Texas notes: Flags

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey speaks truth to Texas.

 

    Mr. "President" there is nothing funny about COVID. There is something very wrong with you to have made fun of Joe Biden wearing a properly fitted mask. It is surreal to watch you making light of an epic tragedy. Our only solace is that you will surely be kicked out of high office in the near future. Only then our “great” nation can cease to be the laughing-stock and horror of the world as you mismanage this plague and march your people to death. Once you are properly fired why don’t you do us all a favor and disappear? You’ve joked about leaving the country— please, please do.
     In mid-June on a COVID walkabout I noticed a hand painted wooden sign affixed to a tree in a neighbor’s yard. It boldly read “Texans Lost To COVID 19: 2,193.” The yard was peppered with 2,193 brightly colored flags. It brought home the gravity of the situation and I was moved to tears.
     As the weeks have worn on, I’ve watched the sea of flags grow in this lawn around an otherwise nondescript corner house. We are now nearing 17,000 Texans dead. This is not a soap opera or telenovela. None of those people are coming back.
     A few days ago I saw a brightly colored Fiat with 2 kayaks on the roof drivings towards me as I walked down the street; (we don’t have many sidewalks here). I recognized the car from the flag driveway. Instinctively I waved and the driver stopped and unrolled his window. He knew this was about the flags. He told me his name is Shane, and his wife Erin sat next to him. I asked if I could come by and learn more about his project, and he agreed. We set a date and a few days later Shane warmly invited me into their colorful and well-appointed backyard replete with a brand new chicken coop (with Lucy and Dinah pecking about), a fire pit, and modern wicker furniture. Large vinyl curtains with art prints from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hung brightly on the wall behind him. Shane and Erin once lived in LA and both have backgrounds in film. 

Shane

    

     “When this all started everyone treated it like it was big vacation.” Shane described how he felt watching neighbors bike and walk around, and congregate in each others’ yards. He felt it was important to bring attention to the reality of what was happening. “It’s a real disease and people are dying from it. It was as though we were driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. If we get hit, we get hit.”
     I knew exactly what he meant. Folks seem to think the virus picks and chooses people and will skip them and their loved ones. While on a walk with a neighbor the other day, she ripped her mask off complaining “it’s just so hot. Do you mind?” She is a healthcare professional so I asked her how this choice would affect me. She said “if you have a mask on but I don’t your chances of getting the virus from me increase by about 5%.” 

      “Um, YES. I DO MIND!” I told her to either stay at least six feet away from me, or put her mask on. For the rest of the walk she repeatedly pushed the boundaries and rather than a pleasant walk with a new friend the walk became a stress-laden game of dodge the germs for me. Frankly, I’d prefer to be alone than with someone who is not safe. She works in a medical practice, hangs out closely with people from at least four other households that I am aware of, and sadly cannot be one of my COVID buddies anymore. I’ll just decline the next invitations and maintain my inner balance that comes with impeccable safety standards during this stretch of the marathon.  

Now it's up to 18,000

   It felt good to be with Shane who put his mask on just to talk to me from his car during our first meeting. In his yard, we sat at least 10 feet away from each other if masks were off. As Shane put it, “most things in life are manageable.” He should know, as the father of a teen who had multiple heart surgeries before he was even 4 years old, thus a high-risk person. I stand with Shane and his family and all other at-risk people and I will not compromise these standards. 

     If we’d simply been mandated to wear masks and practice distancing, similar to mandates to wear seat belts and not to smoke in public indoor spaces, people like my dear former landlord Angelo Vouris who died on April 12th of COVID in Chicago would still be with us. For those of us who have the ability to follow simple rules, let’s just do our best to stay on course. It will be over before we know it and we can always say that we stood on the right side of history. Play this song for those who need a push: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltjBT_TuUVA.
     For more information about Shane and Erin: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/insider/front-page-200k-deaths.html.

Prairie wedding

 

     A lovely afternoon Thursday. I'm on vacation, but a pair of obligations kept me inside—an hour on Zoom with Eric Zorn, Lisa Donovan and John Williams, recording a "Mincing Rascals" podcast for WGN. Then another hour with scholars from the Newberry Library, talking about how to best lure people to the Newberry when they, you know, finally begin going places again.
     "We have to get outside," I told my wife, as soon as we were finished, and we grabbed Kitty and headed to the Trail through Time, a meandering path through the Techny Prairie Park, 100 acres of wildflowers and grasses, circling hawks and old oaks, a golf course and a couple soccer fields, just a few blocks from our house.

     I couldn't tell you what we talked about. The usual things I suppose, work and kids and the house, the radiating goodness of our dog. Not too much about politics. As we started our walk, our youngest son called with his latest exciting career development, and we asked questions and listened and strode along. Maybe his call put him in mind, but as we passed the sledding hill, I said, "I'm glad Kenty didn't break his neck." A snowy winter's day, he was maybe three, we were on one of those saucer sleds. He was sitting crosslegged on my lap, and we hit a series of bumps—bah-boom, bah-boom, bah-BOOM!—and we were both tumbling through the air and in my mind he came down, headfirst, and I had a moment of pure fear. But he was fine. Ruffled but unhurt. Solid boy. Still, I felt the faintest chill of a very different life, for both of us, that could have begun at that moment, but thankfully did not. I paused again to squint down that dim passageway in relief.

     We walked along the river—the West Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River, for those keeping track, circling the big bowl of the retention basin. In the soft light of the setting sun, the landscape looked golden. 

     "It's like the English countryside," I said, remembering a journey to East Sussex at this time of year. Kitty surged ahead or lagged behind, savoring the scent of some previous dog. 

     As we headed out again, we saw somebody setting up a white trellis, and a pair of young men in suit jackets. "Photos or wedding?" I asked a woman with a camera. 

      "Wedding," she said. 

      The COVID-19 pandemic has caused all sorts of accommodations and disappointments, parties to be postponed, or shifted in form and tone, into sidewalk serenades and drive by festivities. The pop up wedding is something I had not heard of before, but it seems a good idea, perhaps an improvement, perhaps something that'll catch on. My wife and I had a big lavish wedding in a Michigan Avenue hotel with a 12-piece swing band, and we reflected warmly on it—we're glad we had it, money well spent, but can also see the appeal of going the trellis-on-a-trail route. I do wonder what the cost of our wedding, properly invested, would look like after 30 years, but I bet it would be welcome in retirement, should we ever be able to retire.

     All in all, we decided it had all worked out for the best.

     "Beside, you only have the one life," I said, "and it's fruitless to wonder about it working out some other way. It worked out this way." We both decided this was a fine thing indeed.

     I paused to take a couple pictures of the wedding taking shape in the distance, and wondered if perhaps I hadn't done my due diligence by not quizzing them a bit more. But they seemed very  busy, setting up, and a man whose age and air of coiled distraction made me think he was the father of the bride said something, maybe just, "A wedding," that made me not want to impose further upon them, but let them have their privacy in a public space. We could have stayed as observers, I suppose, but we weren't invited and, anyway, dinner was waiting at home.

Bookmarked

     I don't read for pleasure.

     Well, I do, in the sense that I enjoy reading immensely, and always have, back to when I first learned how to read, and would devour ... what were they? "Dan Frontier" books. I loved those.

     What I mean is I don't read solely for pleasure. There is always the next column, or blog post, or book over the horizon, if not due in a few hours, lurking in the back of my mind. You never know when a passage will come in handy, and need to be found again. Bookmarks make that possible. Otherwise, you forget.

     Which is why wherever I regularly read, there are pads of small Post-It notes scattered nearby. On the night table. In a drawer in my desk. In a drawer in the coffee table. In my briefcase. Dozens of them. I never want to look for a Post-It note, I want to glance down, grab one, stick in the margins, and continue reading. (I could no more dog-ear a book or underline it than I could toss a book into the fire. If you want to discuss this, you may. Text books, yes, or galleys being reviewed. Those are disposable. But nothing else). 

     There are times, however, when a Post-It is not nearby. Then I grab whatever is handy—a scrap of paper, an envelope, a check, anything. I'll open my wallet and grab a business card. (Not that you give people business cards anymore. They're fomites, aka, objects that transmit disease). 

     But people used to carry them, and I wasn't alone in the habit of using business cards as bookmarks.

     Tuesday I pulled a book off the shelf, to do some research for my next book. "Truman," by David McCullough. It opened to a business card, but it wasn't mine. It was Steve Neal's, my former Sun-Times colleague, our political columnist, who died, by his own hand, in February, 2004. 

    I almost gasped, to see it there. And then I remembered. His office at the Sun-Times was jammed, floor-to-ceiling, with books. I had permission, when working on something, to just go in and take one. I didn't have to ask; he didn't have to be there. A very generous man, in that and other regards. I remember standing on his desk, balancing precariously, reaching over to grab some volume shelved up high, near the ceiling.

     After he died, his family took some books, and the rest were just piled nearby, an enormous mound, a yard high. I took armloads of books back to my office—the McCullough was a no-brainer. They retain the calm, scholarly air of their previous owner: Steve's books. I'm not alone in that attitude either: if you go down to the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, there is a corner with Neal's portrait, and a couple shelves of his books, as in books written by him. It seems an apt tribute. 

    Yes, it's easier to search books online. But not every book is online, and those that are can be severely limited. "Snippet view." How I hate that term. Besides, nothing beats having books around, at hand, accessible. It leads to all sorts of serendipitous encounters and random discoveries, such as picking up an old book and being reminded of a passage that was worth highlighting. Or of a colleague, gone now more than 16 years, who was a splendid man, and worth remembering. 

     

     

Flashback 2011: Nobody had to ask for Daley's special favors

     I'm on vacation this week, working on the book and staining a wooden storm door, a more complicated process than it sounds (one coat of conditioner, two of stain, and three of marine spar varnish. Quite a lot, really). So no column in the paper today to reprint here. But Facebook dangled this column from 2011 at me, and I found that, after nearly a decade, it's a good reminder that Donald Trump isn't the first politician to milk his office for personal gain. He's just much more inept at it. See how a recent master did it, and how in the hazy past at least one politician managed to avoid graft. 

     After the media-led history lesson that accompanied Richard M. Daley's final days in office last May, perhaps a few Chicagoans learned that Daley and his father, Richard J. Daley, were not the city's first father-and-son mayoral team.  

Carter Harrison I

      That distinction goes to Carter Harrison I and Carter Harrison II, who straddled the cusp of the previous century, serving from 1879 to 1915, each man elected to five terms.
     But here the similarity ends, in many regards—for instance, the two Harrisons were deemed "lovable" by historians—one charge never leveled against either Daley, and while they ran a wide open town of bordellos and low dives, both were considered to be personally honest.
     The son, who was "handsome as a matinee idol" to quote one historian, printed re-election campaign posters of himself with his hands jammed in his pockets and the headline "Chicago is fortunate in having a mayor who keeps his hands in his own pockets." Was our former mayor, despite his considerable moxie, ever bold enough to make that election claim?
     "This was no empty boast," wrote historian Edward Wagenknecht. "[Harrison] was so scrupulous that when his wife came into his office one day and asked him for stamps for three letters, he told her that if she really wanted him to steal from the city, there was no point in stopping with six cents, for he could get a million dollars just as easily."

Carter Harrison II

      How easily? Well, Carter Harrison II could have allowed his wife Edith to serve on the boards of philanthropic organizations, which would pay her sizable salaries and then reap donations from companies doing business with the city.
     Harrison knew he was responsible for his wife's actions—even if it involved 6 cents worth of postage. Our recent mayor prefers to assume sputtering outrage or lack of knowledge when the subject comes up, as it did last week due to an inspector general's report involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from companies that received city subsidies to a charity founded by Daley's wife, who ran the charity pro bono.
     It was a subject that was considered bad form to even mention while Daley was in power and which the ex-mayor seems to still think is beyond all public discussion.
      "A personal insult," Daley said Monday, when asked about the inspector general's report. "A disgraceful thing they did."
     Then, in typical Daley straw man style, he rebutted a charge that wasn't being made.
     "No one," he said, " No one talked to anyone" to force companies receiving city subsidies to donate money to that particular charity.
     Well, of course not. That's not how it's done. Daley didn't call the police brass and demand his nephew be let off the hook for allegedly killing a man, or direct sewer business to his son and a nephew. Nobody needed to spell out the chain of reflexive favoritism that goes back to the days when city insurance business would be funneled to the Daley boys.
     Do you think Richard J. Daley was on the phone barking commands? Of course not. He didn't have to. Everyone understood. Play along and receive the benefits, or don't and be frozen out. A word to the wise . . .
     As much as we like to tell ourselves that we are improving, I like the bald candor of Richard J. Daley better than the denial of his son. When confronted with cronyism, he didn't feign surprise, didn't hide behind the personal dignity of his also admired wife, Sis. He told reporters to kiss his ass. "If a man can't put his arms around his sons, then what's the world coming to?" he said. A world where we're not even allowed to ask, apparently.

'That is what fiction means'

     My colleague Mark Brown's thoughtful analysis Tuesday of why Kelsey Grammer's new Chicago-based TV show, "Boss," which debuts Oct. 21, does not resemble actual City Council meetings reminded me of when my wife and I would watch "L.A. Law" together. A litigator at Jenner & Block at the time, she was constantly complaining, "Oh, that would never happen" at some violation of judicial procedure, until I finally said, "Honey, if the show were an hour of you shepardizing legal documents in a windowless room in Minneapolis, nobody would watch it."
     City Council meetings are painfully dull stretches of prolix aldermanic speechifying, usually about nothing. Reporters forced to attend these struggle to make them seem relevant by seizing the wildest utterances and giving them a weight they don't deserve, which is why you'd see a headline like, "Mayor: Floating airport in lake?" followed a day later by "No floating airport, says mayor." To make some things exciting, you must resort to fiction.

                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 16, 2011

Avoiding skunks

 

     Okay, I'm finally a true suburbanite.
     I thought I was, before. But I really wasn't. Now I am.
     How come? What changed? I've lived in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook for more than 20 years. What did I do now that I haven't done before?
     I called the cops on a skunk.
     In my defense, I didn't want to. My wife alerted me to the skunk, kind of poking its nose into the grass in our front yard. Which was strange, because it was in the middle of the afternoon. Usually skunks come out at night.
     "I think it might be hurt," she said. "It's kind a limping." I watched. It was hard to tell what it was doing. A fan of inaction, I counseled waiting and hoping it went away. 
     It didn't. An hour later, the skunk was still there, in a different spot on the front lawn, probing its nose, this way and that. And a definite, not entirely unpleasant eau d'skunk was permeating the house. 

     My wife and I watched it. 

     "Hey skunk!" she yelled, loudly, "Go away!"

     So I guess she's a suburbanite too. Yelling at woodland creatures. The skunk didn't flinch, but kept its obsessive lawn poking.
     "Call 311," my wife suggested. That only works in the city, or at least didn't work when I tried it. I plugged "Northbrook Animal Control," into my iPhone. Animal control's web site suggested I call the police non-emergency number.
     So I did.
     In my defense, I was not panicky or demanding. I didn't expect squad cars to show up and arrest the skunk. I was curious what, if anything, I should do. Maybe the thing was in distress. 
     "They're feeding on grubs in your lawn this time of year," explained the friendly police woman, who sounded as if she had been fielding skunk calls all day. She said, if I want, she would call an animal service for me.
     "Will I be charged?" I asked. I didn't want to pay $600 to remove a skunk that was lingering on our lawn. To be honest, skunks in the daylight made sense. It fit in with the general strangeness of these very strange times, the mask-wearing, plague-ridden, darkness-at-noon, black-sun-in-the-sky-at-night weirdness and inversion of all established verities that has been going on since the pandemic kicked in a few months back. If you turned on the bathroom faucet and a gusher of black blood poured out, well, why not? Most of 2020 has been like that.
     No, the police officer said, you won't have to pay. The village covers skunk removal, should it come to that. That seemed generous. And still extreme. Getting carried away. It was only a small skunk.
     "Let's wait," I said.
     A while later, it was time to walk Kitty. The skunk was still there, exploring a corner of the lawn, rather frantically I thought. Very focused on the ground in front of it. I put the dog on a short leash and we quickstepped down the walk and vectored away. The skunk didn't seem to notice us. Kitty didn't notice the skunk. It was still there when we got back. We gave it wide berth.
     And that's it. By our nighttime walk, the skunk was gone. Though there was a skunk—a different one, not ours, bigger—in the Village Green, which is not unusual. I've been there very late at night when there are four or five skunks, skunks in all directions, large and lurking, almost scary in the darkness. Keeping an eye on this little skunk, we hurried by it. Then, on our way home, we altered our route so as to avoid it, my keeping an eye on the thing, to make sure it didn't rush us. Waiting and avoiding are, I believe, undervalued strategies for coping with certain aspects of life. Some problems, like skunks, are better avoided than faced head on. They have a way of solving themselves, if you let them. There was no sign of the skunk on Monday.

Staircase wisdom

     Eating food together isn't the only way to socialize, you know.

     My wife and I met another couple, longtime friends, at the Chicago Botanic Garden Saturday afternoon and we had a pleasant 90 minute stroll. We paired off by gender, my wife with his wife, and her husband with me, talking away. At one point he asked me about turning 60, and I sort of shrugged. The word "acceptance" came to mind, but I didn't feel like trotting that out. Nothing traumatic. We agreed that sailing into your 60s is a sea change from being in your 50s. It begins to feel old.
     My thoughts on the subject didn't clarify until the next day, reading the New York Times obituary for Scott Lilienfield, 59 "Psychologist Who Questioned Science of Psychology" in the shorthand of the Gray Lady's headline writers. I probably would have read it anyway—he was an iconoclast questioning the mistaken certainties of his field, my type of fellow—but I especially find myself drawn to the obituaries of people younger than myself. I'm not sure why. Curiosity—how'd they do with less time than I've frittered away? Part obligation to the fallen, perhaps, part celebration of being the reader and not the subject.
     He worked to deepen the understanding of "so-called psychopathic behavior." I'm not sure why the Times feels compelled to not only insert that skeptical "so-called"—to me, like global warming; it's just there—but also to explain it.
     "Psychopathy is characterized by superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying and a lack of empathy."
     Do I have to say it? No? Of course not. Too obvious, right? Good.
     "Three underlying personality features that psychopaths share...: fearless dominance, meanness and impulsivity."
     It is so difficult to shake politics nowadays, isn't it?
     About 2/3 of the way through, the narrative backtracks, as newspaper obituaries do, starting at the beginning of life. "Scott Owen Lilienfeld was born on Dec. 23, 1960, in Queens..."
     So he would have been 60 this December, had not pancreatic cancer intervened. At which point I realized I now have an adequate answer to my friend's question that stymied me at the Botanic Garden, the one about how I view turning 60. As a gift. Definitely. A present that not everyone is lucky enough to receive.

Amazon robots, workers speed stuff to you

 

Darnell Gilton (Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia).

     Darnell Gilton is “picking,” a process that takes six or seven seconds.
     “When the pod pulls up to me, I look at the screen,” explains Gilton. “The screen tells me what bin to pick the product from. I go to the bin, I grab the product, I bring it to the hand scanner here, I scan the product, the light tells me what tote to put the product in. Just like that.”
     The pod is a yellow tower about 7 feet high, each of four sides presenting a grid of merchandise tucked securely into bins, driven by an orange robot tucked underneath. The screen shows an item — in this case, a Real Techniques Miracle Complexion Sponge + Case located in cubby 2H. Gilton grabs it, scans it, tosses it into a yellow bin beyond a flashing green button, hitting the button to show he’s finished the task. Then he does it again, with a different product. About 350 times an hour.
     Gilton works at MDW7, the Amazon Robotics Fulfillment Center in Monee, one of nine in Illinois, with two more on the way. In all, there are 50 similar facilities in the United States, with another 100 worldwide, part of a staggering network of warehouses, distribution hubs, conveyers, chutes, trucks, pickers, drivers, supervisors and, of course, an omnipresent internet presence, which working together last year sold $280 billion worth of products and delivered 3.5 billion packages worldwide.  

     The advent of COVID-19 has made Amazon, already the most dominant online retailer in the world, more important than ever, as fear of going out in public has encouraged people to try e-commerce. Even as the president slashes at the Postal Service, trying to cut into Amazon’s business, it grows so fast the company, now worth $2 trillion, is hiring 5,500 new workers in Illinois, adding to the 23,000 already working in the state.
     Between that, and Amazon Prime Day last week — Prime Days actually, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the world’s largest e-retailer offered all sorts of sales for its 112 million U.S. members, more than a third of the entire population of the country, who get free shipping for a monthly Prime fee of about $12 — a visit seemed in order.
     MDW7 — “MDW” refers to the code for Midway; Amazon fulfillment centers are named for the nearest airport — is enormous, nearly a million square feet, and from the parking lot, that size immediately presents reportorial challenges.

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MDW7 in Monee (Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia).