Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, these challenges are far too easy. Time to pull out something that strikes me as just a little tougher, maybe stump you guys for an hour, for a change. So I airbrushed out the dead giveaway in this photo, and while I left in one tiny hint, to me this isn't one that should be solved in a minute.
     Of course I could be wrong about that; I invariably am.
     So where is this large rambling white wooden structure? My hunch is that the reader who guesses it won't have actually been there—off the beaten trail, to say the least.  But someone might be able to figure it out. 
      The winner will receive ... not a poster, that's getting old. How about this lovely and inspirational desk flag? I used the line to title my fourth book, and bought dozens of the little flags, thinking they'd be a good promotion giveaway for the book. They weren't, the book sank like a stone, which I suppose is apt. Anyway, the winner takes one away, which will only leave me with 10 or 2o. Place you guesses below. Good luck, have fun. 

"Keeps rainin', all the time...."

     How does God know it's the Blues Fest this weekend in Chicago? And why, knowing that, does He send the rain? Thunderstorms off and on all weekend. Tonight might be merely damp, if we're lucky. A philosophical quandary. Maybe the deity hates the blues, maybe He's just establishing the proper context. I don't have to make the obvious blues/rain connection. Your heart breaks, the skies open up. That's life.
     At least that's my belief. I did not, I admit crunch the numbers to see if it rains more on Blues Fest than other days in mid-June. That's doesn't seem worth doing. Besides, few people confronted with facts contrary to their beliefs change those beliefs—easier to ignore discordant facts and keep plowing forward—and I might as well be one of them, at least in this regard. As this column shows, I've held my Blues Fest=Rain conviction for a long, long time. It also shows how, unlike beliefs, fashions change. I almost never wear a suit today. What would be the purpose? Though I still have that tailor-made blue silk suit that I bought in Thailand, though I' know better than to try it on. 

     I'm writing this on casual Friday, which means that instead of wearing a coat and tie, I'm wearing jeans and a golf shirt. I don't know if that frees me up to soar the empyrean heights; we'll see.
     Frankly, I prefer wearing a suit. First off, there are more pockets. Like many men, I carry a lot of stuff. There is a wallet and keys, pens, sunglasses, my security card, a pocketknife, a handkerchief. It gets quite bulky stuffed into jean pockets -- a suit jacket has room for all that gear, plus whatever newspaper clippings, bar matches and folded letters I pick up through the day.
     There also is a certain feeling of readiness you get from wearing a suit. This is a job where literally anything can happen, and if you're dressed down, well, it can be one of those memories that causes you to flinch for the rest of your life.
     Two incidents come to mind. One was on a Saturday night. I was working the late shift -- 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Typically, if I'd be sent out, I'd be sent to a fire. So I wore jeans and a T-shirt. No fire that night. But I did get sent to the Palmer House, I believe, for a black-tie dinner for the Israeli prime minister, attended by the brass of the newspaper. Not a good moment.
     Even worse was a black-tie AIDS benefit. The men there really knew how to don a tuxedo. I went to this benefit, again at the last minute, wearing jeans and a ragged linen short-sleeved shirt that had begun to fall apart. I was literally hiding behind plants, scooting up to men dressed like the cast of a Noel Coward play. I would apologize profusely, get a quote while trying to scrunch myself up into a little ball, then hurry back behind a chair to hide until I worked my courage up to sally out again and grab another quote.
     A suit is so much easier. Lots of men grumbled when the word was put out, a few years back, that reporters at the newspaper were expected to dress properly. That was a shock to people used to dressing as they pleased -- I had once come to work in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
     But I didn't grumble; I felt liberated. The beauty of suits is that you don't have to think. Just make sure you aren't wearing the same one you wore yesterday, find a tie that doesn't clash terribly, and you're on your way.
     Perhaps because I don't deal with software companies, I have never gotten into trouble with the suit. Yes, I got a few long looks hanging around the dock at Montrose Harbor, chatting with boaters in tank tops and cutoffs. And there was that terrible Blues Fest.
     As you may know, it always rains at Blues Fest. Always. They might as well call it Rain Fest. I drew the short straw one evening, and went over there just as a monsoon of biblical proportions was lashing Grant Park. I happened to be wearing a blue pinstriped suit, tailor-made for me, and black wing tips -- the best outfit I owned.
     Of course I stayed under cover, by the bandshell. Until I noticed, way out in the grass, one lone person -- this goof, sitting all by himself, holding a garbage bag over his head, listening to the music in the driving rain.
     I at first tried to ignore him, tried to pretend that I didn't have to do what I had to do. But duty called. I'll never forget the slow slog through that mudfield, the shiny wing tips sinking into the mire, the rain matting the blue silk against my body.
     I got to the man and flipped open my notebook, the rain instantly soaking the paper, the ink running down the page.
     "I see you're enjoying yourself here at the Blues Fest," I said.
     "Oh yes," he said. "I'm a big blues fan."

              —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 18, 1998

John Paul Stevens bridges the past, future

    Tuesday morning was quiet, which is bad for a newspaper. My column for the next day was already done, and I was prowling around for something to do. One of our crack editors, John O'Neill, had pity on me, and suggested I might like to go to Harold Washington Library, where former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was giving a talk. He didn't have to ask twice. Hearing him speak perked me up considerably, and I hope it perks you up too.

     Charles Lindbergh gave John Paul Stevens a bird.
     It was the summer of 1927, a few months after Lindbergh became the most famous man in the world by flying from New York to Paris. He was checking out of his Chicago hotel room, and had more presents than he knew what to do with. So he gave the boy in knickers a caged pigeon.
     “I named it ‘Lindy,’” Stevens told a packed house at the Harold Washington Library Tuesday, during an hour-long conversation hosted by the Chicago Bar Association that quick-stepped through his very long and most extraordinary life, beginning as a privileged child of Jazz Age Chicago — his father built the Stevens Hotel, long since known as the Conrad Hilton, now the Hilton Chicago — hitting its stride in mid-life as the third-longest serving justice on the United States Supreme Court, and, for the past five years, enjoying a vigorous retirement.
     Steven is 95 years old. He still plays tennis and swims in the ocean.
     Here was a man who met Amelia Earhart. Who is certain that Babe Ruth really did point into the stands at Wrigley Field during the 1932 World Series, predicting where he’d hit his homer, the famous “Called Shot,” because Stevens, then 12, was there and saw him do it.
     It was about a half hour into the program, a conversation with Judge Ann Claire Williams, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, when he was talking about being a Navy cryptographer in World War II, that I began to worry we’d never get to the Supreme Court part of his life, the way that two-thirds of the way through “Moby-Dick,” readers can start to wonder if the White Whale is ever showing up.
     But by the late 1940s, while a top student at Northwestern University Law School, he’s at the Supreme Court, clerking for Justice Wiley Rutledge, an FDR liberal nominee. Stevens was a Chicago lawyer in the 50′s and 60′s — teaching himself to fly and buying a plane in 1967 so he could more easily visit clients. In 1970, a former classmate from his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago, Sen. Chuck Percy — “The Wonder Boy of Illinois,” president of Bell & Howell at 25 — tapped him to be a judge on the 7th Circuit, and five years later Gerald Ford elevated him to the Supreme Court.
     Over the next 35 years, Stevens rendered more than 1,400 opinions in a career that defies summation, at least here. He was liberal and, as such, his beliefs could actually mature and change. Williams highlighted the evolution of Stevens’ thought regarding death penalty, from finding it constitutional in Gregg V. Georgia in 1976, to deeming it “cruel and unusual” — and thus banned by the Constitution — for people with mental handicaps in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, to finding it morally wrong altogether in Baze v. Rees in 2008.
     “The penalty really does not fit in our society anymore,’ Stevens said.
     His advice to young lawyers ranged from the value of studying poetry — which he found “extremely valuable” on the bench because “it helped me in my work as a judge” — to the best way to counteract a bad day: “drink at lunch” (advice he couldn’t have taken too often, or he wouldn’t have made it to 95).
     Riding the Divvy back to the paper, I tried to synthesize Stevens’ life. Despite the siren call of nostalgia — it’s more pleasant to bask in the glorious past than than figure out the confusing present — Stevens didn’t dwell too much in yesteryear. True, his first book, ”Five Chiefs,” was about the five chief justices he worked under. But unlike many men younger than himself, Stevens throws himself at the future, still, and his second book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” urges exactly that. Some of his suggestions are sadly impossible under the current state of political and moral cowardice — he thinks the 2nd amendment should apply only to Americans serving in militias — but some might actually happen, such as a constraint on gerrymandering, the slicing up of electoral districts for political manipulation, a practice perfected in Chicago and one that both parties see is corroding what’s left of our democracy.
     “I hope I’m that sharp when I’m 95,” I said to someone as I related Stevens talk, without too much conviction. Then, recognizing that I’ll be long relegated to a bronze urn in the back of a linen closet by 95, I decided to hope for something perhaps a little more realistic. “I wish I were that sharp now.”

"Listen to the music, all the time..."

     "Whoa-o-oh, listen to the music."
     Driving along  Dundee Road Wednesday, with my 17-year-old in the front seat.
     "Whoa-o-oh, listen to the music."
     Picking him up from Evanston where he ran, 13 miles, trying out a new pair of sneakers. Was going to turn around and come home, but didn't want to be late for dinner.
     Considerate lad.
      "All the time..."
     "You mind if I change this?" I asked. "Because I was sick of this 30 years ago."
      He grunted something affirmative. I hit the "Channel" button the steering wheel. A song about defacing your ex-boyfriend's car.
      "Shania Twain," I said, as if no more was needed (Actually, it's sung by Carrie Underwood. Casey Kasem, I'm not). Next song.
      "Take a look at my girlfriend
        She's the only one I've got.
       Not much of a girlfriend.
       Never seem to get a lot."
      "This song's 35 years old," I said. 
       Actually, 36.
       In one of the crueler twists of fate, all the pop crap that I hated as a teenager—Doobie Brothers and Kansas, Journey and Supertramp and Toto and the Cars is still around, played continually on the radio, just like it was 1979.
       Sure, I remember we had lots of decades-old, retread stuff when I was growing up. The 1950s were very much in vogue, Sha-Na-Na and "The Loco-motion" and whatever. But there were also new songs, lots of them, and while we might nod appreciatively at, oh, "Runaround Sue," it wasn't all we listened to. The new stuff wasn't so crowded by the overbearing past. 
      And yes, I know the solution is to get Sirius XM Satellite radio where I can tune into a narrowcast station designed for my tastes, whatever they are. Or load the CD player. Or buy whatever piece of string is needed to hook my iPod into the stereo. 
      The next car, I'm sure, will have all that.
      Until then, the radio's still there, and the boys like to listen to it, racing for the front seat so they can jockey the stations, and tend to like what they hear—it's new to them. I try to keep the dial on WXRT, though it does have a tendency to play "Dark Side of the Moon" a bit too much, though it actually will play actual new music that's actually interesting—on my way to Evanston, it played Elle King's funky, fuzzy "Ex's and Oh's," which I had heard once before, liked, and was happy to hear again.  Not that it's great music either—King is the daughter of Saturday Night Live's Rob Schneider, and musically sort of the love child of Amy Winehouse and Adele, with a driving, retro, roadhouse sound, at least on this song, released earlier this year, which is all I've heard of her.
     Promising enough to plop down $6.99 for the album on iTunes—that's also what an album cost 30 years ago. You forget that the Internet gutted the music industry just as it filleted publishing and gutshot journalism. People still make music and heck, Robert Johnson didn't get rich either.  But Elle King has my seven bucks—not that she needs it; or got it, Apple probably grabs $6.90 of that and she gets a dime. 
      Anyway, I was happy to get some new music; anyone can listen to the same old tunes. Liking a new song, good or not, is the best evidence I can think of that you haven't ossified above the neck quite yet.

          
      

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.