Rome Flashback #2: the little things jump out

    My older son is hanging out in Rome, I can report on good authority. I'm reprinting some columns from when I was there in 1999, so that I can keep my focus on il pranzo which means, well, you'll have to read it to find out. Of course the lira is gone now, replaced by the euro.

Portrait of a Man (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    ROME—At first it seemed to be just another funky fashion: a man wearing orange pants. I mean bright orange, Popsicle orange, signal orange, the color usually associated with life jackets and distress flares.

     Italians dress pretty much like Americans. A little sharper, maybe, a little snugger. But I hadn't seen anything too strange, certainly nothing as wild as all those 14-year-old American tourist girls with geometric bands hennaed around their necks. (Gosh, I hope it's henna, and not a tattoo. Imagine selling that to Mom.)

     Still, my first reaction to the orange pants had been bland acceptance. Why not? Europe in 1999.
     But the orange-panted man was unlike most every other man in Italy. He wasn't strolling down the street, gesturing expansively with one hand while pressing a cell phone the size of a pack of playing cards against his ear with the other. He was standing in a trench, working on a sewer pipe. I stopped, and saw that the guy with the orange pants was accompanied by other men, also wearing orange pants.
      Then it hit me. Not fashion, but practicality. People drive like lunatics here. A roiling commotion of motor scooters, tiny cars, lumbering Mercedes, all hurtling pell-mell around each other. A man standing in the street for any appreciable time is in mortal peril. Visibility is crucial for survival. Besides, it gets hot here, and while a construction worker might take off his safety vest, he certainly wasn't going to take off his pants, not in the street, not in Italy.
     I know one goes to foreign countries to see the splendors — the churches and castles and art museums. And I saw those and enjoyed them, at least until numbness set in. But I observed with keener interest, I admit, the small-yet-smart differences that Italian culture has from our own, the slight improvements.
     Some are slight indeed: The toilet in our hotel here had a small indenture in the cover, exactly four fingers wide, located just where you would reach down to flip the seat up. Not a revolution, but a nice touch.
     Or take money (and boy, do they ever, with both hands). Of course their money is beautiful, colorful, well-etched, far superior to the dull green clumps of ill-wrought lettuce we wave around. They also make a greater attempt to differentiate between denominations. A 1,000 lire bill is tiny; it looks like play money, and basically it is, considering what it will buy. The 5,000 lire bill is larger, the 10,000 lire larger, and 100,000 larger still. I assume a 1 million lire bill (about $550) would be enormous, but I never got my hands on one, afraid I would blow it all in one spot, say on a shirt, easy to do in a nation where you are charged just for sitting down in a restaurant.
     The chair fee points to the flip side. For every good Italian idea, there was a matching bad idea or bit of absurdity, at least to American eyes.  

Portrait of a Woman (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Consider mail service. Since smallness and slowness (except when commuting) are cherished values here, the Italian mails are even worse than the notoriously bad U.S. Postal Service. This was demonstrated to me in dramatic fashion one morning in the main post office in Rome.
     Hoping to wow my friends with letter postmarked in a foreign land (my circle doesn't get out much) I took a handful of letters to the post office, and purchased stamps from the slumped, indifferent clerk.
     Italian mailboxes are red, suitcase-sized metal boxes bolted to the wall at eye level, about half the volume of squat, U.S., ground-standing counterparts.
     I pushed one letter through the slot and, pushing in the next, felt my previous letter. Peering through the slot, I noticed the mail was jammed to the brim, my two letters sitting on top at about 10 a.m., across from the front desk inside the main post office. Imagine what boxes must be like in the provinces -- packed like garbage cans at Taste of Chicago.
     Worried about theft, I reached in, plucked my two letters back from top, and went to find another, less densely populated box.
     The postal clerk, by the way, had a cigarette dangling from his fingers. American smokers might consider a trip overseas just for the nostalgic thrill of seeing people strolling in and out of stores and businesses while smoking, unashamed.
     But the best idea in Italy is one that might take a bit of explaining to an American audience. It's called il pranzo, or in the closest English translation, "lunch." Not that the average American meal, bolted back with joyless haste, has much resemblance to a leisurely Italian midday repast. How important is lunch here? They close the stores. They close the banks. The streets empty.
     The next two hours or so are spent spooling pasta, cutting into veal, pouring ceramic pitchers of red wine, spooning gelato (they don't need to watch their diets here because all those cigarettes are going to kill them anyway).
     The Italians sit and sit and sit, talk and talk and talk, eat and eat and eat. As will come to no surprise to regular readers of this column, it is a concept that I immediately and wholeheartedly embraced.

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 27, 1999

Rome flashback #1 "There never is a next time"

(From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     My older son is studying at the Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris this semester (and if you suspect I enjoy saying that, you're darn right). But he's smart enough to take his spring break in the Eternal City. In honor of that, and supporting the idea of breaks from work, whatever your work happens to be, I thought I would join him in spirit and take a breather from rolling this stone up the hill. Though I'm on vacation, we can still tour Italy along with him, if we puff the dust off a few columns from 1999, when I was in Italy myself, after the cruise with my father that turned into "Don't Give Up the Ship." I imagine that you never read these columns or, if you did, you don't remember. Heck, I sure didn't remember these columns and I both lived and wrote them.  Of course, forgetting them might have been protective, some kind of submerged interior defense mechanism. Whatever the ungraspable truth, the great computer in the sky never forgets.

     THE STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR  — Passage through this famous channel was supposed to be a moment of drama -- Europe off the port bow, Africa off the starboard.
     With the strait, at its narrowest, about seven miles wide, we'd have a good look at both continents, simultaneously, plus a gander at the famous Prudential logo . . . excuse me, I mean, the Rock of Gibraltar.
     It didn't work that way. Fog. A morning mist, plus the fact that the strait is sort of like a two-way street, with ships heading into the Mediterranean hugging the coast of Morocco, and ships heading out into the Atlantic sticking close to Spain. We saw the beach resort towns on the Moroccan coast.
     Which is more than what I saw of Gibraltar. No Rock. No Pillars of Hercules. No nothing. I leaned over the rail and gazed hard at the murky horizon and thought: next time.
     There never is a next time, which is what can make traveling so frantic. You find yourself in a new place, somewhere far away you've never been before and are never going back to, and a sort of madness sets in: You feel compelled to see everything; every sight, every monument.
     Travelers reach a point where they aren't relaxing, aren't having fun, but lunging from one requirement to the next, all so they can claim they went there when they get back home — "We saw the Royal Palace and the Art Museum and the Shimmering Monolith and the Deep Gorge..."
     Big whoop. I am of a different school. I believe in going somewhere and sitting there and not doing much of anything, just like the locals do. I was in Barbados for four days late in May. People off the ship were renting cars and visiting caves, touring rum factories, strolling through cigar-rolling plants. They scuba-dived, sailed, fished and signed up for day cruises.
     I sat on the beach. After I had been to one beach twice, passion for novelty overcame me, and I went to a different beach. Big mistake. Rocks. And an oversweet rum punch without any detectable rum in it. Disaster.
     So we bolted back to the original beach. We sat in the same place. We stared at the same aqua waters. It was very restful. Educational, too—Banks beer, the local brew, is good, cold and enjoyable. I never knew that.
     I cannot take full credit. I am learning at the feet of a master. Alone, I might have broken down and actually done something. But I'm with my father, who has a genius for inactivity. For instance, I was weak and felt compelled to swim in the ocean, even though the ocean is wet and salty and inconvenient.
     My father didn't swim. He was never tempted. He has perfected a scowling quick shake of the head that snuffs out any whiff of initiative. "Are you interested in the rum tour?" I asked. "No way," he said, doing the head shake. "I toured a winery in California." I didn't see the connection, but let it go. He's always saying stuff like that. When I suggested seeing the Vatican, he said, "I already saw it." He saw it in 1952.
     I have not yet resigned myself to spending three days in Rome sitting at an outdoor restaurant, writing postcards. I have a plan, at least to see the Vatican. My plan is to tell my father there's a Vatican Square Borders Bookstore; he loves Borders. We'll wander around, looking for it, noting the sights as we pass.
    After an hour, I'll slap my head and say, "Oh gee, I'm sorry. It's not at the Vatican. It's next to the Colosseum." And away we'll go.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times June 22, 1999

The Great Loop Flood, 25 years on

     My first thought was: A bomb went off.
     An atomic bomb, maybe. Why else would thousands of office workers be evacuating the Loop at midday?
     The truth — not that we knew it right away — was far less cataclysmic but in a sense even stranger.

     It was noon, and I was getting ready to head downtown for the 2-to-10 p.m. shift as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. I turned on the TV in that pre-Internet era, and the noon news showed workers carrying files, streaming from buildings downtown.
     In September 1991, workers aboard a “spud scow” from the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company had been on the Chicago River, replacing rotten pilings — those wooden poles driven into the river bottom to protect the foundations of drawbridges from errant boats — at the southeast end of the Kinzie Street bridge.
     Putting new pilings exactly where the rotted ones proved difficult. The bridge tender’s house was in the way. So they moved the new pilings — wooden telephone poles chained together — about a yard south. Just enough of a shift — by a foot, it was later estimated — that it cracked the ceiling of the network of tunnels that crisscross downtown underground.
     The arched tunnels were hand-dug around 1900 ....

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J.J. Madia, the city employee in charge of making sure the tunnels never flood again. 

Garry McCarthy's real friends would be telling him not to run

     The reattachment surgery must have been a success.
     Former Supt. Garry McCarthy, whose manhood resided in a jar on Rahm Emanuel's desk for nearly five years while he ran Chicago's troubled police department into a ditch, seems to be working himself up toward taking a crack at steering the whole city.
     I misstate the case. The East Coast transplant is not himself considering candidacy. But "a lot of people" are urging him to run. He is just the reporter, odd for a man who so scorns the media. Just passing along information, noting that he himself is not the mayoral sort. Politics is "not in my DNA," McCarthy said. He's "not very good at that."
     I bet. In that light, maybe the surgery wasn't a complete success — the man can't even float his own candidacy without fobbing off the blame onto others. We are supposed to see this feint as modesty — a cliche 400 years ago when Shakespeare put it in Richard III's mouth: "Alas, why would you heap these cares on me? I am unfit for state and majesty."
     McCarthy wants to be begged. He expects us to throw our hats in the air, let out a cheer and demand the salvation he is too humble to offer without prodding.
     I'd prefer a list of those friends' names. Who are they and why do they think McCarthy should be our next mayor? Aren't we already enduring one bantam cock on the fifth floor? Is their solution really finding a different rooster?

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They're so cute when they're small

    The chemical attack by Syria's Bashar al-Assad that killed scored of civilians, including dozens of children, appears to have touched whatever portion of Donald Trump's heart isn't reserved for himself.
   “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies! — little babies,” the president of the United States said Wednesday, “that crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line, many, many lines.”
     Which is so odd. Put those babies in the arms of their parents, strand them in a miserable refugee camp somewhere, and they are proto-terrorists that the United States has no responsibility for whatsoever.
     But let those same babies, stranded in Syria and killed by Assad who, like Trump, is best buddies with Vladimir Putin, and we get this unusual display of Trumpian sympathy for people who he can't see in any convenient mirror.
     This flash of humanity could be a lie; highly probable, given that it consists of words that came out of Donald Trump's mouth. The stuff about crossing red lines, just another swipe—veiled for Trump—at Barack Obama, who said chemical attacks would be a red line that, if crossed, would demand action. Then Obama did nothing.
    Which is what I expect from Trump. Whatever action Trump might be considering didn't even involve saying empty words about the Russians who, if they aren't stirring the poison gas and pouring it into bombs for Assad with big funnels, are helping him every other way.
 

Every vote is a little act of faith in democracy

     "What shall . . . we use . . . to fill . . . the empty . . . spaces . . . where . . . we used . . . to talk," I sang quietly to myself, lyrics from an old Pink Floyd song, early Tuesday morning as I headed to the polls to vote in a meaningless suburban election.
     If ever there was an election to miss, this was it. An uncontested village president. A lone candidate for clerk. A solitary assessor. Three library trustees vying for three slots. Of 14 races, two, count 'em, two, fielded more candidates than offices.
     Why waste the time? Why confuse my poor little dog? Her walnut brain, seeing the jacket go on, rejoiced: "A walk! A walk!" Why leave her at the front door, wilting, as I slip out the back at 6:20 a.m.? At that hour, there was no line. I was the first voter of the day, the only voter, with six election judges keeping a watchful eye as I made my satisfying fat green electronic check marks. Nobody arrived while I was there. Early voting is no doubt a factor. But still.
     Why bother?
     Because I've never missed voting in an election. Not once. My little sacrifice of time, some drops of routine life sprinkled on the altar of democracy. This act, making those marks, is what creates authority. Delegates power. Expresses the will of the people.
     The will of some people. Two-thirds of eligible voters don't bother with local elections. Even in last November's epic presidential contest between a steely longtime politician and a thin-skinned newcomer, 40 percent of registered voters didn't see anything to get them off the couch to vote.
     Were they right?

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Yes, we knew it sometimes rains in Chicago

       
     Sometimes what you don't write is as important as what you do.
     For instance.
     On Thursday, I was trucking to the train after a long, soggy day at work—it wouldn't have been so damp had I stayed in the office, but I grabbed the No. 22 bus up Clark Street to stop by the Chicago History Museum to do some research, and that was closer to scuba diving than commuting.
    Anyway, I looked over the Orleans Street Bridge and notice that Rahm Emanuel's brand new section of River Walk was under an inch of water. 
     "You'd think the geniuses at the city would have factored in the idea that sometimes the river will rise..." I thought to myself. I wondered whether I should send the photographs immediately to the paper. Maybe they could splash them—pun intended—across the front page. "RIVER WALK ALL WET!" 
     But something stayed my hand. As safe a bet as assuming other people are stupid often is, you don't want that to be your default. I waited. From the radio that evening, I learned two inches of rain had fallen that day, the most rain in one day for the past 18 months. A rare event. 
   "What if ..." I thought. "The River Walk was designed to be inundated by the river, for an hour or two after freakish once-a-year deluges?" 
    As luck would have it, on Monday I spoke with Dan Burke, the chief engineer at the Department of Transportation. We were just winding up our conversation about an unrelated matter when I told him I had seen the submerged section. He said, in essence, yup, that's what's supposed to happen. 
     "Everything in the River Walk is designed to be flood tolerant," he said.
     The factuality of mainstream media is being emphasized a lot. But they also do the "pause and think" thing and the "do I have all the facts" thing and the "is this fair?" thing. Not everyone does, and we see the result.