The Joys of Summer #7: Baseball

 

    Being America's pastime does not mean that baseball is our nation's most popular sport. Oh no no no. That would be football, by a wide margin—so wide that if you added college football as a separate category, that would beat baseball too.
     No matter.  Baseball is religion and ritual, summer and sunshine and lazy afternoons at the ballpark.  It is tradition and history, our country as it was and, so long as there is baseball, always will be. "Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game," as George Carlin explains in his essential comedic bit "Baseball v. Football." 
      Baseball is summer as in "The Boys of Summer," Roger Kahn's great book about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. And yes, I read it when it came out in 1972, revering Gil Hodges, pitying catcher Roy Campanella, paralyzed in a car accident, no doubt the first time that tragic concept ever entered my young mind. At the time my taste in baseball literature ran to lighter stuff like "Strange But True Baseball Stories" by Furman Bisher, tales of Eddie Gaedel, the midget Bill Veeck sent in to bat and similar fare, a book I notice three feet from where I'm sitting now. I was 12, and at the height of my baseball fandom, which was tough to do when you lived in the western suburbs of Cleveland, your team is the hapless Indians, laboring year after year under the curse of Rocky Colavito,  and your father was a nuclear physicist.   
      Baseball cards were important. Buying and collecting and trading them. I had a whole team of Jewish players, otherwise divided the cards by years, thick chunks wrapped in rubber bands, the edges gently rounded. I think my favorite card was Harvey Haddix, the Pirate who pitched 12 perfect innings and still lost. He seemed like Christ on the Cross, or St. Harvey.
      My father had his own baseball memories. He was a Giants fan; his favorite player was the Big Cat, Johnny Mize. But that's about it. No miracle at Coogan's Bluff, no heartbreak move to San Francisco. As he explained it, the Giants hired loathed Yankees manager Leo Durocher to run their team in 1948, and that was it. My father never recovered from the betrayal, the cognitive dissonance, with Satan suddenly in charge of your ballclub. That seemed the end of baseball for him. He never took me to a game, or played catch, that I remember. I'm sorry that never happened, I would have liked that
     My mother filled the void, a little. She was an Indians fan when that meant something. World champions in 1948, when she was 12. A classic series against the Giants in 1954, including Willie Mays classic behind the back running catch.   
      Her father Irv was an Indians fan too, and once, sometime in the mid-1960s it was arranged for my grandfather and I to attend a game, though the only fact about that game that lived in family lore was that I ate two hot dogs, and thus removed from the opportunity of ever going to a game again. It was my fault.
      I loved those 1950s players—Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and of course Al Rosen, the sluggin' third baseman who was Jewish. Like many Jewish kids, I had an affinity for Jewish stars, a thumb in the eye of the common stereotype that I embodied, as Jews as bespectacled and unathletic. I think my Little League career lasted a week, but I still have my Sears glove hanging on the door, a simple, five finger model, the glove Charlie Brown wears. Every half decade or so I go over it with neatsfoot oil, to keep it limber.
      Most people aren't that good at baseball, which is why, when we talk about the sport, we don't mean the slipshod pick-up games we play but the far more polished pro games we watch. Far too polished, now, it seems, the game given over to agents and metrics, drained of that pastoral quality that once clung to it. 
      Though not much of a fan, I had my moments. One fine summer afternoon in 1973, my father generously consented to drop me off at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the biggest venue in baseball, where I met my friend from summer camp Alan Lictschien, or something similar to that, and we took in a double-header against the Boston Red Sox. Afterward, we lurked in the parking lot outside the stadium—you could do that then—and got the player's autographs, intercepting them as they headed for their Corvettes and Porsches. I got both my hero, Gaylord Perry. I read his memoir, "Me and the Spitter," and Carl Yastremski, who I liked, I believe, for his distinctive batting stance, bat held utterly vertical. I also liked Boog Powell, a heavy has-been, cast-off from the Orioles, but a star by Indians standards, and catcher Ray Fosse who, like so many Indians players, showed great promise until he didn't.  I seem to recall being a member of the Buddy Bell Fan Club one season. I also saw Henry Aaron hit his 704th home run against Montreal in 1974, a moment that shows up in my book on Failure for reasons I won't go into. That must count for something. 
     There's more, but you get the idea. I went to a game in Japan, the Nippon Ham Fighters versus the Sebu Lions at the Tokyo Dome (baseball teams are named for companies instead of teams in Japan). I was deeply jet lagged that day, but remember how the crowd stood in block section, like students at college football games, chanting percussive cheers. "Ni-pon Ham! Ta-Ta-Kai!" 
     Add 10 million more little facts like that and you can be a baseball fan. It proved too time-consuming for me, and while I can admire and envy the devotion to the sport of a guy like my pal, literature professor, baseball expert and Cubs season ticket holder Bill Savage—we literally met and became friends because of "Casey at the Bat"—it is the kind of envy I extend toward someone who speaks German. I wish I could do that. It would be wonderful to read Rilke in the original But my envy is not so much as to actually learn German. Every few years I'll go to a game, usually when a pal gives me a pair of tickets. It was easier when I lived in the city. I would go on my own. I used to work the night shift, and I remember one afternoon I took in an afternoon game, then arrived to start my evening fresh from Wrigley, unshaven, in a Hawaiian shirt and no doubt with a few beers under my belt. 
     I can still see our city editor at the time, the gentle, courtly Southern gentleman, Steve Huntley, stand up, and take the long, slow walk to my desk, and utter a few sorrowful words which I have thankfully forgotten but certainly amounted to, "Don't do that again."
     I think I've made my point. I could share with you the tale of taking my oldest son to his first game, but it's a set piece of my Chicago book and, frankly, I'm not up to retyping the thing. Besides, if you haven't read the book, well, hell, get with the program.  You can order it here, $6.32 used and free shipping. I think I'll pick up a few myself, to hand out to strangers. It has two really good baseball stories about both my boys. The youngest has his photo on the mound at Wrigley Field on the wall in Harry Caray's, and if you want to know how it got there, read the book.  
     In parting, I'll share you a more recent father-son baseball tale. Father's Day occurs shortly before summer, but it's close enough for baseball, as the saying goes. My wife flew my older boy in from New York City as my Father's Day present, and after our family brunch I prevailed upon both boys to go into the front yard for a game of catch. We hadn't done that in, oh, maybe 10 years. The older boy didn't have a glove, but he's a southpaw, so I gave him the first baseman's mitt I bought to play catch with the younger when he was in a park district league. I raced up to my office and grabbed my Charlie Brown mitt from where it has hanging, at the ready, from one doorknob or another, for the past 50 years. We tossed the ball around for maybe 30 minutes. Quite well, in my estimation. The throw and the solid "thwack!" At a respectable distance, catching it most of the time. I thought of taking a photo, or asking someone to take a photo, but that sometimes sets them off and besides, no photo could ever capture how it felt, the golden glow of love and connection that I felt talking and throwing and catching, the arc of the ball, the grab, stretch back, and release. I can't say what it meant to them—indulging the old man, no doubt, exchanging eye-rolling glances. But it meant a lot to me, as does baseball, which you can love though not being a fan, the way you can stray far from your faith and still belong. Baseball is a practice greater than the sum of its parts, the players and managers and ballparks, the bats and balls and gloves, the fans and games and scores and inning and outs and walks and runs. A thing like nature itself, like summer, green and alive, current yet ancient, complex beyond any individual comprehending, but available to the youngest child. And no matter how long you're gone, how far you stray, it's always ready to welcome you home on any given summer day.





     

The Joys of Summer #6: Picnics

    Of course it has to be French, picque-nique—the word practically can't be pronounced without a Gallic flourish—and originally the word referred exclusively to something one did in France.
    "We stayed here till 17th," Miss Cornelia Knight wrote in her autobiography, "and on the previous day went to a pique-nique at a little country house not far from the town." 
     The town being Toulon, and the year being 1777.
    It's clear from the context—the winds were high, they danced afterward—that Miss Knight's picnic was indoors. Prior to 1800, what made something a picnic was the various participants bringing items on the menu; what we call today a "pot luck." After 1800, the essential aspect of picnics being outside crept into use.
     I probably reveal too much about myself to say that the idea, "Hey, let's take our lunch, drag it outside and eat it lying down on the grass," is not one that I frequently, or ever, suggest. Half the time when my wife proposes that we go out on our back deck and eat I have to struggle not to say, "But that takes effort. And the food is right here!"
    But to Ravinia, or the Blues Fest, well why not? Food helps pass the time.
    For families, a picnic is practical on several levels. It's cheaper than a restaurant and invariably better too—most of our family picnics were committed during automobile journeys, where we'd find a well-situated picnic table and break out the cooler. Behavior is also less of an issue. If the kids want to run around after eating, if dad wants to shut his eyes, it isn't the same as in a restaurant. No one is watching. 
     Which also, for the young, is what makes picnics associated with romance. I'm not sure exactly what is going on in Edouard Manet's infamous 1863 painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, "Picnic on the Grass"—nobody is, though the situation is sketchy enough that the work was rejected as too scandalous by the Salon that year. Let's just say that no one in the painting seems too concerned that the food has tumbled out of the basket. 
    In literature, picnics are even more louche, to trot out another term the French like. In D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, the pretense of eating is done away with entirely—Paul and Clara set out on their picnic along the River Trent without bothering with the formality of securing food or a blanket and, honestly, neither are missed. Picnics are not meals at home, so flexibility is important and accommodations must be made. A picnic in Nabokov's Ada is where Ada and Van Veen get it on, never mind that she's 12 and they're brother and sister.
     I would have sworn that one of Anny's "perfect moments" in Jean-Paul Sartre's surprisingly readable only novel, "La Nausee" involve a picnic, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Maybe you'll have better luck, and if you do, please let me know. 
     I never went to church, but of course know of church picnics, primarily through "Porgy and Bess," George Gershwin's great American opera. Much of the second act involved Catfish Row preparing for a church picnic on Kittiwah Island. It allows the evil Crown to drag off Bess, but not before the one-two punch of a joyous ode to clean living "I Ain't Got No Shame" followed by a companion paean to sin, "It Ain't Necessarily So." ("The things you are liable, to read in the Bible, it ain't necessarily so.") 
     Finished? I've barely started. Picnics are a classic cartoon trope, along with desert islands and dungeons, though they are less funny now that beer comes in pull top cans—a lot of amusement seemed to be wrapped up in forgotten church key can openers, though the humor of that eludes me now. 
     Still, I think we've plunged enough for a summer day. Lying on the grass is beyond me at the moment, but I did sit on the front porch briefly Monday, which felt like triumph. A nice roast beef sandwich consumed under a clear blue sky in a sylvan spot sounds pretty good about now. 

The Joys of Summer #5: Hiking

 

     Normally, when I go to write these things, I pause for a second, muse momentarily, then nod briskly once and dive into what I have to say. The path is clear.
    But here, oddly, I sat a moment, pursing my lips, gazing into the middle distance. How to explain hiking? The immediate response seemed to be to invoke the line I sometimes fire at readers who ask insincere rhetorical questions, Louis Armstrong's supposed quip to some weisenheimer who demanded he define jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know."
     What is there to say? You go to a place and walk. The place should be beautiful, yes, but it doesn't have to be. I can't recall every going on a hike that wasn't. Are there trees? Fields? Clouds? Vistas? Flowers? Then it's beautiful.  The hike makes it beautiful.
     Why? Because it is a rare moment in your life when you are not getting or spending, not doing routine tasks, neither idling nor exercising, or some combination of all these things. It doesn't matter where you go, or when. You can hike in fall, when the colors are turning, or spring, when life stirs anew, or even winter. But summer is best, the warm weather, the free time. The above is Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, where we went last summer after setting our youngest up at Virginia Law.
     I supposed it helps to be prepared. I have an excellent pair of hiking boots—Keen's—that make me happy to lace on, happy to walk in, happy every time my eye caresses their perfect lines. They want to walk, and lucky is the person who happens to have their feet inside them.
    A water bottle. A bag of trail mix. A day pack with a jacket. You go into nature prepared, and maybe that is part of hiking's appeal. You don't need a coffee grinder, or a snow blower, or a gallon of Tide, or all the thousand possessions and supplies and accoutrements you clutter your life with. You've got a pocket knife and a lighter, so are prepared to face  whatever life might throw at you that day.
    Hiking makes everything precious. Think about it. At home you've got an infinity of water a tap turn away. And you value it .... not at all. On a hike, you heft your water bottle, feel there is a good eight ounces left, enough to get you down the mountain to the parking lot. You feel blessed, lucky, prudent for not guzzling it all on the way up. 

The Joys of Summer #4: Family vacation

     One irony of this column is the boy who yawned at Times Square now lives in Greenwich Village.

     WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis.—When we took the boys to New York City earlier this year, they were not impressed. "Big deal!" the 6-year-old snorted, standing amidst Times Square's strobing, Blade Runner advertisements and crush of humanity.
     "I want to stay in the hotel room!" the 4-year-old later whined, sprawled in front of the TV.
     The city didn't make much of a mark on the boys. At home, they never mentioned New York and seemed not to recall they'd even been there.
     Now, the Dells, that's another matter. Our past visits were sources of constant fond reminiscence, coupled with urgent pleas to return.
     So here we found ourselves, once again, in the parking lot of Tommy Bartlett's Robot World. The boys surge forward, like bloodhounds nosing a fox.
     "I love Robot World!" the older one exuded.
     "Robot World is the coolest place!" shouted the younger.
     I shambled after, smiling sheepishly at my wife. Once, we vacationed in Paris, in New Orleans, in Martinique. Now, we're at the Wisconsin Dells, staying at the Wilderness, "America's Premier Waterpark Resort," an enormous hive of water slides and game rooms.
     What amazes me most is that I like it. I'm happy here. The bone-deep cheesiness of the place does not depress me, as it once would have. Maybe it's maturity, or resignation, I'm not sure which.
     This is our third trip to the Dells, and the ironic pose needed to shield myself for the first two trips is no longer necessary. I am genuinely excited to breakfast at Mr. Pancake. And the reason I am excited to eat at Mr. Pancake—you might not see it coming—is they have really, really good pancakes. Big and fluffy and homemade. The kind that take the sting out of a 186-mile drive.
     Sure, Robot World is a hodge-podge of optical illusions culled from a defunct science museum, salted with a smattering of low-rent robots of the lightbulb-and-garbage-can variety. But you know what? The boys liked it better than the Statue of Liberty.
     The Dells are an unfolding of hidden delights. Perhaps the biggest concentration of 1950s motels in the world—squat structures straight out of Nabokov, with names like Twi-Lite and Flamingo, heralded by achingly cute neon signs ("FREE TELEVISION"), ringing pools whose curving slides are a question mark as to how these places can still exist in the shadow of all those new mega-water parks such as the Wilderness. (They survive, I eventually realized, because the water-park hotels are so expensive that they've priced themselves out of the market for families that need to pay $50 or so for a room if they want to have anything left over for go-kart racing and roller-coasters and bungie jumping and rides on the Ducks.)
     We even glimpsed a bit of the natural beauty that got the Dells going as a tourist attraction in the first place, 100 years ago. Like most tourists, we didn't bother seeking nature out, but it found us in the most unexpected place: the entrance walk to Tommy Bartlett's Water Thrill Show, which turns out to be a cathedral of enormous pines, hushed and cool and not at all what you would expect to usher you into the inner sanctum of Wisconsin kitsch.
     I had never seen the Thrill Show before, perhaps because it struck me as the Seventh Seal of Midwestern, middle-class bourgeois Hell. I'd see the show, and before I knew it I'd be eating bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches and collecting Hummel figurines. Besides, I thought the kids would be bored by water skiing.
     They weren't. They loved it, at least the first half. The show is an oddly self-referential affair, a celebration of the history of water skiing and of its own history--the various forgotten world's fairs the show participated in (Seattle 1962!) and, of course, Tommy Bartlett, the radio announcer who swiped the idea of a water show from Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven, Fla., and brought it back to the land of clear spring waters.
     The boys liked the speedboats and clownery, and I savored the show as a pure form. One doesn't get much chance to see a chorus line of gals doing the can-can on water skis, never mind a flag-waving pyramid streaking by to "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
     We even experienced "A Wisconsin Moment." My wife wanted to take the boys to a fancy restaurant, so we got dressed up and went to the swank eatery attached to the resort--"Field's of the Wilderness," they call it. It had the trappings of sophisticated dining--the handblown wineglasses, the tuxedoed staff, the three forks. But instead of the forks being different sizes--dinner, salad and appetizer--they were a trio of hefty, heavy dinner forks, identical in size. Maybe that isn't enchanting to you. But, for me, it really was the highlight of the trip. Three big honking silver forks, one after another, triplets, next to the plate.
     It's the kind of thing that melts in with the other memories--like the boys joyously tubing down fake rapids, or pitting themselves, feverishly, against the arcade games--to form the image of a summer vacation. Ancient Greece is gone, but the civilization that is Wisconsin is still there, waiting for anyone bold enough to explore.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 12, 2002

The Joys of Summer #3: The Beach

  

  

New Jersey Beach, by William Trost Richards (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     This is an odd artifact, nearly 30 years old. And while it's a fairly flaccid piece of writing, it is interesting for its circumstance. 
     I hope.
     The summer of 1990 the Sun-Times was launching Sizzle, a magazine designed to appeal to young people. I was in my late 20s, so counted as a young person, or at least youngish, if you squinted, and so either volunteered or was asked to write something about the beach. I wrote the below despite that fact that a) I hate going to the beach and b) I almost never go. It's more of a fantasy than anything else, perhaps based on one hour of one afternoon with my pals shortly before graduating Northwestern. Of course the paper didn't publish it. To be honest, I feel a little squeamish posting it now; but then "squeamish" is a condition of life lately. I must have cared about it enough to print out a dot matrix version that has slept in a folder all this while. Vanity. But given the situation on the EGD medical front—I might get out of the hospital today, unless I don't—it's this or nothing. I hope I made the right choice.

    Ideally, you would never go to the beach. The beach would be there, outside your door, and you would wander onto it whenever the mood struck you, to think fine thoughts and watch the herons twirling over the shimmering sand.
     Having to go to the beach is more problematic. There is nothing intrinsically comfortable about a stretch of hot sand, never mind the usually long and difficult trek to get there.
     Comfort must be brought along, and comfort is chairs and coolers and towels and novels and umbrellas. Ice, bottles, food, utensils, sun block, shades and musical devices. Comfort is heavy.
    Which leads to the first and only each rule: Go with people. The thought of going alone might be enticing—you, silhouetted against the blue waters, a beacon of attractiveness and mystery.
    At the beach, alone, magnificent.
    But that isn't ever the case. Alone at the beach, you soon start to feel like something the waves washed up. A dead jellyfish. An old can. Nothing.
     A crowd makes you feel significant and, besides, you need people to help tote all the stuff. People to tell you that your shoulders are turning maroon. people to play Frisbee with and to hand you a cold beer when you don't feel like making the effort of reaching your hand all the way into the cooler.
   And that is the state you wish to attain on a beach. The laziest, sleepiest, most somnolent sort of near-coma you can possibly achieve.  Because you have spent so much energy lugging this stuff from the car, then setting up, and swimming and tossing the Frisbee and capering in the surf (another reason to go with a group. Have you ever seen somebody caper in the surf alone? They look like an idiot) you can then flop on the beach like an exhausted runner and rack up quality beach time.
    That is why we go to beaches in the first place.
     Where else can you wake up, all sleepy and disoriented, like a 4-year-old arising from nap time? You dig your watch out of .a sneaker. It's 4 p.m. You look around. Your friend are all scattered around like a pile of sleeping cats, their sand-crusted sides rising and falling in slumber.
    You fish in the melted ice and grab one of the remaining cold bottles. At the sound of the sloshing water, your friends start to stir and murmur. The sun is getting low. You think: evening. Dinner. Going out. First, a nice, cool , invigorating shower—maybe the best shower you ever had in your life, maybe with all your friends. Then dinner. Perhaps the best dinner you've ever eaten. The whole bunch of you, fresh and clean and wearing crisp new summer clothes, laughing together at your collective wit and mutual intelligence, heading into a wonderful restaurant after a day at the beach ,brown as beans and ready to party.
    That's what beaches do. they jumpstart your life. otherwise, why would people bother?

The Joys of Summer #2: Hot Dogs

     I love hot dogs—who doesn't?—and have written about the humble frank on a number of times over the years, whether attending Hot Dog University, or dipping into the ketchup controversy, alluded to yet again below. I somehow never shared this visit to the mothership itself, the Vienna Beef factory. Gold Coast is gone, alas, except for a tiny outpost tucked into a remote corner of Union Station. And Vienna Beef moved its factory to Bridgeport in 2016. No hot dogs, or solid foods of any type, for me at the moment—but I'll be looking forward to my next one, some time in August. Or September at the very latest.

     Another Fourth of July come and gone, and have you reflected on your deep personal debt to the humble hot dog? I thought not.
     Despite this being peak wienie season—nearly half of all hot dogs are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day—and despite Chicago being a world center for hot dogs, somehow the mild little sausages don't get proper credit, their significance ignored in their home town, drowned out in the choruses of praise for other Chicago standards, such as pizza.
     To add insult to injury, the only references I noticed to hot dogs over the holiday weekend were several reports on a hot dog eating contest—on New York's Coney Island, of all places, sponsored by Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs, whose franchise on Rush Street quickly withered and died in the face of superior local fare.
      "Chicago is a hot dog town," said Tom McGlade, a senior vice president at Vienna Beef, the largest of several frankmakers in the city. "We have 1,800 hot dog stands—more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's combined."
     That gets overlooked, since none of those hot dog stands have the advertising clout of the burger giants. Most of Vienna's marketing goes into hot dog stand umbrellas and those eye-catching posters of giant hot dogs.
     There are many noteworthy stands, such as Gold Coast Hot Dogs on State Street, known for the tendency of visiting Hollywood stars to send their underlings to Gold Coast to fetch bags of chardogs back to their luxury suites.
     And Murphy's Red Hots on Belmont Avenue, whose owner, Bill Murphy, found himself tapped as the Col. Sanders of the Japanese hot dog after he stepped out from behind the counter to greet a group of Japanese customers at his stand. They turned out to be a team of food executives scouting the American hot dog scene before introducing the fare to the frankfurter-starved Japanese millions, and Murphy's friendliness earned him a goodwill trip to Japan.
     Despite the famous quote about how people who like legislation or sausages should never see either being made, I couldn't resist inviting myself over to Vienna's North Damen plant, where more than 100 million hot dogs a year are sent forth to gladden the hearts of a weary world.
     "Before I came to work here, I always thought hot dog makers were sweeping bugs off the floor, tossing in cow's noses and pig's toes," said McGlade, standing in front of a vat of 2,500 pounds of ground beef. "You can see how clean our beef is."
     Indeed. The meat looked as attractive as a ton and a quarter of ground meat could. Surround it with a hundred loaves' worth of toast points and a few dozen pounds of chopped egg, pop open a few jeroboams of champagne, and you could have the largest steak tartare party in the world.
     The beef arrives in big hunks from Vienna's own slaughterhouse in Harvard, Ill. I was taken aback when I saw a worker with a metal hook at the end of his arm use it to pull a chunk of meat toward him so he could trim off the fat with a big curved knife. The perils of industry, I thought.
     Then I noticed that all the other workers had hooks, too, and I quickly realized the hooks were held, not attached.
     A computer monitors the mixture to make sure it is 80 percent beef, 20 percent "sweet brisket trimmings"—a fancy way of saying "fat."
     Garlic, spices and salt are added and the mixture is pulverized until it ends up an unappetizing beige gel, which is then packed into casings.
     After the dogs are cooked, they turn the rich, enticing mahogany color people associate with beef franks.
     "No dyes," McGlade said. "It's a miracle." McGlade demonstrated that they are pre-cooked and don't need heating by plucking one off the line, snapping it in half, and taking a bite.
     Vienna takes credit for the invention of the famous Chicago Style Hot Dog, a frank buried under a mound of yellow mustard, neon green relish, chopped onion, tomato wedges, a pickle slice, hot peppers and a dash of celery salt.
     "It's a nice combination of sweet and crunchy and hot," said McGlade, who personally likes his dog with jardiniere and Grey Poupon mustard.
     You think that's odd? I like mine with mustard and ketchup, and eat them that way even though every person I've ever mentioned this to recoils in utter visceral disgust.
     I've come to accept ketchup on hot dogs as a perversion unique to myself, and will continue the practice until they pass a constitutional amendment banning it, and probably beyond.
     Then there is the entire question of charred vs. boiled.
     But that's an entirely different column. Hot dogs, thank God, are one area where consensus is not needed. You can enjoy your hot dog with whipped cream and a splash of Tabasco and it won't disturb me a bit. It's summertime. We should all relax.

                —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 9, 1997

The Joys of Summer #1: Ice cream

This is not the Jumbo Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae—that has three scoops—but the more modest Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae.

     Summer is a time of relaxation and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures. To set aside quotidian concerns—our troubling political situation, the endless demands of work, complicated medical conditions that require surgery—and just have fun. 
    So for today, and the unforeseeable future, the blog, if not necessarily its author, will concern itself with the pleasures of summertime. For those who like to comment, it might be a number of days before I can sit up, read, vet and post them, and your patience as always is appreciated. I did think about just leaving the comments section open, but that's like handing my blog over to lunatics, and I'm not doing it.
     When I wrote the following, I had been home on paternity leave for seven months. This originally ran under the headline "Life, Treat Sweet at Margie's." For many years the Wicker Park institution kept a stack of photocopies next to the cash register, which pleased me greatly. It's still there, if you want to go, approaching its 100th year in business.

     I do not believe in angelic voices, interceding in our daily lives. Nevertheless, a voice did speak to me last week. It said, clearly, unmistakably, "Go to Margie's and get a sundae."
     To be honest, I had been feeling a little down. The routine had become very, well, routine. "Go to Margie's," the voice said. "And get a sundae."
    So I went. Driving down Western Avenue, I tried to remember how long it had been. At least six years. Maybe eight, since I last tasted that gorgeous bittersweet hot fudge sauce. And Margie, a tiny, ancient woman, sitting beside the cash register. Would she still be alive? Would the place even be open?
     Six years! Maybe eight. The Republicans are right. Our values ARE skewed. What could I have been doing all this time that was so important I couldn't go get a sundae? Shameful.
     From the outside, the place at 1960 N. Western is the same. Same 1940s sign. Same silk flowers and china dolls in the windows. The menu still offers 50 different ice cream sundaes, with names like the Zombie and the Astronaut and the Coco-Loco.
     The choice was easy. I ordered the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae. Just placing the order was a joy: "I'll have the Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae, please," I said.
     Say it out loud once and you'll see what I mean.
     The Jumbo Fudge Atomic Sundae was exactly as it should be -- a white clamshell filled with three scoops of ice cream, covered by a lattice of hard chocolate dribbled over the top. (The lattice is what makes the sundae "atomic"). Whipped cream and chopped nuts on top of that. Plus a cherry. Plus two sugar cookies.
     Alongside, a stainless steel urn, filled with hot fudge sauce. Just as perfect as before—hot, rich, deep, dark, bittersweet.
     There was one difference, however. Margie Poulos was gone. She passed away just last year, at age 80. But Peter George Poulos, her son, was there, and he slipped into the booth and told me the Margie's story.
     His grandfather, also named Peter George Poulos, came to Chicago from Greece and, 75 years ago this year, opened an ice cream parlor at the exact spot where it stands today.
     The grandfather's son, George Peter Poulos—the current owner's father—met a girl named Margie Michaels.
     "They got engaged in that booth over there," says Poulos, pointing to a spot a few feet away. "We call it Lover's Lane."
     That was in 1933. Countless other couples have used the booth to pop the question. "You should be here on Valentine's Day—the joint is up for grabs," says Poulos.
     "People come back here to get engaged because their parents were engaged here."
     Poulos was born in 1936, and grew up, literally, in the store. "My father made up a cradle in the back of the candy case," he says.
     From the beginning, Margie's candy, the ice cream, the fudge sauce, was homemade, and nobody ever saw a reason to change it. "My mother was offered a fortune for the fudge recipe," he says.
     Fame has brushed against the little ice cream shop. Al Capone was a customer. The Beatles came by, after their Comiskey Park concert. Poulos, who is a podiatrist, was at a hospital doing his residency when his mother called.
     "She said, 'Hey, some English guys are here from Sox park,' " remembers Poulos. "I said, 'Ma, there's no English baseball team.' And she said, 'No, dummy. It's the Beatles.' "
     When Margie died, Poulos took over, moving his podiatry practice across the street, so he could better run the place. Lunchtime finds him there, along with his wife and their newborn son, named George Peter Poulos, after his granddad.
     "He loves the taste of ice cream," says Poulos, who gave the infant a fingerful of Margie's 18 percent butterfat frozen treasure when he was a week old.
     Might there be a chance that baby George will be running Margie's 75 years from now? Following in the footsteps of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents?
     "The little guy?" Poulos says, as if he never considered the question before. "I don't want him to be a foot doctor. I hope he will grow up here, like I did."
     Poulos thinks he has something good to pass along.
     "There are so few businesses that children want, because they see their parents work so hard, killing themselves," he says. "This is fun. You make people happy. It's not a tough life. You can walk around to your customers and say 'Hi' and be proud of what you're doing."
     I finished scraping the white clamshell clean with my spoon and made sure that not another iota of fudge could be dredged up out of the steel urn. Then I licked the spoon.
     I paid my bill -- the Jumbo Atomic Fudge Sundae cost $4; less than some places charge for a bottle of beer.
     I can't tell you how happy I felt leaving Margie's. Maybe it was enzymes from the fudge, working on my brain. Maybe it was the infectious cheer of Peter Poulos. Maybe it was the thought of baby George being groomed to make the secret fudge sauce for me when I am old and gray and will need it more than ever.
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 5, 1996