Say goodbye to Aunt Jemima

     My primary experience with Quaker Oats is writing about how thoroughly they screwed up Snapple, buying the brand and running it into the ground. Plus their oatmeal is way down the pantheon of beloved hot breakfast cereals, a distant third loping along after Cream of Wheat and Maypo.
     So my reaction to the company dumping Aunt Jemima Wednesday in the wake of the George Floyd protests, was a kind of gentle amazement.
     "Quaker did something right?!" I marveled. "Well good for them. Had to happen eventually."
    That for a century and a quarter pancake mix was hawked by an offensive racial stereotype goes without saying. The round jovial "mammy" was one of the happy faces that white folks put on the incomprehensible horror of slavery, which is why she was on the box, dutifully serving up her pancakes.  The name came from a song in a minstrel show, the "Aunt" a particularly direct relic of slavery. A white person couldn't call a Black woman, "Mrs." but "Aunt" was suitably familiar, diminutive with a sprinkling of affection and respect.
      The wonder is she lasted so long—130 years. To all those blinking bigots stepping out into the light of day to argue that this is all in the dim past, we can now point out that the last American receiving a Confederate Civil War pension died May 31 and that a major American corporation gave its racist totem retirement, ah, Wednesday. (Being late to the party is typical of Quaker, which finally let AJ take off her plantation do-rag all the way back in 1989).
      As a fan of brand mascots, I tend to be sorry to see them go, but Aunt Jemima won't be missed. First, because their products are so meh—their mascot could be Taylor Swift, or a snaked-headed gorgon and it wouldn't matter to me. I wouldn't buy that stuff, not while you can whip up your own pancakes and top them with real maple syrup.
      I might feel a pang of regret were Cream of Wheat to ditch their Rastus mascot. He's such a cheery presence. If you read the tale a few decades ago, he's a Chicago waiter given five bucks to pose in a chef's hat and never heard from again. But in recent years he became Frank L. White, a "master chef", which might show some strategists at corporate headquarters are finally thinking a little. That grounding in a real person, in theory, might be enough to get current owner B&G Foods off the hook—they say they are reviewing the situation—though don't bet on him sticking around. Uncle Ben is being called into human services as we speak and given the bad news about his future as a rice spokesman.
     But if our swirling times fling Rastus to the curb next, I'm certainly not going to be the guy braced in the doorway trying to stop them. The maiden on Land O' Lakes was nice, but it's still butter, and the Wisconsin landscape on the box is still quite pretty without her.
     Icons do have value. I revere the Big Boy character even though Big Boy Restaurants tend to be lousy and you couldn't prod my wife into one with a pitchfork, not after the series of awful meals we've endured there.
     But mascots aren't everything. McDonald's has perhaps the worst mascot ever—Ronald, a truly frightening clown, with his sex doll mouth, like an escapee from a John Wayne Gacy wet dream—and he didn't hold the company back too much.
     I hope Quaker replaces A.J. with somebody. They'd do well to take the Onion's sound advice, and find a real version of Sheila, the satiric site's "black female lawyer who enjoys pancakes sometimes." They could have a contest. People love contests. Trying to sell Nobody Offensive Pancakes just isn't going to fly.
    Let me tell you my concern about this type of thing. There is an argument that pulling down statues, exiling mascots, and the like create a world where the irrational bigotries of the past, which created these symbols, have no place. A racial version of the broken windows theory. Take care of the tiny stuff and the big stuff falls into place. Ditch Chief Wahoo and maybe not so many people in this country will be such narrow minded bigots. That is certainly possible.
     However.
     This process can also be seen as the ritual picking of the low-hanging fruit. We can't fix the police. Or jobs. Or education. Or the economy. We can't remove whatever gland—I think of it as being somewhere near the hypothalamus—secretes racial poison in so many people and sends it coursing their their veins. But we sure as heck can pull Aunt Jemima off the box, give her a bus ticket and send her on her way. It isn't progress so much as busywork, a distraction so maybe we don't notice that nothing substantive really happens. Again.
      I know extrapolating to ridiculous ends as a way to protect any given development is a Fox News trick, and I am not slyly defending Aunt Jemima. She's gone, good riddance, they can get rid of the Quaker Man next, for all I care. In fact, they should, because he's been a thumb in the eye of actual Quakers for 140 years. We wouldn't permit "Jew Oats," would we? A reminder of what this unrest is about: that African-Americans are fighting a special system of repression designed only for them. If you think slavery wasn't a huge boon to the America's economy, an unpaid debt, then, remember: its progeny was selling pancake mix up to this week.

Oh no! Cheated by Trump? What a SHOCK!

Chicago drag performer Jo Mama  to leads the “Drag March for Change”
in Boystown Sunday afternoon. (Photo by Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times)

     What’s this strange emotion? A sudden surge of ... what? Sympathy? Toward religious fanatics, home-grown haters and gimlet-eyed keyhole-peering revanchists. Is that it?
     Well, pity, anyway.
     I mean, man, that’s gotta hurt.
     You betray your country, handing control over to a notorious bully liar, fraud and buffoon in the casual way you’d toss your car keys to the village idiot, saying “Here, take ‘er for a spin.”
    You betray your faith, falling in line by a staggering majority — 81 percent of evangelicals — to cast your ballot for a thrice-married con man, casual bigot and serial ignoramus. You crowd auditoriums to shriek in rapture over this church-avoiding, lie-spewing, norm-shredding, sniffy abomination of all that is holy, a shambling, rambling, stumbling refutation of the very idea of grace, dignity or living a spiritual life.
     And for what?
     The idea was: you sign away your support to this Apprentice Archfiend, this strip-mall Satan, and he rewards you by picking Supreme Court justices who will sprinkle juridical fairy dust over the United States and magically transport it back to the Mayberry 1958 of your imaginings. The Court will protect the notional babies you claim to so adore, and drop-kick all those other — brrr, shudder — unacceptably different folks back in the far shadows where they belong.
     Ah, hahahahahahahahahaha.
     And then he ... and then he ... excuse me, inhaled a little coffee there, guffawing ... he turns around and betrays you, or his Supreme Court does anyway, on a cloudless Monday in June.
     C’mon, laugh along, hard though that may be drenched in soda water, pants yanked around your knees, the calliope wheezing away, derisively.
     No? Not laughing?

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Flashback 2000: Model in-laws come through again

     In a few days the boys will have been here for three months, studying and sheltering in place after their schools shut down. It has been, in a word, great. "A stolen season," is how I describe it, swiping the term from "Shakespeare in Love." While fully understanding just how massive is our good fortune—the world convulses, hundreds of thousands die, and we get to have a protracted family reunion. But this is the hand we were dealt, and there's no shame in looking down and seeing a flush. 

     At dinner the other night, I mentioned words to this effect, and my wife recalled a previous time, exactly 20 years ago, when another set of circumstances—trying to bring our newly-bought old house to livable condition—forced us all to spend nine weeks in a small bedroom at my in-laws house in Skokie. Another experience that was far more pleasant than we had any right to expect, as I documented in this column at the time.

     Since I often point out when columns are much longer than today, I should mention that this is from the period when my columns ran Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the latter two in the features section weighing in at a scant 600 words.

     For years, whenever I wanted to sing the praises of my in-laws—Irv and Dorothy Goldberg—I would cite the most amazing fact I knew about them: that in the seven years I dated their daughter before we got married, they never asked about my intentions. Never.
     Not one sly hint. Not one probing question. Not a murmur.
     Instead, they acted . . . (and this is so incredible I can hardly articulate it) . . . as if . . . it were . . . none of their business.
     How rare is that?
     But this summer, a new wonder eclipsed the Long Engagement Silence. I moved into their home in Skokie, with my wife and two young sons, while our new house was fixed.
     We moved in. And we stayed. And stayed.
     For nine weeks. Nine weeks and some change.
     Take a moment. Think about your in-laws. Or think about your adult children and their families. How would you get along? All packed into the same house. And not some big honking McMansion, either. A modest, two-bedroom ranch house with one full bathroom.
     How long until you were strangling each other?
     A few days, judging from my friends. I have enjoyed the sympathy of everyone I know this summer, just by letting slip "We've been staying with my in-laws for two . . ." then four, then eight -- "weeks."
     With this shock still washing over my listener, I really broke out the violins.
     "The four of us," I'd sigh, "all crowded together in one tiny bedroom."
     My friend would exude pity, and I would feel a pang of secret shame. Because though I had recited the cold facts correctly, mere facts can mislead.
     The truth is: It was great.
     My wife loved being with her parents. My kids loved being with their bubbie and zaydie. I loved living in a house crammed with people and home cooking.
     And my in-laws seemed to enjoy having us. They really did. I know that because I watched them like a hawk for nine weeks, waiting for any whisper of complaint or criticism.
     Here's what I came up with.
     My father-in-law once said: "There's more beer in the refrigerator downstairs."
     That's it. The comment struck me as a veiled criticism. A reply formed, and I almost growled: "I know. That's where I got this one."
     I kept quiet. Not that I've perfected restraint. I still have the tendency to open my mouth and let whatever thoughts are in my head pour out onto the floor.
     But I have also begun to admire discretion, and am learning at the feet of masters. I realized, very quickly, that my father-in-law was not saying, "Enough with the beer, Booze Boy." He wasn't being sarcastic. He was informing me that, if I wanted more beer, there was some. In the basement.
     Period.
     We all moved out Monday. It was a cool, cloudy day. My wife and I didn't feel the joy of liberation. We felt, as we silently packed, a certain melancholy, as if a special time in our lives was ending, something we hadn't planned, but that came about through the incredible slowness of our painters. An accident. A gift.
     I didn't thank my in-laws profusely. Just a few words, with a handshake for Irv and a hug and kiss for Dorothy. None of the speeches I like to make.
     Although there is one thing I'd like to say. Many times, over the summer, my mother-in-law would express concern over how we were faring at her house. Not an-invitation-to-leave-disguised-as-concern concern or control-your-damn-boys-masked-as-concern concern. Just concern. Real concern.
     And I would always look at her and say: "Dorothy, if I knew how much I was going to enjoy staying with you, I wouldn't have bothered to buy a house. We'd just have moved in here."
    We'd both laugh, as if it was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. I meant it.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 2000. 

Clinical trials press forward in age of COVID

  

     Jim Butler is receiving his monthly 45-minute infusion of drugs.
     What kind of drugs? He doesn’t know. Nor do the nurses administering them. Could be an experimental medicine that will help his brain fight Alzheimer’s disease. Or could be a placebo that does nothing.
     Only one doctor conducting the medical research at Great Lakes Clinical Trials knows what drug Butler is getting, and even he doesn’t know what the effect will be.
     None of this influences Butler’s determination to be here.
     “I got an Alzheimer’s diagnosis four years ago,” said Butler, 71, who describes the disease as causing “multiple times a day, cognitive hiccups, confusion.”
     One thing he is not confused about is the importance of participating in research.
     “The simplest reason is I like to be very proactive about my diagnosis,” he said. “My game plan is not to get overwhelmed and unsettled at these things. To try to smile at them, dismiss them, let them go. A clinical trial is an enormously great way to do that.”
     Clinical trials are the minor leagues of medicine. Before drug companies can sign up a star cure to wow the public, they need to know if it can deliver. To do that, they spend billions of dollars and commission hundreds of small clinics like Great Lakes Clinical Trials, which opened in Andersonville in 2014. There is a second location in Arlington Heights.

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One last phone call from Burt Natarus

Burt Natarus (Photo by Richard Chapman/Used with permission)

     I was about to begin this sentence, "Most aldermen..." when I stopped, realizing that I have no idea what most aldermen are like. I rarely hear their names, never mind learn them, and seem to get by fine. Only the oddballs stand out, whether former power broker Ed Burke, or hat-wearing Dorothy Tillman, or serial nepotist Dick Mell. Occasionally I'd encounter one merely in the performance of his duties—Joe Moore, Matt O'Shea. I think I liked them best, regular guys getting stuff done. 

     Then there was Burt Natarus, the oddest of the oddballs. I have to admit, when I saw the Sun-Times obit Fridy, my reaction was, "Oh no, not Burt Natarus ... was he still alive?" Then again, indignity followed Natarus wherever he went, quacking like a pull-toy duck.

     "Neil? Burt Natarus . . . All you have to do is call that guy in charge of bridges and paint 'Irv Kupcinet' on the side of the Wabash Bridge. The other thing I want to ask you if you think I could get my ode to Maggie printed. I think it would be a nice gesture and a kind thing to do."
     There is no official post of ex-alderman. Yet attention, to quote Arthur Miller, must be paid. So I was happy to get a phone call from Natarus, for 36 years the vivacious representative of the 42nd Ward, whose bold vision helped build Chicago into the global city that it is today (OK, OK, a cantankerous machine loyalist known for suggesting we put diapers on horses, but I thought, at least let the poor guy have a moment).
     "I have a copy of the ordinance. Dec. 23, 1985. I was one of the floor leaders. We got Harold Washington to sponsor an ordinance naming the Wabash Avenue Bridge the 'Irv Kupcinet Bridge.' I don't think that designation has been taken away. All they have to do is paint the side of the bridge. All you have to do is get a hold of the new transportation director. Get him on the phone: Kemp, his name is, or Kremp."
     Gabe Klein. Easier said than done. I've been calling for a week now. Nada.
     "I think, with your influence, you could make it happen—by the way you are a good writer, but you have a mean streak."
     Thank you, though "mean" is a matter of perspective. Maybe it's a mean world and I just reflect it. Besides, it can be difficult to decide: whither meanness, wither kindness.
     "You gotta do me a favor. I wrote a poem about Maggie. I sent it in under a letter to the editor. I want them to publish the poem. I'll tell you why it isn't being published: I don't think your editor likes me."
     No! How could that be? Let's look at "Ode to Maggie," shall we—and I think this perfectly illustrates the mean/kind conundrum. His poem begins:

"Oh, sweet, beautiful, brilliant ladyIn sadness and in grief, you have leftyour beloved, Richard, our Gaelic leaderfor the heavens and your maker."

     Now is it kindness or cruelty to print that? Is it mercy to stop? Or to continue:

"In gratitude we thank you for being youand giving us so much of yourself andfor us: Noble love! mutual respect."

     Frankly, I have to stop here, out of concern someone will think I'm making fun of Maggie Daley, when to be honest I'm just amazed at the virtuosity of Natarus' tribute—aldermen of today certainly jostle each other to stand up and sing the mayor's praises, but they can't touch a candle to the elaborate, fulsome paean to the Daley divinity that an old master can perform. That itself is worth a bridge, or at least a plaque. I couldn't have been more surprised if I heard one of those shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits knocks on my door, looked up and saw Hinky Dink Kenna in a paisley vest and bowler hat.
     "I drafted the ordinance covering the railroad tracks, to what became Millennium Park. I passed it, got my friends on board. I'm the one who first put in the ordinance. Maggie liked that. Maggie never forgot that when she got sick I wrote her a couple letters. She wrote me some beautiful letters back. I told myself I would write her a poem. I call it 'Ode to Maggie,' you know 'ode,' O-D-E, you know these ancient odes, John Keats, who can understand it?"
     He kept going; I think he expected me to interrupt, but I was having fun just listening.
     "I talk too much. How are you? How's your . . . mentality?"
     I said I'm fine; I could tell my answer frustrated him, but he let it go. I asked his age.
     "I'm 79. I walk. I sold my car. I walk wherever I go. I live by Ontario Street. Everybody that attacks TIFs don't realize this was once a warehouse district when I was a big shot."
     Why bring the Kup bridge up now?
     "I bring it up now because I walk around and see the other bridge, the Lyric bridge, has a sign on it, but this doesn't have 'Irv Kupcinet' on it. Kup was a great guy. Kup was really something else. He was really great. The bridge . . . just put it in gold, 'Irv Kupcinet Bridge.' That's all. They should put up that sign. That's all I want. I don't want it to be referred to anymore as the Wabash Avenue Bridge. I want it to be the Irv Kupcinet Bridge and that's it."
     He didn't ask my opinion, but I think that, while Kup indeed was a great guy, Mr. Chicago, that a bronze statue on Wacker Drive is also honor aplenty. Still, I told Burt Natarus that I would do what I can, and I have.

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, December 18, 2011 

Happy birthday, Kier.

     "Well-we-jus-got-back-an-I-wish-I'd-never-leave-now...."
      —"Where'd you go?"
     "Who'd-a-thought-somearattl-rebulent-fought-year...."

       Again. And again. Standing, side by side, over the turntable in room 210 of the sprawling Northwestern Apartments on Orrington Avenue. Setting the needle down. Listening to the opening chords of The Clash's "Safe European Home." That machine gun guitar and drums, then a firehose of South London verbiage. Lifting the needle. Silence. Returning to the start of the song. Over and over, and over, trying to parse the slushy words, like snatching bubbles out of a torrent.
     That first line was easy.
     "Well, we just got back and I wish I'd never leave now...."
     The second, simple.
     But that third line—what was it?
     It had to be done. Because if Kier couldn't figure out the words, then how could Phil sing them? And if Phil couldn't sing the words, how could the Front Lines play the song? The needle lifted, and we started again.
     Music was important. Words were important. Songs were important. The band was important. No band ever formed that wasn't, if only to the people in the band.  Plus various hangers-on, like me. I wasn't, technically, in the band. But I was helping because I was there, his roommate freshman year, 1978, Northwestern University.
     We had been assigned to the same room by a computer through our mutual hunger for coolness, even over personal comfort. On our housing forms, both Kier and I checked that smoking was A-OK with us, even though neither of us smoked. We didn't smoke, but we didn't want to be the kind of stick-in-the-mud losers who cared about that kind of thing—this was back before continually signaling your virtue with semaphore flags became a national obsession.
     So we were stuck in a four-man quad with two smokers, Tim and Fitch.  Fitch was a rich kid from Christmas Hill, Connecticut, who brought skis and golf clubs to college.
     "Well the reason people are poor..." I would imitate him saying, in a plummy, Thurston Howell III voice, "is because they don't go out and get the money. I mean, the money's there."
     Tim was a manic-depressive on lithium who had been institutionalized over the summer and was let out, if memory serves, so he could go to Northwestern and live with us, along with, briefly, the homeless man he met at Burger King and brought back to our room. This was not the college experience I had expected. I remember realizing, with a frisson of horror, that Tim was not going bald, organically. It was only on the side of his hair that he clonically ran his fingers through.
     Fitch was gone by Christmas. He wasn't about to stick around, not when he had roommates like Kier, who once pushed him into a closet after a political discussion. And me, who braced the door closed with the old headboard of Fitch's bed—why was it deconstructed? Maybe because we had moved his furniture into the fire escape. We left him in there a long time. Tim took off too, by spring, leaving us two living in a four man quad.
     That kind of thing tends to push people together, and I learned a lot about Kier, who was an exotic on several fronts: he had long hair that girls on our delightfully-coed floor loved to brush until it shone. He was from Washington, D.C.—who is from Washington, D.C.? He had been a Boy Scout. His parents were divorced.
      He was a political science major, and what we would call today "woke." I remember him explaining what a terrible governor of California Ronald Reagan had been, years before he was elected president. He cared about world events, which vastly different from me, who cared almost exclusively about myself. We had nothing in common.
    Especially when it came to music. I was pop: David Bowie, Peter Frampton, and especially Elton John, because my girlfriend back home adored him, and I caught that like a rash. The closest thing I had to discernment was love of Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," and that was more because it spoke to my personal brand of heartbreak. Otherwise, sentiment was fine. I had gone to see Harry Chapin twice in a month, first back at Blossom Music Center in Cleveland, then at Pick-Steiger Hall on campus.
    Kier brought albums by the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the B-52s—edgy stuff. But he didn't just listen to music, he made it.  He was a musician. He brought with him a beautifully battered Fender Telecaster and an amp the size of a small refrigerator. And a Pignose—a small portable amp. I felt myself half a musician through osmosis, and loved even knowing the words, knowing what this stuff was called, the small electronic boxes his guitar plugged into—a phase shifter, a fuzzbox, a wah-wah pedal.
      Kier was a crackerjack guitarist in the Jimmy Hendrix mode, who killed the frat talent show by playing behind his head. (Was it Robin Trower's "Sinner's Song"? It's only been 41 years, but I seem to remember that was the song). He played it with a bow and, at another gig, at the pathetic little shack of a nightclub the school ran, finished a riff, and pointed the bow at me, in the audience. I was thrilled. Not in the band. But close.
     If that seems needy and fanboyish, remember I was in the Medill School of Journalism, with no interest in reporting or newspapers or news. My general goal was to be a novelist, a humorist of some sort, cut from the Robert Benchley cloth, to wear a fez and lead conga lines out of "21" in between polishing timeless gems of humor to display in the gold setting of The New Yorker.
    Except I couldn't write, and didn't know anybody at The New Yorker or anywhere else, and didn't have much ambition, not the real solid kind that pushes you to try and do and achieve, as opposed to the vaporous kind that flickers just outside your range of vision and keeps you constantly startled and stumbling, twisting around trying to catch a glimpse of something that isn't there.
     Kier, on the other hand, was close to a star on campus. I have a memory of frat boys lining the stage while he played, on their knees, salaaming, fluttering their hands to heaven. It was close to worship.
     Helping the band put me into Belmont Avenue clubs years before I would have found them on my own. Lugging equipment upstairs into Tut's then, being the first one there, dancing by myself in the center of the floor. I became very good at dancing alone, and particularly like to do it after someone I asked to dance had turned me down, my way of saying, "Fuck you, honey, I just wanted to dance." Not that the person I had asked noticed or cared. But it felt like a small victory.
     We painted the walls of the room black, with all sorts of bars and lines running everywhere. That summer I visited him in Washington. I can still see his mother, in half glasses, primly typing her church newsletter. Other people, living other lives. It was an epiphany.
     I can't go into it all. You'd be reading for hours. By junior year, he floated off toward the band, and I was exiled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for a very unhappy internship toting up ambulance runs for the Green Bay Press Gazette. This was hard work, and not what I wanted at all. This wasn't it at all.
     Meanwhile, Kier and the Front Lines put out 45s. They played gigs, and lived in a big house on Forest Avenue. We weren't that friendly then, but kept up and, I believe around then, drove to New York City. We went to the Thai Hut on Devon Avenue—the first time I had tasted Thai food— left at 6 p.m., and at dawn pulled into Manhattan with Little Feat on the tape deck.
    "Oh the sunlight looks so pretty.
     God it's such a sight.
     Like rolling into New York City.
     With the skyline in the morning light.
     Roll on through the night."
    My first job took me to Los Angeles. Another dead end. I tried to last six months and lasted three. Back in Chicago, Kier would tear Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" cartoons out of the Reader and mail them to me, in that half support, half mockery that friends do. When that job blew up, I drifted eastward, pausing to live with my folks in Colorado. When I returned to campus, one year after graduation, a certified failure to launch, I moved in with Kier—in the third floor of his house on Forest. "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Two weeks on a cot set up in an empty attic under an inverted V of shiny insulation, watching the bare bulb, hands folded behind my head, thinking, "How did I fuck this up so badly? And so fast." The starting gun went off. And there I am, face planted a yard from the blocks, trying to get to my feet while my classmates lap me, one year already gone.
      Kier's band, meanwhile, was hot, with a young thumb-slapping bassist, recording sessions and influential people interested.  But success of the kind that allows a person to live on it was elusive, over the next decade Kier faced a choice, and chose wisely.
     "Music was his life," sang Harry Chapin, who knew how to write a lyric, "it was not his livelihood." I thought it a testament to Kier's character that eventually he set aside his guitar and joined the working world, as did I. The novel went into a drawer and I began rolling the stone of professional journalism up the hill. We both, not stars, but practitioners of the possible.
    We knew another student, Nathan, a gaunt, pop-eyed, jittery guy who also wanted to be a musician. A year younger. I remember sitting in his dorm room while he explained to me that he was going to be a rock star, and I just looked at him like he was crazy.
     But he wasn't crazy. He was driven.
     Speaking of driving. Kier and I were driving in the broken down blue van the band used. And there was Nathan, walking along the road. So we pulled over and gave him a lift. He asked Kier what he was doing, and what Kier was doing was working at Student's Publishing.
     "Well," sneered Nathan, radiating contempt—his superpower, "somebody's gotta frame the artwork."
      I don't know whether singing in Urge Overkill amounts to a life well-lived. But I've never, in the past 40 years, cared enough to find out. While Kier and I have been in constant communication as we pushed our lives forward. I can't remember Kier ever being in a bad patch—he's far too stable for that. Though I remember helping him move into a crappy little apartment on Broadway, and worrying for him. You're living HERE? I thought, but didn't say. There was a pipe running across the ceiling, maybe seven feet up, and I remember staring at it, grimly, wondering, Is this the pipe Kier'll hang himself from? Of course I was projecting my own insecurities more than anything else. He was fine. Kier is always fine. I have many good friends, but if I had to pick one to be holding the rope that I was clutching while I dangled off a cliff, I'd pick Kier.
    Which reminds me: back on campus, I was trying stand-up comedy. I had to try something. We had some kind of group, comic performers. I can't even remember their names. But I wore hard contact lenses, trying to make myself more palatable, and one night, waiting to go on in some forgotten club, I left them in too long and my eyes swelled shut. I ended up at St. Francis Hospital, where they treated by abraded corneas, covered my eyes with bandages, and told me I could go home.
    "How?" I asked.
     Who brought you?
     Nobody brought me. I came in an ambulance. A nurse handed me a phone. What number to dial? It was 3 o'clock in the morning.
    I called Kier. Which is as good a definition of a friend as you're going to find: your friend is the guy you call to come get you at the hospital at 3 a.m. He rode his bike over and walked me back to my apartment.
     Life clicked by, day by day, year by year. I can see my first real apartment in Oak Park, on Washington Street, with the aluminum deco sconces. Kier called from New Orleans: he had asked Cathleen to marry him.  A nurse, as grounded as he is, and one of the prettiest women I have ever seen. I remember my advice when he had said he was thinking about asking her to marry him: "Well, if you're not certain you ever want to get married, then give it thought. But if you might want to marry somebody, someday, then by all means ask her right now. Because you'll never find a better woman willing to give you the time of day." Or words to that effect.
     So he got married—I was the best man. Sorry Kier, about forgetting the boutonnieres back in the refrigerator of my apartment on Logan Boulevard, and the mad dash that Edie had to go to retrieve them so they could be pinned on as the music swelled for you to walk down the aisle. A little bit of unnecessary drama and tension, I know. But it all worked out okay. 
     For a number of years we'd grab a movie in the three days between my birthday and his. But family and work, time and routine, plus there not being a convenient way to get from Naperville to Northbrook, all got in the way. Which was okay. We didn't need frequent check-ins. We had a past. We knew. It all worked out okay.
     That's how I felt last week, turning 60. An astounding, perhaps Kier-like calm. It had all worked out okay. Better than okay. Great. Not great in the usual sense of the term. Not famous. There was no "Steinberg at Sixty" retrospective at the Chicago History Museum, which I could imagine if not achieve. But greatness is overrated. Hemingway was great at 60 and shot himself in the head at 61. Frankly, I feel I've found myself a better gig. I am lucky in love, blessed by work I like to do, and so rich in friends, the oldest and best being Kier, who didn't become a star, like Nathan, later Nash. But he didn't have to be. Never being a star also meant never becoming a has-been either. He didn't die at 28, like Jim Morrison. He didn't have some hit in 1993 that everybody has forgotten by now. He isn't some Oh-yeah-I-remember-that-guy in a non-age appropriate haircut, a dangly pirate earring and mascara, playing to four people at the Heartland Cafe. He cut his hair, raised two great sons, became a Christian and a grandfather and a good, thoughtful friend, the kind who sends CDs of music you might like for your birthday.
     Songs on Apple iTunes, by the way, now scroll the lyrics to songs. No laborious guesswork necessary.
     That tricky line to "Safe European Home" is, "Who that Martian arrival at the airport, yeah?"
     No wonder we couldn't figure it out. Something of a let-down, to finally learn the elusive truth. But hey, that's life. You wait 40 years to learn something that wasn't worth knowing in the first place. Maybe what was worthwhile was in the figuring out part, not the mystery we were figuring. Which comes as no surprise. Maybe that's wisdom.
     On Wednesday I saw the photo montage Kier put on YouTube—our college life, photos I had never seen, jumping to marriages, to kids, to his kids' marriages. Putting this together took planning, consideration, work I called Edie up to my office to see it.
      "What am I going to do?!?!" I wailed. "His birthday is three days away." I always get blindsided by his acts of consideration. All those mixtapes, then CDs of music, arriving promptly on my birthday. Thoughtful. Did I ever return the favor? I hope so, in some other, smaller way.
     Edie, of course, as she always does, assessed the situation immediately and offered the perfect solution.
     "Write something," she said.



      Editor's note: Caren Jeskey's post will appear next week.




     

 

O’Hare couple have a home—until June 23

     Life is looking up for Linda and Manny Benavides.
     They are no longer sleeping on chairs at O’Hare International Airport, late in the evening, or on a Blue Line train early in the morning, after police make their sweeps and throw them out.
     Now they are in a clean if bare one bedroom ground floor apartment in Norwood Park, temporarily.
     “It’s beautiful in here,” said Linda. “We love it.”
     “Thank you,” added her husband.
     After the Sun-Times featured the couple on its front page May 22, there was an outpouring of support. The couple was put up for a few days in a motel in Des Plaines, where people kept arriving with clothes, gift cards, money.
     “A beautiful Chinese lady, she knocked at the door, gave us an envelope,” said Linda. “She said, ‘This is for you,’ and she brought two masks. I said, ‘What is your name?’ and she said, ‘God’s blessing you.’ She left right away. I gave my husband the envelope. He started counting. It was a thousand dollars. So we opened a bank account right away. We didn’t want to keep it on us.”
     Linda estimates they’ve received $2,600 total.
     Plus the apartment, offered by a stranger.
     “She’s been so good,” said Linda. “I’m afraid for her, because she’s a cop.” 

     That seems noteworthy, especially now. I don’t get many emails from cops, but this one stood out.
     “I am a Chicago police officer,” she began. “I saw the article about the homeless couple that have been sleeping at O’Hare since April 16th. I would like to offer them a place to stay and try to help them to get into a place where they can stay together. I think it’s heartbreaking not to have a place to stay during these difficult times.”

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