Bears survive one more week, but starch goes on forever

 

     The Bears lost to the Packers on Sunday but made it into the playoffs anyway, so their suffering continues.
     The season started so well, if I recall, base on snippets overheard Monday mornings on WBBM radio news. Not that I watched a single second of a single game. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the team.
     I’ve been reading about how, 100 years ago this October. the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company of Decatur, producers of starch, sent their factory team, the Staleys, north, along with its young coach, George Halas, to become the Chicago Bears.
     Learning this led to the rare football-related question that intrigues me: Does Staley still makes starch?
     Yes, they do, but not under that name. The company was purchased for $1.4 billion in 1988 by British sugar refiner Tate & Lyle. I contacted them at the end of August. We hear so much about the football part of the tale, but drop the ball — look, a sports metaphor! — when it comes to the starch aspect.
     Tate & Lyle not only has a 400-acre factory making starch in Decatur called Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas LLC but a mixing plant in Sycamore that employs 100 workers; various silos; a purchasing facility, Tate & Lyle Grain; and a research lab, the Commercial and Food Innovation Centre, in Hoffman Estates, which is the place they decided our two-hour Zoom dog-and-pony show should showcase.

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"I am a legend, a beloved legend"—RIP, Bert Raynes

Bert Raynes

     I was sorry to hear that Bert Raynes died on Friday, at the ripe age of 96, after a life well lived in nature.

    When the boys and I went on our big trip out West in 2009, we were lucky enough to run into Raynes at the 4th of July parade in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A legendary columnist who always wrote "whatever suits his fancy," Raynes only spoke with us for a few minutes, but they were memorable ones. 

     This excerpt is from my unpublished memoir of that trip, "The Quest for Pie."

     The next day was the 4th of July, and there is no better dramatization of the blend of Old West rawhide nostalgia and affluent modern herbal tea ease that characterizes mountain resort towns such as Jackson than to watch the Independence Day parade go by.
     There was a grey-bearded prospector driving a Conestoga wagon and a clean-shaven guy driving a Mercedes gull wing sports car. A rifle-toting cowboy in chaps and an elderly gentleman sitting in a brown recliner in the back of a blue pick-up. Beauty queens wearing cowboy hats and holding American flags, their sequined gowns fanned out over the flanks of their horses, and a squad of unicyclists. Girls in pigtails were riding with both the 4H Club and with the Therapeutic Riders Association (slogan, “Horses for Healing”). There was a float for a dude ranch and a float for Compassion Moves Mountains, the umbrella group for social service agencies in Teton County.
     A hundred years ago the parade would have been freighted with civic societies—the Masons, the Lions, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Now they were mostly businesses, like the Barker-Ewing White Water Rafting Outfitters, which featured employees rowing a big inflatable raft and spraying the crowd with Super Soakers. There was exactly one marching band, though it did not march—the musicians played their instruments while sitting on folding chairs, arrayed on a wide trailer pulled by a truck. There was something sadly supine about that.

     Before the parade began, rather than claim one spot, we explored the downtown strip of shops. From snatches of conversation, filtering in from the crowd, stray words like cricket chirps, I got the impression that Dick Cheney, the former vice-president under George W. Bush, was somewhere nearby, and the boys and I worked our way toward the thickest part of the crowd—his position clearly marked, ironically, by the big security agents milling around him. We’d have never noticed the man otherwise. Cheney was sitting in a chair, wearing a beige suede leather jacket and a white Stetson hat—he has a house around here—and I figured the boys might enjoy saying hello to such a prominent political figure.
     “You want to meet Dick Cheney, the former vice president of the United States?” I asked them. Kent made a face as if he had eaten something bad.
     “No!” he said.
     “Why would we want to do that?” asked Ross, genuinely puzzled. We moved on. I was proud of them for snubbing Cheney—me, I’d have said hello, just for the bragging rights, but I could also pass him by with only a faint regret. 

     The guy in the brown vinyl recliner in the back of a vintage blue Dodge pickup was a different matter. He intrigued me—an elderly gentleman, wearing a brown cowboy hat and a bright red zippered fleece. The only identification of this enigma was a large white sign that read simply, “Bert.” As he passed, the crowd cheered and chanted, “Bert! Bert! Bert!”
     “Who’s Bert?” I asked the lady beside me. She shrugged—another tourist. Jackson has only 8,500 full time residents (the town itself is “Jackson,” the town and the surrounding area are known, together, as “Jackson Hole.”)
     “Must be some beloved local,” I told the boys.
     After the parade ended, we wandered, looking at the shops selling t-shirts, selling knives. We noticed the blue Dodge pickup truck parked at a corner so Bert could watch the end of the parade. Here was my chance; I went over and complimented Jackson Hole.
     “Thank you,” he said, regally, as if he had built the place himself. “We like it.”
     One of his companions whispered that this is Bert Raynes. I observed that, given his reception, he must be some kind of luminary.
     “I am a legend, a beloved legend, no doubt about it,” said Raynes, a newspaper columnist, whose column, “Far Afield,” has appeared in the Jackson Hole News & Guide for the past 37 years. Raynes arrived here 50 years ago, drawn by photographs in National Geographic.
     When I asked, with requisite apology, how old he is, he smiled enigmatically and said, “Very.”
     The local perspective is different than a visitor’s. A tourist comes for a couple of days, hikes in the summer or skis in the winter, then leaves, wondering: what’s it like to live here year-round? I posed the question to Raynes.
     ”The sex is great,” interjected a 60ish woman standing nearby. A comment I paused at then decided was best to ignore.
     “The living is easy,” Raynes replied. “Even though it’s a boom town now, it’s still easy to make friends. You can walk up to anybody and say, ‘I’m a little lost—can you help me?’”
     In that spirit, I told him what we planned to do while in town—hike around Jenny Lake, maybe raft the Snake River—and he gave us a few tips.
     “Keep an eye out for thunderstorms,” he said. “They can come up fast.”
     One doesn’t run into a fellow newspaper columnist very often—we’re a dying breed—so I took the opportunity to talk shop.
     “I don’t type,” he said, with pride. “I still write my column by hand, with a ball point pen on yellow paper.”
     How does his column get into the newspaper? I asked.
     “Some poor guy back at the office gets the short straw and has to type it up,” he laughed. “If he complains, they tell him he’s lucky to have a job.” A common refrain in the profession.
     At lunch, I plugged five dimes into an outdoor newspaper box for a copy of the Jackson Hole News & Guide, and read Raynes’ latest column at a diner counter as we gobbled our burgers.
     The column was about vultures, and begins: “A while back—say 20, 30 years ago—a turkey vulture (a large scavenging bird) in Jackson Hole was a rare sight. Just didn’t seem to happen, even in those times of year when lots of carcasses or parts thereof are available in quantity.”
     Now vultures were being observed “fairly often.” I learned something about vultures I had never even thought to wonder about, but seems worth knowing—why they have “unfeathered, naked heads.”
     “This feature evolved in response to a vulture’s method of probing with strong, white-tipped bills to feed upon the often decomposing entrails of carcasses,” Raynes writes.
     That would also explain why so many journalists are light in the hair department. Raynes’ column was packed with interesting vulture information, and has a “Field Notes” section at the end where readers share their own observations and are credited. “Rufous hummingbirds are back (Dick Hobbins, Mary Louis, Roger Watson, Amelia Gelssler, others).”
     I smiled, thinking: I might have to borrow the Field Notes idea and transplant it to Chicago: “Hector Smith reports that the tin-whistle-blowing lunatics usually roosting on North Michigan Avenue in warm weather have been migrating down to Congress Parkway this summer.”
     It’s incredible—almost unbelievable—that a columnist at such a small paper would have more than four readers contact him regarding rufous hummingbirds. He must have his audience well-trained.
     We wandered over to the Snow King Lodge to take a gander. Though the Virginian was completely adequate—stripped down and aging, but clean— a pal back in Chicago had nabbed us a fancy condo, gratis, at the Snow King, and we decided to relocate there.
     We checked in, sprawling happily in our fancy new digs. The boys would have their own bedroom, and we had a deck to watch the fireworks that evening.
     Edie phoned. Ross talked to her, and I couldn’t help noticing that, in describing Jackson Hole, Ross did not mention the glory of the snow-capped Tetons, nor the cherry-paneled luxury of our brand new condo at Snow King Lodge. He did not mention that we saw former Vice President Dick Cheney at the parade. What he said was:
     “Mom! There’s a columnist here who’s actually respected!”

Texas notes: Ode to 2020

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey glances back at 2020, then looks down the road of 2021.

I wake up, not certain I’m in the right world.

  Every day is the same song, the same verse.
I’m quiet, but screaming inside;
  I’m on the edge of feeling it’s going to be OK.
Inside, I raise Cain for hours.
  Yet I feed others with a long handled spoon—
It seems better to keep things to myself these days.
  I don’t have the strength to get into a Donnybrook with anyone.
It is comforting to know we are all in this together.
  Still, I don’t know from Adam’s off ox what to do—
Perhaps a Quarantini?

     Each of these lines was uttered by clients in our sessions during COVID season. The poetry of their words astounds me. The silliness of the last word illustrates their overall resilience. Each person I know, personally and professionally, has dug inside and found ways to cope with the hard, cold truth of this period.
     I did not anticipate feeling such a deep inner peace today. I’ve been thinking that 2021 will not be much different than 2020 was; we still have obstacles galore on the horizon. I’m not sure if it’s the power of suggestion—that each year for my whole life I’ve found New Year’s eve to be a fresh start—or something more tangible, such as welcoming President Biden to office. I will not miss saying Resident Rump or feeling sickened by his dangerous, egomaniacal, greedy ways.
     Today I’ll sit in a yard, ten feet away from my friend Richard, the one COVID buddy whose house I used to go for visits during all of this. When the virus flared we cancelled our holiday meal plans. After that I felt it was best to stay away, since I do not want one single inkling of an opportunity to infect him. With nice weather and confidence that an outdoor hang can be safe, off I’ll go on my bike in a bit. The thought of sitting with Richard—a warm and elegant Renaissance man and sculptor—in the cool sunshine of Texas, sends feel good chemicals coursing throughout my body. Being grateful for such a simple thing makes me see that a healthy and happy inner landscape is all that really matters.
     The thought of hugging my family again—hopefully in 2021—embodies almost more more joy and comfort than I can handle. I feel that we are all coming back from limbo, and did not know if we’d make it. I realize it’s not guaranteed, but I will hold onto hope for now.
     The grief that comes in waves is sure to continue. I am sure part of me is in denial about realities I cannot face. The luxury to focus on self care, my career and hobbies seems like an absurd boon. What did I do to deserve this standing in the world?
     Since March I’ve been overcome at times. I once broke into sobs while biking, so had to pull off of the path. I stood barefoot in the grass of a field. I wanted to lie on the ground and let it out like a toddler would, but I was too afraid of scaring others. As I cried like I have not done in ages a friend called. I did not want to pick up, but I did. Julz talked me out of my despair for all of the suffering I felt—the lives lost in antiseptic hospitals, or worse yet, alone at home. I generally do not like to be talked out of my deepest feelings; I see great value in feeling them. But I let Julz walk me over to the swings and I let her cheer me up. I hopped on my bike and rode home with her still on the phone with me, and I actually felt good.
     This type of hand-holding from friends and family has given me the strength to put one foot in front of the other time after time during COVID season. Cheers to allowing others to help me, rather than doing the lone wolf thing, and cheers to the gift of others turning to me so we can all hold each other up.

Make the Most of a Brand New Year

    Good morning! Happy 2021. Well, so far anyway. As for the rest of the year, well, we'll see. A new president, almost certainly, with that 0.1 percent doubt half the story of what we've been through. The same old COVID, but we're working on it. Turning the corner, maybe, soon.

     Did you have a fun New Year's Eve? We really did, at the Steinberg household. Both boys home, little hot dogs wrapped in crescent dough, a relic of the 50s, passed from my parents, through me, to the next generation. Sorry about that. It's only one night. Watched "Soul," which is truly excellent. I highly recommend it.

     Now to the year ahead. The village of Northbrook asked me to write something for their Northbrook Voice magazine about starting the new year afresh, and I came up with this:

     The black aluminum front screen door, battered and completely wrong for our 110- year old farmhouse? The one I nevertheless walked through for 20 years? After looking around for a replacement and finding nothing suitable, I took what was for me a dramatic step: unscrewed the thing and just threw it away.
     "There are no new beginnings," the poet Kae Tempest says. "Until everybody sees that the old ways need to end."
     Welcome to 2021. It’s a safe bet that this year will be better than the last—on a grand scale.
     But what about your life? What are you going to do to better yourself? A single digit changing on the calendar can be powerful inspiration.
     "It's very motivating for a lot of people," said Marilyn Fettner, a Northbrook life coach. "It’s a fresh start, especially this year. Midway through the year, people were saying, 'I just want 2020 to be over.' It's been such a difficult year. People want a clean slate, mentally, an opportunity to say, 'Okay, here are the things I've been wanting to do.’"

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How long was 2020 in dog years?

Kitty

     So, the final day of 2020, come at last.
     A singularly challenging year. A fatal year, a plague year, one where 330,000 Americans died of a disease that was thoroughly booted by our bumbling nincompoop of a president, Losey L. McLoser.
     Don't do that little celebratory dance quite yet. Still a few hours left. Much can go wrong in that time, if 2020 is any guide. A volcano could rear out of Grant Park at 10 p.m.. Or a meteorite to come winging in your direction at a quarter to twelve. 

     What's to say it won't happen? Hope? Ah, ahahaha.... 

     And looking ahead ... what? All we have is a whiff of our old narcotic hope, plus Joe Biden and a nadir of a year already behind us, nearly, permitting us to imagine that 2021 must be better.
     Should midnight approach, and we make it there, to the end of Dec. 31, you might be wondering what you can do to ceremoniously bid farewell to 2020. A rude gesture, an obscene toast, a guttural shout, something that will represent the year in all its splattering splendor.
    Don't bother. I already beat you to it. You will be hard-pressed to conjure up a tribute to 2020 more fitting than the one that fell—okay, was hurled—into my lap Wednesday.
     I was on the sofa late yesterday afternoon, reading the new New Yorker—an excellent Talk of the Town piece by Adam Gopnik pointing out how autocracy is the rule, and democracy the exception, and how all the elements of fear and ignorance we've seen rampant this year have been faithful handmaidens to our national experiment because, well, they're omnipresent. "The only way to stave off another Trump is to recognize that it always happens."
     And I was feeling ... well, calm, and ready, fortified by Gopnik's perceptive take on the situation. Poised, and maybe even a little comfortable, as the winter daylight dwindled. So comfortable that I beckoned Kitty, my faithful dog over, and boosted her up, so we could sit on the couch together, one prone master, one loving dog.
     Poor dog, she's had a rough few days—hurt her knee Sunday, a torn ligament probably, then poked and prodded by two vets, on a variety of anti-inflammatories and herbal joint remedies. None of the long walks we both love for ... shit ... eight weeks. If that is even possible. 2021 is already souring. I can't even walk the goddamn dog.
    Accept. Endure. Overcome. All will be well. A moment of calm. I look at Kitty, scritch her behind the ear. And Kitty looks at me with her large, liquid, brown eyes. Which grow larger and more liquid, taking on a certain expression of ... distress. Yes, distress. The significance of which dawns on me just in time to slide her a few inches to the left so she is right over my midsection, when ... well, let's draw the veil a bit ... she coughs, and then lets loose a geyser. Like Old Faithful. Which luckily I catch with my cupped hand, trapping it against my body, sparing the sofa.
     I call for my wife, who run for towels and a garbage bag.
     Much scooping and daubing and squeegeeing. 

     Eventually I get to my feet and have a thought:

     Perfect ... that's just perfect.
     What better way to ring out the year?

      So unless an anvil falls out of an upper story window this morning, or a tree crashes through your roof, I think I have retired the prize for banishing 2020 in proper style. By being thrown up upon by a dog. Because really, has not the whole damn year been like that? It sure has for me, and I bet you too. And we're the lucky ones. Anyway, Kitty seems better now, and I'm okay too, and together we plan to face whatever comes in 2021. What choice is there? Happy New Year.

Mitch McConnell will CRY when he reads this: State of the Blog, 2020

     At the end of every calendar year, I pause to evaluate the past 12 months of this blog. Though frankly, with the epic global train wreck of 2020 finally coming to a sheering, twisting, screeching, smoking halt, it seems the thinnest and most trivial piping—a bird chirp after a bomb blast—to use the silence to puff the steam from my own teacup. A bit too self-absorbed, even for me. 

     But heck, maybe a long gaze in the mirror will hit the spot, for me if no one else. Besides, it's what I do.
     To begin, global pandemic and societal disaster must be good for clicks. Eyeballs increased in 2020. On Jan. 28, everygoddamnday.com had its highest number of visitors in one 24-hour period, ever: 182,625 hits. Kind of a lot, really. More about that later.
      First, thank you everyone for stopping by. I'd sure feel stupid if nobody read the thing. The blog has quite a flock of regulars at this point, and I appreciate you sticking with me, despite my occasionally pausing to—reading off a card—"gratuitously insult the very people upon whose good nature I depend, a misstep for which I am truly sorry."

    There's, that's out of the way. Thanks to Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey, who joined the party in April, for illuminating our Saturday mornings with ... heck, what would one call it? Her woke feminist Texas-via-Rogers-Park transcendental spiritual karmic splendor? For starters. She is a woman of parts. I've enjoyed getting to know her, and I know readers enjoy it too, particularly since they don't complain about her anywhere near as much as they do about the guy responsible for the other six days. My favorite columns of hers are about the various critters she's encountered, such as scorpions. I would read a book of that, "My Adventures Amidst the Texas Vermin."

     Thanks to Marc Schulman, who didn't want a holiday season to go by without Eli's Cheesecake showing its support for America, free speech and everygoddamnday.com. He is what makes this blog an economic endeavor and not pure hobby, and I appreciate it, and the cheesecake. It really is excellent cheesecake, and if you haven't ordered any yet, well, damn you.

     Thanks to Tate and Jakash and all the readers who have pointed out my continual stream of typos and errors, so I could correct them. Too right is two air—whoops, I mean, "To write is to err."

     There were three main stories of 2020: COVID, racism and the election, and I tried to cover all three. When the pandemic struck, the question raised in that British World War I poster designed to goad men to enlist lodged tauntingly in mind, "What did you do in the war, daddy?" I wanted to make sure that, when this is over, should it ever be over, that I felt I did my share, as a newspaperman, and didn't sit out the crisis on my ass in Northbrook, sheltering in place. 
     My best-read post was in January, "Profiles in Cowardice," had 4,600 views, pondering in amazement how Republicans senators can grovel before Trump instead of impeaching him, yet sounding a defiant note:

I am certain that opposing Donald Trump is a patriotic duty, almost sacred in its alignment with all concepts of democracy, freedom, morals, human decency. I have no doubt whatsoever that no matter what occurs in this country, it is something I will look back on with pride, or my children will look back on with pride, and if that is in conflict with the general consensus, it will mean that Trump has triumphed—as he might—and we are still in the dark age that follows. But that dark age will end because all dark ages do. The story can't end with Trump winning. It can't it can't it can't. Enough people will stand up, vote, resist. It has to happen.

     And it did, barely. Okay, a quick glance at the year's highlights.
     In January, the last normal month, I used having a new hip put in the week before to deep dive into the etymology of "crutch,"
     In February, I looked into filing cabinets.
     I beat a drum all year against the treason of Trump and the idiocy of his administration, but in March paused to point out that coronavirus would far surpass historic reckonings of presidential blundering.

America took a gamble, allowing itself to be led by a charismatic fraud, and now we see we lost the bet. The awful toll of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans dead, was my previous high water mark for presidential folly, Now that’s chump change. And if you still like to imagine that our fellow Americans would not literally follow that man into their graves, you can stop now.

     I've written dozens of COVID stories, but I was particularly proud of April's column-length Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. May started at Roseland hospital, with a nursing supervisor would couldn't end her shift until she found someone to replace herself.
     In late May and early June, the civic unrest following the killing of George Floyd took center stage. I wasn't downtown when the first riot broke out, and hurrying straight there seemed both unwise and unnecessary. But I still managed to convey a sense of the chaos.
     In late June, as if to mock that decision, I wrote a post that pinballed around the country, "Virus Mystery: The Case of the Missing Fresca." I had been reluctant, even embarrassed, to turn it in—it's about Fresca—and the column blowing up seemed a kind of punishment. The piece seemed to lodge itself into Google so if you type "What happened to Fresca?" it pops up, and topped the leader board in our newsroom for so long, my bosses asked for a follow-up, which I dutifully delivered in August, "Fresca's Back! Mystery of its absence solved."
     In September I posted probably my favorite column of the year, about the Cologuard test. Why? Because I was proud of wondering, "Hey, who opens the jar?" And prouder that I drove to Madison to find out. That isn't cutting edge journalism in the usual sense of the word, but it's the standard I aspire to myself: I want to be the guy who wonders who opens the jar.

     During the pandemic, Amazon tightened its grip on our lives, and in October I went inside one of its enormous procurement centers to glance at the live of workers there.
     What else? We had our five millionth hit, of which I estimate a quarter are robots and spiders and other quirks of robotic attention, including 180,000 of the 182,625 hits on Jan. 28. I figured, many people probably bail out midway through these, and there is no harm in giving them the impression they're bailing out of a big deal. Usually it gets about 2,500 hits a day—75,000 in December. Not much, but it'll have to do. 

     Anyway, thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

Goodbye 2020: A year like ... well, you know

     An Easter like no other.
     A summer like no other.
     A World Series like no other.
     A year like no other.
     The description “a _____ like no other” wasn’t invented in 2020. It has been used for more than a century: ”It has been a year like no other,” wrote R.M. Squires, summing up the world of dentistry in 1919.
     But the phrase was worn to a nubbin over the past nine months by journalists lunging to convey in a handy three-word code the baked-in strangeness and continuous turmoil we’ve been enduring. A branded logo to rubber-stamp this slow-motion train wreck: COVID-19 pandemic meets civic unrest meets economic disruption. Our locked-down society of shuttered schools and struggling restaurants, all playing out against a political clown show that veers from farcical to frightening, sometimes within the same hour.
     A presidential election like no other.
     A Thanksgiving like no other.
     So often was “like no other” flung, at times I wanted to scream, “EVERY year is a year like no other!” Years are unique, like snowflakes. And besides, 2020 is like other years. It’s like 1968, 1945, 1918 ... all the way back to 1066, landmark years where you won’t have to purse your lips and ponder, trying to dredge up a single event. We all know what happened in 2001. Nobody is going to snap their fingers and try to recall what year COVID struck: 2020, a year to remember, whether you like it or not.

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