A guy can be a gal, but white can't be black. Yet.

 

 

     Who am I?
     Well, I'm a man, for starters, because I was born male, have all the requisite male equipment, and embrace a range of typically masculine behaviors, my interest in opera notwithstanding.
     I'm white, having Caucasian parents, being light-skinned, and reflecting the range of white attitudes (see opera, above).
     There's more. I'm an American, Ohio born. And Jewish, both technically, coming from a Jewish mother, the standard definition, and in practice, holding Seders and such, and enjoying foodstuffs like gefilte fish, which you really have to be Jewish to consider putting in your mouth.
     Some of these identities are mutable: I could renounce my U.S. citizenship and move to France, learn the language and become a French citizen. I could convert from Judaism to Christianity, like Bob Dylan. And based on the Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner path, now I can change gender. Society would tolerate these changes, in theory, though in practice not the French, nor Christians, nor women would welcome me with open arms. A convert carries an asterisk, the shadow of stigma.
     But white, I'm stuck with, race being seen as an identity that cannot be changed, yet, not without calls of deception, as the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Rachel Dolezal, demonstrated this week. She thought she could simply declare herself black and be accepted. But while wearing a cross or carrying a baguette might be smiled at, straying into another race's realm is an insult, as Sen. Mark Kirk learned with his "bro without a ho" remark.
     Which raises the question: How come Bruce Jenner can take some hormones and claim he's a woman, spouting the most cliched notions of femininity and the country — myself included — brushes away a tear at how far we've come in accepting the heretofore marginalized, but if Rachel Dolezal insists she's black, that's unacceptable dishonesty?
     Biologically, it should be the other way around, since there is are huge chromosomal difference between men and women (XY for men, XX for women, if you are keeping score) while the genetic shift between races is far more subtle.
     This is a matter not of biology but culture. The differences between genders and races both are mostly social construct. Nothing in human genes makes boys like trucks and blue and girls like dolls and pink. If race were only a matter of skin tone, then George Hamilton was black while Lena Horne was white. Like religion, there's an entire cultural identity to race, one that you can't just seize.
     Why? Why can I embrace Jesus and become Christian, like Shia LaBeouf, but not Asian? I like Asian food. It's complicated, but the short answer is: race is earned, in part. I can't put on burnt cork and pretend to be black for the same reason I can't slap a "Semper Fi" bumper sticker on my car and pretend to be a Marine. Both conditions require annealing in the furnace of experience. A real Marine joins the Corps and goes through basic training. Asians — or blacks, or whites for that matter — are raised in the cradle of their ethnicity. To simply claim membership is to seize what isn't yours.
     There's a backstory to Rachel Dolezal that gets lost in the media roar. A boatload of pathology, and my hunch is she was allowed to be black by her immediate circle for the same reason that a 4-year-old with cancer is allowed to wear a police uniform. We feel pity for the sick child, and you'd be a jerk to complain. ("You can't be a police officer, Timmy, you're far too young and sick.")
     There's no law that says society must limit its sympathy to sick children. I sparred with readers who had a sputtering, the-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes indignation at the newly-minted Miss Jenner. They insisted: Vanity Fair be damned, the guy has a penis, he's a man.
     I see where they're coming from. But Jenner also underwent a personal catharsis, and society, to its credit, is now questioning the utility of oppressing such people. Whether Rachel Dolezal is an anomaly or a pioneer will depend on whether others start wanting to change their race. I have a hard time imagining that, but the future is always tough to imagine. We forget how unimaginable certain identities once were: a woman doctor; a black president; a gay public school teacher. Right now, the idea that people can just pick the race they identify with is crazy. But so was the idea of women wearing pants, once.

Kent Week #4: "No one left here for you to murder"

Kent with Gizmo

     My younger son turned 18 yesterday, and I thought I would celebrate by sharing some of the items I've written about him in my column over the years. This was the beginning of a longer column, believe it or not, about abortion rights.
    
     Cats kill fish. It's in their nature. For food, sometimes, or just for sport, as was the case this week when our younger cat, Gizmo, nudged a fish bowl containing a black tetra just given to our younger son, Kent, from its spot in the center of his dresser, off the edge and onto the floor. Nobody else was around.
     Kent later came upon the scene—overturned bowl, a spray of gravel, the very dead fish—and let out a howl that brought us all on the run.
     The culprit had fled. I grabbed toilet tissue and performed fish disposal duty. My wife uttered some poetic words over the lifeless form before it was flushed away.
     "At least we didn't have it long enough to form an attachment," said Ross, our older boy, trying to put a good spin on the situation.
     "But Kent did," said his mother, and we all patted him on the shoulder and said words of comfort as he sat on his bed, slump-shouldered, head bowed, desolate.
     The cat eventually slunk back into his room.
     "There's no one left here for you to murder!" Kent said, hotly.
     I thought about right-to-lifers. They present their values as universals—life, even a speck of life, matters because God says all life matters. It certainly mattered here. But it is also obvious that the fish's value comes not from above, but because it was cared about, by us, or at least by my son. Significance is a human gift we bestow capriciously. A billion, if not 10 billion, creatures will die today, from blue whales to gnats. As will 155,000 human beings — 155,000 people expire worldwide every single day. Yet my son sat on his bed and cried, a little, for a fish the size of my pinky that had sat on his dresser in a bowl for exactly one full day.

       —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 2006

Kent Week #3: "Last game of the season"

 

     My younger son Kent turns 18 today, and this week I've been looking back at his appearances in the newspaper over the years. An editor at the paper liked this so much he framed it for me — it's the only column of mine I have framed on the wall. A reminder that, if we're lucky, we learn from our children as much as they learn from us, if not more. I was never into sports as a kid—I wasn't very good and wasn't willing to get good. Kent played basketball, baseball and football, and through him I got a whiff of the sports experience I missed. I've been watching the Bulls games for the past five years because he does, and I the only regret I have is that they didn't win the championship, yet.  And then there was this, when he was 10.

     All spring, my younger son, Kent, wouldn't pitch.
     "Your team needs you," I'd say, as we played catch in the back yard.
     No.
     "You've got a great arm."
     No.
     "You're just afraid."
     No. "I just don't like pitching, Dad," he'd say.

     I'd open my mouth, then close it. Shutting up is a lost art. Particularly among dads. You talk and talk, spewing advice and wisdom, because you can, and you forget that sometimes you just need to zip it.
     So I let it go. You don't want to pitch? Then don't pitch. The season passed. Fourth grade is a sea change from third grade in the Northbrook Instructional Baseball League. The kids who gingerly approach the plate as if living out their worst nightmare and never get a hit are pretty much gone by now.
     In third grade, you're surprised if a fielder catches a fly ball hit to him. In fourth, you're surprised if he misses it.
     The pitchers, who could barely find the plate last year, now have their own personal styles. There is much grace in a 9-year-old pitcher's wind-up. Much — dare I say it? — beauty. Like a Balinese dancer, they join mitt and ball together over their head with ritual slowness, bend both elbows, the gloved ball sinking slowly back as if of its own weight, while a leg goes up, coiling and firing the ball to the batter.
     The batters, too, have their own stances. My son's batting stance has a rough-and-tumble, Pete Rose majesty, his cap askew, tapping the plate, impatient, sometimes giving the bat a quick, bring-it-on twirl, sometimes a Casey-at-the-bat, slugger's glance of contempt in the pitcher's direction.
     I tried to burn the image of that stance into memory, particularly after he announced he wasn't going to play baseball next season.
     "I wish you'd reconsider," I said. "I really enjoy going to your games."
     No. He prefers tennis.
     Tennis.
     Again, I tried to keep my mouth shut. I decided to focus on what was left, savor every game I could. Though that old song murmured in mind as he put on a batting helmet and walked to the plate: "It was a long time coming, it'll be a long time gone."
     Then the team won a close game. Kent scored a run and made a solid defensive play. Which seemed to shift his mood. After the big win, still in his uniform, he asked me to play catch, which was unusual.
     He zipped the ball in. Not a casual toss, not a lob, but a screaming fastball. I considered making a rueful comment about pitching, but again kept my yap shut. A lost art.
     What I did, instead, was silently lower into a catcher's crouch, my gloved hand straight out in the strike zone.
     He fired the ball. Thwap!
     "High," he pronounced. A few more throws — one low, bouncing two feet in front of me, ricocheting right up into, ummm, a part of the anatomy you don't want a well-thrown ball to hit.
     "Sorry, Dad," he said as I shook it off.
     More pitches. More silence.
     "Maybe we could get one of those pitching nets, with the target, that bounces the ball back to you," he said.
     "What for?" I asked.
     "I thought I might pitch next year," he said.
     Toss and return, toss and return.
     "I thought you weren't going to play next year," I finally said.
     "I am going to play," he said. "I changed my mind."
     I stifled a whoop, groping instead for a Clint Eastwood concision.
     "Good," I said. "I'm glad."
     Another pitch.
     "You pitch next year, I'll get one of those practice nets . . . and a real catcher's mitt, for myself. And a cup, too—also for me." We both smiled.
     The night before the last game, the coach asked the boys if there was anybody who hadn't pitched in the playoffs who wanted to. Kent looked at me and I pantomimed lifting a finger. He raised his arm.
     "Steinberg?" chuckled his coach — Jeff Simon, by the way, a first-rate baseball coach. "You don't pitch all season, and now you want to pitch in the playoffs?"
     He made a note on his clipboard. And before the last inning of the last game, he came over to me.
     "Warm him up," he said, and walked away. I scrambled to grab somebody's mitt, and we worked at the side of the diamond. I think you had to live my kind of life, to be as distant from sports as I am, to understand how much I enjoyed the next few minutes. An unexpected gift.
     With two outs in the bottom of the last inning, the coach waved Kent in.
     He walked to the mound and struck him out.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 20, 2007

Bob Newton tackles his toughest opponent

     Bob Newton never became the athlete he might have been.
     Yes, he played football with Nebraska the year the Cornhuskers won their first national championship.
     Yes, he played for 11 years as an offensive lineman in the NFL, five years with the Chicago Bears, with teammates like Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Walter Payton. Then six years with the Seattle Seahawks.
     But Newton could have done even better.
     “The Chicago Bears, after my first year at offensive guard, thought I had the potential to be an all-pro offensive guard, which means one of the best in the league,” Newton said Friday at Mount Carmel High School. “I never made it. I never reached that potential because what I was doing off the field.”
     What he was doing off the field was drinking heavily. Many men wouldn’t admit that to themselves, never mind to others, never mind to a gym full of high school athletes taking a break from their summer weight training. But Newton, a recovering alcoholic, who went straight from the NFL into rehab, and for the past 15 years has worked at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Rancho Mirage, California, is trying to help young people avoid the pitfall of addiction.
      “I speak to patients, families, and high schools, as often as possible,” he said. “Going to assemblies, training teachers, school administrators, to identify signs and symptoms of substance abuse.”
     He told the athletes how, despite the rising tide of legality, marijuana can be addictive and affect cognition. “It saturates your brain cells.”
     Newton said that in addition to hurting his athletic career, his drinking also destroyed his marriage. And that addiction runs in families.
     “How did my problem start, where did it start?” Newton asked. “When I look back on my life, I started drinking alcohol in high school. Back in those days there was not a lot of intervention. I went on to the University of Nebraska, my drinking continued. There were signs I had a problem. My father had a significant problem with alcohol, and aunts and uncles on both sides of my family had a significant problem with alcohol. If people in your family have a drinking problem, I would be very cautious. This problem is handed down.”
     Newton is 65, his hair and beard now snowy white. But he still is a commanding 6’4 presence. He knows he’s going against all the glitz that Madison Avenue can muster, the endless big bucks promotion of alcohol wedded to pro sports.
     “My concern is all the advertisements,” he said. “Young people are bombarded. By the time you’re 18 years of age, you’re going to see 100,000 messages to drink.”
     Football is a team sport, and Newton enlisted a more famous teammate to help get his message across. His last year with the Bears was Walter Payton’s rookie year.
     “I never saw a player work harder in practice,” Newton said. “One of the hardest working guys. A great teammate. I never saw him put a toxic substance into his system. Never saw him drink. Never saw him do any other drugs. He came to practice every day to work. But he felt like it, because he wasn’t putting these toxic substances into his system. We all know how phenomenal he was, one of the greatest football players to every put on a football uniform.”
     Mount Carmel was eager to have Newton speak.
     “We’re not naive to think these kids never drink,” said athletic director Dan LaCount. “A lot of them have aspirations to play Division I football and beyond. It’s important to us to have someone who has been where Bob has been to speak to them at this age. We’re very aware of what can attract these kids, and we do our best as a school, as an athletic department, to be sure they get the right message.”
     I could tell from the players’ faces that Newton had caught their attention. Afterward, I asked a few what they thought.
     “Eye-opening to see an NFL player who went through these problems and to come out and talk about all of it,” said Jake Cirame, 17, a lineman entering his senior year. “Personally, I think it affected me.”
     “Truly eye-opening, to have someone whose been through all of that and have the guts to speak about it,” agreed Logan Brokop, 16, a defensive back entering his junior year. “How he beat it, and he’s still sober and beating it today.”

Kent Week #2: Living swankily among the swells

Kent and Ross, living large at the Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

     My younger son Kent turns 18 tomorrow. The official end of childhood. So as he slips into the general anonymity of adulthood, I'm celebrating, if not a most distinctive youth, then one that ended up in a newspaper column more than is average. He was always a headstrong boy, a quality that one day will serve him well, but that growing up, as illustrated below, could pose a challenge to his parents.

     Several people have asked me what Mackinac Island was like, and while I intend to write something for the travel pages, I thought, with summer about to wink out, I ought to give a brief report here.
     There is a charming little downtown, with plenty of the famous fudge shops -- fudge is not my favorite sweet, but you get used to it. Most of the island is park, with good trails and hiking. Cars aren't allowed, so transport is by bikes or horses or foot. People seemed enthralled by the horses, though, frankly, in my view, they were a reminder of the utility of cars -- you spent a lot of time waiting for the horse taxi to come around.
     We stayed at the Grand Hotel. A tour guide described it as a "steamship on dry land," which summed it up pretty well. An enormous white wooden structure built in 1887. Meals are included in the price of the room, and, as with cruise ships, there was quite a focus on eating.
     Or maybe that was just me.
     The place is so big and so elegant that I walked around the lobby for a day before I realized it displayed three John Singer Sargent oils and a Childe Hassam. Elegant enough that the hotel charges $10 apiece for non-guests to walk through the lobby, and takes in $75,000 a year from people willing to pay. Its greatest feature is a stupendous front porch -- said to be the longest in the world, holding 100 white rocking chairs. I spent as much time as I could on that porch, staring at the blue expanse of Lake Huron, and I know it's corny, but the phrase "sacred space" came to mind. Put it this way: It's worth the nine-hour drive to Mackinac to sit on that porch for an afternoon.

    Passing along genetic grandiosity

     Vacations are all about forging memories, and I'll share with you the key Mackinac memory for me. The Grand Hotel requires that men wear suit jackets and ties in public spaces after 6 p.m. Even though children are exempt from this -- their outfit of choice seems to be golf shirts and khakis—I used the opportunity to put my boys in their first blazers.
     This demand for elegance infected the mind of Kent, my younger boy, and at one shop in town—the London House—he seized upon a walking stick, black with a blue cobalt glass knob, and announced that he had to have it. He just had to.
    As any sane father would, I emphatically told him: a) I wasn't spending $50 on a walking stick; b) I wasn't about to be the father of a boy who carried around a walking stick, and c) no, no, no.
     Tenacity runs in my family, and we do not give up easily. "I want to die," he said, confronting the disappointment with all the gravity an 8-year-old can muster. Returning to the Grand Hotel—this fabulous swooping vista of Victorian charm—while he whined "die, die, die" was one of those strange, exquisite highlights of fatherhood, along with being thrown up upon.
    This was the first day, with four nights of "die, die, die" ahead of us. At dinner, with the boys safely tucked in the hotel's children's program, I consulted with my wife. Yes, he was spoiled, and getting him the stick would spoil him further. But really, we were on vacation....
    What had softened me was, in the constant rehashing that followed, I asked him where he imagined taking a walking stick.
     "To fancy occasions," he said.
     Did I really want to be the guy standing in the way of a lad being properly decked out for fancy occasions?
     We told him he could get his stick—provided he kicked in the next six weeks of allowance, and behaved for the rest of his life. He enthusiastically agreed.
     The older boy, of course, needed to be bought off, and he chose to go on a spree at Doc's House of Magic, loading up on itch powder and joy buzzers and the most realistic-looking rubber cigar I've ever seen.
     It was all worth it—the expense, the certainty that my lax parenting skills were turning my boys into brats—that night, as we marched into the Grand Hotel's archly labeled "Salle a Manger" (see, I didn't invent pretentiousness).
     The boys strolled in front of me, Kent proudly holding his walking stick -- it was a little big for him, so he had to hold it high, which made him seem like Louis XIV taking the air, Ross wearing a Thurston Howell III yachtsman's cap and brandishing his fake cigar.
     Guests did double takes. I am not exaggerating to say that heads turned in the dining room to see this strange family come rolling in. The maitre d' informed my older son that gentlemen must remove their hats at dinner, and we were shown our seats, my heart bursting with pride.
     "My work on Earth is done," I told myself. "I can die now, confident that I have passed on my qualities to a new generation."
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 4, 2005

     Postscript: Almost needless to say, he never used the walking stick again. But it is mounted above the door to his bedroom, where it is available, should the occasion arise. 

Why this flag?

     I love the American flag, how it looks, what it represents. There's so much history bound up in every stripe; three years ago I set out to mark Flag Day, June 14—which fell on a Thursday in 2012—by answering a basic question about the American flag: Where did it come from?

     Why red, white and blue? Why these colors and not, oh, green and beige?
     Flag Day is Thursday, so it's an apt moment to wonder, and a quick glance into the murky and legend-prone history of our national flag offers a fairly solid answer.
     First, yes, Flag Day is without question a third-rate patriotic holiday, if you consider the Fourth of July as the undisputed No. 1, with the solemn military Memorial and Veterans days tying for second. Nobody gets off work for Flag Day. It's sort of an Arbor Day for flags, almost like one of those made-up Hallmark holidays, like Grandparents Day.
     Except Flag Day actually commemorates something real, June 14, 1777, when the Continental Congress decreed: "The flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation."
     Why those colors? In the 19th century, when people felt free to make stuff up, one patriotic guide suggested red, white and blue were handed down by God at Mt. Sinai.
     The short, factual answer is our colors are red, white and blue because the British flag is red, white and blue. Changes that seem revolutionary in retrospect actually occur in stages, and when George Washington began leading his troops, they saw themselves as British citizens fighting for their rights. Thus his Grand Union Flag, raised over the Continental Army in January 1776, had the British Union Flag where the field of stars is now.
     The British flag at the time was an amalgam of two crosses, the English cross of St. George and the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew The reason George's is red disappears into medieval lore (my guess: he's a martyr; red symbolized blood and courage). The reason Andrew's is white on blue rests on 1340-year-old legend: a sign, the X-shaped saltire cross, that Scottish King Angus MacFergus II supposedly saw in the sky before a battle in 732.
     So the red, white and blue in the American flag represent, originally, blood, clouds and sky, which sounds about right.
     Washington's version might have stuck—other former British colonies, such as Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and, surprisingly, the state of Hawaii, still have the Union Jack (as the British Union flag was called after the addition of the red X of Ireland in 1801) in miniature on the upper corners of their flags.
     But in the 18 months between the time Washington hoisted his Grand Union flag, and Congress codified it, passions had inflamed, the British banner jettisoned, and somebody had substituted a field of stars.
     No one is sure who. It almost certainly wasn't Betsy Ross. Much received flag wisdom is late 19th century whimsy embraced as fact by the ever-credulous public. Nothing suggests Ross had a hand in the creation of the American flag, beyond a paper presented in 1870 by her grandson based on family tradition. She was a seamstress and sewed a Pennsylvania navy flag, but beyond that the few known facts point elsewhere.
     The next time Congress took up the flag was 1793, prompted by the admission to the union of Vermont and Kentucky. Sen. Stephen R. Bradley—of Vermont, naturally—proposed a bill "for altering the Flag of the United States" to reflect the change. It passed the Senate, but the always fractious House bristled at being asked to consider this minor matter.
     One representative called the bill "a trifling business which ought not to engross the attention of the House, when it was its duty to discuss matters of infinitely greater importance." Something Congress ought to keep in mind when debating the next inevitable flag burning amendment—previous Congresses didn't even want to bother talking about the flag's design, never mind fret over those misguided enough to burn one. (I'm glad Flag Day is unofficial; enforced honor loses significance.)
     After complaining, Congress gave the flag 15 stars and stripes. It stayed that way for a quarter century, despite the addition of five more states, until 1818, when the prospect of an ever more striped flag brought about the current scheme of holding steady at 13 stripes, adding one more star with each new state, on the July 4 after that state is admitted.
     Which means, if you are my age—I just turned 52—or older, you can amaze children by informing them that you are older than the American flag, the current version of which became official on July 4, 1960, when executive order No. 10834 went into effect, giving the flag a 50th star to reflect the admission of Hawaii the previous August.
     Have a great Flag Day; fly it if you got it.
     "There is the national flag," Sen. Charles Sumner once wrote. "He must be cold, indeed, who can look upon its folds rippling in the breeze without pride of country."

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 14, 2012

Kent Week #1: "Good day at Wrigley Field"

   

     The only topic I was ever specifically forbidden to write about in my newspaper column was my children, by an editor who had none himself and thus didn't see their utility. So naturally I wrote about the boys a lot, because I found them a source of endless fascination. My older son, Ross, being first out of the gate, got the lion's share of attention. But his younger brother was not ignored either. Since he turns 18 on Tuesday, I decided—with his permission, of course—to dub this Kent Week, and reprise a few highlights from over the years, such as this, when he was seven:

     Second children often get the short end of the stick. The hand-me-down clothes. The old toys. The half-filled photo album. When I try to explain the difference between how we treated our first and second sons, I put it this way: When Ross was a baby, I'd boil his baby bottle nipples, handling them with tongs and setting them out on paper towels to dry. When Kent was a baby, if I dropped a nipple on the floor, I'd pick it up, brush it off on my shoulder, and use it.
     Maybe that's inevitable. Parents get tired, and what at first seemed extraordinary over time becomes routine. Even here in the column. You've read, over the past nine years, of my oldest -- the chess-playing, book-devouring wunderkind. My youngest -- quieter, more athletic, more of a regular kid and less an oddball like his dad -- hardly gets mentioned. That isn't fair, but life isn't fair.
     Every once in a while, however, life compensates, and the overlooked step into the limelight. When my good friends at Harry Caray's asked if one of the boys wanted to throw out the first pitch at a Cubs/Sox game at Wrigley Field earlier this summer, I knew it had to be Kent. He's the ballplayer, the Cubs fan. I measured off 67 feet in the driveway and insisted we practice. The boy has an arm, for a 7-year-old, but it's a long way to the plate.
     The big day finally arrived. We sat together for nearly an hour in the stands in the bright sun, waiting. I yabbered nervously away while Kent squinted silently at the field, as if measuring it. Finally, they called him. He picked his glove up and trotted out to the mound. He never looked back, never glanced at me. He stood at the mound, set himself, looked at the plate for a single moment, and threw a cannon shot to the catcher. A strike. The stands erupted. I shouted myself hoarse. He trotted back to me, the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.
     I couldn't shut up for days; told everyone I know and sent copies of the pictures everywhere. He, on the other hand, never mentioned it again. 
    Well, once. I was marveling, for the 50th time, about him throwing that strike, right over the plate, and he said, softly, "The catcher was standing in front of the plate, Dad," which impressed me even more. The modest hero.
     I hope you'll forgive me sharing this -- I know it's bragging, and I resisted at first. But summer is almost over, and, thinking back over it, I realized that I had once again overlooked Number Two. It's hard to be a little brother and to dwell in the shadows of the first born, and I'm so glad he was able to step up and nail his moment of glory. You have to keep an eye on those quiet types -- they can surprise you. Not that anything he could do would surprise me now. If he is someday elected president of the United States, when the final ballot count comes in, I will turn to my wife and say, "Of course, after that pitch at Wrigley Field, we should have expected this."
                             —published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 3, 2004