I love wordplay as much as the next guy. However...

 

    And people think "every goddamn day" is edgy...
    Wednesday I was leaving the Department of Motor Vehicles—after a more than two hour wait for a simple driver's license renewal; get on the stick, Jesse White. 
     There it was, in the parking lot. I raced over, pulling out my iPhone.
    But clicking a few pictures was not enough.
    I had to know. 
    "Why are you asking?" said the voice that answered the number a few hours later. 
     I explained.
     "It happened in a bar," owner Ross Reed began. "Forty years ago."
    "Seandell's," he continued, a bar in Lincolnshire, at Milwaukee Avenue and 22, now long gone. "As red neck as red neck gets."
     He was in the tree business, understand. Sold a lot of firewood. Firewood goes in fireplaces. Creating smoke, that billows up chimneys and, eventually, over time, dirties them. 
     "So many people were asking who I knew in the cleaning business," said Reed. The tree business cools down the in fall, just when the chimney-cleaning business heats up. 
     "One night I was out with the boys in 1980, and I said, 'I kinda like sitting in a nice warm living room instead of being up a tree in a blizzard,'" Reed said.
    He started the business with a landscaper friend, Kevin Winkler. A business needs a name. Names were discussed. A certain sooty pun was unspooled. 
    "They said 'No way' and I said, 'watch me' and it's been Ash Wipe ever since."
     Officialdom didn't blink. 
    "Oh hell, I'm incorporated with the state, my own trademark," he said. "If the government can accept it...."
    So can the chimney-owning residents of the tony North Shore? So does the name attract customers? Or drive them away?
    "A little of both." 
    But between the two, business booms.
    "It's crazy," said Reed, 59. "Here it is, middle of July, I'm absolutely slammed. I don't advertise."
    With that truck you don't have to.
   Ever find any interesting stuff clogging up chimneys?
    "Lots of times you find animals," Reed said. "The coolest thing I found is a letter to Santa Claus written by a girl named Sarah. The family in the house had been there 25 years and didn't have a Sarah. They knew the people they bought the house from: no Sarah. I could tell from the dolls and toys she asked for, the letter was from 1910, 1915, discolored from time. It had gotten stuck up behind the damper. The lady from the house wanted it; I would have framed it, hung it up. I hope she kept it. That's one of the cooler things. I've been waiting to find the box of diamonds that grandpa hid up a chimney, but it hasn't happened yet."

    We talked for a long time. Sadly, some of the more interesting things he made me promise not to repeat here, and I'm a man of my word. These rich people and their fireplaces...

     While on the subject. How do you clean a chimney?
    "Brushes," Reed said. "You send 'em up. "You do it from the bottom up, because if you do it from the top up you got no control. You push the brush up, with a vacuum running, to catch it before it gets out of hand. In some of those mansions in Lake Forest: white carpet, white furniture, white dog, white wife... you get one speck of it in there and you're in trouble."
     No doubt. I did not envy the man his clientele. 
     A cleaning costs $150 to $200, "depending on how far I have to drive." A mansion can have five fireplaces. Or more. He's cleaned the fireplaces of homes about to be torn down. He's cleaned the chimneys for artificial fireplaces.
     "You really don't got to clean 'em with gas logs," he said. "I tell 'em that. They say, 'Well, I'll feel better if you do it.' My honesty only goes so far. 'You got seven fireplaces. You want me to pretend like I cleaned 'em? Okay...'"
    Then, out of the blue.
    "I don't wear my top hat anymore. It's in a drawer, but I don't wear them."
    But you did?
    I started in '79. I have hats as old as I am. The real McCoy. I bought it because that's what chimney sweeps wear. If you see someone up there in blue jeans ..." 
     He paused, to let the thought sink in. "But if they're up there in a top hat, you know immediately what they're doing."
      He said that chimney cleaning began in Germany 800 or 900 years ago, and the top hat tradition began with undertakers throwing away their top hats and tails and chimney sweeps taking them. 
     We talked a long time, and I hung up with reluctance, wishing I had a fireplace.


  




     

What's something that women in prison just can't get enough of? Books

Perimeter fence, Cook County Jail

     Among the hardships of prison — bars, noise, other prisoners — there is the trouble with books.

     Prison libraries tend to be small, their books old, dated and falling apart from use. And in a penal version of the old joke about the food at a Catskills resort being lousy and in such small portions, use of these small, out-of-date, battered prison libraries tends to be heavily restricted.
     “Sometimes a woman or man might have access for half an hour every two months,” said Vicki White, a volunteer at Chicago Books to Women in Prison, a group that does just what its name implies.
     White contacted me because she saw that “Out of the Wreck I Rise,” the literary recovery book I wrote with Sara Bader, had come out in paperback — the only person in the wide world who noticed, as far as I can tell. Would I consider, she wondered, donating 20 copies for female inmates, who often struggle with addiction.     

Vicki White

 

    “Right,” I thought. “Like that’s going to happen.”
     Still, I was curious about the group. The paperback publication is significant to them because they can’t send hardback books.
     “Many prisons require paperback only — security issues,” White said.
     When CBWP was founded in 2002 it originally shipped books to prisons in bulk, where the boxes would sit in mailrooms, unopened. So the founders assembled a library — about 8,000 volumes now — and began filling specific requests from prisoners.

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'No doubt'

Thomas Hobbes

     "Scientia potentia est," Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan. "Knowledge itself is power." 
     Which is why this particular era in our nation's checkered history can be thought of as The Great Abdication of American Power, since we are in full retreat from what we know to be true, racing willy-nilly to embrace what our leaders wish were true.

     Accusations of the president colluding with Russia? A "witch hunt." Again and again, drilled into us. Before a charge is leveled or evidence shown. 
    Is the president a traitor? Half the country doesn't know and doesn't care and never will.
    The respected lawman conducting the investigation? Hopelessly compromised. The media? Fake. Except for news flattering Trump. That always seems on-the-level. 
    Does this contradiction bother millions of Americans? No.

    We act like what we don't know won't hurt us. When it can and does and will. Consider climate change. 
     The weather ratchets warmer, day by day, year by year, gradually, on average. It's hotter than it's ever been. That warm weather drives storms, fires. We see it all around us. 
     The nations of the world gathered, agreed to do something with the Paris climate agreement. It wasn't a lot, but it was a start.
    Then Trump was elected. And our country crawled before industry, in general, and the coal industry in particular, naming a paid lobbyist, Scott Pruitt, as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a government body he used to regularly sue.

     Being a shill of the coal industry—a paid lobbyist who continued to hoover up favors as EPA head—did not end Scott Pruitt's career with the federal government last Thursday, when the president accepted his resignation.
     Trump knew what they were getting. Pruitt was chosen because he was a shill. Pruitt was Oklahoma attorney general and a hireling for the coal industry. Since the complexity of that phrase might elude some readers, I should elaborate: the fossil fuel industry paid him hundred of thousands of dollars to encourage the use of coal.
     Of course Pruitt kept that gravy train rolling even after Trump made him administrator of the EPA, while he also vigorously began trying to dismantle the environmental regulations put in place to keep the country from being polluted and the world from burning up, and urged Trump to pull out of the Paris accords, where the nations of the world had banded together trying to reverse climate change—the process by which carbon dioxide, created by burning coal and oil, collects in the atmosphere and causes the climate to become warmer . 
     There is no question this is happening. Unless you sell the stuff causing it to happen, or are in the employ of people selling the stuff causing this to happen. Knowing the truth, we could have done something, were trying to do something. Almost did something.
     Now we're just blinding ourselves to the problem, in order to maximum our short term gain. It's like burning your home's floorboards in the furnace on a cold day.

     As scary as this is, even scarier to see how it is perceived.

     I used to think it was just Fox News. But looking at the reaction to Pruitt's resignation, I happened across a Wall Street Journal editorial that begins: 

   Chalk one up for the swamp. The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.
     President Trump announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon that he had accepted Mr. Pruitt’s resignation. Mr. Pruitt cited the “unrelenting attacks on me personally” and his family that have “taken a sizable toll on us all.” He’s right about unrelenting. Dozens of reporters have examined every furl of Mr. Pruitt’s forehead since he started the job.

     Dozens! Oh my! As if scrutiny is a bad thing. The editorial mentions a few of Pruitt's more minor abuses and then lets loose with this startling sentence: "Mr. Pruitt says most of this was false or exaggerated, and no doubt much of it was."
     "No doubt." Could you summarize the requirement to be admirer of the current administration better in two words? You cannot doubt what he says, no matter how obviously incorrect, or contradictory, or petty. Easier to imagine a Deep State bogeyman—I suppose we should be grateful it isn't the Jews, yet, because when you're imagining a shadowy presence to blame for your own faults, it usually falls to them. Maybe that's coming.
    So Pruitt had to go, not for corruption, not for tearing down regulations but—as the New York Times reported—because he was coveting Jeff Sessions' job and Trump got tired of reading about his daily excesses and petty grifts.
    The Journal faults Pruitt, not for viewing his office as a personal dole, but for appearing to do so. He isn't responsible for what he did—that's the Deep State, the "collaborationist press" and the "left's environmental agenda." Not because he was terrible, but because it looked terrible.
     These people have "no doubt" their pieties are true, because it is in the financial interest of a few, who put out a lie, that their supporters slavishly believe, contrary to their interests. I wish I had the knowledge why, but I don't. Talk about powerless. 

The first 100 questions about Rev. Pfleger's Dan Ryan protest

     Rev. Michael Pfleger's anti-gun violence march shutting down the Dan Ryan was the big Chicago story over the weekend. It raised a lot of questions. Here are the first 100:

1. Who were the protests for?
2. Does anybody not know about the problem at this point?
3. If so, will they learn about it from this?
4. Or were the protests supposed to jar those already aware into action?
5. What should those people do?
6. Aren't those inconvenienced by closing the Dan Ryan the ones whose attention the protest is trying to snag?
7. Are they now more sympathetic?
8. Or less?
9. Did the mayor really suggest the march might deter shooters?
10. What dream world is he living in?
11. Is this crisis even a matter of caring?
12. Can we care the problem away?
13. Don't officials care more about the Dan Ryan being shut down than Chicagoans being killed?
14. How screwed up is that?
15. Did you answer "totally?"
16. How does awareness help, anyway?
17. Aren't residents of violence-plagued neighborhoods plenty aware?
18. What should they do?
19. Start jobs programs?
20. Is the march mainly for their benefit?
21. Ever notice how personal responsibility is rarely mentioned?
22. Is that blaming the victims?
23. Why do protests insist affected communities don't control their own lives?
24. Do they?
25. Aren't protests appealing to some higher power to fix everything?
26. Isn't that what priests do every Sunday?
27. Is question No. 21 a sign of white privilege?
28. Should this column have been written by a black pundit?
29. Would it offer different questions?
30. What are those?
31. Would those questions have more validity?
32. Why?
33. Or why not?

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Why do buried lives become important?

      Am I the only one seeing the ghost of Floyd Collins?
     He flickered into mind after those boys were trapped in a cave in Thailand, a dozen soccer players and their coach. 
    When the search was going on, as each day passed, hope dwindled. Then they were found but, in a cruel twist, getting them out was neither immediate nor perhaps even possible. It involved a six hour dive, in near total darkness, for children who could not swim. Found but not safe.
     Collins was the Kentucky cave explorer, on Jan. 30, 1925, he became trapped 55 feet underground, while trying to find a new entrance to the Crystal Cave. He too could be seen but not rescued.
     The next two weeks became an early American media circus, as primitive radio stations set up, barkers sold food and souvenirs. A reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, William Burke Miller, began wriggling into the cave to interview Collins, and sent out breathless dispatches: 

     CAVE CITY, Kentucky, Feb. 2—Floyd Collins is suffering torture almost beyond description, but he is still hopeful he will be taken out alive, he told me at 6:20 o`clock last night on my last visit to him.
     Until I went inside myself I could not understand exactly what the situation was. I wondered why someone couldn't do something quick, but I found out why.      "I was lowered by my heels into the entrance of Sand Cave. The passageway is about five feet in diameter. After reaching the end of an 80-foot drop I reached fairly level ground for a moment. From here on in I had to squirm like a snake. Water covers almost every inch of the ground, and after the first few feet I was wet through and through. Every moment it got colder. It seemed that I would crawl forever, but after going about 90 feet I reached a very small compartment, slightly larger than the remainder of the channel.
     This afforded a breathing spell before I started again on toward the prisoner. The dirty water splashed in my face and numbed my body, but I couldn't stop. Finally I slid down an eight-foot drop and, a moment later, saw Collins and called to him. He mumbled an answer.
     My flashlight revealed a face on which is written suffering of many long hours, because Collins has been in agony every conscious moment since he was trapped at 10 o`clock Friday morning.
     I saw the purple of his lips, the pallor on his face, and realized that something must be done before long if this man is to live.

     Miller won the Pulitzer Prize. Collins died of exposure after two weeks, days before a shaft sunk trying to reach it would have broken through. The fates of those boys are still in the balance.
      Why do such stories resonate? Collins would be followed by a number of others—Baby Jessica McClure, the 18-month old girl who fell into a well in Midland Texas in 1987 comes to mind. When children are involved, world attention is even more transfixed.
     Maybe it's the optimist in me, but these stories touch on something precious. They remind us of the value of every life. Experts from half a dozen countries, including the United States, which sent Navy divers, rushed to Thailand. It was breathless, front page news. The same children who would be turned away from our borders with a sneer of mocking derision were suddenly of enormous value—suddenly, I would suggest, be given the enormous value they deserve. 
      I hope that the boys are rescued, all safe, and reunited with the parents. And moreover, I hope that the world, relieved, sees the contours of a lesson in this. Why do people only become important when buried alive? Why are the lives of others precious only when they are put in peril? Something to think about. 

RIP Danny Malloy

Downtown Berea, Ohio, mid-1960s

     "Absolutely heartbroken 💔," the Facebook post begins. "I am a better person for knowing 'Dad Malloy'..."
     A glance at the photo. Heavier, half a century older. But that black curly hair. Those black eyes. That overbite smile. A keen little boy's face peered at me through the thick mask that time settles over us all.
     Danny Malloy was my best friend. We lived in a suburban development, brand new at the time. Ranch houses, oblong boxes, set in circles. I was on Carteret Court, he lived the next circle over, on Downing. Walk straight out my front door, hit the tree lawn as the screen door slams, cut across the circle, aim myself between Ricky Johnson's house and the Caffreys and there you were, in Danny Malloy's backyard.
     His dad was a janitor at Southwest General Hospital. Mine was a nuclear physicist at NASA. Ricky had us both beat: his dad was a fireman. That's how it was then, people mixed together. Well, they lived together, in the same neighborhood. Now that I think of it, there wasn't a lot of mixing among the adults. I doubt my father and Danny's father ever met. How could they? They went to work, came home, slept. On weekends they stayed in their own yards. 
    We kids, on the other hand, we mixed. We rode bikes, played kickball.

    Danny had 14 brothers and sisters. I read their names on the funeral notice with flashes of recognition: "Robert (Mary Ann), Sharon Mayer (Paul), Pam, Michele Batdorf (Dave, deceased), Celeste Deguzis (Jeff), Connie Schramek (deceased) (Jim), Gary (Simona), Ann Marie Weger (Rod), Mary Siskovic (Ken), Tim (Kelli), Brian (Hallie), Brenda Bednar (Steve), Laura (deceased) and Angela (deceased)."
     Bobby, the oldest—a shadow, a decade or more beyond us, that distant cool of an older sibling. Sharon and Pam too. Celeste babysat for us—she once brought her dinner over on a paper plate, covered in foil. I can still see her, cutting across the circle, holding that plate, staring at it with a child's shock at seeing the proprieties upended. You ate dinner at home. 

    Or was that Connie? No, Celeste.

    Gary was a little younger than us, and the rest were babies, their births faintly registering. Fourteen brothers and sisters.
    I had two. So naturally, Danny came over to play at my house. That's how it worked. I just assumed we represented some kind of sanctuary—my parents must have pointed that out to me. And we did what? Played. I couldn't spend 30 seconds describing those years. I was a solitary kid, given to making castles of wooden blocks—red rectangles, blue squares, yellow cylinders—and army men and Hot Wheels. I remember Danny and I ... playing with dinosaurs. Plastic dinosaurs. Creating elaborate scenarios, stories.

     I wish I had a picture. But you didn't take photographs of that kind of thing.  My parents took photos of us on vacation, as documentary proof. Tiny figures set against some historic site. Not of their kids playing kickball with their friends. Mine didn't anyway.
     I only went over Danny's house once, I'm certain of that. But the visit stayed vivid in mind. Triple bunkbeds in the bedrooms. In my memory, their dining room table was a picnic table with benches—can that be? His mother made our peanut butter sandwiches out of an enormous peanut butter jar. I had never seen one that big. His father worked at night, was tired, unshaven.
     That's really it. No dramatic moments, no break, just the gradual drifting off. He probably went to St. Mary's, the Catholic School, or we lost each other in the vastness of Berea High, heading toward our various fates. No doubt I fancied my path far, far better, heading off, seeing the world, being a writer. Though reading the heartfelt tributes from Danny's friends and co-workers, I see that wasn't the case at all. If you measure a man's life by the lives he's touched, the people he's helped, then Danny has me beat. Turns out, I was playing the wrong game all along... 

    Honestly, for years I doubted we had really been friends at all. Assumed he came over because my house was quiet and full of toys. The fact that I was also there must have been secondary. I tend to think the worst of people, which is usually a safe bet, but also how you move through life leaving the fewest ripples, a solitary boat on a vast and empty sea.
    I had a coda with Danny that made a lot of difference. I came back to Berea, maybe 15 years ago, to participate in a ceremony at the high school, and dropped my latest book off at Danny Malloy's house, and inside the cover jotted a note, the phone number of where I was staying. It would be great to see you.
     Danny showed up, met my wife. 

     "We were like brothers," he told her. 

     That shocked me. We were?
     "I still remember things you would say," he said.
     You do? I said, amazed. What sort of things?
      "You would turn to your mom and command, 'Sing for us, mother!"
     I did? My mother was a singer in the USO. Went to Europe to entertain the troops. I was very proud of that. It sounded like something I would say. And my oldest boy calls my wife "mother." I sounded like him.
     "What would she sing?"
     "Get Me to The Church on Time."
     Of course. From "My Fair Lady." My mother saw it on Broadway on her honeymoon in 1956. Played the soundtrack over and over. As a child I loved that song.
      That's all I have to say. I should leave the last word to those who knew him better, such as Kathy Stein, whose post began up top.

    "This man has touched the lives of so many for the better, including mine. He was one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known, always encouraging, and he never failed to see the best in everyone. I hope my life from this point emulates that level of love and service to others. He loved his family and the Lord and I’m so glad that we will get to see him on the other side of eternity. Thanks for always being there, the motorcycle rides, and trips for ice cream. Love you and miss you Dan-the-man ❤️." 

  

Sure, I hung with Nelson Mandela....

     Zulu dancers. A line of them, far away and below. And music. Drums.
     Or some kind of dancers. African. 
     That's it. That's all I remember.
     And I didn't even recall that until I noticed a beaded chain holding press credentials hanging from a door knob in my office. 
     Seven Chicago Police Department news media identification cards, from 1991 to 1998, a big red and blue PRESS tag from the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
     And a greenish yellow OFFICIAL PRESS CREDENTIALS with the seal of the City of Chicago and the words: "NELSON MANDELA, Chicago VISIT, July 6 & 7, 1993. City of Chicago. Richard M. Daley, Mayor.
     Leading to two thoughts.
     Nelson Mandela visited Chicago? And I was there?
     Exactly 25 years ago.
     Dancers. Music. Nothing else.
     You'd think that kind of thing would lodge in a guy's memory.
     Could I have gotten the tag and never gone? Then kept it? That doesn't sound like me. 
     Although ... I had the Democratic National Convention credentials and I know for a fact I never went inside the hall, not once. But I was outside, talking to ... anarchists. 
     Those dancers....
     I scribble notes at the end of each day for just such a situation, so pulled the maroon 1993 Waterstone's Literary Diary down from the shelf.
    Tuesday, July 6—the diary observes that in 1674 the second edition of Paradise Lost was published, and Milton received 5 pounds from the printer. In the little section for the day, I wrote:

      Started to get cracking on old people story, but sent over to cover Mandela at City Hall. Couldn't get to fifth floor because of security sweep so I worked the crowd waiting downstairs. About 150 fans & curious passerby. Young man who shook hands with Mandela held his hand aloft as if broken and beamed at the hand. Wouldn't let friend touch it. Strolled over to Palmer House—pleasant, smoking a Cuban, stuck in upper balcony, waiting without a newspaper. Fought urge to go get something to read—made myself just sit there—zen. Mandela was ushered in w/dancers and drummers. Endless speeches by religious leaders, including a cartoon Sikh who, as best I could tell, lectured us on the benefits of Sikhism. No lunch, caught a frozen yogurt from Carson's on the walk home (Since when do I refer to the newspaper as 'home'? A bad sign). Mandela didn't say a lot—basically begging for money. But his speech was delayed so much that he blew the market edition deadline and I had to scrape together whatever scraps I could to fill a story.

     A reminder that, for all our complaining about cell phones, at least now you always have something to read. Wasn't always the case...
    Looking over the stories that ran—the main story by Lynn Sweet—I don't seem to have missed anything vital. Mandela was here to raise money, was sorry he couldn't meet Michael Jordan, who had a previous commitment. An unsigned quote box gives a sense of the speech I heard:

     A sampling of Nelson Mandela's comments here:
     On how black South Africans will benefit economically from a new regime:
     "The government that will be installed will be able to address the major socio-economic problems facing our country, raising questions of employment, raising the living standard, working out illiteracy."
     On violence:
     "We must not lose our sense of proportion to think that because of the violence that there will be no progress as far as the quest to bring about a democracy in our country."
     On his rival, Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi:
     "He must not allow himself to be used as a cover by sinister forces and to curry to the impression that there is a clash between two black organizations, which is what the ruling class is trying to create. I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of our people are for peace and in due course all organizations and individuals who are playing the role of spoilers will be sidelined." 

     I'm not saying Mandela isn't worthy of reverence; he is. But sometimes we also magnify our heroes to a height they don't quite deserve. As amazing as it is to think I don't remember a speech by Mandela, it's even more amazing to realize that, just maybe, I don't remember it because it wasn't very memorable.