Dear Subscriber...

      Newspapers, in their continual quest to stay in business, have tried just about everything. Last year, marque columnists at major papers began writing letters to subscribers, thanking them for their patronage. Someone at the Sun-Times thought it might be a fine idea if I were tapped to write such a letter. Doing my best to get into the spirit of the thing, I gave it a shot, and produced the following. I turned it in, and never heard anything more about it, which is usually how these things go. Honestly, I don't know whether it was ever sent out. I imagine not. That said, it is, I hope, not without wit, and I thought I would share it here.

Dear Subscriber:

     For many years, the Sun-Times has brought you everything you expect in a newspaper; specifically the "Love is..." comic strip, with its two naked sweethearts expounding on the vast complexities of their affection.
     I swear, half the readers I talk to, when they hear I work for the Sun-Times, start rhapsodizing about "Love is..." They do that for a while, then eventually look at me, as if seeing me for the first time, and ask, "And what it is you do? Write a column? What sort of column?"
     Not that I'm complaining. It's a cute little panel. Very sweet and ... umm ... sugary.
     But a newspaper that merely presented a two-inch tall panel, no matter how popular, well, it would look a little thin. So we on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times work hard, every day to build a dynamic newspaper around the "Love is..." cartoon, so that after you've had your essential fix of the multi-faceted ecstasies of affection, can find out what 's going on in the city, state and world.
     We try to offer clarity and consistency in a changing world. Every day for the past 70 years—since Feb. 2, 1948, to be exact—when the Chicago Sun joined the Chicago Times, the combined product has landed on the doorsteps of the city.
     For almost exactly half that time—34 years—I've been in the paper, first as a freelancer, then a reporter, then a regular columnist. The powers-that-be asked me to write a note to thank you for subscribing. Without you we truly wouldn't be here, and while we provide you with a portal into Chicago and the world you cannot get anywhere else, you do one better: you pay our salaries, and we are grateful for that, as well as for the other kind of support you show—the news tips, the letters (well, most of the letters. Some people, well, geez, get a hobby...)
     But most of all, your loyalty.
     Why are you loyal? Beyond an inexplicable addiction to "Love is..."
     I like to think it is because you trust the Sun-Times. You know what you get in the paper. A thorough sports section anchored by seasoned pros such as Rick Morrisey and Rick Telander. Investigative stories broken by Tim Novak, Bob Herguth and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Frank Main. Movie reviews by Richard Roeper. Columns by Mary Mitchell and Mark Brown and, if I may, me.
     Plus podcasts and videos and all that modern stuff we're obligated to put out because everyone else does.
     You trust us, and we trust you, to stick with us, through thick and thin, to keep reading, and forgive our occasional lapses: those newspapers that get tossed into a bush, for instance.
     Part of news writing is being brief, so I won't belabor the point. The Chicago Sun-Times offers a steady platform from which to view our ever-evolving city and world. We try to both maintain a comforting stability while adapting to stay current. We always keep our audience in mind, maintaining your high standards as well as our own, and want you to know how important you are to us, as both readers and a subscribers. We will always be on the lookout for ways to improve our paper, to make it both familiar and fresh, every day, to make what changes are necessary—except, I am quick to add, "Love is..." That stays, forever.
     So that after you enjoy "Love is..." there will be important, valuable information, as well as a certain quirky column written by a blowsy curmudgeon, to keep you occupied until the next installment comes around. Thank you for your support in the past, and to come.

Best,

Neil Steinberg

L.A. Burdick: "When luxury passes into necessity."

 

    The second half of my Lewy body dementia story, 'Where's Bob?' is running in today's Sun-Times. If you haven't read it, you can read it here.  If you have, well, mustn't leave you high and dry. Here's a little something sweet to tide you over until tomorrow. 

    What? Mid-March already? Nearly.
    That means I missed Valentine's Day.
    Damn.
    Not for my wife, of course. We enjoyed a spa day in the city and this exquisite box of L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates, which we broke open a few days before Feb. 14, because they only last about two weeks, and you've got to eat 'em while they're fresh.
     But for you. I meant to tip off procrastinating swains and sweethearts facing the traditional Valentine's dilemma of what to buy their beloved that, if stymied for a gift, they could always rush to the Chicago branch of L.A. Burdick's at 609 N. State and buy some really, really exquisite chocolate. Because not everybody knows about the place.
     We've been aware of Burdick's for years, from that most unromantic of publications, Consumer's Reports, which included it in a national chocolate roundup in 2002.  Something about the notice caught my fancy, and I ordered a box, and remember our liking the stuff, but we weren't so captivated that we ordered more.
      Then in October, we blundered upon Burdick's festive Greenwich Village outpost, twinkling with golden lights, while visiting our son at school.  The company was founded 30 years ago, is based in Walpole, New Hampshire, and prides itself in not using any artificial flavors. Burdick has been slowly branching out—the Chicago store opened in 2017. In New York, we loaded up on presents for the various cat-sitters and dog-walkers minding the home front while we were gone. And some chocolates for ourselves.
    Man. They were really good in a way that stuck with us this time. 
    Why?
     Intense flavors. Lime zest and anise. Caramelized honey and saffron. Unique combinations: cherry and cumin seed. Dusted in cocoa. Not overwhelmingly sweet, the way, oh, Fannie Mae tends to be. I sent a box to my mother. She went wild for it. Over. The. Moon.
     Come Valentine's Day, we got lucky—bought a box as a present we weren't able to deliver, because of a snowstorm. So we delivered it to ourselves.
     That's it. No larger philosophical point today. Life's too short to eat mediocre chocolate. Tuck the thought aside for next year. Or maybe you have a birthday or special event coming.  Or if the world starts looking glum. The stuff is pricey, at $68 for a pound box, or more than twice what Fannie Mae will set you back. That might seem like a prohibitive amount of money; that only means you haven't tried it. Once you do, well, it brings to mind Dostoevsky's dictum about "how easily habits of luxury are acquired, and how difficult they are to give up afterwards, when luxury passes into necessity."
     Now I can't imagine buying a box of anything else. Not that we now have to eat Burdick's chocolates as a matter of habit. At that price, who can? But after Burdick's, all other chocolate seems not worth their calories, hardly worth the effort of chewing, despite their reduced cost. Burdick's heft price can almost be seen as a blessing—if they cost less, you might never stop eating them.  Our routine was to permit ourselves one of the "tiny bites" each evening after dinner. Okay, usually two. Three if we were feeling decadent. 

'Where's Bob?'—Love, loss and Lewy body dementia

     This piece has an unusual backstory. Bob Ringham was a photographer at the Sun-Times. In the mid-1990s, we took a road trip downstate to cover the Mississippi floods, and got to know each other better. Jump to late last year. He asked me to call him so we could talk about blogs—he reads this one, and thought of doing his own about his wife, who was dying of a lesser-known form of dementia. I gave him what advice I could, and then asked him if he were documenting her end, photographically. He said he really couldn't: he was the primary caregiver, and his hands were full. I asked him if he wanted me to come down, hang out for a few days, maybe take some pictures he could then use on his blog. He said he did. At that point, it struck me that there might be a story here, and I went to the paper's editor Chris Fusco, who said, "Do it." 

     Clare Ringham prepares a simple dinner: linguini with broccoli and chicken.
     She sets the table in the comfortable house she shares with her parents in a pine-studded suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina. Festive green-and-red pasta plates for herself, her father Bob and mother Peg — at Peg’s place setting, she puts special weighted silverware. Peg’s hands tremble with palsy, so the heavy silverware makes it easier for her to eat — or would, were she to use them.
     But Peg won’t be joining her family for dinner tonight. She hasn’t for over a month, and she never will again.   

      Making the bed that morning, Bob plumps Peg’s pillow, even though she does not sleep with him. She sleeps in a hospital bed in the living room where the mattress alternates pressure to avoid bedsores. With death near, she sleeps most of the time now.

     This is the Ringham household routine in late January: holding onto what they can of the past with Peg, coping with a demanding, almost overwhelming present and adjusting to a grim, inevitable future.
     “A year ago, 2017 Christmas, she went to the mall, got me a shirt,” Bob says. “This year, she didn’t even know it was Christmas, and she can’t even walk. It’s a terrible, terrible disease, a steady progression.”

      The disease is Lewy body dementia, a common though little-known brain disease like Alzheimer’s, combining the mental decline of that condition with the physical decay of Parkinson’s disease. A million people in the United States are thought to have it.
     “Alzheimer’s disease essentially takes the main stage,” says Dr. James Mastrianni, director of the Center for Comprehensive Care & Research on Memory Disorders at UChicago Medicine. “People don’t hear about a lot of the other forms.”

Peg Ringham

     Mastrianni says doctors have studied Alzheimer’s for over a century. Lewy body has been recognized for perhaps 25 years.
     “That’s a pretty short time when you think about understanding these disorders,” he says.
     Hundreds of researchers are studying Lewy body dementia, which you might think of as Alzheimer’s-plus. An Alzheimer’s patient might forget he has a family. With Lewy body, he might forget the family and also invent pets.
     “With Lewy body dementia, one of core features is hallucinations and visions,” Mastrianni says. “They will often see animals or birds flying around the house. I had one patient who put a cup on the floor with water so the dog could drink. But they don’t own a dog. Your perception is completely unreal.”        

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The Saturday Snapshot #30

     Of course the boys loved Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Easy, cheap, I would prepare it for them on the stove and maybe leave a few tablespoons for myself in the pot, a guilty pleasure craftily consumed between the stove and the sink while they were focusing on lapping up their dinners.
    Lately, Kraft Mac & Cheese has been out, in favor of other, newer, better M & Cs. Over Christmas I was dispatched to Jewel to pick up this Banza stuff—it has lots of protein and few carbs, or so I'm told. As often happens, I was dispatched on my mission thinking I was collecting one product and found myself confronting three: these blue, red and orange boxes, containing confusingly similar foodstuffs. I dutifully sent home a photo of my choices, and picked one, but forgot to buy enough. The younger kid plows through it.
     Shortly thereafter, I read of the troubles of Heinz Kraft, which lost $15 billion of valuation in one day in late February. The merger of two years earlier hadn't helped, it hurt. Of course it did. Smaller companies always come up the Next Thing, because they can make the nimble, daring choices that behemoths balk at.
    It gave me pause, to see our own little private shift, magnified 100 million times and reflected in giant economic doings. We think of there being a separation between our private sphere and the public realm. They feel separate, like fish bowls bobbing in the ocean. But the division is imaginary; the glass isn't there. It's all one big ocean.
    Banza was founded five years ago, in the Detroit apartment of Brian Rudolph, who thought, with all this gluten aversion, that pasta could be made with chick peas instead of wheat.  Why Kraft couldn't do that is a mystery. Or, more damningly, not a mystery. They introduced their Mac & Cheese in 1937. Why screw with success? (Spoiler alert: because if you don't, the world changes and you lose).
     Sometimes the world changes fast, sometimes slow. We live in a time of fast change—change is one definition of time. In theory. Yet change somehow also seems as somewhere between unexpected and shocking in practice. The bedrock keeps shifting. Small town stores vanished to big chains in malls. Then the chains started to vanish, and the malls themselves. Automobiles—cars!—are beginning to disappear. And now Heinz Kraft is in trouble. I would have bet on Kraft Mac & Cheese lasting through the ages. But who knows? Anything is possible.
   

R. Kelly was ‘guilty as hell,’ singer’s prominent lawyer from first trial says

Ed Genson

     R. Kelly is on television, saying he never did anything illegal with underage girls.
     “I didn’t do this stuff!” he told Gayle King on CBS. “This is not me!”
     Trying to reach over the head of the legal system and speak directly to those who might be in his jury pool.
     Which is his right, I suppose.
     But R. Kelly’s is not the only voice on the matter.
     There are the alleged victims. And the lawyers representing them. They will have their day in court.
     There is also the past. The 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse with four women he’s accused of now are not the first charges Kelly has faced. In 2008 he was acquitted of child pornography charges; that case was dragged out over six years by a defense team headed by Ed Genson, a well-known, even notorious Chicago criminal defense attorney.
     Genson is still around at 77, though ill, his usual candor honed by the approach of death.
     “I have bile duct cancer,” he said in the paneled study of his Deerfield home. “Terminal cancer.”
    Doctors gave him 90 days to live.
     “That was a year and a half ago,” said Genson. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
     Perhaps this is a good moment to set the record straight.
     “I’ve been a lawyer 54 years,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent criminal cases. I’ve represented entertainers, represented people connected to organized crime, represented professional criminals. I’ve represented guilty people, I represent innocent people.”
     “I can say whatever I want, but we’ve got to do it fast,” he said. “It would be nice to get it down so somebody knows besides me.”
     His father was a bail bondsman, and we talked about the profession of posting bond in the 1950s. Then Genson brought up a certain former client.
     “When I represented Kelly in Florida, they set the bond at a $1 million,” he said. “We paid the bondsman $100,000. He was out on bond on the Florida case for three days and they made $100,000. Because he had to fly back to Chicago because they were going to arrest him here.”
     Any insights into R. Kelly, the man? Guilty as hell?
     “He was guilty as hell!” Genson said. “I don’t think he’s done anything inappropriate for years. I’ll tell you a secret: I had him go to a doctor to get shots, libido-killing shots. That’s why he didn’t get arrested for anything else.”

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$3.22

 

       Cities are proud of themselves and rightly so. They have an energy, and crackle with creativity. 
      But that doesn't mean small towns are without their excellence, their innovation. All is not sleepiness and tradition.
      I was in Danville a few weeks back, as you know, reporting on the enormous sign that Watchfire Signs is creating for Las Vegas' Fremont Street.
     Before heading to the factory, my hosts took me to a charming eatery inside what was once a private home, Charlotte's Coffee and Tea.
      Typically, I avoid salads outside cities—you tend to get iceberg lettuce and half a hard boiled egg. Usually, the cheeseburger is a better bet. But I really felt in the mood for a salad, and theirs was excellent. As was their lemon meringue pie. And their coffee—surprisingly good. Sometimes these small towns have lousy water, therefore lousy coffee. 
    But the coffee at Charlotte's Coffee and Tea was really good.
    I know, it should be, given the name. But city or countryside, an establishment dedicated to coffee and coffee you can drink do not always, or even often, go together.
    Draining my cup, I excused myself from my two table mates and returned to the counter, where an array of sandwiches and salads were offered on a chalk board. The young lady behind the counter was on the phone, but eventually accepted my glass mug and tried to fill it from a pump urn that only wheezed emptily. So she headed in the back, to what I hoped wouldn't be too long an adventure, while I gazed back up at the board.
     "Cottage cheese," I noticed, thinking of a small white curdly pile I seem to remember eating more often than I wished, as a child, and haven't tasted in years. Then the price: "3.22."
     Three dollars and 22 cents? What's that all about? And a sandwich cost $4.08. 
     I asked the clerk. Her face did that thing that the incurious do when confronted with a question of incomprehensible origin. The price? Of the cottage cheese? Why was it ...? She had no idea. The owner set the price.
     Was he around? No.
     I returned to the ladies I was lunching with, finished off my pie and second cup, we lingered in conversation, then it was time to get to the factory I had come down here to visit.
     "Just a second,"  I said, as we passed the counter, noting a different young woman now behind the country. "I have to give it another try." I put my question to her. She said that would a matter for the owner, and disappeared to find him. Nope, just stepped out. I set down my business card.
    Ask him to call me when he gets back.
    He did, not a minute later And explained the mystery like this: Charlotte's gets busy. It slows things down to fumble with change. By pricing the cottage cheese at $3.22, that comes out to be $3.50 with tax. Less fussing with coins.
      I've eaten in restaurants from Bangkok to Belize. And I've never seen an off-pricing system like that. Maybe it's common and I'm admitting to an embarrassing ignorance. But I don't think so. It struck me as clever, and worth mentioning.  Of course a place trying to make their pricing easier would also have good food—if you worry one detail, you probably worry them all.
     I don't imagine I'll be going back to Danville anytime soon—so far, 58 years of living have required a single visit. But if I do ever find myself having to make the 120 mile drive, I'll think, "At least I can stop by Charlotte's for some pie and that good coffee." 



     

Taking apart a watch is easy; putting it back together, however . . .

Eric Buth, a radiation oncologist from Grand Rapids, Michigan, disassembling a mechanical watch movement at a class recently in Chicago. The Horological Society of New York has been holding watchmaking classes in major cities to give collectors a better understanding of how watches work.

     Taking apart a watch is not difficult. You need the right tools: a magnifying eyepiece and pointed tweezers, to see and handle screws the size of mustard seeds and springs as big as eyelashes. To turn those tiny screws, three jeweler's screwdrivers. Plus a pointer to nudge parts into place, and an elevated tabletop, to lean your elbows on, to get your face close to your work. Don't forget to slip on pink rubber finger cots, to keep the oils from your fingertips from corroding delicate parts.
     There is one more tool whose purpose doesn't immediately reveal itself: a round metal tray with ten compartments. 

     To understand the role of the tray, you need to know what you are doing or, barring that, have the guidance of someone who does, such as Steve Eagle, director of education at the Horological Society of New York. A few Sundays back, Eagle led seven novices through the removal and return of most of the 78 gears, wheels and springs of a Unitas ETA 6497 watch movement.
     "Welcome to Horology 101 to 103," said Eagle. "You're in for an intense four hours of watchmaking."
     The survival of the mechanical watch half a century into the era of quartz watches — the 50th anniversary of Seiko introducing the Astron is this Christmas — is a miracle of savvy marketing.
     "We've seen this resurgence in the last 15 years where people are circling back and starting to appreciate the longevity of mechanical watches," said Eagle. "The artistry behind them, the history, these little miracles that will work under their own power. Such an analog product in such a digital world."

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Steve Eagle