Pause at cemeteries

     I pause at cemeteries, then go in. 
     Don't you? It seems the thing to do.
     Though I'm not sure why. It feels like dull curiosity, at the moment, a mild historic interest. Almost something embarrassment, prying in the affairs of others, treading on their graves.
    But it's something of an obligation too. These people lived, they loved, they died, as shall we all, and left these traces, claimed their little space, a private country, eighteen square feet of territory made sovereign by their headstone forever.
    The least we can do is glance at them as we pass by, at this little garden of eternity.  
    Well, maybe not eternity. Not, in fact, forever. Nature is forever. Humanity is the frost on a pumpkin, the charge on a battery. Headstones melt in the rain it turns out, at least marble and limestone do. Granite lasts a bit longer, but those will crack or be carted off in their turn. It's only the illusion of permanence, to comfort the bereaved among us.

     Me, I find comfort in their ephemerality. Because it reminds us that for all the effort we put into our works, our careers and houses and such, great or small, it adds up to nothing, long term. A bigger monument, a plinth, a pylon, a crypt, which only makes the passerby shake their head at the irony, the futility. "Benjamin F. Barge" and his cap and gown and steepled glory is just as dead as the guy under an unreadable mound of softening stone. Reputation helps him no more than anonymity hurts the other. 
    How many people waste how many years piling up those stones? Stones that most people, truth be told, never contemplate at all.
    Though there is good in doing so. I hiked up a steep hill in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania last October to look over the cemetery. I did it the morning I left, as if it were some duty that had to be performed before I was free to leave the town. Because it was there.
    I pause at cemeteries, then go in, Because, coming out, I'm gladder to be alive. 

Roll on, Big O....

     The mind's a funny thing.
     When I was in Japan, I saw Lawson stores everywhere; they're the second most popular convenience store in Japan, after 7-Eleven, with some 11,000 outlets all over the country.
     And I immediately knew I was familiar with them.  That before 7-Eleven, before White Hen, there had been Lawson's in Ohio, where I grew up.
     Lawson's began as a dairy in Akron, Ohio, in 1938. As the stores spread, they threatened the milk man monopoly -- you didn't buy milk in stores, y0u had it delivered. Lawson's began the practice of selling milk in gallon jugs, and battled milk inspection laws as they spread their stores —as many as 700 in Ohio and three neighboring states, 200 in the Cleveland area alone.  They also fought the Ohio blue laws that kept stores closed on Sunday.
     But I really didn't think about their sudden appearance all around me. I hadn't seen one in decades. Lawson's sold out to Dairy Mart in 1985 and the stores were renamed. I hadn't seen the familiar, comforting, familiar, fat white milk bottle on the blue shield in 30 years. But I instantly accepted its presence, a survivor in the Far East.
     All I thought was "What a great logo."
     It wasn't until I got back home that the full memory returned. We were having breakfast Sunday morning. Edie had set out some orange juice, a new brand, and I was reading the ballyhoo on the label. "Squeezed daily" it said.
     Rollllllll on, Big-O,....
     Suddenly, I was hearing music in my head.
     Get that juice up to Lawson's in 40 hours. 
     A TV commercial, making heroic "The Big-O Orange Run," rushing fresh orange juice up to vitamin C deprived Ohioans.
     Now one man sleeps while the other man drives, on the non-stop Lawson run.
      Of course the commercial is on-line.
      And the cold, cold juice in the tank car caboose, stays as fresh as the Florida sun.
     Now we're used to living in a small world. If our roses come from South America, our bricks from China, well, that's how it works. But once upon a time racing that OJ up from Florida was a big deal. It was something to sing about.

"Let's make the bastard deny it"

     If Ted Cruz weren't such a loathsome piece of venality, I might have sympathy toward him for having his private life — his alleged private life — splashed all over the National Enquirer. 
    It has to be a nauseous feeling for a monster of personal ambition such as Cruz to spend years struggling with salmon-to-spawn intensity toward a cherished goal of personal aggrandizement, and have it, if not within his grasp, please God no, then at least within the realm of possibility, Donald Trump notwithstanding.
     Then to see it hit this road bump. More like a tree: the National Enquirer, which has bird-dogged some of the biggest scandals of recent years, has implied that five, count 'em, five women have had affairs with Cruz. The mind reels...
    Excuse me a moment....
    Ewww, yuck!!!! Ptooey!
    I'm sorry, where were we? Ah yes, Cruz, who spent Friday busily denying the story.  Blaming Donald Trump "and his henchmen." I haven't heard the word "henchmen" used seriously outside of North Korean propaganda and Lemony Snickett novels.
    Cruz went on, at great length, denying these allegation. Stepping into the trap set for him. News outlets had ignored these whispers for months, and might have ignored the "thinly-sourced" Enquirer piece, had not Cruz so ham-handedly drawn lingering attention to them, violating the first edict of Crisis PR: Don't Spread the Negative Press Yourself.
     Which reminds me of the famous story about Lyndon Johnson. Usually the story hinges around the phrase "pig fucking," but the late, lamented Hunter S. Thompson, of all people, tells a fairly clean version:

     Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.
     His campaign manager was shocked. 'We can't say that, Lyndon,' he supposedly said. 'You know it's not true.'
     "'Of course it's not true!' Johnson barked at him. 'But let's make the bastard deny it!' "

     To be honest, I have a hard time believing the National Enquirer allegations—that would imply that somebody, man or woman, found Cruz attractive, and that is unimaginable to me. Not that he's so bad-looking, really, so much as he's living proof that a person's personality colors their features. Satan is handsome, too, until you get to know him. 

On lemons and ladies in the men's bathroom

     Hiroshima is known for its lemons.
     Well, not known here. In the United States we know exactly one thing about the city: atomic bomb dropped there at the end of World War II.
That's it. And I'd wager cash money that a good many Americans, say 20 percent, don't even know that. 
     Heck, I'm being generous. Twenty percent of Americans probably don't know there was a World War II.  (I can't find stats to back that up, but a telephone poll of 1,200 high school students in 2008 found 20 percent could not name a country the United States fought in World War II, which is close enough).
     But once actually in Hiroshima, as I was earlier this month, wandering among its pleasant outdoor shopping arcades, you see they have a big lemon thing going on—Hiroshima is to lemons as Florida is to grapefruit. Enough that I bought a handsome jar of Hiroshima lemon curd at the train station before heading West, where I eventually packed up to leave Japan....


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29 years a staffer

      Twenty-nine years ago Wednesday, March 23, 1987, was my first day on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times. I read every plaque between the 'L' stop at Clark and Lake, trying not to be too early, got to the office just before 9, and was assigned a story about a dog.
     I thought, to mark the occasion, I'd pull something I'm proud of out of the archive, and thought of this, for a variety of reasons. I wrote it on deadline. It's a news story, but I cast it in an unusual structure, one that I think echoed what I was writing about. You'll notice a familiar name in the first sentence—before she was a disappointing state's attorney, she was a promising assistant state's attorney. As you probably know, she was defeated by Kim Foxx earlier in the month. Girl X, whose name is Shatoya Currie, is 28 and lives in an assisted living facility. In 2012 she made news when the singer Jennifer Hudson sought her ought and brought her to a show.  Patrick Sykes was sentenced to 120 years in prison, where he remains. 

A. . . B . . . C . . .

     Letter by agonizing letter, assistant state's attorney Anita Alvarez slowly read off the alphabet Friday afternoon while a nearly blind, partially paralyzed, mute 13-year-old known to the world only as Girl X struggled to nod "yes" or shake "no."

D . . . E . . . F . . .

     Judge Joseph Urso's fourth-floor courtroom was filled to capacity—people waited in the hall for a seat to be vacated—yet was utterly silent during her testimony. From the back of the large marble courtroom you could hear the gentle clack of the clear plastic beads in Girl X's neatly braided hair as she moved her head in response to Alvarez's line of questioning.     

     Letter by letter, her account unspooled of her brutal sexual assault and beating four years ago in a Cabrini-Green apartment. Patrick Sykes has pleaded not guilty. He sat at the defense table, toying with a pen, occasionally gazing hard at Girl X.

G . . . H . . . I . . .

     Again and again, Alvarez recited the alphabet, her voice flat. First she would ask if the letter was in the beginning of the alphabet. If the answer was yes, she started with "A, B, C . . ." 

     If Girl X shook her head no, Alvarez asked if it was in the middle. If yes, she began with "I, J, K . . ." If no, she began with "R." When Girl X nodded, she went on to the next letter in her testimony.
     She walked Girl X through the night before the attack. A routine day in the life of a 9-year-old girl. A sleepover at a friend's house.
     Some were simple yes or no questions. "Did you see T.T. after school?" "Did you play with T.T.?" "Do you remember where you played with T.T.?"
     The testimony created the rare sight of the judge not sitting on the bench but standing, next to the court reporter, so he could see Girl X's responses. Urso often leaned forward, his hands on the table, watching closely, jumping in to explain an answer—"I believe it was a `No,' " he said. He seemed concerned about Girl X, asking several times if she was OK, or for her therapist, Barbara Robinson, who sat next to her clarifying her sometimes slight shakes of the head into "yes" or "no," to adjust her wheelchair headrest so she would be comfortable.

J . . . K . . . L . . .

     While testifying about a sexual assault is considered harrowing even for adults, Girl X not only kept her composure, but managed to laugh at one point. She began coughing, clearing her throat, and for a moment Alvarez seemed confused whether she was responding.
     "The witness is coughing," Urso said, and Girl X smiled and let out a laugh, as if she was thinking, as any teenager would, "No kidding, judge."
     She wore a Nordic sweater and gray pants, rolled up in wide cuffs. Her hands were tightly curled, drawn up against her chest: hands that hadn't played in four years and probably never would again.

M . . . N . . . O . . . P . . .

     Habit is hard to break, and Alvarez kept messing up, not asking a yes or no question, but asking questions like "Was it a man or a woman?" while not giving Girl X a chance to spell her answer. Finally Urso had to caution her, "Please ask a question that can be answered."
     "I'm sorry," she said.

Q . . . R . . . S . . .

     As a 13-year-old whose schooling has been interrupted by years of therapy, Girl X's spelling was at times shaky. Spelling what her attacker pulled out, she stopped after "K-N-I." She hesitated. "You're not sure how to spell it?" asked the state's attorney. "Did he pull a knife?"

T . . . U . . . V . . .

     The details of the alleged attack were spelled out in crude, necessarily short descriptive terms that can't be printed in a newspaper. The two word, eight-letter act she said her attacker ordered her to perform took nearly a minute to spell. She then testified that he urinated in her mouth—she spelled it "pe"—and that he fondled her, though she could not begin to spell the common word for her private parts.
     When the attack was over, she testified, she asked him a question.
     "Did you say anything?" Alvarez asked. Girl X nodded.
     "Can you spell it for us? Is it in the beginning?" Girl X nodded yes. "Is it A . . . ?" She nodded yes again.
     Gradually, Alvarez drew the following sentence from Girl X: "Ask can I scool?"
     His reply, Girl X spelled out, was "o . . . bitch." Then she said he began to smother her with a blanket.

W . . . X . . . Y . . . Z

     "Do you remember ever coming out of that bedroom?" A shake no. "Do you remember ever coming out of that apartment?" Again no.
     Defense attorney Robert Byman asked a few polite questions—about her favorite TV show, about whether she had one or two grandmothers, but Girl X did not respond to most of them.
     As she was wheeled from the courtroom, Girl X let out a sound, a loud, quavering wail that started out like a laugh and ended like a sob.
                                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 25, 2001

Donald Trump, terrorist tool

     Donald Trump has been called a lot of things: real estate developer, short-fingered vulgarian, bigot, demagogue.
     All deserved.
     To that list, I'd like to add one more well-earned moniker: terrorist tool.
      Because really, after the Brussels bombing, short of wrapping himself in explosives and setting himself off in some crowded public place, nobody could do the terrorist's bidding with such alacrity as Donald Trump, running from station to station to spread the ISIS gospel.
     “Frankly, we’re having problems with the Muslims,” he told Fox News. “These attacks are not done by Swedish people. That I can tell you. We have to be smart. We have to look at the mosques and study what’s going on. There is a sick problem going on.”
     In other words, “Muslim = Terrorist.”
     Which is exactly the reaction terrorists are looking for when they commit these atrocities. Like Donald Trump, they are uncomfortable with the idea of a tolerant Western society that welcomes all faiths. Like Donald Trump, they don’t think it’s wise for the West to include Muslims either. Like Donald Trump, they’d prefer the cultures remain separate and apart.

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RIP, Dr. Quentin Young

     Dr. Quentin Young, age 92, died March 7 in California. He was an energetic advocate for public health, and a man deeply involved with his time, whose patients ranged from Martin Luther King to the Beatles. You can read Maureen O'Donnell's fine obituary here. I tapped his deep institutional memory in 2001 regarding a problem that has only gotten worse since then.  

Dr. Quentin Young

     More than half a century has passed. But Dr. Quentin Young still remembers the grim details of his 20 days on the septic obstetrics ward at Cook County Hospital in 1948.
     "I was fresh out of medical school," says Young, 77, a well-respected Chicago physician. "I was a resident, an intern. I had OB service for 60 days at Cook County. At the time, there were three services. You had 20 days on each: Normal OB, for most women. Pathological OB, for the numerous women with heart and lung problems and TB. And then there was the third service: the so-called septic OB, a euphemism for women who had been damaged in self-induced or criminal abortions. Of course, all abortions were criminal then."
     And may someday again be. I called Young because one of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to cut federal funding to overseas family planning organizations that mention abortion to their clients -- a small step in itself, but the opening salvo in the coming battle to roll back abortion rights.
     Perhaps all the way back to 1948.
     A year most people do not remember. But Young does. It was not the happy time that lives in our nostalgia. He was seeing dozens of women a day who were so desperate to have an abortion they tried to do it themselves, using whatever was at hand.
     They douched with bleach or peroxide. They used paintbrushes and cocktail stirrers and pencils and knitting needles. And yes, they did use wire coat hangers.
     "Of course they did," says Young. "They hurt themselves, perforated their uteruses, they came in bleeding, with difficult-to-treat infections."
     The ones who were in comas, who had raging fevers, would be treated by the more senior doctors. Intern Young would finish up the more straightforwardly botched jobs begun by back-alley butchers, or themselves.
     "As a young intern, I was responsible for completing the septic abortions that the women had begun, to save them from ill health or death," he says. "The volume was so large. I would do 20 D&Cs a day."
     Damage was often severe.
     "Many became infertile," he says. "Many had abscesses. Many had to have hysterectomies. Some perished."
     The women were only lightly anesthetized, and Young would speak with them as he worked.
     "I was struck with how readily the women would talk about what they did," he says. "For my part, I was appalled they took that risk, and they would try to explain it to me, why it had to be, how their personal circumstance could not bear the having of an illegitimate child or, if they were married, how they had many children. There was a good deal of guilt about it.
     "If they had paid for the abortion, they would go to hotels and people of unknown credentials would put them on table, do the procedure and leave them there. It had all the grim vulnerability and fear we associate with criminal abortion."
     Young's score of days on the septic ward changed him.
     "I was fresh out of medical school," he says. "I had not formed views on abortion, other than that it was illegal and undesirable," he says.
     But his experience led to a fresh realization.
     "Abortion is not a modern development," he says. "Every civilization had it. The fact is, it will take place. The question went from should it take place to how to make it safest for women. I've never seen a happy abortion. It's always a source of great concern, thought and contradiction. For many the alternate is a ruined life, so they do it. I'm not an enthusiast for abortion. I've simply come to understand it should be medically safe."
     And it is medically safe, and legal. For the time being.

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 25, 2001