Gas pump strikes fear in heart of modern man

      Technology actually hasn't been changing as fast as it used to. Cell phones are more than 30 years old. Personal computers too. The Internet has been a public commons for more than 20 years. Changes now seem slower, more incremental. 

    It's hard to recapture the anxiety that all this stuff originally created. I was searching for something else, and happened upon this column from 1997.
     As a guy who used to watch the attendant at the Clark Station check the oil and hand sticks of gum into the back seat to us kids, notice my terrified approach toward a gas pump credit card reader, and my wonder at the cleverness of "swiping." To be honest, at 58, I feel far less angst about shifting technology than this young man of 36 apparently felt. So that's good.

    I used to worry that if I beeped the car horn too hard, the air bag would explode in my face.  
     Thus I always tried to gently press the horn, and not hit it sharply, so as not to antagonize the thing and get it mad at me.
     The concern was that the air bag would deploy, scare the bejeezus out of me, drench me in talcum powder and maybe even cause an accident.
     The bags use talcum powder for lubrication, I heard once.
     I have since learned more about the bags. So now I worry that I'll beep the horn too hard and the air bag will deploy and kill me.
     That's progress.
     Some days life seems like a grim plodding from one vague technological dread to another, wrapped in a patchwork of half-knowledge and doubt woven out of the dubious information washing over us daily.
     Is the nightstand clock throwing off a low-level, cancer-causing electric field, or did that turn out to be a myth? Will the whiff of fumes when I remove the dry cleaning bags from my clothing aggregate over the years and bring hideous death? Is coffee good or bad this week?
     Modernity has always been daunting and scary. A hundred years ago, James Thurber's aunts also worried about electricity leaking out of empty light sockets. His uncles treated those newfangled automobiles like a particularly stupid brand of horse. The toaster was a menace.
     Thurber himself was forever struggling, with automobile tires and telephones and all the trappings of the brave new world of the 1930s.
     How would poor, half-blind Thurber make it today?
     Not too well, I'm afraid.
     We've moved away from balky manufactured objects—stubborn umbrellas, blenders that don't—into an incomprehensible digital world.
     Last Wednesday night was a perfect example. I was dog-tired, dragging home about 8:30 p.m. The "EMPTY" light had been burning on the dashboard for two days. Time to fill up the tank.
     I stopped at a gas station on La Salle Street. Just another pasty-faced guy after work, his tie knot slipped down to his sternum.
     A gaunt bum with a squeegee shambled over. I was about to wave him away automatically when I realized the windows were, indeed, dirty.
     "Go ahead," I said.
     Normally I go in and pay—clinging to the transaction, a vestige of all the jogging Texaco men from lost days. But I was short on cash, so submitted to the seduction of the credit card slot in the pump.
     Whoops, backward. Finally got it right. Don't use these much.
     I began pumping gas, keeping a close watch on the squeegee guy. Sometimes those squeegees have a sharp edge, and can scratch your car.
     The tank was filled. The windows cleaned. I checked to see that the gas cap was on. Checked the pump to see if it still had my credit card—no, it was one of those swipe things. Clever design, I thought as I returned the pump nozzle. No chance of leaving your card behind.
     I gave the squeegee guy two bucks—tried to make a little small talk, to be a human. He said he was using the money to take a bus to a shelter. I mentioned that I've eaten at the Pacific Garden Mission, and the food was hearty. He said the food there aggravated his ulcer.
     I pulled out of the gas station. Whoops, lights off. Hadn't checked those. Turned the lights on. Maybe a minute later I was driving up La Salle Street, when a thought struck me: I hadn't ended the gas transaction, hadn't gotten a receipt, hadn't pressed a "STOP" button. The squeegee guy must have rattled me.
     I tried to push the thought away and continue home. Those pumps have got to have some sort of mechanism that resets themselves, either after you return the nozzle or after a brief idle span. They can't just sit primed with your credit information, waiting to dispense more gas to anybody who happens by.
     Can they?
     The image formed immediately. A long line of cars, snaking down La Salle Street, forming in front of the Free Pump—already an urban legend. Some feckless victim put his credit card in and didn't get a receipt. The next guy just picked up the hose. Word spread. By morning I would be a "bright," an amusing little story used to fill out columns in every paper in America:

"CHICAGO -- Bar patrons occasionally buy a round for the house. But gas station customer Neil Steinberg accidentally bought a round of gas for some 200 grinning customers -- at a cost to himself of nearly $ 4,000 -- at an Amoco station here after inserting his credit card into a pump. 'He's an idiot, and we're going to make him pay his bill,' said Visa spokesperson . . ."

     Sighing, I turned the car around and returned to the station. There was already somebody at the pump —a young guy on a motorcycle. I pulled over to him and rolled down my window. What to ask? "Hey guy, are you paying for that gas or stealing it from me?" That wouldn't do. I was at a loss. He seemed to be pushing buttons. A good sign.
     Wordlessly, I pulled out of the station—again—and headed home, resigned, weary, at the mercy of giant forces I could barely understand, never mind conquer.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times April 6, 1997

The Saturday Snapshot #4

        Uniformity is the watchword of the suburbs. What's the line? "Little houses made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." Not entirely true, but true enough. Yet some people do manage to manifest their personalities. A neighbor on my block not only maintains this very stolid concrete goose, but will deck him out in appropriate seasonal attire: a little Cubs outfit for summer baseball, a pilgrim hat and cloak come Thanksgiving. It's very whimsical.
     At least I assume it's his handiwork. I suppose it could be his wife's, but the baseball regalia makes me suspect him. I don't rightly know. In 18 years, I've never remarked upon the goose to my neighbor. I don't see him often, our interaction is pretty much limited to half-hearted waves and wan nods. We keep our distance, here in the great generic sprawl.
     But lately I've been tempted, next chance I get, to say, "I like your goose."
     Why? Whimsy does not play as well in some quarters as others. While I smile at the goose and welcome his calming presence, I have also on several occasions noticed him toppled, even broken—by what passes in Northbrook for hooligans, I would imagine.  It's always sad to see the fellow in disarray.
     My neighbor, to his credit, is always scrupulous about immediately setting the goose right again or repairing him, as need be. Or perhaps replacing him.
     That is as it should be. It shows grit. We open our hearts to the world, reveal a glimpse at our inner soul, and, more often than not, the world rewards us with a kick. Even when we are doing something as unobtrusive as presenting a bit of anserine decoration to an anodyne suburban block. You have to wonder what sort of person would assault the thing. Merely being young and stupid doesn't seem sufficient cause—if the armies of the young and stupid turned against lawn decoration, not a gnome or ceramic frog would be safe. I imagine the culprit or culprits are people with no interior lives to project, lashing out instinctively at those of us who do. There's a lot of that going around.
   

Hate Donald Trump? No way. It's more a sense of luftschlossmoddermüde

     There are 171,476 words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from common—the definition of "set" runs 22 closely-packed pages—to pleasantly obscure: "aglet," for instance, the hard tube at the tip of a shoelace.
     Quite a lot, really. But not enough to cover the range and complexity of human experience, judging from other languages, which have words for concepts that we can't express in a single term. The Japanese word mibojin comes to mind: it means "widow," though its literal translation is "not-yet-dead person" with all the obvious implications of superfluousness: a woman without a husband is just sitting around waiting to die.
     Perhaps another language can serve up the elusive word to describe how I'm feeling toward Donald Trump. Readers certainly offer their opinions:
     "Why the hate for TRUMP every single day" writes J.T. Kozlov, forgetting his interrogative punctuation.
     "Your level of anger and hate is debilitating," Stephen Hardy writes.
     "All you do is write about how you hate Trump," writes Ron Olovich.
     I could give 100 more examples. They believe I’m criticizing Trump — not every day, I must point out — because I hate him. Trump himself flings the word about. “The hatred and extreme bias of me by CNN has clouded their thinking” he tweeted Thursday. It’s easy to see why. With “hate,” Trump and his fans can pretend he isn’t being criticized fairly, but out of blind animus. Projecting hate upon the president’s critics ignores their valid complaints. It’s in harmony with the frothing, head-exploding reaction they like to image takes place among those they sneer at as “libtards,” horrified by Trump’s unending vandalism against our country, its laws, traditions and values.

     Back in the non-fantasy world, all the libs I know are in full if grim possession of their unexploded heads, while of course giving those heads frequent sad shakes of amazement.
     “Amazed” is closer to the mark, but not quite right. “Shocked”? Not anymore.
     Not hate. I certainly don’t hate him. He’s hardly worth hating. Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?
     What’s the right word?

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A restaurant should be beautiful

Calavera, 1438 W. Chicago Ave.

     A successful restaurant is like a stool, in that it rests on three legs.
     The first is the food, of course. Delicious, unusual, satisfying—something good you can't make at home.  I'm sure somebody can make Thai beef & broccoli at home, but me, I'm heading for Star of Siam.
      The second is service. The person bringing you the food should be brisk, effective and, ideally, show a little flair. Fall down on this aspect and the first doesn't matter—the food at Greek Isles is great, but will have to be savored in memory, since we're still never going back. I wasn't even there when my wife and her sister were handled rudely by a waiter. Just her description was enough. Besides, Athena is practically next door. 
     Bad service turns customers away, while great service, on the other hand, cements love for a place. I went to The Dearborn, a new, airy bistro at 145 N. Dearborn, for the first time a few weeks ago. Pretty good. I returned Wednesday and our server, Matt, did something both appreciated and rare, if not extraordinary: he waved me off something on the menu. "You don't want that," he said, making a face. Then when he brought our drinks, and set them down, the table wobbled, slightly. He apologized, rushed off, and returned immediately with wedges, kneeling down and bracing the table. In 40 years of eating out I've never seen a waiter do that. And so The Dearborn enters the rotation of My Places.
     And finally, the one that gets forgotten: the atmosphere. The Dearborn must have paid a fortune on glazed tile and fancy light fixtures and exposed beams. You're happy just sitting there; the fact they serve you food is a lagniappe, an added bonus.
     That third leg is one that I pay particular attention to, since those opening new restaurants too often don't. There is a space a block from my house in Northbrook that has seen three, count em, three restaurants come and go in five years. The first, My Pi, served pizza that wasn't anywhere near Lou Malnati's just up the street. The second, Agave, was a Mexican Restaurant that couldn't hang its own sign straight. The place had bare walls—maybe a single colorful paper mache lizard, maybe a sombrero. That's it. I remember sitting there, on my one obligatory visit, thinking "Who would start a Mexican restaurant and not decorate it?" The third, Drumstix, fell short on both food (fried chicken should be crisp) and decor. The tables were metal painted to look like wood; no doubt the idea was to create that warm farm house feeling while saving a few bucks. I pressed my fingers to that cold metal table and thought, "A year, tops" which was about right.
     Which explains why this colorful report from Block Club on Calavera, which opened a month ago, made me resolve to visit the place as soon as I could. 
     "Calavera" is Spanish for skull, and is a prominent feature in Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, brightly decorated, often rendered into sugar and intended to remind us of the sweetness of life and the colorful personalities of our beloved departed. They aren't considered morbid, but whimsical, just as the holiday is not really a festival of death, but of the circular nature of life. 

Sandra Rodriguez

     The restaurant was entirely empty at 12:45 p.m. Tuesday, and we were greeted by owner Sandra Rodriguez. We started with guacamole and homemade corn chips, then moved to a selection of enchiladas and chicken breast with mole. I got a glass of horchata. 
     My lunch mate thought the chicken was terrific and loved the mole. I'm not a food critic, and it wouldn't be fair judge a place after only one visit, particularly one that has been open for just a month. The chips were warm and thick, the mole complex, the horchata served in a jar with a light sprinkling of cinnamon and a note of rosewater. Otherwise, ... well, I'll withhold judgment, except to say that I hope in time the food will be as finely executed as the artwork. 
    Besides, you should decide for yourself. We sat there for an hour and not a blessed soul walked in the door—just as we were leaving, at 2 p.m., a lone diner appeared. That isn't right. Every person takes a shot at their dream, but it doesn't matter how good the food may be if nobody stops by and eats it. So if you are in the vicinity, please consider visiting Calavera, 1438 W. Chicago Avenue. Admire their paintings and grouped incidental objects, say hello to Sandra Rodriguez and get something to eat. Let me know what you think. I certainly plan to circle back and continue my investigation.


      

Toastmasters speak the global language of humanity, ambition

Dr. Hill Krishnan spoke about the need to keep trying at the Toastmasters semi-finals.

     James Traywick is wearing a dark gray suit with a bright yellow pocket square, a lemon yellow shirt, a bow tie with a sliced lemon motif and, we will learn later, is carrying an actual lemon in his jacket pocket.
     The retired Chicago public school teacher, 69, belongs to seven local Toastmasters clubs, and was among 30,000 members around the globe who entered this year’s speech-making competition. He’s tried several times, but this year was the first year he was among 106 who made it into the semi-finals, held last Friday at McCormick Place, site of Toastmasters International’s 87th annual convention.
     “It’s such a safe environment to make mistakes in,” said Traywick, of the organization. “To improve your speaking ability. That was the emphasis for me joining, and it has been a really great experience.

Ena Agbahovbe,

     Founded in California in 1924, Toastmasters has 357,000 members in 143 countries. About 1,700 were at the convention, attending networking lunches and talks with titles like, “How to Get What You Want: Influencing Others Into Action.” The halls were crowded with men in three-piece suits and white Arabic thobes, women in colorful dresses and flowing chadors, entire districts clad in matching outfits: maroon golf shirts on a group from Northern California, goldenrod dashikis on 20 Nigerians, including Ena Agbahovbe.
     “This is my first time wearing something like this,” said the petroleum engineer from Lagos. “In our culture, when we’re having a big ceremony, we like to dress similarly, to show we’re like a family.”
     He joined Toastmasters two years ago.

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Happy anniversary, Kitty!

Kitty, relaxing in her suite at the Palmer House Hilton. 

        Eight years.
        Eight years ago today: Aug. 28, 2010. The bar mitzvah had been a great success, the luncheon afterward at Prairie Grass consumed and paid for. Now the only thing left to do was collect the boy's present. It had to be done quickly, like jumping out of a plane, lest nerves undo my resolve. In my journal that night I described it this way, "2 Petsmart for leash, puppy chow. Get name tag, 'Kitty' cut by laser. Picked up puppy. Not stressful. Dog never barked. Fell asleep in Kent's arms in back seat."
     That "not stressful" was worth mentioning because it was surprising, to me. Somewhat amazing even. I thought a dog would ruin our lives. 
     And so the adventure began. The 3 a.m. walks in the rain. Back to Petsmart for training both pet and owners. It was effort, yes. It was at times uncomfortable, yes. But it was all somehow necessary and, even, wonderful.
     Eight years. What's to say? Either you get dogs or you don't. Before I didn't. Now I do. Dogs enrich your life, add purpose and meaning. That time we stayed with her in a hotel downtown—the Palmer House was promoting its dog-friendly services and invited me to a sleepover—was as close to being a celebrity as I will ever come. Every eye in the grand lobby swiveled in her direction with interest and delight, and I mused on suddenly finding myself as a fussy older man with a little dog. At Miller's as we walked past, the barflies tapped on the window and waved and smiled.
      She was the perfect dog for us. Sweet, loving, energetic. People mistake her for a puppy still, though of course she is now in the definition of middle age. Eight is half of 16, which evokes the haunting line of Mary Oliver's, "How many summers does a little dog have?" 

Drying a wet dog

     A lot, I hope. This is the end of her ninth. 
     But a dog doesn't worry about the future, and I've learned a lot from having a dog. Walk frequently. Eat food. Smile if you can. Don't worry so much. The future comes whether you worry about it or not.
     Walking falls to me. She fixes me with a look, and I somehow just know. I almost said, "She doesn't even have to speak," though frankly, if she started talking, it would only surprise me a little. As it is, we communicate.
     Walks morning, noon and night—well, right after waking up, right before dinner and right before bed. We have a ritual. A big, seven-block circuit in the morning, watching our neighbors back their Jaguars and Audis out of their driveways and rush off to work. A shorter walk later in the day, maybe nipping around back, by the village community garden. Then toward downtown, around what I called "The Point," a triangle of flowers and grounds cover across from the train station. Sometimes the spirit moves her and we head downtown to make a loop through the park.
     What's she thinking? Who can say? She has a brain the size of a walnut. "I'm a dog" perhaps. What am I thinking? With my far larger brain? Not much more. "I have a dog. We're walking." Often, this year, I've been listening to books on Audible. Chekhov skewering a "journalist of minuscule reputation" with such specific skill I suspect we must have met, that he must have seen my office and peered into my heart.
    Here, the dog helps. I've certainly taken good care of this dog. Nobody can say I haven't. She could lose a pound or two—my fault, diverting chicken from atop my salad. But not fat. By no means fat. 
     A dog is a kind of exquisite timepiece, a clock I set ticking shortly after Kent's 13th birthday that will, if we're lucky, start ringing a couple years after he leaves law school. I'll look up then, astounded and heartbroken and ask myself where the time has gone. A question that sits there now, to be honest, waving its hand, trying to get my attention. But I won't call on it just now. 
     

TV and the 1968 Democratic convention: 'They hated us for showing it to them'

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, by Naim June Paik (Smithsonian American Art Museum) 

     This book was so bottomlessly fascinating I just had to share. Among the facts I hadn't room to include: Thomas Hart Benton did courtroom drawings at a kidnapping trial for NBC. At the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago, Robert Taft hired "all available models" to dress in cheerleader outfits as "Belles for Bob" and hold signs in front of any live TV camera they could find. Television cameras took 15 minutes to warm up, and after NBC's PR department tried to dub the first entirely mobile camera a "walkie-lookie," a newspaper writer offered up a more popular moniker, the "creepie-peepie."

     We can't come close to agreeing about what's happening in this country. Illegal presidency of a pathologically narcissistic would-be tyrant? Or Golden Age of proud true Americanism reclaiming our stolen birthright? You decide!
      Given the gulf in perspectives of what's happening right now, what are the chances we'd agree about the few crumbs of history we carry around on our shirtfronts? Nil.
     The next few days mark the 50th anniversary of Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention, from Aug. 26 to 30 of 1968. To get myself in the mood, I've been devouring a fascinating 1991 memoir, "Out of Thin Air," by Reuven Frank, then president of NBC News.
     TV affected the 1968 convention. Then again, TV always does. The four networks began on May 1, 1948; ABC, NBC, CBS and the short-lived Dumont. Those new networks, thanks to the miracle of coaxial cable, could only reach 17 stations in seven cities on the East Coast, from Boston to Richmond, but that was enough to sway the choice of where the 1948 Democratic National Convention would be located.
     "When the manager of WFIL-TV, Philadelphia ... pointed out that a third of America ... would be 'within reach' of a television set, San Francisco, which had more hotel rooms, withdrew its bid," Frank writes.
     Anyone who thinks that the dawn of television was all Edward R. Murrow speaking truth to power should read this book. I couldn't tell if my favorite moment was R.J. Reynolds, sponsor of NBC's Camel News Caravan, forbidding shots of "No Smoking" signs, real living camels (nasty) and anyone smoking a cigar, requiring Frank to get special permission to air an interview with Winston Churchill.  Or Texaco writing a news report that Chet Huntley read word for word.
     Then comes the 1968 convention.

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