Reader flashback: Swiss Gold

     
     On Sunday I posted a column from the late 1990s that had been spiked by the Sun-Times and rescued by the Reader, which happened on several occasions back then. Another was this one — newspaper journalism has a certain Kabuki quality, and I think the following was just too personal, too forceful for the Sun-Times' audience, but fit right into the Reader's looser vibe.  It originally ran Dec. 25, 1997. 

     The tomato soup was delightful. The quail, neither greasy nor dry. Though I preferred the white wine served with the appetizer to the following red--which seemed a bit casky--I wasn't about to mention this to my host, the ambassador.
     If this sounds like something out of a Henry James novel, well, it felt pretty weird to me too. I was squirming in my elegant chair in a private dining room at the Four Seasons Hotel this past September, snared in a roundup of Jewish journalists and delivered before Alfred Defago, the Swiss ambassador to the United States, so he could tell us how sorry his government is for having played banker to the Nazis during World War II. How much it regrets that for half a century afterward Swiss banks kept the money from thousands of accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, their heirs turned away empty-handed with bureaucratic dodges: I'm sorry, but you'll need to get an official death certificate from the Nazis confirming that they shot your parents in the head and dumped their bodies in a slit trench in some forest in Poland....
     Not that Defago used these words. Everything the ambassador said was correctness itself. Polished. Poised. His words would look good engraved on a coin. And his timing was perfect--a little late in the grand scheme of things, but right in keeping with 1997. This was the year for making nice with history. The Brits apologized for the Irish potato famine. The squeaky-clean Norwegians apologized to the Laplanders for past indiscretions. Even the French, who never apologize for anything, were lining up to say how sorry they were about their various lapses, misdeeds, and crimes during World War II.
     Jews were the favorite object of public contrition but not the only one. President Clinton gathered the few surviving victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment and invited them over to the White House so he could look them in the eye and repent from the bottom of his heart. Clinton's good at that--from the sincere look of dolor slapped all over his mug, you'd think he was there at the clinic, pretending to treat syphilis and lying to patients. He even trembled on the brink of issuing a mea culpa for slavery but then pulled back, perhaps because there are no ex-slaves still around to summon for a photo op....

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Now that I've caught Rattata, what do I do with him?

     The entertainment is so all-encompassing, you forget you’re outside. People are killed blundering in front of trains. Legislators fret.
     “It’s really getting out of hand,” said a councilman in Newport, Rhode Island, promoting a ban on something with the “potential to remove a person from the confines of reality.”
     No, not Pokemon Go, the cellphone game that has millions wandering around in a kind of global electronic walkabout. The above is from 34 years ago, referring to a previous high-tech menace: the Walkman, Sony’s personal tape recorder, which also put people in their own little bubble of oblivion.
     The most amazing statistic about Pokemon Go is not the tens of millions of users, but this: 7/7/16. The thing debuted July 7, meaning we’ve had it for five weeks. The Northbrook police have already held their own Pokemon Go event. The Walkman was around for years before government grew alarmed.
     I learned about Pokemon Go in the quaintest, most low-tech way possible. My wife noticed two young ladies walking up our driveway, phones in hand.

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The Plumber's Dream

    Sunday I met someone who was shooting photos for a calendar on ... well, I better not say, as I plan to write about him this fall. During our conversation, I mentioned a piece I wrote about the Ridgid Tool calendar for the Reader in the late 1990s, and he surprised me by digging it up. It was back in the day when my column was spiked with some regularity, either because our standards were more constricted, or I hadn't learned to self-edit.
    This piece was written for the paper, but snagged on the phrase "Ridgid Tool." I always remember Larry Green saying to me, "It's a bad joke!" and me replying, "It's the name of the company, Larry. It's on the wrench." In my memory, I glared at him and said evenly, "You're not hurting me, Larry. I'll sell this to the Reader and they'll pay me $500. You're hurting our readers, who could read this without dying of shame." That might be a bit of bravado confabulated after the fact—it sounds too bold for me. But that's exactly what happened. The Reader ran this March 25, 1999. Ridgid Tool still makes the calendar. And I still have the wrench. 

     Bought a pipe wrench the other day. The wife was going to call the plumber. "I'm calling the plumber," she said. But I said no. It wasn't just the money. I knew what the problem was—screws, tossed down the bathroom sink drain by our 3-year-old. I knew where the screws were—the U-trap, that curved pipe under the sink. All I had to do was remove it and take out those screws before they ... did something bad. Even I could do that.
     Almost didn't buy the right tool, however. After strolling with the 3-year-old to the hardware store—behold your handiwork, O my child, the heartbreak you have wrought—I almost bought an expandable pliers. Figured that would do the job, would remove the pipe, and be more useful later for other things. For holding hot rivets, say.
     But I had second thoughts. A phrase, "the right tool for the right job," bubbled up from somewhere. From the lips of some long-dead shop teacher probably. So I bought a 14-inch pipe fitter's wrench.
     The pipe wrench—and this will seem ridiculous to those who spend significant time around pipe wrenches—struck me as a wondrous object. Big, heavy, solid. I held the wrench in my hand—all the weight at one end, where the adjustable steel teeth are—and wanted to bash somebody in the head with it, just on general principles. I felt happy, safe....

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Book signings

     A book signing is an odd tradition. The author gathers together his family and friends and what interested parties he can lure into the same room. He subjects them to what is in essence a sales pitch, reads from his book then begs them to buy it. Incredibly, many do, and they line up while he takes a fat marker and scribbles his name all over copies of the pristine book to ... show what? A kind of "Kilroy was here!" territory marking? Because it's the one time in life when you're encouraged to write in books? To make it more valuable should that author turn out to be Hemingway? The odds of that are worse than a lottery ticket. 
     Maybe it's a chance to breath life into the silent, lonely world of books. To hold a kind of church service to something that, like a religion, gives our lives structure and meaning. Mine anyway. For whatever reason the tradition exists, a tradition it is, and I'm not one to buck it.  Just the opposite; I embrace it, as welcome communality in an all-too-solitary profession. 
     I almost forgot this part, but I suppose it's also a chance to meet the author. Never a high priority for me, since there's an author everywhere I go. But I see a certain novel appeal for others.
     The University of Chicago Press is publishing Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery on Sept. 5, and I have a busy itinerary of signings and readings, which you can always find under "Book signings" at the side of my blog. I thought I'd roll it out here, as fit Saturday fare—the contest can wait a week. 

 Thursday, Sept. 8, 7 p.m. -- The Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior. Join Tony Fitzpatrick, Rick Kogan and Carol Marin as we read the book's "Family" chapter. Co-author Sara Bader will be there from New York City to answer questions and sign the book with me. 

Friday, Sept. 9, 7 p.m. -- Book Stall, 81 Elm St., Winnetka. A reading and signing at this beloved North Shore institution. I'll be joined by co-author Sara Bader. And yes, there will be wine and cheese.

Thursday, Sept. 15,  12-2 p.m., Atlas Stationers,  227 W. Lake Street. There are no bookstores in the Loop, to speak of, so when the "Chicago" book was published, my friends at Atlas stepped up threw me a well-attended signing. They're doing it again. 

Westlake, Ohio

Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m.  Barnes & Noble, 198 Crocker Park Blvd, Westlake, Ohio.  The Plain Dealer is running an interview, so I shrugged and decided to go to Cleveland and sign some books. I'll be on Alan Cox's show on WMMS Sept. 16 at 5:20 p.m.

Monday, Sept. 19, 7 p.m. -- 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th. Kennedy Forum executive director Kelly O'Brien and I will talk about the challenges of sobriety, followed by a signing.  

Thursday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m. Bookends & Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston. This is the site of the old Bookman's Alley bookstore, which I patronized for more than 30 years. It was bought and revitalized by Jeff Garrett and Nina Barrett, enthusiastic supporters of the book. It's a sprawling, comfortable location Roger Carlson hosted a memorable night when "Drunkard" was published, and I'm expecting no less here, as I read my favorite passages from the book and answer questions.

Saturday, Sept. 24, Pygmalion Festival, 1:45 p.m., reading at Exile on Main Street, 100 N. Chestnut, Champaign, Illinois.  

Have a bookstore and want an event? Contact me at dailysteinberg@gmail.com. 

Good news rolls by us, if we only notice

     Trumpless Friday continues. 

     There is no proper history of the garbage can. Not that I could find, anyway.
     A shame. If you look at contemporary American life trying to find evidence of undeniable positive change, improved garbage cans roll immediately into view.

     For me, anyway. Then again, I am of an age that remembers galvanized steel garbage cans, remembers muscling them to the curb and remembers that hideous metal-on-concrete scraping sound.
    Now moving garbage is quiet and easy.  

Rolling garbage can patent

    How did that happen? 
     Jump back 70 years. Garbage was a crisis in Chicago.
     “Almost half the city’s 2,000 miles of alleys have been lined with open piles of filth,” the Chicago Sun noted in August 1946. Only one in seven garbage truck stops were made to empty “tight, strong metal cans.” Thirty percent were to pick up garbage placed in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter were at concrete containers, which garbage men emptied using shovels, a process that took five times as long as tipping a can. Another quarter, nearly, were at open piles of garbage.

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Abolishing the 2nd Amendment

   "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

     By now, Donald Trump's dog whistle to the gun-nuts in the Republican Party has been picked over like a turkey carcass on Dec. 1. There's really only one thing to add.

     That one thing is: Donald Trump's crazier comments mask those remarks that are merely delusional.
     So while the political sphere vibrated with horror over Trump's smirking, coy appeal to violence, and his unshakable fans—any other kind have fled by now—explain that no, he meant 2nd amendment voters, acting as a coalition, something important is overlooked.
     Sighing—a kind of reason fatigue sets in—I want to wrench our bug-eyed gaze from the end of Trump's quote, back to the beginning. "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment."
     What's that based on? Like many Democrats, Hillary has floated some vague ideas about stricter background checks, a bit of fine-tuning and deck chair arranging that ignores the greater problem with guns in America. Judging from Barack Obama's eight years of inaction, no rational person expects anything more. The 2nd Amendment isn't being abolished; just the opposite, it is eroding the others, draining meaning from all that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" nonsense.
    A separate issue is the difficulty of changing any aspect of the Constitutional: two-thirds of the House and Senate must approve, then have three-quarters of the states ratify the change. Well nigh impossible in a nation that cannot get rid of the penny. 
    That's clear to those who aren't in the grip of fear. But Republicans, remember, are fear junkies, and if reality won't get them high, they cook something up. They start out scared, and then conjure up new terrors to justify their fear. The Democrats have to be continually plotting to take away guns; otherwise why would they need to keep buying more? I don't know if the whole things a conspiracy of the gun industry, or just a mass psychosis that plays to their economic interest. Probably both. Either way, the result's the same.
    So sad. Were I looking for a genuine reason to be terrified, I couldn't find anything more ominous than a GOP presidential candidate who's a cat's paw of Vladimir Putin, who can't figure out what NATO's for, or why we can't use nuclear weapons—after all, we got 'em! To ignore all that, to miss the truly frightening stuff, and point in horror at the lip-service gumming the Dems do on the subject of guns is a most perverse of hallucinations. 
    Then again, there's a lot of that going around. The least we can do is mention it. 

Suburbia isn't all neatly trimmed lawns anymore

     The front yard has Queen Anne’s lace and coneflowers, both purple and yellow. Joe-Pye weed and ironweed, hydrangea, phlox and more.
     “We have a lot of milkweed,” said Tina Paluch. “Because we like the butterflies.”
     What her yard doesn’t have a lot of is lawn; only about a quarter is grass, and that is uncut. The rest is covered by wildflowers and what some would call weeds, up to 5 feet tall.
     The small brick house sits next door to Greenbriar Elementary School in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook. I’ve been walking by for 16 years, admiring the front yard for both its appearance and for what it symbolizes: a departure from the lockstep green buzz cut most homeowners aspire to. The suburbs get a bad rap as cookie-cutter Levittowns of identical ticky-tacky houses and Astroturf lawns. But look closer and there is individuality there too.
     I’d never seen the people who lived there. The exact moment I was passing the house, thinking, “A real reporter would knock on the door,” a woman rolled her garbage can to the curb. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I introduced myself.
     Tina Paluch, 50, lives here with her parents, Anne and Jerry, in their late 80s....
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