Texas notes: The soul of a man

     "The ability to give" should top all of our lists of reasons to be grateful, as Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey reminds us.

     “Hey Siri. Play Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.” 

      His name had been floating around in my mind since I heard it mentioned on NPR the other day. She complied, and I was greatly rewarded. Lilting, bending guitar chords slowly built up to the moment when a rich, boyish yet distinctive voice began imploring the listener. Mr. Elliott played and sang an old gospel song, "Soul of a Man."  

     Time stood still in the way only a song or another stunning piece of art, nature, or sentient connection can accomplish. The lyrics with more questions than answers matched my mood on this strange and lovely Thanksgiving day.
     The morning had started as usual with freshly ground coffee, newspaper headlines and my attention being pulled in and out of radio stories. I like to keep WBEZ Chicago playing in the background, even down here in Texas. Sure, it can be disconcerting to hear “a high of 47 and overcast,” and sometimes I have to take a moment to reorient. After years of living down here in the South it still surprises me, somehow, that there are places where winter doesn’t really exist.
     After coffee, I got dressed and decided it was time to get out of the house. I drove off listening to Ramblin’ Jack, windows open on a mid-70’s Fall day, to nowhere in particular. I had only a loose plan for this holiday. Once the song ended and the trance was lifted, I decided to start at the grocery store. Masked and distanced with hand sanitizer in my fanny pack and peppered all around the store in touch-less dispensers I felt like a character in the Jetsons. I thought “make sure your helmet and space suit are on, lest the very air around you cause sudden death.”

     Reasonably sure I’d survive this visit, I picked out one of the last containers of freshly baked Pao de Queijo (Brazilian cheese bread). I got back into my car and as I drove off continued listening to Jack. I could not find a song nearly as transfixing as the first one I’d heard, so I played it again and again.
     I headed to my friend Richard’s house where he met me in his garage. I left the cheese bread on a chair for him. He took a box of Saran-wrapped plates and Tupperware loaded up with holiday foods and placed the box on the trunk of his car, then backed away. I felt grateful and humbled that he (and others) offered me holiday meals and distanced visits, so far away from my family this year. Richard and I were both masked and kept a good distance from each other. We chatted for a little bit and then said our goodbyes.
     I took the food and headed to my happy place— a small field behind the castle-like museum in the Hyde Park neighborhood nearby. I laid a blanket out on the grass, unloaded the box and turned it over as a table. I put a nice cloth over it and unwrapped the feast. Baked chicken, yams with pineapple, green beans with thick-cut bacon, tart cranberries, stuffing and gravy. The works. I started with the pie of course.
     I marveled at the sky and how utterly content I felt. I’ve gotten used to solitude and while I miss people, we have found ways to stay connected. In some ways I feel closer to family and friends who are far away than I did when we visited more often. When we do talk it’s with more presence and reverence than before. The fragility of life is now ever-present.
      After my meal I took a short constitutional and saw families sitting in circles on their lawns. I wondered if they were wishing they were somewhere else. Sheltering in place with family members usually seen much less has been taking a toll on folks I know. Or were they basking in gratitude for being close to the ones they love? Perhaps they were wavering between the two, or something else entirely.
     As I headed back towards home I passed by a disheveled man talking to an unseen force in his head, standing next to a large dumpster near the gas station. I stopped at the store, picked out a vitamin water, and put together a bag for him— the rest of the feast that I had set aside as leftovers, a plastic spork and napkins, and a waterproof jacket a neighbor donated to my trunk-stash for folks in need. As I slowly approached him (keeping 20’ or so of distance) he bent down and hid. I called out “sir?” and he peeked out at me. I said, "If you’d like a meal and a jacket I will leave them here for you,” and left them on the curb.
     As I walked back to my car he called out a feeble and garbled thank-you and quickly took his gifts down the alley. I saw him sit down in his encampment, about a half a block away, and dig right in. I wished I’d given him more and now that I know where he is, with the generous flow of gifts from my neighbors, I will look for him again. “What is the soul of a man? I’ve traveled in different countries. I’ve traveled in foreign lands. I found nobody to tell me, what about the soul of a man?” In this COVID era I’ve never felt more comfortable with the fact that I do not know.

Why the media isn't fake.

Donald Trump, White House press conference
Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020

      Because nobody could make this shit up. 

     That's it. That's the entire post. I could add more. (What is that? The Irresolute Desk?) But the picture of Donald Trump's first press conference since losing the election Nov. 3 says it all. He is the living embodiment of John Milton's observation, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven." Outside conditions are wildly over-valued, particularly by crude frauds like Trump. It is the person within, his mind and character, that color everything. Look at him. Look at his condition: Rich. Powerful. Famous. The president of the United States. And yet such a tiny, pitiful man. He radiates the essential pettiness within, emits a constant whine of grievance, no matter the circumstance, a howl that drowns out everything else. That's why I'm really not very concerned whether he goes to prison or not. What difference does it make? He carries his cell with him wherever he goes. Some people are their own worst punishment.

Thanksgiving 2020

     Happy Thanksgiving!
     I suppose I should just leave it at that. After a brutal, endless, emotionally-wringing 2020 presidential campaign, with its unprecedented attempt by a sitting president to subvert the election process, conducted against the background of a raging viral pandemic, we deserve a moment of relief, of stepping away from the maelstrom and concentrating on our own personal lives. I still feel blessed, and hope you do too. I hope there is food on the table and a loved one or two in your bubble and you find time to pause, and reflect, and give thanks for the good things, the rocks that are not washed away in the tempest, solid enough to set up a table and sit and share something plentiful and good.

     Period. End of post.
     But this is far from the usual Thanksgiving, even though an alarming number of Americans are pretending it is just another holiday, hopping on planes and gathering in big family groups, while all of the medical experts and the responsible parts of government beg them not to. Why? I suppose being heedless, even stupid, has something to do with it, or at least on automatic pilot, zombies vacuuming a house that's on fire.
     It isn't entirely their fault. We've been grinding through eight months of this. The impulse to say, "The hell with it," is human and strong. Plus many are being led astray. It isn't as if Trump is alone setting fire to the curtains. Yesterday I notice a post on Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas' Twitter feed and, well, perhaps it's best if I just show you:

     In one sense, that is a standard GOP bullshit, the hallucinatory conjuring up of some insane stand—the War on Christmas migrating to Thanksgiving—and projecting it on the bogeyman of liberals, so it can be decried. Squeezing a little imaginary victimhood into a paper bag so it can be huffed, for the high it obviously produces. Not that there aren't academic sorts pointing out that the actual first Thanksgiving took place in September, or that it didn't work out so well for the Native-Americans welcoming the pilgrims. Not that some don't cluck at Thanksgiving, as people do about literally everything. Yet all of it scraped together doesn't amount to a collective eye roll, never mind "losing their minds." Rather, it's the same comic Yosemite Sam bow-legged bluster, Cruz firing his rhetorically six-guns into the air, swaggering against imaginary enemies who are, again remember, trying to cut down the number of conservatives who are dying on ventilators in three weeks.
     It is grotesque enough from a stupid man, from a man like Donald Trump. To see it from Cruz, who was educated at one point, and knew enough to denounce Trump in 2016, before he fell at his feet and began rolling like a puppy. It's despicable and should excuse him from the office he holds—in Texas, remember, where they called out the National Guard to help with the morgue overflow—never mind let him aspire toward higher office, as he so obviously does. That he is a member—I almost said "respected member" but don't want to overstate the case—of the United States Senate, and not some fringe loon, is a hard pill to swallow. Never mind the prospect that he might be the 47th president since, after Trump, anything is possible. So I had to take that tweet and seal it in a bottle and set it on the shelf, here, where we can find it in 2022 when Cruz starts vigorously running for an office even further beyond his abilities. (Assuming he's still not crouched over Trump's shoes, licking). 

      This is criminal negligence, to make business-as-usual Thanksgiving into an act of political defiance and egg his flock of Lone Star State sheep to rush baaing to the nearest pack of wolves and show their bellies.
     Enough, let me let you get back to your celebration, the more modest, safe and low key the better. If Ted Cruz can wildly cheer on folly, then I can provide a knowing nod of approval to caution. There is nothing wrong with stepping away from the herd. When you're giving thanks, you might want to give thanks for being able to breath, unassisted, because not everyone can.
    We will always remember this Thanksgiving. Crisis holidays are like that. I remember a distant New Year's Eve, 2000. The coming of the millennium was a big deal, and people were doing all sorts of wildly excessive things, rushing off to the pyramids, seeing laser shows in Paris. Not only did I not do any of those things, but I had to work, the newspaper sounding an all-hands-on-deck alert in case the Y2K computer melt-down some experts feared actually occurred. (Before COVID, before 9/11, we had no idea what a crisis looked like...)
     So it's 11:45 p.m., Dec. 31, 1999. A quiet night, none of the bad stuff we feared occurring, and I look up at the harsh florescent-lit newsroom at 401 N. Wabash and think, "I'll be damned if I'm ushering in the millennium sitting in this goddamn place." And I get up, and go downstairs, and stroll south on Wabash Avenue, an unusually warm December night, and stop at the middle of the Wabash Avenue Bridge, lean against the rail, and watch the clock on the Wrigley Building slowly advance toward midnight, utterly alone, the street empty. It was quiet and solitary and peaceful. At 11:55, a knot of partygoers, rushing somewhere down the block. Then still again.
     At midnight, a soft cheer, from somewhere, from everywhere, and some fireworks popped in the general direction of Navy Pier. It was a very nice, comforting moment that became a beautiful memory. I hope this COVID Thanksgiving is the same for you. There will only be the one, if we're lucky, and we might as well make the best of it. We can celebrate in the traditional fashion next year. Those of who live to see it, I mean. Stay safe. Happy Thanksgiving.

"I've got a BAD feeling about this..."

     The "Raiders of the Lost Ark" quality of the Trump ordeal, how it keeps coming at you—deadly spikes bursting out of tunnel walls replaced by giant boulder rolling toward you leading to Amazonian tribesmen shooting poisoned arrows—means that the president finally admitting the obvious, that Joe Biden will be sworn in as president Jan. 20, brings only a small frisson of relief and the immediate question, "What's next? What peril is right now zinging in our direction?"
     Will Trump consolidate his stranglehold on the Republican Party? Build his own media juggernaut and stride toward the 2024 campaign? Defect to Russia while babbling secrets? A thousand days of rallies and tweets and rhetorical boulders tossed into the political pond? Or will he, could he possibly, begin to fade, Cheshire-cat like, until there is only that horrible hairdo hovering behind some neglected podium?

     Nah, not that. That isn't how these things work. "Oh look Indy, I guess we got the priceless statue, got away clean and are home free..." Won't happen.
     Will some other Republican lunge to take Trump's place? Is that even possible? That's the question I've been chewing on: Is Trumpism transferable? Can Ted Cruz simply put on a red baseball cap and be worshipped like a little toy god too? That is a risk, but very hard to imagine. Then again, all of this was hard to imagine. But my gut tells me no. To get the momentum Donald Trump did, the running start of Manhattan megalomania and years of reality TV, you have to be Donald Trump. Marco Rubio can't do. Donnie and Eric Trump can't do it. There was a Fox News in 2012, but nobody was shrieking because Mitt Romney touched their hand.
     Then again, all that frenzy, the illusion-based calliope they've built, has to go chugging off in some direction. Conservation of mass, energy. Nothing vanishes in a puff. They aren't going to look at each other, blinking, and suddenly wake up. "What? Where are we? Who? Joe Biden is president? How can we help him move the country forward?" That ain't happening either.

      Earlier this year, I cast Trumpism as an addiction, a damaging compulsion clung to by broken people in full flight from the world of facts. If we keep the addictive mechanism in mind, then the concept of growing tolerance for the substance of choice might be useful. Don't let our craving for moderation, for relief, blind ourselves to how these people function. The dullness of normality, policy, programs is what they're fighting. They need more insanity, not less, to raise a tingle in their blown-out senses. Trump will be replaced with something wilder, grosser, more destructive. Not Ted Cruz but Alex Jones. The crazy will give way to the really crazy.      

     That's fairly terrifying. And a reminder that prediction is pointless. Nobody could have seen the Trump juggernaut in the spring of 2015. Whatever giant spider or six-headed cobra is hurrying our way, we can't really prepare for it, much.
     So, speaking for myself, I plan to enjoy this moment of calm, the part of the movie where the China Clipper is flying along a little dotted line over India, a breather, the naming of governmental officials who aren't bumblers, fanatics and children of president. Given how horrified we were when it seemed like it was never going to happen, we owe it to ourselves to be pleased, for a little while, that it has happened. To sigh, smile, and await what comes next—a dozen assassins with scimitars raised, shouting "Aiyeebah!" and rushing at us from all directions. That sounds about right.

Live to see another Thanksgiving

    Why yes, I am proud to have snapped this not-all-that-bad photo of a Cooper's Hawk Sunday at the Chicago Botanic Garden with my iPhone 8, not a device well-suited to taking pictures of birds on the wing at a distance.
     And yes, I would like to spend this entire post musing on hawks, and their various splendors and glories. While recognizing that it might not really be a Cooper's Hawk*; I have a tendency to call every hawk I see a Cooper's Hawk.
     But I'm not going to do that, discuss hawks, I mean.
     I can't do that.
     Because of you.
     That is assuming you're one of those people who are actually gathering for a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner this Thursday, despite there being a Level 3 Code Red Emergency Pandemic Alert, or whatever they call it, because you've already bought the turkey or you always have a big Thanksgiving and people expect it and you just can't imagine missing Thanksgiving dinner even if your life depends on it which it may very well.
    I know. Tradition and family and expectation.

    Well boo-fucking-hoo.

     You think I don't miss Thanksgiving? We had 27 people at our house last year. Twenty-seven. My sister came in from Texas. My parents came in from Colorado. We made two turkeys, one roasted, one deep-fried, because one turkey just isn't enough.  We always make two turkeys. So yes, tradition. 
     You know how many people we're having over this year? None. Sure it's stressful. My wife is making a full Thanksgiving meal anyway, complete with a 14 pound turkey, due to ... I don't know, muscle memory. Which isn't quite Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. But in the realm. You know what I said when she asked me what we should eat this year? I said, "Swanson TV dinners. The frozen is just as good as the real." An homage to "Broadway Danny Rose" and sincere expression of the who-gives-a-fuckism that has been getting me through the past eight surreal-if-not-nightmarish months in this country.

     And you see how well that worked. Big turkey. Gravy. Stuffing, Sweet potatoes. Green bean casserole. Some kind of carrot salad and God knows what else. Homemade cranberry relish. 

     So we're going to make this enormous spread and get it on the table and sit down and just look at each other. No guests at all. Nor did we accept any of the invitations to have Thanksgiving dinner anywhere else. Not with my brother. Not with our son studying across the country. And do you know why? Because we don't wanna die. We wanna live to have a better Thanksgiving next year. It wasn't even a decision. It was the biggest no-brainer of all time.
     Returning to hawks. You know how I was able to sneak up close enough to get that quasi-good shot of the hawk? Because he was focused on a squirrel, which was standing still, as frozen as a squirrel ever is, whispering whatever squirrel prayer squirrels say when a hawk is bearing down on them. Because we live in a natural world where hawks hunt squirrels, and eat them for lunch, if the squirrel is not careful and often even if it is. Where the predator swoops in on the breeze and carries you off, from hawks to viruses, and neither care that it's your special holiday. COVID-19 moves from host to host without giving a rat's ass whether it's Thanksgiving or not.
     I'm not writing this to upbraid you. Well, yes, I am. But there's more to it. I'm actually passing along a useful, thoughtful, spiritual idea. Which makes this the blog version of Hints from Heloise, to date myself. A warm, loving suggestion which, needless to say, did not originate from me. The extended family was communicating our general agreement that we were not getting within throwing distance of one another this Thanksgiving when my sister-in-law said yes, yes, that notwithstanding, she'd still like to bake pies for everyone, as a way to off-gas all the goodness in her heart, and to keep her pie-baking muscles limber and what kind of pies would we like? And I put in my order—pecan please—and manfully restrained myself from adding, "...and pumpkin and sour cherry, if possible. Plus chess. And key lime." Then I spent a few minutes thinking about the pie I'd be getting, and then an alien, unfamiliar, completely uncharacteristic thought came to me, like a stranger edging into a vast, empty hall, raising a finger and clearing his throat.

     Ahem.

     "You know..." the thought went. "The stuffing I'm making for Edie and I .... the trademark challah stuffing ... I could ... I suppose ... in the same away Janice is making a half dozen extra pies .... could, without the expenditure of too much extra effort, really ... make MORE stuffing, by using extra ingredients ... and put that additional stuffing into those little square aluminum tins, and when I go to her house, to collect my pie (or, ideally, pies) I could leave a few tins behind, for her and her family, and other members of the extended clan, who could get their care packages of stuffing, the stuffing they always eat at Thanksgiving, and enjoy my primo perfected over a quarter century stuffing instead of whatever sucking-pebbles-in-the-desert stand-in for my stuffing that they would cobble together on their own.
     I examined that idea, blinking, surprised. That came from me? With inspiration from my sister-in-law, of course. A boost over the wall. But still. My idea.

     And it felt ... nice.
     So if instead of getting together, and getting each other sick, as millions of Americans seem to be doing because they're dumb as dirt and their lives are forfeit, you could adopt the patented Janice Live Through the Holidays Strategy and safely swap homemade foodstuffs. It seemed an idea worth sharing. I know there's only 48 hours until Thanksgiving, and you might have to scramble. But heck, that should be plenty of time, so get to it. 

     And, if not, well, I tried.

* It isn't. Tony Fitzpatrick tells me it is a red-tailed hawk, and if there's anybody who knows his birds, it's Tony. 

Storm door

     So how you doing? Holding up, between the election and the endless vote tally and the laughable lawsuits and the COVID? Good, good. Me too. Not much news to relate. The boys were home, for about six months, but they're back at school—well, the younger one. The older one went to study in Florida with a classmate, which is possible thanks to remote learning. Smart and resourceful.
     I finished a wooden door. And since some readers are outraged when I write about something that isn't politics, I should say, we'll get there, but it'll take time, as good things often do.
     But finishing the door, is a far, far more complicated process than I could have ever imagined. I'm tempted to write a weeklong series about it. There was the genesis of the project. The hideous battered old black aluminum screen door that was completely wrong for our 1905 Queen Anne farm house but I nevertheless walked through several times a day and tolerated because, well, people will tolerate just about anything, particularly if it is already in place when they show up. There was a period of years where I talked vaguely about "replacing the door" but did nothing, as people also tend to do. Then my wife floated plans of buying a new white aluminum door, and pointed out this complicated Suburban Screen Door System at Home Depot which reminded me of the hatch of a battleship, airtight, which I assume was the appeal.  

     Maybe that was her way of giving me a nudge. Maybe it was sincere, who knows? Anyway, it worked, and I realized that if I was to have a door in harmony with the 115-year-old aesthetic of the house, I'd have to take charge of the project, which I hate doing. But she gave me an additional nudge by going online, and finding the exact right wooden door, in the right wooden door factory right in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. It was quite expensive. For a wild moment I contemplated driving up to Fond du Lac to examine this door candidate. But, COVID. So I put my reportorial skills to work, and phoned up the factory and quizzed someone over the phone—friendly people, in Wisconsin, Scott Walker notwithstanding—getting various details, including the fact that the door is sold at Evanston Lumber. 

     I sent an email, then when that did nothing, phoned the owner, and went there, to look at the door, and got to know the owner, a little, who told me he bought the nine neighboring houses so they wouldn't complain about his lumber yard that had been there for nearly a century before they ever showed up. Which is one way to solve that problem. 

    A series of columns would be easy. The factory. The lumberyard. The process of buying the door would be one column, as would Tom, the salt-of-the-earth carpenter  hired to hang the door, since I knew that if I'd put one screw hole 1/64th inch off and the door would never hang true or open properly. His services cost more than the door itself, but I was glad I hired him.
     But since your time is precious, and news is going on, I'd better cut to the chase. The door had to harmonize with our current door, and that took buying a multitude of cans of stain—four, maybe six—before I found the exact right shade, Gunstock ("Gunstock"? Jesus. Why do woodworking and conservative politics go hand-in-hand? That could be yet another post). Once the stain was found, we arrived at the main challenge: marine spar varnish. Close friends of ours treated the old door of their lovely old house in Berea, Ohio with marine spar varnish, and my wife, who'd have been happy with the metal aircraft carrier hatch door let slip, several times, the advisability of using marine spar varnish. It was almost an order, though I liked the idea—it seemed very nautical, and my father was a sailor, and we did once sail across the Atlantic in a ship together, so I guess I'm a bit nautical too, if only in fancy. 

Only $40 a quart

     But applying spar varnish is like building a house. It's like gall bladder surgery: an enormously complicated process. Go online, and look at the tool porn videos of salt-of-the-earth handyman types explaining how to apply spar varnish. At first I thought I would mix the stain into the varnish but the guys I consulted at J.C. Licht—a Northbrook paint store around the corner from our house that I have to plug for all the times I raced in, asked them some frantic question and left—said, no, you put on the stain first, then the marine spar varnish. 

     Only you don't. There is also preconditioner, as my wife discovered, doing her own independent online research—teamwork—which keeps the stain from going on splotchy, and nobody wants splotchy stain. So I watched a variety of wildly differing videos online, some suggesting the stain be applied 15 minutes after the preconditioner, and some saying no, no, it has to be 24 hours. I tried to balance who was right. The divergence was so extreme, it was like watching competing home handyman videos by Martin Luther and the Pope.

     I practiced. I'm ashamed to admit it. I cut up little blocks of wood and practiced applying precondition and stain and marine spar varnish. Then practiced sanding them, a process that itself took a few days. Practice seemed to make sense. Given the cost of the door and the carpenter, I didn't want to then swoop in and Fuck It Up with a bad finish. That would kill me.
     When time approached to actually finish the door, I thought to do it in the garage, and was sweeping out the thick layer of crumbled leaves that lives on our garage floor 12 months a year, no matter what we do, when my wife, who has a genius for bold, out-of-the-box insight, pointed out that our TV room is utterly empty—like many, we're remodeling the homes we're trapped in, covering over a hideous linoleum floor that we tolerated because we're dead inside with real maple flooring—and I should do it there, and I looked at her, amazed, love blooming anew, because I never, ever would have thought of that, and would have suffered for hours and hours in the bone chilling unheated detached garage instead. I prepared the TV room, putting down a drop cloth to protect the floor that is going to be covered by maple flooring anyway because I'm an idiot that way, and set up a pair of sawhorses.  
     So how long to finish a door? A solid week. A day for preconditioning, which I decided needed the full 24 hours because it says so on the can. That's how serious I was about this. I read the can. Then two days of applying stain—the first coat, not dark enough, so sand and apply a second coat, which is just right.
    Then three coats of marine spar varnish, which take six days—and given how bad people are with simple practical situations, I should immediately explain why, though I'm tempted to make you squirm. Three coats require six days...why?
    Sigh. Two side of a door. You stain one, carefully stroking it on, slowly, to avoid bubbles. Then the thing has to dry for 24 blessed hours. Then you turn the door and do the other side. So each coat takes two days.
    Not solid days, mind you. I'd say it took 15, 20 minutes tops to do the door, plus the inset for the screen, for springtime and the glass, for winter (both had to be masked off, using painters tape and brown paper; I'm leaving off all sorts of intermediate steps, like sanding in between coats; I told you, this could run over a week. Or two). 

     So for six days, the door sat on sawhorses in our utterly empty TV room, just before the wood flooring arrived—and on the seventh I gave it a final caress with 350 grit sandpaper: really more like emery cloth—and the spar varnish was like glass.
     The process could not have been rushed. If I hadn't let each coat dry 24 hours it would pill up when sanded (touch the surface after 20 hours and it was still a bit tacky). If I skipped the preconditioner it would have been splotchy. One coat of stain was too light. And three coats of spar varnish were needed for the fabulous glass-like finish I was looking for. I could have done a fourth—some of the endless YouTube videos mention a possible fourth. But I decided not to gild the lily—a glasslike finish would have to do.
     So here's my question: as laborious as the above was, nobody read it and thought, "He should have rushed the door. He should have only given it one coat." So what's the problem with waiting three weeks to thwart the various pathetic legal dodges of the would-be demagogue who would undo it? To make sure every vote validly counted by an American citizen is recorded and certified and shoved up Donald Trump's ass? How is preserving democracy less important than my storm door? Yes, it feels like forever, while it's going on. But when it's done, it'll just be a moment in the long history of our great country. As will be waiting until Jan. 20 for the beast to be booted from office. We should be ecstatic. Squirm as he likes, he's going. The rest are details. So no, I'm not too worked up about his selling drilling rights in the Arctic or appointing judges. He can steal the light plates from the Oval Office for all I care. All that matters is, he's going. Eight weeks from Wednesday. It only seems forever.

Extra special

     "I don't think we've been on this path before," I say, part as threadbare joke, part in sincere wonder that no matter how many times my wife and I walk through the Chicago Botanic Garden, dozens and dozens, hundreds even, we always see new things. What I mean is, "This is fresh, this feels new, I like this."

     I always do. We've been members for years, gone regularly for years. But during the past eight months of the COVID crisis, we've really leaned on our membership. Three, four, fives times a week. Six. After work, usually. Or as a lunch break. For an hour, usually.  Just walking, this way and that, randomly chatting about this or that, our day, our kids, sometimes politics, if we can't avoid it, but we try to. Sometimes not talking at all. Sometimes in what our older son calls "companionable silence."

     It's never gotten dull. It's kept us sane. We've never gotten tired of it. Of course not. The Chicago Botanic Garden is big, 385 acres, and with our going at different times of day, light to dark, and different seasons, summer, winter, spring, fall, dazzling heat and bitter cold, flowers awash in bright springtime colors and retreated into the browns and ochres in winter. Not to mention heading down different paths—you really can't walk it all in one visit. You can't take in half, plus and facing different directions. There really is always something fresh, something we haven't done in a while—the woodland path. It's a little apart. We haven't walked it in a couple months now. Maybe three. Must do that. 
     "That fire hydrant is new," I said, pointing it out. Not meaning "new"—it's obviously quite old, the fire plug from a children's book, and clearly has been there every single time we've visited, by the entrance to the orchards and vegetables gardens, waiting patiently to be noticed. Or maybe I clamped eyes upon it 10 years ago and subsequently forgot. That's possible. the thing doesn't exactly call attention to itself, other than its charming old-fashioned quality. No reason for it to vibrate in mind.

     Why notice it now? Maybe the light was right. Or we were vectoring in just the right direction to bring it into our line of sight. We notice a lot of things that way. Never seen before, then suddenly right under our noses.
     My wife noticed this bell, tucked behind some evergreen branches by the carillon, which a certain family member pronounced "carillion," until occasional gentle correction and the passage of years, nudged them into the proper pronunciation, so now just saying "let's walk by the carillon" has the sense of a complicated bit of personal business. An ingrained demi-tradition, so that hearing it said right, "carillon," is almost a let down, a loss, at least to me, a uniqueness that was allowed to fade through inattention. I have to bite back expressing the desire to hear in incorrectly.

      In the summer, there are carillon concerts—not this past summer, of course, but previous summers, the bells chiming out across the gardens, and, one hopes, next summer. People bring picnics, spread blankets. It's nice. Though over the summer we did happen by when somebody, a student I imagine, was practicing, and we felt lucky to be there. Though honestly, we always feel lucky to be there, bells or not, and usually say it, one of us or both, at various times, "We're lucky to have this," one of us will say and the other will echo "yes lucky" the word resonating a few times, itself like the peal of a bell.
     We stay for an hour. Not only do you discover aspects that are always there, but

sometimes there are ephemeral displays. Orchid shows and cacti shows, back when people did that kind of thing. I usually take a brochure, planning to join, not for the plants, but for the members. It seems like the ideal setting for a murder mystery, the Cactus and Succulent Society of Greater Chicago, awash with violent controversies and seething, suppressed hatreds, all out-of-scale with the tender attention to little spiked spheres. I always smile just contemplating it.

      Pumpkin festivals, art fairs. They're having their light festival right now—don't try to go, it's sold out— and we happened upon these metal men. Not my cup of tea, frankly. Escapees from a Barney's window in the year 1988. But we saw them from a distance and wandered over, then paused before them a moment to take a looking. Knowing they might be gone next time we visit. Hoping that.

    "They're all men," my wife observed, and so they were. 

     Not only are there paths and ponds and plants but, to continue the "p" motif, people, all ages and races and conditions, black and white, Hindi and Chinese. Elderly couples and mothers changing babies on blankets. Hispanic families taking quinceanera photos on the sly. Engaged couples posing on the bridges. Orthodox Jews on dates. Christian families fresh from church. Generational groups. There always seems to be a lot of nationalities there, I'm not sure why. A lot of Russians, and I plan to someday ask a few what it is about Russians and Botanic Gardens. Somebody must know. I'm always hearing snatches of conversation—they talk to each other constantly, or into cell phones.

     "Konyeshna," I said Saturday, repeating a word I had overheard. "'Of course.'" Then we talked about how odd that that word would slumber somewhere. I haven't studied Russian in 40 years.

     At home Saturday night, preparing dinner, we did our usual post-walk post-mortem, and came to our usual conclusion.

     "It was special," my wife said.

     "It's always special," I said. She pondered that logical contradiction.

     "Extra special," she replied.