Turning away from wonder to gaze at matters Trumpian

     The word “placebo” is not only from Latin, it is Latin, an unaltered Latin word meaning “I will please,” the first person singular future indicative of placere, “to please.”
     It wasn’t originally used to describe a sugar pill pretending to be medicine, of course, but a part of Vespers, Book of the Dead, taken from the line, Psalm 114:9 in the Latin Vulgate Bible: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” or “I will please the Lord in the land for living.”

     By 1200, it was used to describe flatterers — Chaucer names a character in The Merchant’s Tale “Placebo.” By 1811, it was a term for pills with no medical value but offering psychological benefit. 
     OK, OK, Donald Trump. Do you think the media wants to natter on obsessively about him? Others perhaps do. But not me. Gazing into Trump’s world is like directing a flashlight down the hole in an outhouse while the Northern Lights flash and flicker in the heavens right outside.
     But focusing elsewhere, no matter how fascinating, also feels like describing a pretty flower when the school next door is burning. Worse, your entire country aflame. I was going to write today on last week’s Alabama debacle. You know the particulars if you’re paying attention. With Hurricane Dorian turning up the East Coast, Trump said Alabama was in peril when it wasn’t, the risk already past.
     A small error. Worth correcting only because people in Alabama could be alarmed by the president suggesting a deadly storm is bearing down on them. A normal human being would dismiss it with a shrug.

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Lighted balloons

    Did you have a good summer? Now that we're hurtling into September, hard to believe it's almost gone. For me, spine surgery carved out a big two-month chunk, cancelling two vacations and sucking up all my attention and energy. That was unfortunate.
     But I did have one beautiful day. Center Avenue had a block party a few weeks ago. It was a marvel of planning—thank you Carla, thank you Tanya, thank you all the other neighbors who helped out. Not only the usual tables of food and tubs of cold drinks, but live bands. A fire truck and bouncy house for the kids. Games. My oldest boy was in town, and we all hung out, chatting, eating, listening to music as day turned into evening, then into night. I think I spent eight hours, from setting up to the last stragglers sitting around a fire pit in the front yard. Playing corn hole. Dancing in the street—really, how often do you get the chance to dance in the street? Not often enough.
     After dark, someone produced something I had never seen before. Lighted balloons. I hope that doesn't tar me as hopelessly out of it, and that you haven't been enjoying LED balloons since the 1950s. I'm sure you'll let me know. But they were new to me. Not only did the balloons glow sooth shades of blue and green, but they changed colors. I'd never seen anything like it. Finally, a new technology that isn't menacing.
      A tiny girl—5, 7, it's hard to tell anymore—walked up to me and, with heartbreaking solemnity, presented me with one, saying, "Would you like this balloon? Please take it." You can't very well say no to that. I accepted it with a bow.
     Though once I had the balloon, there was a difficulty: what to do with it? I carried the balloon for a bit, giving it a few tentative tosses into the air and catching it. But that got old. I didn't want to cast the balloon away, not after that little girl had so earnestly entrusted me with it. It would pop on the ground. And be my fault.
     Then I had a brainstorm. There was a low branched tree in the yard where the block party was centered. I took the string from the balloon and wrapped it around a branch. A good idea spread. Other people automatically followed my lead—that never happens—and soon the tree was festooned with balloons, all gently changing colors. It was gorgeous. When I think of the summer of 2019, I'll think of that.

This might not be the outrage Patti expected, but it’ll have to do

     Friday was the rare day I had two columns in the paper, the second being a quick hit ordered up in response to Patti Blagojevich shaking her fist at the heavens for the unfairness of life. A few readers found this harsh, feeling pity for Patti and her fractured family. They might not realize that it was her father, Dick Mell, who inflicted Blago on the state in the first place, as a wedding present. She had plenty of opportunity to spare him, and herself, and us, this endless drama. Sympathy is misplaced.

Coincidence can be a satirist.
 A reader sent in this, which ran
 in the paper the same day. 

     Oh, Patti. Do you really not get it? After all these years? You “cannot even wrap” your head around former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, having his indictment dismissed while your hubby is seven years into his 14-year prison term? (That is, assuming Donald Trump, friend of frauds and crooks, doesn’t commute his sentence as a big wink to his cronies that he has their back.)
     Shall I explain it then? OK.
     First, Schock’s acts were penny-ante — Super Bowl tickets and fudged expense reports. It was not trying to sell a seat to the United States Senate, and doing a botched job at that. The harm of a crime matters — a guy who takes a sledgehammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta is in more trouble than somebody doing the same to a plaster Elvis. Both guys are swinging hammers. Schock got a fancy office; Illinois got Sen. Roland Burris. Those are not equal harms.
     Second, Schock played ball with the feds. He cut a deal. He did not prance and preen and glory in the attention, the way your husband did. He did not go on “Dancing with the Stars.”
     Not that Rod didn’t have a point. Sure, he only did the kind of horse-trading politicians do. But into an open FBI tap he knew was there.
     Third, what makes you believe the legal system is fair? Murderers walk while mopes sit in stir for decades over a $50 stick-up. Dan Rostenkowski committed petty thefts over postage stamps and office chairs — and ended up in the joint. (Taking it, I might add, with far more grace than Rod, who practically had to have his hands pried off the radiator as they dragged him to prison, like Jimmy Cagney going to the chair in “Angels with Dirty Faces.”)

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Ping Tom Park part of a growing Chinatown

Artist Anna Murphy finishing mural at Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown.

  

     Nobody calls the near West Side of Chicago “Jew Town” anymore. The great-grandchildren of the merchants who sold ... well, just about everything ... at the sprawling open-air market on Maxwell Street have scattered — to Rogers Park, then Skokie, then everywhere.
     Many of the city’s old ethnic enclaves were shattered by supposed “progress,” whether the Italian community on Taylor Street, bulldozed by the expanding University of Illinois at Chicago, or the heart of Bronzeville, cut out by CHA high-rises.
     Chinatown is an exception. Not only has it preserved its ethnic character — 90% of the neighborhood’s residents are Asian, most speaking Chinese at home — but it’s growing, despite, and in some cases because of, setbacks it suffered.
     “Chicago’s Chinatown is really interesting,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, a community center in Chinatown. “Philadelphia and New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston — every Chinatown is within blocks of the financial district and City Hall, and every one of these cities would say their Chinatowns are dying.”
     Chicago’s Chinatown was originally jammed into two blocks of Clark Street in the Loop. But in 1912, rising rents and white hostility prodded the Chinese community to move, wholesale, to Wentworth and Cermak.
     Bad then, good now.
     “If we were at Clark and Van Buren and wanted to expand at all, we couldn’t,” said Wu. “A hundred years ago, it wasn’t nice to be pushed out of your community. But now Chicago’s Chinatown is the only one flourishing. It’s more like a normal community, without huge pressures of gentrification.”

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Bee careful

     Nick and Nora Charles don't carry the cultural heft they did when I was growing up, and the "Thin Man" series of 1930s black-and-white detective movies were a staple of UHF television.
     As played by William Powell and Myrna Loy, they seemed the ideal married couple, for their swank deco apartment, their frequent martinis, and exuberant wordplay.
     I never had a swank deco apartment. The frequent martinis proved troublesome, and were long ago set aside. But my wife and I do manage a bit of wordplay, now then.
     Particularly in the Chicago Botanic Garden, where we like to spend hours walking and talking. It's like being in heaven, and you don't have to die. We went twice over Labor Day weekend.
     A favorite spot is the circular Rose Garden. Maybe because I had skipped my standard rose garden joke. "I didn't make any binding commitment to come here," (think about it) I felt poised, when my wife offered me the perfect slow pitch.
     "Be careful for bees," she said, smelling a rose.  "They're out in force."
     She could picture her husband swooping in to smell a perfect rose and ending up with a nostril full of bee. Sometimes my whole life seems like that.
     "That's why they call them 'bees,'" I replied. "Because you have to 'bee careful.'"
     Some might have groaned. You might be groaning now. But my wife thought that is funny, or has been conditioned to think that funny. She laughed, and then realized she was laughing.
     "That's why you love me, because I'm easy to please," she said.
    "No," I corrected her. "That's why you love me."
     She laughed even more.
     Okay, not Nick and Nora Charles. But we enjoyed it. And "I didn't make any binding commitment to come here" translates into "I never promised you a rose garden." A reference to the country song. Maybe it gets funnier after you've heard it 50 times. Maybe not.
     Labor Day happened to be our 29th anniversary. The garden was mobbed, the line of cars backed onto Lake Cook Road, the parking lot jammed. Once inside,  we joined the wonderfully diverse crowd the Botanic Garden draws: black and white, Hispanic and asian, wedding parties and orchid societies, brides and quinceañera teens posing for photographs. 
    Usually, the throngs taper off quickly as soon as you get away from the front entrance. But not Monday. Even in the far reaches, the winding paths and well-wrought bridges were bristling with strollers: young couples, old couples, parents and young kids in strollers, large, extended families. Sometimes that's annoying. ("Hell," I like to say, quoting Sartre, "is other people.") But the weather was so perfect, I didn't object to sharing the Botanic Garden with the big crowds.
     "I don't mind the other people," I informed Edie, as we walked.
     "What other people?" she replied.

No, this will not be on the test.

     Hi kids! How was school? Hope you had a good first day. Hope the rain didn’t mess things up too much.
     Kidding. I know students don’t read the newspaper. Not when they can endlessly flip through Instagram posts on their smartphones and check out what their friends are doing.
     So OK, none of the some 360,000 students enrolled this year in Chicago’s 642 public schools are reading this. A shame. Because if I remember correctly, students can feel cut off. I wish they knew they are actually a major force in the city, by numbers alone: 13 percent of Chicago residents are enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools. If CPS were itself a city, it would be almost as populous as Cleveland which, with 385,000 residents, just nudges past. Fold in Catholic schools, and the “City of Chicago Students” becomes the 47th largest city in the country, surpassing Oakland or Minneapolis.
     See what you miss, not reading the paper? OK, you don’t see. A survey last year found only 2 percent of American teens read the newspaper.
     Who are these people? As with any large city, CPS is too vast to generalize, ranging from 3-year-olds in pre-kindergarten programs excited to learn about the color blue to 18-year-olds learning to fertilize with fish poop (not a made-up example: the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences in Mount Greenwood had four large tanks, raising tilapia, when I visited. The wastewater was being used to nourish the school’s crops).
     From elite high schools like Northside College Prep, where it is not unknown for suburban families to lie about their addresses, trying to sneak in students, to Consuella B. York Alternative High School, which families work equally hard to keep their kids out of: it’s the high school inside Cook County Jail.
     Whatever grade or school, just paying attention in class can seem a lot to ask. To also follow the news is a bridge too far. I get that. The news is so chaotic and ... granular. It unfolds so slowly. Nothing like a video game, where you hurtle through a colorful tube of geometric shapes flying at you and then on to the next, even harder level. That’s accomplishing something!

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Flashback 1999: "Right choice is in eye of the beholder

Mattress Show Room, W. & J. Sloane (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Decisions are hard. You have to make a choice, then live with it. At least they are for me. I know there are people who breezily acquire tattoos, shed jobs, buy cars, sell homes, without a moment's qualm. I envy those people deeply. They don't know how lucky they are. Even when I make a major decision easily, I can never be sure that a backwash of cold regret won't swamp me the next day. The Mattress Story came up twice in the past few weeks, and I realized I'd never posted it here. That oversight is now corrected.

     Went to buy eyeglasses the other day. I had mangled my current pair roughhousing with the boys, and while the glasses were still wearable, they threatened to snap at some moment of maximum inconvenience. Why not cleverly sidestep the crisis by getting a new pair first?
     But buying glasses is itself a crisis, or at least a tough decision. It's like buying a new nose. They perch on your face for years and years, defining you. And they cost almost as much as a new nose, which only makes the decision more difficult.
     Of course I told myself the Mattress Story, even before I got to the store, for support and inspiration. The Mattress Story is one of those cherished family tales used to define a person, in this case my brother Sam, the decisive executive.
     This was about 10 years ago. He had just moved from Tokyo to Chicago and was living with me on Logan Boulevard, sleeping on the sofa. He needed a bed. We visited a mattress store on North Halsted Street. Sam immediately flopped backward on a mattress/box spring set, closed his eyes, spread his arms, and seemed to doze for a second. Then his eyes snapped open and he popped up.
     "This one is fine," he announced. He moved to the cash register, taking out his wallet. This astounded me, shocked me. "But what about that one?" I said, wedging myself between him and the register, pointing to another, randomly chosen bed. "Or that one." The store offered about two dozen beds.
     "This one is fine," repeated my brother, a little impatiently. I began to protest, agog, but he stayed on his feet, paid for the mattress, and left.
     I could never do that. Never, ever, ever. I would have to carefully lay on each mattress, from the $100 aqua foam pallet destined for a fleabag motel, to the $2,500 deluxe luxury model, all gold and satiny braid, which I could never buy anyway. I would narrow them down to two choices that were completely identical, then agonize, back and forth between them, sweating and mumbling and flopping from one bed to another until a crowd gathered and I just picked one to end the embarrassing ordeal, so I could flee the store, heart palpitating, already regretting my decision.
     So you can imagine how an eyeglass store, with its hundreds of frames of all sizes and varieties, would pose a problem. I tried to coax my wife along to make the decision for me, but she was too savvy. "You can do it," she said.
     And I did, in my fashion. I actually, sincerely liked the first frame I touched. Stylish. Handsome, in my estimation. I thought about buying that one and being done with it. But no. That is not my way. I had to carefully examine every single frame in the store, forcing myself to select a second choice, which I then spent 20 minutes comparing to the first choice, sitting before a mirror, putting on one pair, then the other, then my present pair, again and again and again, polling the clerks, the optometrist in the back, flipping a coin at one point, contemplating running out to get my wife.
     And then I bought the first pair I tried on.
     But life offers compensation. While I agonize over the big-ticket items—I'm sure many people have less anxiety deciding to move abroad than I do choosing a sofa—at least there aren't too many of those decisions. It's not as if you buy a new car every week. And the small, what's-for-lunch questions are a breeze for me.
     I flop open the menu, pick something, usually a club sandwich on wheat toast, snap the menu closed, and am whistling and drumming my fingers, along with the waiter, while my wife silently stares at the menu as if it were written in a foreign language. And am I sympathetic, based on my own difficulties with certain decisions? Of course not.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 1999