Texas notes: Oyster

The Aegean Sea by Frederic Edwin Church (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    Our Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey is a woman of parts, without question. Still, today's report ventures off in a totally unexpected direction, as you will see.

     During the summer of 2005 the man I was dating got a phone call. The King of Jordan, who was once a boarding school buddy of his, was inviting him to come for a visit to help support the building of a new boarding school in Jordan. The idea was for the King’s previous classmates to help fund and support the up and coming King’s Academy, which was modeled after the school in the States where the King had spent some of his formative years. Since wives and partners of his classmates were also invited, I was beyond excited to learn I’d be joining my boyfriend on this trek to The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. My ex and I were not exactly a solid couple, though we lived together in his gigantic rental loft in the West Loop of Chicago, and we did our best to make things work between us. Even though he did not always like me — once calling my “histrionics boring and pedestrian” when I was passionately expressing my innermost feelings — apparently there were some perks to my presence, despite what he saw as my somewhat plebeian tendencies. We had almost nothing in common and to this day I can’t quite explain how we ended up a couple, though I remember clearly how it started.
     The first time I saw his six foot seven inch stature adorned in high-waisted hand tailored trousers that seemed to come from a distant and more magical era, and the long black braid cascading down his back contrasting against his fashionably wrinkled white linen shirt, I was enamored. I was not used to such unusual eye candy in the city I’d lived in for most of my life when I spotted him on the outdoor dance floor of Summer Dance on South Michigan Avenue. I discovered that a good friend of mine was there with this tall living sculpture, so we had a chance to meet. He was an odd bird, wildly interesting and intelligent, and I loved it. He was self taught on the baby grand piano placed with a view out of a huge plate glass window of the loft, and would whip out a ragtime hit in between other acts of prowess. I joined him at dinner parties in Chicago and New York with artists and brilliant thinkers, doers and creators, and my life became a French movie. Everything was amber and tawny, we had a demanding orchid that simultaneously could not tolerate too much attention, which was casually and somehow perfectly placed in a pot full of mulch that hung precariously from a giant exposed brick wall. We made tofu with vindaloo sauce and used molasses, whole wheat flour and dark chocolate nibs in the banana bread. Our visitors were the curators of jazz festivals on islands in Europe and famous musicians, poets, actors, and inventors. We once spent a summer working on an art project on tobacco farms in the South where we were taken on a four-seater private plane to an island in Georgia with a pilot who did loop-de-loops while I squealed with nervous joy and my boyfriend and the pilot’s wife screamed at him to cut it out and right the plane. Being in this man’s life opened the world up much bigger than I had ever known it to be.
     It was not surprising that now I’d be joining him on a trip as the guest of royalty. One big question loomed large in my mind: what on earth would I wear? My wardrobe of tie dyed bell bottom yoga pants mixed with funky dancing and club attire would not do. A solution quickly surfaced — a warm and generous woman who lived in a penthouse that we frequented for wine-laced never ending dinner parties on Fulton Market jumped right in. She was all too thrilled to help this comparative pauper become a princess. She invited me over and into her closet, which was larger than most apartments I’d lived in, and started pulling out colorful zigzag designs of Ottavio Missoni and flowing silk and linen garments, and buttery leather designer sandals. She didn’t skimp at all, and outfitted me with elegant jewelry and a handbag too. I was ready to face this once in a lifetime adventure properly.
     As was the case with many big dreams in my life, the expectant picture I held in my head proved to be much grander than the real thing. Don’t get me wrong — riding camels through the Wadi Rum Desert and snorkeling off the King’s yacht in the Red Sea were as wonderful as anything I could have possibly imagined, but at my core I knew I was only a temporary fixture in this magnificent life. My boyfriend and I were not connected as some couples are, like best friends. This was temporary. Knowing that, I felt a bit sad, but more than that I was grateful. The King put us up in Disney-like castles of hotels where the housekeeping staff would sculpt swans kissing each other out of towels and surround them with rose petals placed on our bed until I asked them to stop. We spent the trip mostly apart. I bonded with a woman — another partner of a former classmate of the King — who was to become a dear friend, and my boyfriend got lost in creating his art.
     I never did meet the Queen who was too busy for us, but I did get to spend a little bit of time with the warm and welcoming King and his son. The rest of the trip was spent exploring Petra, the city carved into the sandstone you may have seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, floating in the warm thickness of the Dead Sea, exploring the ancient Roman city of Jerash and the port city of Aqaba. We ate lamb and vegetables that baked for hours in huge metal pots that were buried in the hot desert sand, and dug out ceremonially by Bedouin men and women who were hired to take care of us. We sat in tents in the desert, woven rugs beneath us and hookahs and beverages at the ready. We learned that delicious cardamom flavored tea would be continually poured into our little glass tea cups until we shook the cups from side to side, indicating that we were done.
     A week before our trip we learned that three missiles had been launched from the Jordanian city of Aqaba towards a US naval ship in the Red Sea. One missile had landed in the Sea, one in Israel and thankfully harmed no one, and the third mistakenly landed in a warehouse off the coast of Aqaba and killed a Jordanian man. Family and friends begged us not to go on the trip after hearing of the violence aimed at Americans, but we were not backing down and would not be frightened out of taking this trip. The absurdity of war continues to ripple though our nations. Even with the danger that always loomed, I once felt that the world was my oyster and I traveled at every opportunity. For now it seems there is less talk of war among my friends and even in the news. Now a global threat has taken on a new form, an all but invisible organism that is not only keeping us from distant shores but even from travel within our own borders and even from our own families. It’s keeping us away from or warily distanced at civic centers, meeting halls, places of worship and all of the little places we once took for granted — markets, mom and pop shops, libraries, book stores and even our own sidewalks. As distancing relaxes successfully in some parts of the world like New Zealand who has handled this pandemic with clear and sane leadership, we can only hope that even with our hiccups and strange partisan fights we will beat this thing and once again have the freedoms we were accustomed to, or at least some semblance of them, and perhaps with an even deeper sense of gratitude this time.

Trump stomps on his Twitter megaphone

     I believe it is the complaining I shall miss the most.
     The whining.
     I almost added “the grumbling.” But Donald Trump does not “grumble,” not the low, corner-of-the-mouth, suppressed muttering implied by the term. No, his every grievance is an air horn two inches from your nose: “BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!”
     I’ll miss that.
     And by “miss” I don’t mean, “wish back.” God no. But “notice it’s gone.” That delicious moment when the endless beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up nearby just suddenly ... stops.
     The steady drumbeat — no, drumroll, rat-tat-tat-tat — makes pausing at a single cavil a challenge. While you carefully consider one, three more are fired off. It’s nonstop, exhausting, the drip-drip-drip of norm-shattering psychopathology.
     Did I call them drips? Make that a firehose — high pressure, the nozzle flinging itself about, water jetting in all directions. You can’t drink from it.
     But you have to try, occasionally, despite the soaking. Because some Trump gripes are more significant than others.
     His lashing out at Twitter this week is worth getting water-logged to address. Because it shows just what a nihilistic, “Top of the world, Ma!” ending we can expect should he somehow lose the election in November. No gentle going into that good night, not for The Donald.
     It started Tuesday, with a lie he’s been repeating a lot:

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....

     Republican invocation of voter fraud is itself a fraud. The GOP takes an insignificant problem and pretends it is widespread in order to suppress Democratic votes and undercut trust in the electoral process that increasingly disfavors their shrinking base of angry, fact-averse white folks.

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New oaks

    “Life," Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein, "although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

     That elegant phrase the 21-year-old author puts in the mouth of her monster, who tends to speak in "thees" and "thous" and praises life while explaining that only his miserable treatment has prodded him to violence. "Misery made me a fiend," he says. "Make me happy, and I will again be virtuous."
    He's onto something, though I'd suggest it's the other way around—be virtuous and it'll tend to make you happy.
    Either way, human life does sometimes require vigorous defending. Though any gardener knows that botanic life, while perhaps low on the anguish scale—it's not like we can ask plants—can benefit from a helping hand as well.

     Every autumn though this year is an open question, I join my buddies and head to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to cook thick steaks, drink cold beverages, take long saunas, and jump in the frigid lake. No question that our lives are defended in the process.

     Returning, I bring back memories, sometimes Held's deer jerky, though people complain ("It smells like a burned down house," Ross once said, which makes me a little sorry he's becoming a lawyer and not a writer, because that's a perfect description).

    And saplings. A good half dozen. Pines, firs, and, if I'm feeling ambitious, oaks. The first year, I planted them in the fall and they just vanished. The snows came and I never saw them again. The second, I put them in pots and set the pots on the back deck. I wanted to observe what was happening. What was happening, I decided, was bunnies. Because they were fine up to one point in winter. And then they vanished. So we do not know if plants feel anguish, we do know that bunnies find oaks delicious. Or maybe they were just really hungry.

     This year I took extra precautions, securing a roll of chicken wire and constructing little cages around my saplings.

     For a month I gazed hard at those little bare sticks, six inches tall. Scrutinizing their ends—as if we weren't all scrutinizing our own ends enough during this crisis. A bud? No. Maybe? No. How about today? No.

    Then one day, something. I clomped closer, leaned forward, looked close and hard. A very small but unmistakable sprouting.

     "LIFE!!!!" I cried, in a very Dr. Frankenstein-like fashion, arching back and fluttering my hands to heaven. "It's alive!!!"

     Now all I have to do is wait a few decades, and I'll really have something. But I am nothing if not patient; being a writer, you sorta have to be. 
     Until then, only one question came to mind. How do oaks figure into "Frankenstein"? Easy enough to find out.

    One sentence, early in the book: during a thunderstorm storm that our budding teenage doctor watches  boiling out from the Jura mountains. 

     "As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump."

     If you've paused at the have the lightning "issue from" the oak, remember that lightning comes from the ground up as well as from the sky down. 

     And a good place to end, being reminded that, as T.S. Eliot writes, "In my beginning is my end." Even the grandest trees die, and my happiness at my pair of saplings surviving their first winter might be echoed by some future owner mourning their passing. If there is a future, and if we care about life in it, which right now is an all too open question.

Immigrants with COVID-19 may hesitate to go to hospitals

Francisca Garcia

      What’s worse than fighting for your life against COVID-19 in a hospital?
     Fighting that battle at home.
     With the infection curve finally flattening, for now, and what attention is being paid to the sick concentrated on those in hospitals, it’s easy to forget: people with no insurance, or who are undocumented and fear entering the system, or just don’t know to seek care, are sick at home.
     Not many, relatively. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, only 4 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the state occur in private homes. Still, that’s some 200 deaths since February. Thousands more are being cared for, not by trained professionals, but family members.
     They can’t be counted, but they can be helped.
     For them, Francisca Garcia, a critical care nurse who heads the COVID unit at Holy Cross Hospital, has an important piece of advice: lay on your stomach.
     “For the patients who are awake and alert and able to follow directions, we ask them to lay on their stomach,” she said. “Laying on their stomach helps with lung capacity, increases oxygenation. It’s almost a little mini-miracle when we have patients prone.”
     She said this has become widespread practice.
     “Different countries and different hospitals are starting to do this,” she said. “In the ICU, we’ve been doing this for many, many years. Patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome, an acute phase patients’ lungs go into when they’re very sick. We’ve been doing this for 25 years. With COVID, nurses and doctors and hospitals all over have started trying it.”

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Flashback 2007: Suburban swine

     A stack of photographs tumbled out from a drawer. Pigs in a garden. Hadn't seen them in years, but I instantly thought of this column. The wonder is I haven't reprinted it long ago. The first item is oddly topical, with the internet allowing us to complain about everything all the time. This ran was back when my column filled a page and had a joke at the end, and I have kept the original subheads and the parting stab at humor.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     My wife and I honeymooned at a lovely spot—the Keeper's House, on Isle au Haut, in Maine's Acadia National Park. I still remember making the reservation, almost 20 years ago. The woman said that they had just one room available, but cautioned me that the room looked out over a dock, and at the end of the dock was a blue light, and the blue light sometimes bothered guests in that room, who complained that the light shone into their window, causing them dismay.
    I said OK, we'd just have to cope with the blue light, as the room was the last available, and we really wanted to stay at the place, a rustic inn made from an old lighthouse keeper's house, with no phone and no electricity, accessed only by the daily mail boat.
     So now we're stowing our luggage in the quaint room, with its mantle and candles and thick down comforter. Evening falls, and we look out the window, and begin to laugh, because the light is this little tiny cobalt blue light, way at the end of a dock, the size of a blue marble at this distance. The thought of someone being bothered by it, never mind complaining, was ludicrous.

     Though people do complain. They get bothered, and struggle like wolverines to make it right, forgetting that, more often than not, they'd be a lot better off if they took a breath and rather than try to sand off the rough edges of the world, instead adjusted their high expectations and repaired their lofty estimation of themselves and the perfection they consider their birthright.
     It was a dim blue light far away at the end of a dock, lovely in its own way.

SUBURBAN SWINE
     
     And now the story can be told. I've been champing at the bit to tell it, for well over a month now. But my next-door neighbors had not yet moved away—they left last week. And I didn't want to get them into trouble with the pig police.
     Which is an alien attitude, nowadays, in some parts of the Chicago area. Up in Lake Forest, for instance, where Robert and Kathleen Murphy sued their neighbor, Estelle Gonzales Walgreen, because she kept three pigs on her 2.3-acre property.
     The Murphys said the pigs were loud, dirty and threatened their safety.
     Which struck me as a joke. Because, as fate would have it, my next-door neighbor also had a couple of pigs—or so I was told, since I had never actually seen them myself. Never heard them. And never smelled them. Not once.
     And I tried, craning my neck over the nice cedar fence my neighbor built to contain them. I considered asking, "Show me your pigs." But that seemed nosy.
     Then one day last spring, around breakfast time, I blundered out the back door and, gasping, stopped dead in my tracks—there, in my neighbor's garden, which runs along the side of his house alongside my driveway, were pigs. Two big pigs, one pink, one black, nuzzling the greenery. I don't gasp often, but I gasped then because, really, one doesn't expect swine in the suburbs—well, not that kind of swine anyway.
     The first thing I did, of course, was call the boys, who hadn't seen the pigs either. Then I grabbed a camera. Then I knocked on the neighbor's door, but nobody was home. The garage door was ajar, however, and my first concern was that somebody had broken into the garage, releasing the pigs.
     I suppose I should have been thinking about filing my lawsuit ("discovery of said livestock caused an elevated heart rate and other as-yet-to-be-determined physiological conditions...") But really, my central concern was to get the pigs back into the garage before one of the 15 police cars that constantly patrol the streets of Northbrook slid by and my neighbor's pigs got busted.
     Having never shepherded pigs, I assumed it would be a simple matter of tapping them on the butt—with a stick perhaps—and they would trot in the intended direction. Wrong. It was like trying to herd a pair of fire hydrants. The pigs were happy where they were.
     By now, other neighbors were wandering over. One reached the wife on her cell phone, and she instructed us to dig into a tub of popcorn in the garage and use it to tempt the swine back into the garage. We did so, dropping a kernel a few inches in front of each pig. It would notice the kernel, eventually, lumber forward, snuffle up the morsel, and the process would repeat itself.
     It took about 20 minutes—one of the pigs balked—but eventually we got the beasts back inside the garage. It was about the most excitement the street had seen in a long time, probably since a few of us men removed an enormous wasp nest the summer before.
     The Murphys lost their case in Lake County court, and—all together now—are appealing the case to the Illinois Appellate Court.
     "No one wants to live next door to pigs," Robert Murphy told the Tribune. But that is not true—I wanted the pigs to live next door, had no complaint about them except for their reclusiveness, and am willing to testify in a court of law that I was glad that they were there, am glad I met them in their thrilling bid for freedom, and will miss them, and their owners, now that they are gone.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     I looked in vain for a pig joke that could be printed in a family newspaper.
     Failing at that, I noticed this coyote joke by Billy Crystal, which, given the packs roaming the city, is also apt:
     In L.A. we got coyotes in our garbage cans. Coyotes are just like my relatives -- they go out in pairs, they whine at night, and they go anywhere there's food.
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 29, 2007

Honor U.S. dead by not making more of them

Pete Stockslager, former Commander of American Legion Post 791, participates in a Memorial Day ceremony. A Vietnam War vet, Stockslager was an Air Force pilot stationed in Da Nang. He served two tours, flew 336 missions, and left the Air Force after six years with the rank of captain and 80 percent hearing loss from the roar of the jet engines.

     Monday is Memorial Day, and I know what you're thinking: boo hoo, no Memorial Day sales, no picnics, no parades...
     Well, dry your eyes. That isn't quite true. Some stores are open—my wife and I bought a washer at Abt a few weeks ago. Yes, the shopping experience is not the unbridled joy it once was. The employees are wearing masks now, more or less. As are we. No jars of Hershey's miniatures to fuel the deliberative process. We ran in, tapped an Electrolux, paid and ran out.    

     And picnics...of course you can still go outside. Outside is right there, where it's always been. True, you can't go to the lakefront. That's rough. And you can't gather your family or friends in groups, at least you're not supposed to. When I think of barbecues at Memorial Day, I think of that joyous moment when the charred hot dogs and Polish sausage are heaped on the big oval platter, the poppyseed buns stacked high in their big circular basket, the superfluous burgers glistening, just in case someone wants a burger, the pickles slivered, the potato salad mounded, the relish, mustards and —judge me harshly if you like but really, give it up because it's tiresome—ketchup set out and ready. People crowd around the kitchen island, elbow to elbow, nose to nape, grins big and goofy, hands shooting out in all direction—plates! forks!—spearing franks, splitting buns, scooping big dense spoonfuls of potato salad and chattering away how delicious everything looks. There's always enough.
     Not this year. Parades are out too. I suppose some could try a social distancing parade, but the just Northbrook Junior High Marching Band, spread out, would cover a mile and take 20 minutes to pass by, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" a thin, disjointed ditty wafting along the scattered spectators, as the horns at Cedar Street try to follow the drums three blocks back at Western.
     So sales ... barbecues ... parades —we've dispatched Memorial Day, have we not? Having covered the holiday's various elements, and can now look forward to 4th of July without fireworks. That will be. ..
     Oh wait. I've forgotten something, haven't I? Memorializing fallen soldiers...

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The Cave Dwellers

Joseph Mitchell

     Greatness guides.  Or can, if we let it.
     Several times in my career when, facing a dilemma, I pondered what my idols would do in a similar situation. When writing my first book, about college pranks, I wondered whether I could get away with writing the chapter on Caltech's Ditch Day by consulting the many articles already written about the annual event. Or did I really need to try to pry the secret date out of class officials, then spend a chunk of my advance buying airplane tickets to Pasadena and back, plus booking a hotel room, then actually fly to California and attend the event itself?
     I solved this dilemma by asking, "What would John McPhee do?" The great New Yorker writer was always there, up that tree with that logger, or in the canoe cutting through some stream "as cold as a wine bucket" in Alaska. That gave me my answer, John McPhee wasn't phoning it in. He'd go.  So I went to California, and the chapter is far, far better for those select few who have ever read it.
     Or on a more regular basis, if I find myself contemplating revealing something awkward or uncomfortable that I had rather not write about, I remind myself: "If Dan Savage can write candidly  about being fucked up the ass, I can write about ... whatever. Owning eight Big Toe Uglydolls." (Savage is known for being a sex columnist, but he writes wonderful memoirs—"The Commitment," about getting married, "The Kid," about adopting a son. They're honest, funny, and delightful to read). People who win admiration are bold. Be bold. The enemy isn't embarrassment, but indifference.
     Greatness also comforts. I never attempt anything so ambitious that I can actually be guided by the example set by the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Gene Weingarten. That's would be like modeling your paper airplane after the B1 bomber. But we are both still in the same profession, or what's left of it, and that has to count for something. It's like admiring the stars at night: I didn't make 'em and I'll never get there. But I can look at them.
     So naturally Friday, right after dinner, I stepped out onto our front porch with Joseph Mitchell's "McSorely's Wonderful Saloon," a collection of New Yorker stories, and soothed myself. It worked like a charm.
     Mitchell was so famous for the unproductive last decades of his life, where he would go to his office at the New Yorker and, well, nobody knew what he did, that's it's possible to overlook just how good he was. He was excellent.
     I knew the story I was looking for, though I hadn't read it in many years: "The Cave Dwellers," a reminiscence about when he was a reporter for a New York tabloid in the early 1930s.
     "The winter of 1933 was a painful one," the tale begins, with Mitchell's trademark simplicity. Friday was certainly painful to me, and I'm not even sure why. At every step, I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Yet by day's end I was feeling so ... crappy. Maybe I was just tired.
     A couple had lived at O'Hare airport for nearly a month. The tip had come in from the wife of the couple, in an email Wednesday morning. My editor passed it on to me because, well, I'm kind of the Keeper of Lost Toys. I phoned the woman, like I was supposed to. She made sense. I drove to O'Hare to talk with her and her husband. They seemed what they said they were. We spent, oh, 90 minutes chatting. I had no question in my mind that everything she told me was true. She knew the streets of the old Taylor Street area where she said she grew up intimately. She knew who Oscar D'Angelo was. Nothing was suspect. She didn't seem to be trying to scam me or deceive me. She wasn't looking for anything.
     I wrote the piece Thursday morning, as expected. The part I was most proud of was the end, a sentence pointing out that those getting antsy being at home should be happy they have homes to be at.
    Friday morning the story was played across the entire front page. Credit Ashlee Rezin Garcia's moving photographs for that. The treatment wasn't expected, but appreciated. Every day on the front page is a good day.
    Except this one.
    Then emails started in. Lots and lots and lots. I'm used to emails. But this was ridiculous.
    In "The Cave Dwellers," Mitchell is covering the "human suffering" beat. Murders and Salvation Army bell ringers, breadlines and relief bureaus and evictions.
    "The attitude of the people I talked with was disheartening," he wrote. "They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless."
     Maybe there was some of that. You don't become homeless because you're so dynamic. That echoed a phrase I wrote several times Friday, trying to explain the couple's situation: "learned helplessness." Some readers wanted to know why these people were homeless. I didn't know what to tell them. Others—most—wanted to help. But how? Where should their money go?
     I suppose I could have just ignored them, just skipped over their emails. Sorry, not my table. I just report the fires, I don't put them out.
    That didn't feel right. That would make me the faulty transmission, the void between the roaring engine of Chicago generosity and the mired wheel of this homeless couple. I didn't want to be that. My first thought was to set up a bank account for them. But I just work at the paper. I don't run it. We have policies. I consulted with my bosses, who reminded me: we don't do that sort of thing, I was told. And that makes sense. Because if we did, we'd slide into becoming social service, all our time would be taken up helping homeless individuals, and no stories would get written. I agreed, and was off the hook.
     And yet....
    "I began to feel I was preying on the unfortunate," Mitchell wrote.
    I was relieved when somebody set up a GoFundMe page. Problem solved. I began referring people to the page. For less than an hour. With each email referred, however, it dawned on me, clearer and clearer—I didn't know who this guy was. It could be a scam. Worse. A scam I was endorsing, just by making the referral. Thousands of dollars had already been pledged. I phoned up the person who organized the page. Our conversation did not settle my concerns. It was almost normal. But something was ... off. He was not a legit person, in my estimation, but someone acting like a legit person. A fine but important distinction. The emails kept pouring in. Maybe he was honest. Maybe he wasn't. I couldn't be sure. I got permission from the homeless woman to give out her email to those who wanted to help, so people could contact her directly. We stopped recommending the GoFundMe page. The couple moved from Terminal One of O'Hare to a Quality Inn, courtesy of a benefactor. The ace investigators at the paper looked into the GoFundMe page. There were worrisome questions, reservations. I won't go into details. We made sure not to recommend or link to the page. I ended up wordlessly forwarding the letters offering support to the wife's email, and to write the readers back, thanking them for their generous inclinations. It took the whole day. Nothing else got done.
     The cave dwellers of the story's title are a couple who lived in a cave in Central Park for a year but are living in an apartment by the time Mitchell meets them, down to their last seven cents, apparently. This is at the height of the Great Depression, another crisis moment in American history. The story Mitchell writes about the pair also goes on the front page. He also is overwhelmed by the reaction. "My box was stuffed with letters and telegrams from people who had read the story about Mr. and Mrs. Holliman, and attached to many of the letters were bills or checks to be turned over to them," Mitchell writes.
     At least I didn't have to deal with that.
     He revisits the couple, trying to give them the donations the readers had sent. The couple is in mid-spree, with liquor bottles scattered about, cigars, gift baskets wrapped in cellophane. I'm not suggesting that my O'Hare couple would respond to support in the same way. Rather, it is the sense of let-down I related to. No kindness goes unpunished. The couple is indignant over a slight error. The husband starts in.

    "You said in that writeup we only had seven cents left, you liar."
    "Well, that's what your wife told me."
    "I did not," said Mrs. Holliman, indignantly. She got up and waver her tumbler, spilling gin and ginger ale all over the bed. "I told you we had seventy cents left." 

     They refuse the money Mitchell has collected, chase him out of the room, throwing a gin bottle at his head as he flees down the stairs. Back at his office, he has to send each donations back to each individual reader. The couple are swept up by a millionaire in a limousine who. takes them to live with him at his farm in New Jersey. But when Mitchell checks on them a few months later, they are gone.
    "I think they left me because they just got tired of living in a house," the millionaire tells Mitchell.
     Life is too complicated to whittle down into a news story, yet we try anyway. Most people are good, most people want to help. I certainly consider myself to be a good person who wants to help. But helping can be difficult and fraught with complications. You can do everything right and at the end of the day it still feels wrong, and you aren't even sure why.