In praise of enthusiasm

   "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     It wasn't what she said so much as how she said it.
    We were walking through the passenger area at the Lime Kiln dock on Put-in-Bay, hurrying to catch the ferry back to the mainland after a long weekend with old friends. Our dog Kitty, in a burst of zeal, extreme even for her, strained forward on her leash, making emphatic, urgent noises that sounded, I swear to God, like a chimpanzee going "Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!"
     As we passed the ticket taker, she said, "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     On the page, that statement might seem a wry observation of the dog's boundless energy. But spoken, there was a flatness, almost a deadness to it that chilled me, causing me to pause and look back at the speaker. A standard issue young person, female variant. Shorts and a Miller Boat Lines shirt. The aviator sunglasses kids wear nowadays.
     Some young people are buoyant, filled with squeals of delight and flights of wonderment. Others are languid. New to the world, they measure it and find it lacking. And they don't know about the second conditional tense. It really should be, "I wish I were that excited to go places," assuming she wasn't talking about wishing she had been more excited at a specific time in the past. But we'll let that go.
      Enthusiasm is pretty much squeezed out by the time adulthood hits.  Except of course for sports. And game shows. People go nuts on game shows.
      I would never hazard whether people are generally more or less enthusiastic now than before. They certainly seemed more worked up in previous times The 19th century gave us over-the-top art forms like opera and melodrama. And other cultures seem to froth quicker than ours. Few whirling dervishes twirl in Protestant Christianity. 
     Enthusiasm shouldn't be mistaken for zeal. We have no shortage of glittery-eyed fanatics and one-note obsessives. Mania isn't excitement, though perhaps the former has given the latter a bad name.  Howard Dean let loose one guttural "Hyaaaaah!" like he was driving cattle in 2004 and his campaign fell over dead.
     I'm as much immune to enthusiasm as anybody. Times when excitement seems in order I tend to dull it with literary references. I remember, heading to Wrigley Field to watch my younger son throw out the first pitch at the Cubs/Sox game, I described myself as feeling like Willy Loman heading to the Polo Grounds to watch Biff play in the championship. I guess that was my way of saying I was thrilled.
     I'm happy to go places, to get away, to Put-in-Bay, last April to Italy and France, last year to Japan and Washington, D.C. I'm glad to get away. But excited? Gee-I-can't-wait-to-get-there excited? Not really. 
     Maybe I should be grateful not to be susceptible to ardors. Many a folly has started with a whoop, hats thrown into the air and then over the top of the trench, into the teeth of the machine guns. Enthusiasm is by definition short-lived. "There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever,” Lord Byron wrote. “Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
     Still, the choices aren't continual enthusiasm or a life of sighing torpor. Maybe that teen's remark caught me off guard because I feel the same way. "I wish I was excited to go places." But how do you get that way?

 

   

The Fourth of July: Year One of the Trump Era

     Patriotism is a wonderful feeling. Love of country, your native land. Your home and all that comes with it: baseball, mom, apple pie and Chevrolet, or Ford, if you prefer. 
     The story of its birth, of brave men resisting tyranny, marshaling high ideals and lofty words to defeat a king. The flag, bold stripes of red and white, its original circle of 13 of stars representing "a new constellation," now a mighty grid of 50, one for each of our scattered, proud and distinctive states.
     Sure, that pride would have to be tempered with sadness. To love America doesn't require that you think her perfect. Conquering the continent came at the price of slaughtering the native inhabitants. The original sin of slavery, written into our Constitution, leading to a fratricidal Civil War. More Americans died fighting the Civil War—about half a million—than died in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, combined. 
    But those sorrows were safely confined to the past, and what country did not have worse? Looking around the world, at the legacy of madness burdening other nations, of repression and poverty and horror, we had to feel pretty good about ourselves. We may have troubles, but we sure aren't them.
    Now look at us.
    How are patriotic Americans supposed to place their hands over their hearts and say the pledge with the country in its present state? Having elected a fraud, a bully and a liar, bent on systematically tearing down our Democratic traditions—respect for the electoral process, the courts, the press. Our nation as an in-gathering of immigrants? A place where science is respected, where women and minorities, gays and lesbians, enjoy equal protection under the law? 
     The first 4th of July under the Trump presidency. A buffoon king propped up by his court of cringing underlings, flattering toadies, traitors, psychopaths and henchmen. The first of four, or eight, depending on how things go. And we really have no idea how that will unfold. Are we in the lull before the true calamity starts? Is it spring 1914? August 1939? Where all the elements of disaster are in place, waiting for the spark to touch it off. Half the nation is already in lingering shock that we could have elected someone so unfit. Will the other half quickly learn the cost of their folly, when some irreparable harm is done? Will they never learn, and race off toward calamity with an enthusiastic whoop?
    Has that harm already happened? Are we on the other side of the mirror now, bouncing down the proverbial slippery slope, watching mileposts of the unimaginable, boundaries of the unacceptable, flash past as we tumble into our new world? Will we look back on Trump with nostalgia as we squirm under the boot of a true tyrant? 
     Some days I worry that we are over-dramatizing the situation. We have sunk to some truly low states, endured truly mediocre presidents. Warren G. Harding. Richard M. Nixon. And even the okay presidents have committed extraordinary blunders. Lyndon B. Johnson is generally viewed as a competent president, who battled poverty and passed the Voters Rights Act, though his reputation was tarnished by Vietnam. Some 57,000 Americans died in that war; so that's a bit more than "tarnish." Trump hasn't caused anywhere near that kind of damage. Yet.
     Sometimes it seems we are under-reacting. One shock piles upon another and before any given misstep can be reacted to we are on to another. Reeling, half the country in a narcoleptic stupor, mumbling how they wish he's stop Tweeting, as if it were the expression of the president's thoughts that is the problem, and not the thoughts themselves—infantile, combative, petty, mean, stupid, preening.
     It's odd to take comfort in America's lapses. Interning its Japanese citizens. Institutionalizing racism. Enthroning one religion over another. But remembering those helps balance the shock of the present moment. We made mistakes, we recovered. We are a great country—still, despite our electoral calamity—not because we've never erred, never blundered, never betrayed our values. But because we always manage to right ourselves when we do. The march of freedom carried on.
    At least up to now. Anyone who feels our democratic liberty is guaranteed isn't paying attention. With a conscienceless buffoon swinging a pick axe daily, if not hourly, at our institutions, nothing is certain. The battle is going on right now, today, this minute. Anyone who ever wished they could have been there at the nation's birth, a cobbler in Lexington, a baker in Concord, so he could have heard the call, set down his hammer, his bowl, taken up his flintlock and rose to the defense of our aborning country, has to be a little grateful to be alive at this moment, this 4th, when the country needs every sound head and every stout heart it can muster. Every man and woman who believes in the United States of America at its best, not at its worst. This is the gravest sort of crisis—one self-imposed, by the cowardice of our leaders, the selfishness of our electorate, the loss of faith in ourselves and in each other. People have never needed an America more, and America has never needed her people more. This 4th of July, it might be hard to feel good about what our country is now. But we certainly can celebrate what it once was, and what it might yet be again. 

Night work daily

     CATAWBA, Ohio — People seem to believe our country has become one vast undifferentiated nowhere because there are McDonald's and Walmart's in every town and, in some cities, on every corner. But the truth is, there are subtle differences, if you look for them.
    Such as here at Bergman's, a 158-year-old farm stand on the north coast of Ohio, where we always stop on our way home from Put-in-Bay to load up on peaches and sweet corn, local honey and unusual spreads such as, this visit, carrot cake jam. We also bought shortcake because, really, how often do you get the chance?  
     It was before lunch, and my eyes immediately went to the various bags of Ballreich's potato chips. As I did, a certain odd word popped out. "Marcelled." 
     Marcelled. As a lad, I had read numerous books about the 1920s, and always thought of marcelling as something done to hair. I had never seen the word applied to potato chips, though it harmonized with the bold declaration "Since 1920." (Well, I must have seen the word; I've been coming to Bergman's for years; but  I never really noticed it before). 
     I knew what they meant, yet how did the word get to potato chips, one of the last consumer food products to resist globalization. Yes, Chicago's own Jays—no possessive since there is no "Jay"—went bankrupt in 2007 and suffered the indignity of having its brand taken over by Snyder's and production moved to the barrens of Indiana. But many regional diehards remain, such as Zapp's in Louisiana and Utz in Pennsylvania.  
     As if Ballreich's, made in nearby Tiffin, expects customers to be perplexed, the bags contain this definition on the back:

     Helpful. But it did not strike me as definitive. If someone challenged your source, "I got it off the back of a bag of potato chips" is not likely to convince. Something more authoritative was in order. 
     The corporate web site mentions the word early in their history: "Ballreich's chose to call their potato chips "marcelled" (which means "wavy"), taken from the popular ladies' wavy hairstyle of the 1920's.     
     But how did "marcel" come to describe hair? That seemed easy. I like to form theories of words as I go to look them up, and marcel was likely to come from some French hairdresser, Monsieur Marcel, or some such thing. I knew exactly where to look, too. The Oxford University Press' highly-useful 2oth Century Words. Sure enough, there it was.

   marcel v (1906) to wave (hair in the 'Marcel' fashion. This was a kind of artificial wave (known as a Marcel wave) produced by using heated curling-tongs. Fashionable around the turn of the century, it was named after Francois Marcel Grateau (1852-1936), the French hairdresser who invented it.

     Too easy. It's almost disappointing to strike gold so fast, and nail it so closely ahead of time—saps the thrill of the hunt, though it was a few years earlier than I—and Ballreich's—imagined.

Marcelled hair

      Of course that definition could mask earlier meanings. Off to the full Oxford English Dictionary. No "marcel" but the very close "marcella" which is defined as "a kind of twilled cotton or linen cloth," with "twilled' meaning having a series of parallel ridges, rather like the hairdo. And "marcela" dates back to 1802, so obviously M. Grateau was casting his seed onto well-tilled and fertile ground when his name was being lent to hair waves and, eventually, potato chips. 
     I don't want to give the impression that I spent my whole time in Put-in-Bay hunting for novel words. We went for walks on the beach, got ice cream in town, watched the parade and the arrival of the Budweiser's Clydesdales. There was the uncovering of unusual cuisines. Such as Friday night, at Mossbacks—no possessive, a lapse in my view— a bar/restaurant downtown. I didn't intend on ordering a burger, but scanned the list of burgers anyway, searching for novel approaches, and boy did I find one. 
     

    "Welcome to Ohio!" my friend laughed, when I pointed out the delicacy. The waitress stopped by at that moment. 
     "How drunk do customers have to be to order the Peanut Butter and Jelly Burger?" I asked. This didn't register.
     "I sold one tonight," she said.
     "Have you tried it?" I continued.
     "Not yet." 
     I could tell from her tone and expression that this interchange was entirely puzzling to her—I could have been inquiring what exactly was Gallic about these "French fries" and whether anyone actually ordered them. I let the matter drop and we ordered.
     The six-hour drive home Monday left plenty of time for musing over signs. Just as we were passing through Port Clinton one read "Fowl Foolers" which had me craning my neck, puzzled, examining the place of business as we rushed by and wondering exactly what the establishment could possibly do: produce tofu meals disguised as chickens? Perform chicken-oriented entertainments to soothe birds on their way to slaughter? The graphic—a duck in mid-flight, just begging to be shot out of the sky—gave away the game.
     "Decoys!" I said, triumphantly. (And bird calls. And more! Their web site). 
      The last challenge was on 94, heading north. An electronic sign that read, "NIGHT WORK DAILY." It communicated its message: Every night the construction that goes on during the day will go on into the the night. But it also bothered me. something was wrong. "WORK NIGHTLY" would be shorter and convey the same meaning. Though some drivers could be confused and mistakenly believe they were being urged to labor after sundown. "DAY WORK NIGHTLY" might be better or, better still, "ROAD WORK NIGHTLY."  
     That sign entertained me for minutes. "'Night Work' has an edge to it, like 'Sex Work,' I said to my wife. "Good title for a thriller."
     Back home, happily before my iMac, I logged into Amazon. Half a dozen novels entitled "Night Work," plus "Nightwork" by Irwin Shaw. There's nothing new under the sun, as we are told in Ecclesiastes 1:9.  
     

Hey! We have one of these back home!

    The stuff in the Louvre museum is original. That's sort of the point.
     That lady smiling enigmatically? The actual Mona Lisa, not a photocopy, but really painted with actual paint by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Winged Victory of Samothrace? A bona fide 2200-year-old white marble Hellenistic sculpture discovered on the island of Samothrace. If it were white styrofoam from Cleveland, well, it just wouldn't be the same. 

     Which is why I was a little flabbergasted, during my recent visit to Paris, to turn a corner and see the 20-foot wide, 16-foot tall Assyrian winged bull of Sargon II. Which, to my knowledge was still at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Excavated in what is now Iraq by University of Chicago archeologists in 1929, it had been shipped back to Chicago and been on display there since 1931. What was the beast doing here? Had it flown the coop?

    A little on-the-scene sleuthing uncovered this clue: 

     Even my junior high school French could make sense of "Reproduction." 

     Though still a mystery. Why place, among all those actually treasures, a copy of this particular piece?  I mean, it's nice, in a brawny, blanked-eyed way. But couldn't they do without it? They had lots of other fabulous ancient stuff—the Code of Hammurabi, for instance. 

     After a few seconds of on-line sleuthing, I learned that the "M. Bourbon" on the plaque was Michel Bourbon, a Parisian artist who came to Chicago in 1991 and led a team of craftsmen to create a mold around the 40-ton, 2600-year-old sculpture. It was a difficult job. To keep the limestone from absorbing the silicon used to make the mold, they had to rub it first with a special conservation soap.

    The Louvre wanted the model because, before the Maroons plucked away the 40-ton winged bull, the French had excavated the site, Dur-Sharrukin at what is now called Khorsabad, in northern Iraq and carted off Sargon II's throne room, with the exeption of the bull. Now they wanted the whole room displayed en suite. The odds of the Oriental Institute parting with its treasure were nil, so a copy of the big guy seemed in order. Four pounds of raw potatoes were rubbled inside the mold to smooth out the silicone. 

    They also used 8,000 pounds of plaster of Paris shipped from France. Not because the French plaster was considered superior to Midwestern plaster, though I suppose it was. But rather the work was sponsored by Lafarge Copee, a large French concrete and plaster company, and part of the deal was they fronted the cash, but the conservators were required to use their stuff. The potatoes, I assume, were local. (It was a good investment, if you notice the mention of "avec le concours de Lafarge"—24 years of subtle product placement at one of the landmarks of global culture; not bad for four tons of plaster).

    The moral of the story. Whenever we talk about antiquities being removed from the ancient world, the default attitude is that it's plunder. However it was acquired, we swiped their patrimony and ought to give it back one of these days. But the truth is more complicated. This giant winged bull was found at a site not far from Mosul, where ISIS just blew up an ancient mosque. If European nations hadn't spirited it to safety, a lot of this stuff would not have survived to this day. Then all we would have are copies.

State of the Blog: Year Four

     Year four, in the bag? As of midnight Friday. A little unsettling. When I started the blog, one of those glib little packets of online advice observed that most people abandon their blogs too soon, before they have a chance to succeed. Give it at least three years, they counseled. 

    And now I've given it four.
    Has it succeeded? Numerically, hell yeah. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. Year three, 577,617. And this year added ... 730,955.

     An increase of 153,338
    Or 26 percent.
    Hey...that's pretty good. Not only is it growing, but the growth is growing. The year before it grew 13.5 percent. This year growth almost doubled. (The fiscal year, so to speak, begins July 1 because it was in June, 2013 that I ... well, let's save that story. Let's just say the work situation had darkened).
    Last year we averaged 48,134 viewers a month; this year it's 60,812. Last April was my highest month ever, 65,893, buoyed by my most read post of all time this year, the April 1 Russian postal stamp April Fool's prank, though I'm even more proud that I successfully dragooned Tim O'Brien, a talented New York illustrator to help. That a highly paid professional would donate his work to my effort seemed a kind of validation.
    Speaking of validation, there was money. Eli's Cheesecake once again sponsored the blog during the Christmas holidays, and I thank Marc Schulman for his support. I've been meaning to approach small companies to run ads for a month or two, but haven't got around to it. I like the thought of bringing in companies I like—Lou Malnati's is a natural. A solid Northbrook-based company. They could pay me in pizza, and we could offer some as prizes in the Saturday contest, which I brought back briefly this year. Something to try for next year.
     Creatively, I feel pretty good about it. I've begun re-reading and sometimes reposting whatever was written on a certain day one, two, three (and now, I guess, four) years ago. And while sometimes it's something so topical or slight it doesn't merit a second look, usually it does, and I don't cringe for having written it.
     This past year was of course the Year of Trump, and while I can't even pretend that my contribution to the howl of protest has had any significance—the entire national media shining a klieg light on his flaws couldn't do that—I'm glad to have been doing my patriotic duty, manning my station, blazing away. There's a Norman Rockwell liberty bonds poster that comes to mind—I'll stick it atop the blog. Rockwell was a stickler for detail, and you might want to notice the long cloth ribbon trailing out of the water-cooled machine gun—he's about out of bullets, a nice touch.
     I don't feel like I am. The Internet rewards extremity—I heard the term "outrage porn" for the first time on Friday. So given what succeeds, and the generally contemplative tone that I try to maintain here, I believe my success, gradual though it is, should be encouraging, and I am duly encouraged.
     Thanks to you, needless to say. I'm pleased that the blog has a group of steady followers, Tate and Bitter Scribe and Bernie, Nikki and Wendy and Sandy, Thomas Evans and Paul Fedrick and Dennis Fisher, and all the rest. I generally am able to leave the comments section open and not monitored too closely, though occasionally some nest of malice will stir, acting under the impression that I maintain my blog so unbalanced individuals can post lengthy tirades against me and my family. I don't. The internet has no lack of opportunities to be petty and hateful, and I wouldn't tolerate it directed toward any anonymous commentator who is part of the every goddamn day family, if I may, I certainly won't tolerate it toward the hard-working proprietor. The trolls don't like it, but that's tough. 
     What else? A warm thank you to the Sun-Times, for allowing me to post my work here, albeit demanding that I link back to its godawful web site. Readers often ask me why it can't be improved, and I tell them, in perfect candor, that I have no idea whatsoever and I've never encountered anyone who did, or at least anyone who would admit to knowing. When I make a typo, as I do often (thank you John for your valiant and ceaseless work to birddog my mistakes; I owe you another cheesecake) I leap online to fix it, and I can't understand leaving something unrepaired that so irks loyal readers. (My hunch is that it makes a ton of money being that way). I would normally cringe from criticizing my beloved newspaper home but, really, fix the damn thing already. You said you would.
     But with the sale looming, I suppose that'll be addressed soon enough.
     Let's end on a positive note. Going into Year Five, I sometimes think of the blog as a vast iceberg of my writing. Floating placidly in the enormous electronic sea, buffeted by winds, but with no particular direction except to reflect the weather around it. An iceberg that, unlike regular icebergs, diminishing in the warming winds and relentless sun, will only grow. That the thing will remain, year in and year out, even after I stop. That should I step in front of a bus and the additions abruptly end, the blog will still be here as long as Google runs blogger, safe within the vault of some windowless server farm somewhere. That people might continue to find it, and be glad they did. I like that thought; it's reason enough to keep going.
     

   

News flash! Clinton Street wasn't named for Hillary Clinton

      July 1 is an important date in American history.
     And no, not because, barring a miracle, that date will mark the beginning of the third year Illinois has gone without a budget.
     As if that grim anniversary were not bad enough, this July 1 history taps us on the shoulder and reminds us who we used to be.
     Two hundred years ago Saturday, DeWitt Clinton was inaugurated as governor of New York.
     Who was DeWitt Clinton?  He was a politician who wanted to dig a canal across New York State. That way, Atlantic Ocean commerce could pass through the port of New York, move 150 miles down the Hudson River, meet the proposed canal at Albany, float west 350 miles, then enter Lake Erie at Buffalo.
     A project of this magnitude seemed to demand national effort. Clinton first tried to get the budding federal government to foot the bill. Thomas Jefferson dismissed the canal as  "little short of madness."
     But just as states now are picking up balls dropped by our paralyzed federal government, so Clinton brought the battle home. He ran for governor vowing to build the canal if elected.
     Clinton won, and was inaugurated July 1, 1817. Construction of the canal began ... wait for it ... three days later, on July 4, just outside Rome, New York. The heart breaks.
     The canal — 40 feet wide, four feet deep and 363 miles long — was dug by hand, with shovels and picks, with the occasional black powder explosion. It required 83 locks to surmount 675 feet of elevation. and aqueducts to cross streams. Before the canal, it cost $100 to move a ton of freight from New York City to Buffalo. After the canal opened in 1825, the same shipment cost $10 and got there in a third of the time. Tolls repaid the cost to dig the canal within a decade.

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Cotton Candy Grapes

     Occasionally, I will write about some less-than-urgent subject — walking the dog, a pair of gloves I like, an obscure book that caught my interest — and someone will shout that the state is in financial crisis, or Trump is president, or some other dire situation unfolding at the moment. The implication, or direct assertation, being: "How can you write about this trivial crap while ignoring important matters of extreme urgency?"
     And usually I don't reply, because the person asking has long established themselves as hating what I do anyway; they are just seizing on what they consider an example of my inadequacy to make their opinion known, again. As to why they hang around the blog of someone they hate and find inadequate, well, I can't answer that for them. Chronically unhappy people, I suppose, keeping their furnaces of displeasure well stoked, mistaking the compulsion to abuse others for rational conversation.
     Were I to bother answering, I would point out that I reject the notion that the world benefits by cathectic focus on our woes to the exclusion of everything else. That only by continual ventilating of our myriad of troubles can we ever hope to resolve them. That's zealotry, and mistaken. 
     I am not the only medium for expression, God knows. If a subject is deftly handled a dozen other places, I don't feel the need to pile on with something identical or even similar. If readers come here not knowing if they'll find some oblique approach to a familiar issue, or something about Cotton Candy Grapes, that is my intention.
    They're relatively new.  Created in 1992 by horitculturist David Cain of International Fruit Genetic in Bakersfield, California, not through gene modification, but by breeding together two strains of grapes, making the Cotton Candy Hybrid. They've also created strawberry, mango and pineapple flavors, and are hoping to train consumers to expect grapes in a range of tastes and textures.
     "When you go to the supermarket, there's like 15 kinds of apples — Fuji, Pink Lady, Gala, Braeburn. The list goes on," Cain told The Salt website. "We want to give consumers the same array of flavors for grapes."

    My wife noticed them at Sunset Foods as we were shopping together one evening. As much as I'm against nibbling on food you haven't paid for, she—in good Eve fashion—prevailed on me to sample a grape. It tasted exactly like cotton candy. So we plunked down $3.99 for a one-pound bag. 

    And here's the strange part. When we got them home, most didn't taste like cotton candy. Maybe chilling them was the problem. Or some dynamic of the store. I'd eat 10, and only one would have a vague cotton candy-like taste. Maybe the effect is psychological, or I got a bad batch. I can't explain it, and the online literature seems to be full of praise, so I'm sure it's me. Though when I tried one in the store, it was like eating cotton candy at the circus. At home, not so much. I can't explain it.

     Not the weightiest question to raise, but you can't walk into a bakery expecting to buy oil for your car. Every establishment is entitled to stock his shelves as he pleases, and I don't see why I should be castigated for not being what I've never  been, wanted to be, or had any intention of becoming.