Deploy the big chicken

     The restaurant business is tough. You need good food. A good space. Good service. Good publicity. And a big heaping serving of good luck. Over and over and over. It's a wonder any of them ever work, and most don't. The pudding never sets, the miracle never arrives.  It's unfair to go to a place too soon, before they've worked out the kinks. But wait too long and it may be gone. 
     Who doesn't want a good restaurant a few steps from home? So I've been following with more than passing interest developments at the corner of Shermer and Walters in Northbrook, ground floor of a rounded brick office building just around the corner from where we live. Hope mingled with disappointment, rooting for something to work, invariably let down. 
     My Pie, a branch of venerable Chicago pizzeria, opened in 2009. The place had fans, though we were not one of them. We went twice. It wasn't bad, but Lou Malnatti's is practically across the street. I just wasn't willing to forgo a single Lou Malnatti's pizza in order to support this new place. Do that, and I'd always be short one Lou's pizza. I would never catch up. It lasted a little more than two years.
     In 2015, Agave, a generic Mexican restaurant opened. I knew it was doomed right away before stepping foot inside, because the sign was mounted crooked. They didn't even bother taking down the Mi Pie sign brackets. Really. If you can't get your damn sign straight, what can you do? 
    Charitable soul that I am, I went anyway. Ate some expensive, utterly unremarkable Mexican chow, set down by an indifferent waitress, in a room that was nearly unadorned.  
    Kind soul that I am, I held my tongue, until after it failed. Which took about a year.
     The spot is not even a block from my house. You have to have pity on your neighbors. Pity on restaurants. They're hanging off a cliff; don't jump on their fingers.
     Then, six months ago, Drumstix. I immediately went with my younger son and we happily fed. Moist chicken. Homemade baked beans. Mmm. We were satisfied but then, we are boys and boys tend to like food that can be chewed and swallowed. I hurried back with my wife, a far more discerning eater than I. She pointed out that the friend chicken breast that I celebrated for being juicy was in fact soggy. 
    "Fried chicken is supposed to be crispy," she said.  That wasn't a factor for me, because I scraped off the skin off before eating it.  But I saw her point.
     I was tempted to give the place another try -- sometimes restaurants take time to find their groove, and you need to give them a chance. Support the home team. But my wife was underwhelmed, end of story. There are many other places to eat. I almost pressed. But their signs are paper, tucked inside the windows. Really? Is that the best you can do? The My Pie lighting bracket is still up, illuminating nothing. I know I shouldn't, but I put an almost talismanic importance onto restaurant signs. They reveal the soul within. Months passed.
     And that might have been it. But a couple days ago, this 7-foot-tall chicken arrived out front, set off by his own little wrought iron fence.  "Did you see the chicken?" my wife said. Of course I did. Nothing more really needed to be said between us. We knew what we had to do immediately. You must respect effort like that. Particularly in Northbrook. I wish I had been at the zoning meeting where they finessed the chicken past the board. (Actually, it is on private land, the owner tells me, so zoning approval was not necessary. That explains its presence). 
      We saw the chicken Tuesday. On Thursday night we were at Drumstix for dinner. My wife liked her fish and chips far more than she had liked the chicken. I tried a half slab of ribs. And while it is no Green Street Smoked Meats, no Smoque, Not sweet, as I like ribs, but peppery, I also had no trouble polishing them off, sucking the bones. The place was sunlit and populated with diners, with families. The guy bussing our table was a kid we've known since kindergarten, and we caught up happily. The music was lively, trains passed by outside. We both felt pushed over the hump. We weren't smitten with the food, not yet anyway, but we'd give it another try. You sort of have to -- I mean, look at that chicken. It's a very big chicken.
     Or is it a rooster? The saying "If it crows, it's a rooster, if it lays an egg, it's a hen" is not enormously helpful in this situation. I'm sticking with a chicken because, frankly, a chicken is funnier. 
     Either way, exactly the sort of thing Northbrook so desperately needs.
    "Maybe I'll really like the chicken pot pie..." I said, hopefully. They also have red velvet cake on the menu. It is very hard to wreck red velvet cake. 
     Most people push at their dreams but feebly. A first draft, shopped around a few publishers and then consigned to a drawer forever. A half-assed effort, success fails to arrive immediately, then straight to collapse, surrender and bitterness. But some people roll up their sleeves, cock their heads, squint one eye, and deploy the big chicken. You have to respect that.

 

Lucky

The Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

     So much of life is mere luck. We work hard, and do our best, and are careful as we go about our business. We urge our children to be cautious too, then send them out into the world with nothing more protective than a flimsy veil of good wishes and sincere prayers. When the truth is, it's all out of our hands. Sometimes life comes down to how the dice tumble, to where you are sitting when the shadow falls. 
     A classmate of our older son's was killed last week in Denmark, someone he knew, in his circle of close friends freshman year, someone my wife and I had met at school, a dynamic 21-year-old young woman. Through no fault of her own -- the small boat she was riding in on in Copenhagen harbor was hit by a jet ski, killing her and another student from Massachusetts. A senseless, tragic accident. 
     I was talking to a friend at work about it, about the complex feelings of muted sorrow, general unease, and inexpressible sympathy for her parents, of not being able to imagine what it must be like for them, of not even being sure whether it is something others should presume to think about. She shared this poem with me, and I am sharing it with you.

Any Case

–  by Wislawa Szymborska

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A frame, a turn, an inch, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.
What would have happened if a hand, a leg,
One step, a hair away?

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?
The net’s mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?
I can’t stop wondering at it, can’t be silent enough.
Listen,
How quickly your heart is beating in me.         
    —translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

Time to revise ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’

     Chicago was founded by Frenchmen.
     A fact so little recognized, it looks strange in print. But true. The city began with Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette, born in France, arriving in 1673 to preach le bon Dieu to Native Americans. His canoemate was fur trader Louis Jolliet, born in French Quebec. And don't forget Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the city's first permanent resident. He is usually thought of as black and Haitian, period, ignoring that Haiti was, at the time, like a third of the United States including Illinois, under the control of France.
     Even the word “Chicago” is a French mash of the Algonquin name for the place, having to do either with onions or bad smells (the word “skunk” is related).
     Why this history? Facebook erupted in cries of “Vive la France” at Sunday’s victory of centrist Emmanuel Macron over nationalist Marine Le Pen. Half of America rejoiced, congratulating French friends.
     “I think everybody in America was quite relieved, even more than in France,” said Marie Weber, brand specialist at the Alliance Française, a Chicago cultural center.  

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Better than money

 

     I don't expect that many people visiting Los Angeles go with the specific intention of visiting the Wells Fargo History Museum on South Grand Avenue. I certainly didn't. It's small, and modest, and off the beaten track. I had never heard of it.
     But my accommodating brother-in-law, Don, took us by during a tour of his neighborhood, and I was entranced. 
     Not so much with the stage coach or the gold ingots or the other romantic Old West trappings -- the saddle bags, the telegraph, the copper scales and such. Those were nice.

     But I was captivated by the advertising promoting what is now commonplace: credit cards and 24-hour automated tellers, which were given women's names to make them less mechanized and forbidding. 
      People had to be taught how these systems worked, and reassured that their money would be safe in them. It was a long process — only recently did I stop counting the cash that an ATM spits out —what's the point? It's always correct.
     Credit cards are older than I am — they showed up in the late 1950s as a benefit for business travelers. But I remember the advent of ATMs. Edie and I still smile thinking of how, more than 30 years ago, we approached the first cash machine we had to use, cautiously and not without a trace of fear, as if it might bite us.  To see those twenties spitting out of a slot in a wall -- amazing!
    You really don't need cash much—every fast food joint, convenience store and taxicab accepts a credit or cash card. I'd hate to try to put a date on cash falling away almost entirely: five years? Ten? Fifteen, tops? The new ads, if they are even required, might say, "Better than money." 
    How will our grandchildren view the shift? Like an unimaginable bother? Similar to washing clothes against a rock? Or will hard currency and coinage seem tokens from a lost, romantic past, the way we view candle-lit homes and travel on horseback? Most likely they'll never think about it at all. 

   

All of Illinois is losing "custody."

Tuilleries garden, Paris.

     The statistic that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce is a dusty pre-sexual revolution relic. Demanding people to get married before they canoodle led to unwise, short-lived marriages. With couples getting married at older, more discerning ages, now only about a third of marriages fall apart.
     Still a lot.
     Despite the significance of divorce, I avoid the topic. Probably because it usually arrives at my doorstep in the form of an unhappy, divorcing spouse laying out his — it’s invariably a guy — tale of woe. I explain the need to present the other side, which surprises him, and he lets the matter drop. Just as well, because each divorce is unique if not strange, sad and petty, and so complicated it’s not worth the space to explain.
     Drew Vaughn is not a divorcing spouse, however, but a divorce attorney. He contacted me with actual news — news to me, anyway — that Illinois divorce law is going through a multiyear overhauling, and July 1 two key elements are changing — custody and child support — and not for the better, according to him.
     “Good in concept, awful in practice,” he wrote in an email. “This new law intends to make people believe it is more fair by considering the income of both spouses. Unfortunately, I expect that this will incentivize parenting schedules built around financial concerns and not what’s best for the children.”

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Do what the French do, but not how the French do it.

     Today is the deciding run-off vote in the French presidential election, pitting nationalist bigot Marine Le Pen against centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron.   
     All indications point to Macron winning against the opponent he dubbed "the high priestess of fear." And while shocks such as the one delivered in this country Nov. 8 are in the realm of possibility, smart money says the French, though also dissatisfied with politicians, are not willing to leap suicidally out of the European Union, like the Brits, nor hand their country over to foaming demagogues, as the United States has done. 
     They can learn from us. The hope of Americans learning from the French is a dicier proposition. We don't look abroad for answers much, and when we do, we tend to limit our thinking and cherry pick our points, as this column from nearly a decade ago reminds us. Notice the foreshadowing of this week's health care debacle. 

LE JOUR DE ENERGIE ATOMIQUE EST ARRIVE !

     Holding two thoughts in your head can be a challenge. I know -- I can't tell you how many times I've put out the flag because it's a federal holiday, then later wondered when the mail would show up, before making the connection -- oh yeah, federal holiday, no mail.
      At least the two thoughts collide, eventually. Some people, there just isn't room for a pair. They can hold tight to one idea, if they concentrate, but should a second concept arrive, well, the first one slips from grasp and is lost.
     Sunday, I wrote about nuclear power, about how John McCain, when he could force himself to pause from damning Barack Obama as a socialist, said he would build 45 nuclear reactors and put the waste, well, somewhere.
     That seemed to me to be highly unrealistic, and struck a friend in the nuclear industry as "crazy." We couldn't build that many reactors.
     Readers, needless to say, rallied behind the infinite capacity of the United States to do anything, in theory.
     "So Neil, France could do it but the United States can't?" a reader wrote. "We can't do something the French can?"
     In a word? No, we can't. Yes, France has 59 nuclear reactors generating 87 percent of its electricity. But France is -- prepare yourself for a bad word! -- a socialist state. The French electric utility, Electricite de France, was nationalized in 1946, and while shares were offered for public sale a few years back, the government still owns 85 percent of the nation's nuclear power plants.
     So nuclear power works -- in socialist France. But we hate socialism, remember? It might as well be terrorism, to hear how the Republicans throw the word around, no further elaboration necessary. Although we didn't seem to hate it when we were nationalizing banks and mortgage lenders a few weeks back.
     "This 'can't do' attitude of yours stinks," the reader continued. "The United States has done anything it has set its mind to. We walked on the moon in less than 10 years after JFK proposed it."

   Again, that was the government. The moon landing was another socialist boondoggle, right up there with Canadian health care. And the 'can't do' attitude isn't mine; it belongs to those who -- rather unpatriotically, in my mind -- believe our government is inherently bad and must be starved to death until it improves.
     It's people like John McCain who damn, for instance, any government effort to fix our tragically deficient health care system as "socialist" out of one corner of their mouths while simultaneously proposing grand, expensive new government energy endeavors out of the other. (It's a very selective habit -- farm subsidies? God's given right. Safety standards? The intrusive hand of Big Brother).
     The French -- as the reader accused me of believing -- are not "better than us." But like all Europeans, and most industrialized countries for that matter, they understand that certain areas, such as roads, nuclear power and health care, are the duty of government.
     France not only tops the world when it comes to generating nuclear power. It also has the sixth-lowest infant mortality rate -- 3.3 deaths per 1,000 live births. The United States is 29th in infant mortality, tied with Poland and Slovakia, with 6.7 deaths, twice France's average.
     And in case you think that means the United States is twice as good as France, please go back and re-read the preceding paragraph, slowly. Or ask a friend to talk you through it before writing to me.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Did you notice my restraint when dealing with the French? I was bearing in mind, as Napoleon said, "the French complain of everything and always." But let's end with Robert Morley, who sums it up perfectly:
     The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 20, 2008

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Dropping the Saturday fun activity must have been a good idea, because nobody ever mentioned it, never mind complained, and I never gave the change a second thought. 
     Until Monday. My pal Bill Savage, Northwestern literature professor, baseball scholar, and salvager of lost works, was talking about the Women's Christian Temperance Union and prohibition at the Whiskey Thief bar in Evanston. I thought I'd slide by for illumination. I enjoyed listening rather than taking notes, so can only touch upon how he wove the national drive against alcohol to class, culture and politics. 
    Let's put it this way: the goal wasn't so much to suppress booze as to thwart the sort of people who drank it. 
     The talk was to promote publication of George Ade's "The Old-Time Saloon," a 1931 celebration of drinking establishments that Bill rescued from obscurity and released, with the help of the University of Chicago Press, including his own sharp forward and notes. 
      When Bill was done, I thought I would lead the charge and buy a copy. The trouble was, I already have two copies of my own. A dilemma I brushed aside by rationalizing that I could give the book away here, by reviving the contest just this once. I asked him to sign it to the winner and he did.
     A toughie, I know. But one reason I was so happy about scrapping this is that you guys always solve it within the first 10 minutes. Not so, I have reason to believe, today. Where is this charming old car dealership sign? Because it is so difficult, I will give a hint: it is more than 80, but less than 100 miles from Chicago. The prize is a funny, thought-provoking and timeless read and well worth the effort. Good luck.