “The Blair Witch Project” is a real documentary.

     The program, set to run for a trial six episodes, met a wail of universally negative reviews, standard with the arrival of almost any reality TV show. As always, critics think “a new low” has been reached. “The Briefcase plumbs new depths,” writes Leonard Pitts Jr. in the Miami Herald. “The Briefcase,” adds Todd VanDerWerff, on Vox, “scrapes the bottom of the barrel so thoroughly that it breaks through the barrel then starts scraping the bottom of the one beneath.”

    First, this isn’t a new low, but the same old low. After watching the opening installation of The Briefcase, I called up a clip of Queen for a Day, the black-and-white era TV show, where housewives shared their tales of woe in return for some kind of relief. At the end of the episode I watched, the audience chooses among four women. First, Mrs. Jewel Ellis, in fake pearls. “Mrs. Ellis and her husband have had some bad luck, and she would like to make some money for them. She would like a washing machine to take in washing,” explains host Jack Bailey, who then reminds us that Mrs. Carol Williams wants “educational aids” for her brain damaged son; Mrs. Clarice Singer has a paralyzed brother and wants a medical bed “for he must spend his life on his stomach” and Mrs. Beverly Dolan, hands clasped, has five children under the age of 3 and want their chilly Oregon home properly heated.

    Queen for a Day makes The Briefcase seem like Masterpiece Theatre, and while VanDer-Werff does mention it, he then seems to forget the 100 similar shows in between the two as he castigates this new cultural excrescence.

     “The Briefcase literally forces the American lower class to compete with itself for table scraps bestowed on it by wealthy people who work in television.”

     Which makes TV different than retailing...how? How is banking, with its 0.35 percent per year “High Yield Money Market Funds” any different? There’s an irony in the media lashing out at network TV for manifesting a phenomenon that’s all around us.

     Which brings us to the second uncomfortable truth: Were The Briefcase not dramatizing the troubles facing these families grasping onto the bottom rung before insolvency and poverty, who would? The choice isn’t The Briefcase or some thoughtful examination of the hollowing out of America’s middle class. The choice is The Briefcase or The Bachelor. Pulling the heartstrings regarding the impoverished is a cheap trick, but it works in The Briefcase just as it worked for Dickens. Reality TV is garbage, but it’s also popular, because gazing upon the unfortunate is an entertainment that people savor, and one that goes back to the Story of Job. Queen for a Day milked ratings out of the pitiable downtrodden on radio and TV for nearly 20 years. Odd that some critics seem to think CBS invented it with The Briefcase.

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.