A crumpled photo, and a daughter's search for the father she never met

     This is an odd, out-of-left-field story, my second big Sunday feature in two weeks. It happened this way—in March, Monica Scanlon called me. She had read "Drunkard" and for some reason thought I could help her find her father. Without the photograph above I don't think I would have written anything. But the fading Kodochrome was just the tantalizing detail that caught my interest. I spoke to her, spoke to her adoptive parents and her birth mother, at length, and something unexpected came into play. They were all so candid, unusually candid, that I felt I had a story, not so much because what they had to say was extraordinary, but the opposite.  It was ordinary, human, the sort of thing you don't see in the paper much. I set it aside for almost two months, went to Europe, finished the long falling piece that ran last week, and then luckily took it up again. I half expected the paper to shrug it off, but thankfully Paul Saltzman, our Sunday editor, liked it. 

     Monica Scanlon has never seen her father's face. Not in person. Not yet.
     All she has seen is one crumpled color photograph, nearly half a century old.
     The Greenville, South Carolina, woman, who’s the controller for a big construction company, was born in Memphis at a home for unwed mothers. Her mom was a Tennessee teenager who got in trouble with a boy from Chicago.

     It was 1970. Being pregnant without benefit of marriage back then, especially if you were Catholic, was shameful, something to be hidden. Her brother and sister wouldn't even learn about the baby until years later. 
     The teenager named her newborn "Joan" — the baby's grandmother's name — in hopes her mother would soften and let her keep the girl. She didn't. Signing away her rights, weeping, she left her dark-haired daughter at an orphanage, saying goodbye to her forever, she thought.
     Five weeks later, on Oct. 12, 1970, the phone rang at the Nashville home of Dave and Pat Spilker. After several miscarriages over their five-year marriage, the couple had registered with Catholic Social Services. The caller said a baby was available. Pat Spilker, surprised, said the first thing that came to mind: They were supposed to go on vacation to Florida the next day.
     "Do you want this baby, or do you want to go on vacation?" the lady on the phone asked.
     They wanted a baby. They had only a few hours to prepare for the transition from childlessness to parenthood. Florida would wait.
     "I called my friend Carol and told her, 'We have to pick up our baby tomorrow I don't have one thing,' " Pat Spilker says. "She gave me some shirts and this box to bring the baby home in — a white, rectangular-shaped box with a little soft pad in it. Babies born in Madison, Tennessee, at that time came home in these boxes."

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The Ice Cream Truck Reflex

    Hapax legomenon is Greek -- well, the Latinized form of Greek, ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "thing once said."
    It's an obscure literary term referring to words that appear once in the whole swoop of literature, or once within an author's oeuvre. I learned it while reading Dante commentary -- scholars sometimes refer to words that appear just once in the 14,233 lines of The Divine Comedy as being "hapax."
    For example. In Robert and Jean Hollander's fine translation of Paradiso, the 97th line of the 32nd canto, Rispuose a la divina cantilena -- "From every side the blessed court all sang" — is explained by a lengthy note beginning, "The word cantilena, a hapax, would seem to refer specifically to Gabriel's song..." and going on to observe that Dante seems to have coined the word.
     I began writing yesterday's column about solar eclipse being a big deal in Carbondale—a city named for the coal found therein—with a digression explaining hapax, as a prelude to explaining a phenomenon I call the "Ice Cream Truck Reflex."
    The Ice Cream Truck Reflex is when you hear the distant tinkling of an ice cream truck, the grating melody of "Turkey in the Straw" or "Pop Goes the Weasel" or whatever, and feel an overwhelming impulse to grab change -- or I guess now, a few bills -- and run buy ice cream novelties. 
    The phenomenon has an especially powerful hold over children, transforming them from summer calm immediately into frantic, pleading panic by the approach of the truck. The moment to act is now! But even an adult who might draw back in horror at the prospect of paying $9 for a a half dozen Fudgicles at Sunset Foods, pulling their hand away as if the box were on fire, will eagerly shell out $1.50 for the same pop in front of a big white boxy truck. Better that than to lose your one chance.
     It is a term that I think of when people are driven to extremes by ephemeral situations -- those paying $500 a night to go to Carbondale, for instance, to see a solar eclipse. (Which I am a little reluctant to pooh-pooh, solar eclipses supposedly a superlative natural wonder. I'll know more in August).
    A better example was the Millennium, when people felt obligated to hie themselves to the Pyramids, or shell out some fortune to usher in the 21st century (setting aside the tiresome argument of when that actually began) because it only comes around once in life.
   Something fleeting, something happening once, or rarely. It mesmerizes us. Not realizing that every moment happens once, and many things occur rarely.
   Before using the term, I was curious as to where "Ice Cream Truck Reflex" came from, and plugged the term into Google. Up popped one hit, a kind of Google hapax. When does that happen? 
    Turns out I mentioned the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, in a column in 2010. The paper doesn't keep its columns up that long, but some news aggregator caught it. One reference. And that's it. 
    I decided that my comment on hapax legomenon and the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, though far shorter than this, was too much for a column of 669 words purportedly about solar eclipse opportunism in Carbondale.
    And besides, maybe it'll upset that annoying reader who keeps harping about the state budget.
    It's neat to coin a term as useful as the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, and odd to think that on Friday there was one result. I wonder how quickly it'll spread, or if it will spread. Anyway, a useful concept to keep in your intellectual tool box. When presented with a fleeting opportunity, you can ask: is this something I want, or something I feel compelled to do because the chance is here in front of me now? A lot of people don't ask that question, to their eventual misfortune. 

The twirling solar system pauses to focus on ... Carbondale

     The Train Inn has four rooms and two cabins. All of them are available for the highly coveted days around Aug. 21, when the twirling clockwork of the universe, no less, has placed humble Carbondale smack dab in the center of an event of cosmic magnificence: the total eclipse of the sun.
     No one has booked a room, though not for want of trying.
     "I've had 4,000 plus calls," said Paul Lewers, owner of the train-themed bed and breakfast. "I started getting requests five years ago: the first was an astronomy professor from Sweden."
     And why hasn't he booked any?
     "I'm not coming up with a price," he explained. "I didn't want to have them re-sold."
     Usually, rooms there start at $125, swelling to $245 for prime Southern Illinois University events. But the eclipse, reaching totality longer in Carbondale than any other place in the country, ah, eclipses any football game or graduation. Carbondale businesses are hoping to squeeze every dime out of pilgrim sky gazers. The Holiday Inn is asking $499 a night, paid in advance. SIU is renting out four-person dorm suites: $800 for three nights ("That's only $66 per person per night" an SIU representative helpfully pointed out).
     The university has an eclipse website with an end-of-the-world countdown clock. It's teaming with NASA, the Adler Planetarium and the Louisiana Space Consortium for a two-day celebration that is part tail-gate blowout, part science fair. Aug. 21 was also to be the first day of SIU classes, but those were canceled so as not to distract from the business at hand.

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Heaven, charred

     I can't remember a trip that settled as gently into memory as our April trek through Italy and France. The cities—Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris. The museums. The streets.
     And of course the food. While we ate at some fancy places—particular Astrance in Paris, one of the 50 best restaurants in the world, and enjoyed all sorts of exotic dishes, such as truffles, caviar, crepes, one surprising dish lingers as our hands-down favorite: a head of cauliflower.
    And the amazing thing is, I don't even like cauliflower.
    But we certainly liked this, served up the leaves charred on the outside, hot and moist and salty on the inside, fresh off the grill at Miznon, a packed restaurant in the Jewish quarter of Paris.
    That was our lunch. Cauliflower, artichokes and ... big eyes on my part ... broccoli.
    I'm writing this not in the hope that I can convey the savory joy of that vegetable. Nor because I really expect you to rush there and order it. But because we're tried to replicate it on our backyard grill and can't come close.  We assume you have to gently boil the cauliflower first. But we haven't achieved the tasty tenderness of Miznon. We should have quizzed them, but they were so busy, plus the language barrier.
     So ... readers ... any tips for grilling entire heads of cauliflower? We know it can be done to perfection. But how?

  

Reaction to 'Julius Caesar' truly a tragedy

     "Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges."
     That's Shakespeare, not me, I should mention, lest I be accused of plagiarism.
     I'm not even sure what a "whirligig" is — a spinning contraption, I imagine. (Bingo. "A toy that spins around," the dictionary tells us, "a top or a pinwheel.")
     As to what the sentence means, being literature, it's open to interpretation. I'd guess it's a fancy way of saying, "You get what you pay for."
     Do we ever. The initial pushback against Donald Trump — the mass protests, the investigations — are encouraging to Democrats eager to soften the throbbing sting of our country electing this guy.
     But being liberals, we are allowed — nay, required — to question our own assumptions. The idea that Trump's election awoke this slumbering liberal behemoth that somehow couldn't get out of bed Nov. 8 has to be, to some degree, a self-flattering narrative, a comforting illusion.
     There's a lot of that going around. There is pushback, sure. But the country is also becoming more Trumpian every day. It has to.
     For instance, The Public Theater production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in New York's Central Park just lost two sponsors...

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Are they out there?

    If you don't see something, despite looking for it, it could be:
   A) it isn't there.
   B) it is there, but occurring outside of your range of vision.
    A new Facebook friend pointed out the impossibility of persuading anybody who supports Donald Trump and his malignant botch of a presidency to reconsider their position.
   "A popular meme goes around Facebook saying that nobody’s mind is changed by seeing anything on social media," she wrote.   
    That sounds true. As the Trump disaster unfolds, drip drip drip, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, there is no misstep that can't be explained away. Colluding with Russia? Well, Russia ain't so bad. Firing the FBI director to squelch the investigation? Well, he's allowed to do that. Receiving money from foreign governments in violation of the Constitution? Good business!
     At no point does anyone say, "Hmmm...is this what I voted for?"
     I've never seen, or heard of it.
     Is there anyone, in the United State of America, who voted for Trump, but now, seeing him in operation, thinks,"Golly, I might have made a mistake."
    Because I've never gotten an email, or a letter, or a phone call that betrays even a whisper of that sentiment. Or even the beginning of that sentiment. Rather, we get what is popularly referred to as "doubling down." Angry, aggrieved bemoaning of the unfairness facing our president, the greatest president ever, mixed with condemnations of the bitch he defeated, and nostalgic denunciations of the Muslim sleeper agent he replaced.
    So I'm asking you, the great unseen EGD audience. Have any of you, in your personal experience, heard of anyone dissatisfied with how Trump is performing in the White House? If so, under what circumstances -- and no names, please. I don't want to out anybody or expose them to the caustic ridicule and abuse that passes for political argument from the Republican camp.
    And if not -- and I would guess that common answer is "no" — what does that mean for our country? Even should Trump be booted from office—a long shot—or quit, bored, or be riven with a thunderbolt by the severe God of Deuteronomy, how can we face our difficult American future, knowing that so many of our brethren are blind to the evidence of their senses? Or what would be the evidence of their senses, if those senses could receive evidence?
    We're sorta screwed. Are we not?

Trump Tower? No, I live at 401 N. Wabash....

The hated letters went up on Trump Tower three years ago this week.

     We all know how well Donald Trump is doing as a president.
     Well, not all of us know. Thirty-seven percent of the country seems locked in a kind of trance, a willed blindness almost as unsettling to consider as the grim carnival they ignore.
     Still, many of us are painfully aware of how Trump is performing as president.
     But how is the Trump brand?
     Those hotels and condos and neckties. Will they, boosted by the prestige of the presidency, become a permanent part of the consumer landscape, even after the 45th president, please God, moves on? Is “Trump” the next Coke or Chevy?
     Or will the name vanish as quickly as Jimmy Carter peanut keepsakes?
     I will admit bias. I thought “Trump” represented the most vapid kind of tin-plated junk before he ran for president. I’d compare the Trump brand to the Playboy rabbit logo. On the rare occasions you see it, on someone’s car bumper, you do not think, “Oh, look, Playboy. The driver must do very well with highly attractive women and own a $25,000 stereo system.” Rather, the rabbit represents a kind of naive yearning, a juvenile greed that is almost sweet.
     But my view can be set aside. We are a marketing capital, here in Chicago. Surely experts are observing this process.

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