Memento mori

     Rare is the weekend where I have to work. Well, except for Sunday mornings, when I usually write my Monday column. Except not this morning, because I'm so busy writing this big important project for the paper, the column got pushed aside. 
    I don't want to ignore the blog post though. However ... I can't say that after a day grinding at this task ideas are straining in their seats, waving their arms, going "Ooo, ooo! Me! Me!" 
     In addition. Maybe the slaughter of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand makes the whole effort seem extra pointless. Social media, so stuffed with words as it is. Words, words, words. Suddenly words seem ... I almost said "cheap." But they're worse than cheap, aren't they? They're free, and worth every penny.
    Enough that I don't feel like adding more to them. 
    I do, however, have this photo I do not believe I have posted before. My wife and I were in Paris two years ago, visiting out oldest son at the Sorbonne, and we passed this florist on the Rue Monge in the 5th Arrondissement. Apt for spring, don't you think? Lovely to look at, colorful comfort in light of all the grim news. With perhaps a bit of apt symbolism tucked in, if you look hard.
    Oh okay: they're cut flowers. Which means the clock is ticking. Beautiful now. But later, soon, not so much.  Enjoy them while you can.

The Saturday Snapshot #31

     The Chicago Symphony Orchestra went on strike Monday, and on Friday Linda Spadlowski drove in from the far Northwest suburbs to join them.  She is not a musician—she's a patron, a paraprofessional at an elementary school in Carol Street. 
    "I came to lend my support to the musicians," she told me. "The orchestra is one of the best in the world, and its musicians should be treated with the respect they deserve."
      We spoke for a few minutes—I was just blundering by, heading to the train from the Hilton, where I had attended the the ACLU luncheon, guest of my friend Howard Suskin at Jenner & Block. Picketing is tiresome, and I was impressed that a concert-goer would go to the effort; it speaks to the devotion that patrons have to the music, particularly since this was her first year as a subscriber. 
    These sympathetic thoughts were in my head as I walked away. Then, as if to ground me in the greater reality, a remark from a man next to me cut through the Michigan Avenue background noise.
     "I'm supposed to feel sympathetic for folks playing the goddamn fiddle?" a man exclaimed. I stole sly glance to my right. Enormous cantilevered gut. Brush mustache. Terrified slip of a wife. Young daughter he was dragging along by her arm. 
     The music is out there, free to all. But not everybody can hear the music.  The CSO has cancelled its scheduled concerts for this weekend.

Don’t be scared; they’re only homeless young people — they don’t bite

     At the Crib, the Night Ministry’s youth shelter in the basement of the LakeView Lutheran Church on West Addison, there is a 9 p.m. ritual that can break the hardest heart.
     There is room for only 21 foam mattresses on the floor of the single-room shelter. So whenever more than 21 young people — mostly members of the LGBTQ community — are seeking refuge from the streets, they draw lots. The losers must leave. There are tears, embraces, couples sometimes split, and it is not unknown for one homeless youth to give his place to someone who needs it more. I’ve seen it happen.
     So when I first heard that the Night Ministry plans to move the Crib to a sprawling industrial building at 1735 N. Ashland, I assumed the idea is to accommodate more kids.
     They won’t. They’ll still house 21, to preserve a homey environment. The Crib will, however, introduce a new level of luxury.
     “There will actually be beds and not mattresses on the floor,” said the Night Ministry’s Burke Patten, the benefit of having several dedicated rooms. “People won’t be sleeping and recreating in the same space.
     Maybe. The new location is leased, but its use as a shelter needs government approval; the Chicago Zoning Board of Appeals will hear the case on Friday.

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Poisoned Ivy

     So that's why my boys didn't get into Harvard...
     Because the slots that should have gone to them were snapped up by the spawn of rich celebrities who bribed coaches to pretend their couch potatoes were athletes, and other venal acts of fraud and criminality.
     A spot in a top college projects whoever snags it to the fast-track to success. But those exclusive colleges bat away 95 out of every 100 students who apply, forcing them through an obstacle course where all sorts of secondary hurdles besides academic excellence suddenly loom in importance. If the college has accepted kids from 49 states, and needs someone from South Dakota so they can boast students "from all 50 states," then suddenly South Dakotans go to the top of the stack. If the band needs a xylophonist, suddenly xylophonists start to sparkle. Not to mention all the attempts to create a diverse student body. As Orwell said in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Not to forget money: they have to remember to let some students in whose parents can actually pay the tuition. For starters.
    As Frank Bruni pointed out in Wednesday's New York Times, it isn't that much of a stretch from giving a college $2 million and having your kid waived in—legal!—to bribing a coach to pretend he's on the water polo team—illegal!
     I don't want to excuse the underhanded tricks used by parents to try to jam their kids into the best colleges.  It hasn't been so many years since my boys went through this, and I remember the frantic, what-can-I-do?!? approach to their quest.

Harvard Lampoon (photo by Harrison Roberts)

     But I had a few advantages. First, I had sought the advice of Bill Savage, NU literature professor, master of all things Chicago and, not incidentally, someone involved with the college selection machinery. He gave me what I consider the No. 1, key bit of advice for a student or parent contemplating the college process, which is: Don't get your heart set on a certain school. That's a recipe for disappointment. What happens is, a student, or her parents, or both, decide that they don't get into Boola Boola University then their lives will be ruined. When in fact they might have a better experience at a different college.  
     He also counseled against the general, I'm-gonna-die tone of despair that parents bring to the process. That doesn't help. Important decisions, yes. Key forms and essays and hoops to leap through or, often, not. But the whole upper echelon college thing is also a framework of values that is only of vast importance if you believe it is of vast importance. Donald Trump went to the Wharton School, and look how he turned out.
     Oh, and the boys didn't get into Harvard because neither of them applied. I can't speak for them, but that might be my fault. We visited Cambridge when they were in their mid-teens, and I steered us over to the Harvard Lampoon castle, a quirky building supposedly paid for by William Randolph Hearst and designed as kind of Dutch revival sphinx. I explained how, while researching my pranks book, I had spent a few days there happily poring over their archives, and what fine fellows the Lampooners were.
    Our timing was off. We arrived during some kind of Bacchic revel—maybe because it was Friday. A round metal pool had been set up in front of the castle, students were splashing around in it, drunk, and firing off fireworks. My boys were aghast. We fled.
     Just as well. The older boy went to Pomona, a liberal college in California routinely ranked higher than Harvard. And the younger boy went to Northwestern, applying early admission, because that's where his dad went. Bribes were not necessary.
   

Was Congress condemning hatred or expressing it?

Republican National Convention, 2016

     So my boss tells me to take today off and focus on a special project.
     Yes sir! I think.
     And then, as if to mock me, I flip open the paper and read about Congress last week declaring that hatred in all its varieties — including that against “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others”—is bad.
     What’s a guy to do?
     First, bigotry doesn’t have varieties. Underneath the thinnest veneer, it’s all the same thing: treating people in a particular group with contempt because doing so somehow makes you feel better about yourself.
     Sure, the forms that might appear to be different. But that’s just personal style: Chocolate or vanilla, rocky road or rum raisin, it’s all ice cream.
     I can’t tell you how many readers insisted I weigh in on Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, one of two Muslims new to Congress, and her pair of remarks regarding Israel. My hunch is they do so not out of their overflowing human kindness, but from their own low-grade fever anti-Semitism. They want to nudge me into a trap: Ha, make this Jewish Democrat denounce his fellow Democrat. Sort of the way Louis Farrakhan is used as a pry bar to wiggle apart Democratic coalitions.
     Honestly, Democrat or Republican, feeling queasy about Israel as it slides toward extremism under Benjamin Netanyahu seems more an expression of sincerely-held Judaism than of anti-Semitism, and if that were a sheitel on Omar’s head instead of a headscarf (sigh: sheitel = wig worn by Orthodox Jewish women) nobody would have noticed her opinion, never mind initiated an Act of Congress.

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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.