A short history of occasional poetry

     My treatise Sunday on another columnist got out of hand—every time I read it, the thing got even longer—and this is perhaps worse. I grow prolix in confinement. Today's effort started as a few sentences trimmed out of my column on the inauguration and the Star Spangled Banner. The problem, I think, is a stab at thoroughness. I tried to include ALL the inaugural poets. And more. Plus the subject. If you are arguing something is mundane, you need illustration, but then you end up with a catalogue of mundanity. 

     So apologies in advance for beating you into submission with this. And if you want to skip it, I not only understand, but approve and encourage.

      Though maybe you are housebound and need to kill some time. Or maybe this isn't as bad as I think it is. Anyway, too late now. Grabbing a machete and cutting it back would take a stamina that I just don't have at the moment. Running on fumes. Or maybe Inauguration Day was six days ago and the hard, cold slog ahead is starting to sink in.

     The composition of a poem to mark a great occasion is an ancient tradition, probably what got poetry going in the first place. Stretching back to pre-literate times when verse really was the only way to carry on the particulars of an event into the future. "The Iliad" could be considered such a poem, assuming the Trojan War actually occurred, which it may have.
     The genre slides quickly downhill from there. In later centuries, what has been known as "occasional poetry" tends to be a fairly dubious catalogue, reeking of the overwrought, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," published six weeks after the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

      The most jarring example of a poet knocked off the rails while trying to capture history is "O Captain, My Captain," which intellectually I know was written by Walt Whitman, but really feels like Longfellow. Inspired by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman was proud to nod at as they rode past each other in wartime Washington, D.C., the rebel is kneecapped by emotion, at his overwrought Victorian worst:

But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

     It would take 50 years for  decent war poetry to appear, such as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

     Even more fraught is when a poem is not just inspired by a contemporary event, but paid for, as a commission, to mark an occasion, giving the fatal stamp of official approval to what is supposed to be a spontaneous and heartfelt expression of honest emotion, nudging it toward work-for-hire PR. 

     The first poet to read at a presidential inauguration was Robert Frost, a fact often mentioned by journalists last week, every last one oblivious to the fact that the poem he composed for Kennedy was singsong shit. It clatters like a tray of dropped stainless steel flatware, and the first three lines will serve:

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something for us all to celebrate

     Read it out loud for the full effect.

     In his defense, Frost was 86, and thankfully God Almighty Himself interceded at that point, blinding Frost with sunlight so he couldn't read his freshly-minted opus, and after an agonizing muttering eternity when the whole thing teetered on disaster, Frost recovered by switching to "The Gift Outright," a far better poem he knew by heart.

     Not that occasional poems can't rise to the occasion, occasionally. Gwendolyn Brooks' poem written for the dedication of Chicago's Picasso sculpture in 1968 stands up well, particularly considering she thought the statue looked stupid.

    It begins:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. 
Art hurts. Art urges voyages-- 
and it is easier to stay at home, 
the nice beer ready. 
In commonrooms 
we belch, or sniff, or scratch. 
Are raw.

     "Art hurts." That should be a book title. One has to wonder what Mayor Richard J. Daley, on the dais, made of that. There are also more than a few treatises to be written on the tendency over the past half century for Black female poets—never male—to be called upon to solemnize a public occasion by white politicians who wouldn't dream of inviting them to dinner. Maybe some deeper, unrecognized yearning toward truth sparks the assignment, but the truth can only be considered when rendered into poetry and delivered by a woman. We'll know our country has made actual progress when somebody like Terrence Hayes delivers the inaugural poem. I hope observing this isn't interpreted as diminishing female poets—careers have been scuttled for less. I'm not. I'm just pointing out a tendency. 

     The near fiasco of Frost's reading might have been why nobody tried it again for 32 years, until Bill Clinton tapped Maya Angelou, whose "On the Pulse of the Morning" is more honored than recalled. To listen to it today, with its talking rock, tree, river, and long lists of ethnicities is catch a glimpse of where liberalism goes astray. Maybe the stanzas where all those types come together as one mighty nation got cut, for brevity, and its wisdom is of the shallowed sort:

     History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived

     but if faced with courage need not be lived again.

    I'd say it isn't lived again however it's faced, but that's just me. Then again, the poem was acclaimed at the time, so maybe the message here is the short shelf life of such works. Composed to mark the moment, they lose their footing when the moment passes, as all moments must.

    But Maya Angelou, grim, regal, rebuking, is Grace Jones snarling in a cage at Studio 54 compared to Miller Williams—you ever hear of him? Me neither—the poet whose reading at Clinton's second inauguration was so inconsequential it simply evaporates from history, the words deracinated and drained.

   We mean to be the people

   We meant to be 

   To keep on going 

   Where we meant to go

   But how do we fashion the future?

   Who can say how?    

     Do this for six minutes and you have an inaugural poem.
     Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009 featured "Praise Song for the Day," written and read by Elizabeth Alexander. It is, in essence, a paean to the normal, and all the possibilities contained within. The poem has its moments.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp

    Not a bad poem. But it ends up manifesting rather than celebrating ordinariness, further undercut by her halting, choppy delivery. No matter the poem, you gotta sell it. Alexander's ... one ... word ... after ... another delivery is a reminder why many people don't like poetry. Watch her reading, and Amanda Gorman's accomplishment last Wednesday will be driven home.    

    Richard Blanco was even more somnambulant reading "One Today" in 2013, if such a thing were possible. He was identified as the first gay poet to read at an inauguration, and the son of Cuban immigrants. Those groups no doubt cherish their participation trophy. His poem wouldn't seem extraordinary read by any high school senior at any talent show anywhere.

   "Thank the work of our hands ... weaving steel into bridges ... finishing one more report for the boss."

     Donald Trump, needless to say, did not have a poet read at his inauguration. He may never have heard a poem in his life that didn't begin, "There was a young woman from Sussex..." Still, the Scotsman published a poem written in honor of his inauguration by Joseph Charles McEnzie:

He welcomes the worthy, but guards our frontier,
Lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm,
Should threaten our lives and our nation deform.

     That hasn't aged well, has it?

     Blanco was the youngest, at 44, which makes Gorman, exactly half his age. I probably shouldn't say anything about her; the nation has already rocked with praise for her delivery of "The Hill We Climb" for days. She began:

     When day comes 

     We ask ourselves

     Where can we find light in this everlasting shade?

     In you, young lady, for starters. Gorman soon slips into the lightest rap cadence, "The dawn was ours before we knew it, somehow we do it" with more memorable, powerful phrases in her six minutes than in all the previous inaugural poems put together. "A nation that isn't broken, simply unfinished," and "To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man" sailing boldly over the gender shoals that wreck so many. "Victorious, not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division" (okay, the truth is, we'll never stop sowing. But as another poet, Robert Browning, noted, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?")
     The heart:

The hill we climb if only we dare it
Being American is more than a pride we inherit
It's the past we step into
and how we repair it
We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it
would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.

     I don't want to quote the whole poem. Maybe it feels right because it was written three weeks ago. Or maybe it'll last the test of time.

     My wife said two things afterward, the first undeniable.

     "She's beautiful," she said, and I gratefully nodded. I hadn't wanted to say. It's creepy when the guy says it.

      Second:

      "Maybe she'll do for poetry what 'The Queen's Gambit' did for chess."

      That's an intriguing thought, though poetry is already a big deal, if you ask me, especially in cities. Gorman is the America's Young Poet Laureate, and I'd say she has a future as bright as her canary yellow Prada jacket, although it'll be hard to top the international flash of last week. Then again T.S. Eliot, another Harvard poet, was 27 when "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appeared in Poetry Magazine, and he still had "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" ahead of him. Life is very long, as Eliot said, if you do it right.

     

Season’s skate through youth hockey hell

Micah Cohen

     I know how valuable youth hockey can be because I went to Andy Stein’s funeral. The Steins live across the street from us. Andy coached hockey.
     He died in 2016 of brain cancer, and there were hundreds of mourners at his funeral. The Glenbrook North hockey team came in uniform. I listened to his twin sons, Ben and Jared, eulogize him and thought, grimly, “I’ve wasted my entire life by not coaching hockey ...”
     So thank you Rich Cohen, whose new book “Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent” body checks that sort of thinking, hard. It’s a Dantean journey through all nine rings of frozen youth hockey hell.
     If it seems an odd choice of reading material for me, remember Cohen is author of a string of captivating books from “Tough Jews” to “The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.” I’ve read nine and read this book because reading Rich Cohen’s books is what a person who likes reading books does, whatever the subject. It’s almost a duty.
     Spoiler alert: Nobody comes out well. Coaches, parents, kids with the signal exception of his own son, Micah, and his teammates. But most of all, himself.
     Cohen, who played hockey during his golden North Shore youth, is every angry, stymied hockey parent who ever pounded the glass, albeit with a self-analytic gear most lack. An adult who cares far, far, far more about any given hockey situation than his kid, who just shrugs and plays, as kids tend to do.

To continue reading, click here.

In defense of John Kass

     Back in my Medill days, professors would sometimes pose a trick question: What is the main purpose of a newspaper?
     Apple polishers and future do-gooders would wave their arms, eager to rhapsodize about reporting the news and speaking truth to power, penning the first draft of history, blah blah blah. We worldlier sorts would let them embarrass themselves for a while, then float our hands up.
    "To make money and stay in business," one of us would drawl, with a half smirk, knowing even before we were told that this is the only correct answer. Because a paper that has gone out of business can't do anything good, bad or indifferent. The Chicago Daily News was a fantastic newspaper, the best in the city, right up until March 4, 1978. Then it was nothing but a painful memory.
     One way newspapers try to avoid this fate is by casting a very wide net. A newspaper is a universe, or should be. Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There isn't a section titled, "Airy nonsense for dupes"—we call it the horoscope, and the Sun-Times ran two last time I checked because apparently one just isn't enough. We run three pages of mostly undistinguished comics. Why? When I once asked why we didn't dial the comics back to make room for actual journalism, the features editor shot me a withering look that said, "Because readers would show up here carrying gas cans and solemnly set themselves on fire in front of the paper, that's why." Half of the people who tell me they read the Sun-Times only for my column then add, "...and Sudoku." Which is fine. You can read the Sun-Times for me and the tide tables. Or just for the legal notices. All good, so long as you read.
     That is why John Greenfield's Jan. 11 piece in the Chicago Reader, "John Kass washing his hands of responsibility for last week's riot was a bridge too far" demanding that the Tribune columnist be fired for his supposed role fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks evoked an unfamiliar emotion, one that I have never felt nor could have imagined it possible to feel: a need to defend John Kass.
    Not the material, God knows. I concede that Kass's writing is that of a monotonic right-wing troll, with all the hysterical self-pitying whine that has pervaded our nation like stink in a bus station bathroom for the past four years. At least to my recollection. It's been a while since I've actually read him. So maybe he got better. I try to extend the benefit of the doubt, even to those of whom I disapprove, which is one of the many differences between us. (For instance, I've had colleagues tell me that he is a nice guy, in person, and I have no reason to doubt them. Though, if true, that only deepens the mystery of how avuncular right wingers can smile and nod at passersby while neck deep in a sewer of hateful ideology). But when I did read him, or try to, he was reliably repetitive, dull, tone deaf, mean-spirited and shrill. And that most fatal flaw, incurious. Remember that John Kass column where he eagerly explores some unusual topic just because it is fascinating? Yeah, me neither. For a while, I would test myself by reading the first three paragraphs of his column and then stopping, just to see if I had any problem bailing out at that point. I never did. Then I gave up doing even that. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there was no there there.
     Which is okay, because he isn't for me. Part of the trick of not being John Kass or writers like him is to realize that not everything is supposed to be for you. There are other people in the world who believe other things. They have a right to exist and passionately believe all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. They get to read stuff they like too.  
     From time to time readers would challenge me, since I had written "BobWatch" in the Reader for two years in the mid-1990s, to reprise the column with Kass as my material. I'd patiently explain that doing so would be physically impossible. Bob Greene was deeply weird in a captivating way—you almost had to read his column, excuse me, skein of related columns, celebrating scab baseball players or mourning the passing of soda fountains or keening over Baby Richard, whatever fragile hobbyhorse he had firmly mounted between his monstrous thighs and was now riding into splinters. Bob Greene was like a patient in an Oliver Sacks book, damaged in a creepy, fascinating way. Sure, you might read through latticed fingers, pausing to choke back a half ounce of hot vomit, or turn to an imaginary audience to say "can you believe this shit?" which is actually how BobWatch started.
     But Kass? I'd have great difficulty reading an entire column. Not if you paid me $1 a word. Not if you put a gun to my head and cocked the hammer back and told me I had to get to the end and summarize it or you'd pull the trigger and splatter my brains against a white wall. I mean, I would try, particularly for that buck a word. And maybe, probably, I could do it, but it would take intense concentration, fingers raking my cheeks, eyes whirling to track the pale little moths of thought as they slide off the page and flap silently away, casting strange shadows, circling around me like butterflies around Alice's head. 

     Like Greene, Kass could write at one point. To read his sharp 1996 profile of Richard Daley, with its priceless opening vignette of Daley running home to his mommy with a fever, is to mourn the ruin that can come bundled with a column. I distinctly remember his first one, a riveting. two-parter about a Chicago public school teacher being beaten with a metal bar. Then, as often happens, success and ego and laziness got to him, and soon he was doing a bad parody of Mike Royko, haunting the Billy Goat, sharing recipes for beer can chicken, coining fake insidery lingo and adopting a bully's swagger he passes off as a style. A colleague summed him up far more succinctly than I'm doing here with: "He sees people who aren't there," adding a few lines about how Kass can drive down an empty block and see wise guys in loud plaid jackets picking their teeth under street lamps while grannies in babushkas kneel in front of their bungalows, scrubbing the front stoops with Comet.

     I suppose that's imagination of a sort.
     But after enough years of that passed Kass, like Greene, became a mere parody of himself, as the sentient wandered off, fanning the air. By now he has to be the least consequential columnist on the Tribune's roster, in all of Chicago, if not the world, if not in the history of the world. Nobody I know has ever said, "Did you read John Kass today?" Though, again to be fair, this must be due to my being in a self-selective group. I don't hang out with people who read John Kass. They certainly exist. I'm sure when his column is published on, er, whenever it runs, a cheer goes up in Mount Greenwood. 
     Here's where John Greenfield goes astray. I don't know Greenfield, but I imagine he's not down at Dugans holding up the bar with the guys from Second City Cop, shaking his head about how fuckin' Obama was given every break in the world by the pansy liberal press while poor old Donald Trump never was given a chance. Hated because he was so good and decent and American. Those who see the world as a vast conspiracy of the semitic and the pigmented arrayed against them, and Kass as a brave cry in the wilderness giving voice to their deep existential pain at hearing Spanish spoken by a kid running the fryer at McDonald's.
     In our world, Kass, like Louis Farrakhan, never comes on the radar unless there are hoots of outrage over his occasional lurches into anti-Semitism. But that doesn't make him responsible, just one tiny piping voice in the great Right Wing chorus harmonizing fear of globalism and religions not their own. He's in the back, warbling, he isn't conducting the choir. It's not his fault. Heck, I wouldn't blame Kass for a fist-fight between neighbors over chairs set out in dibs in Gage Park, never mind large-scale mob action in Washington. There isn't a justification for Greenfield's claim that "it's time for Tribune leadership to get rid of Kass's column for good." 
     First, the request is naive. I don't have many rules for myself as a columnist, but one is: never advocate the impossible. One thing Bob Greene taught us is the Tribune never gets rid of anybody over issues of quality. Once in the club, always in the club, no matter how stunted or sporadic their work has become. I can't tell you how many Tribune writers I've met over the years where I had to swallow the reply, "Good to see you; I thought you were dead." Bruce Dold wasn't in the business of cashiering mediocrities; he would have had to start with himself. Granted, that will change under Alden Capital, and this whole conversation might be like debating whether a man who is condemned to hang next week should be shot today instead. I used to feel competitive with the Tribune. Now I just feel sorry for them. They used to have office aeries with semi-circular windows looking out of the Gothic horror show of Tribune Tower at Michigan Avenue, far below. Now they're going to be tucked behind the presses at the giant windowless bulk of Freedom Center. I assume they got rid of the chap in livery handing out warm towels in the executive washroom long ago.
     Second, until Alden pulls the plug and runs the whole place off an algorithm and four workers in Kashmir, Kass will have a valid function. To be the blithering nincompoop that Greenfield decries. That's his job. Half of the Tribune readership laps up that kind of garbage. Why not keep them happy? The Sun-Times used to run Dennis Byrne, who though not quite as sphincterific as Kass, still wrote a column that was similarly a head-shaking mystery to those of us not locked in the grip of right-wing batshittery, I never thought the man should be drummed out because of it. Just the opposite. I was glad he was there. He gave me cover. Whenever someone would accuse the paper of being merely a liberal rag, I could murmur, "But we run Dennis Byrne. Read him instead of me."
     Remember, nobody forces you to read any particular columnist. That's what the photos are for. As a subtle hint of what you'll be getting below. Which, to be honest, still flies past many readers, who will write in to inform me, "A-HA, I'm onto you, Steinberg. You are in the LIBERAL camp!!!" Figured that out, huh? All by yourself! Thank you for writing.
     So maybe that's just me, with the superpower to nimbly jeté over the John Kasses of the world, and hoo-boy, there are a lot of them. I have never watched a moment of Sean Hannity. Why would I do that? You have to keep the poison out, and if I seem irked, it's because the Reader made me think more about John Kass over the past hour than I have in the previous decade. I hope none of this is seen as an indictment of John Greenfield, who has been around the block himself, often on a bicycle, and is editor of Streetsblog. He seems a solid guy, this an understandable lapse and I am not criticizing him for it, personally. Think of it more brotherly advice. I'm only telling him what I would tell a friend who left the dead mouse of a John Kass column on my pillow, as sometimes happens: don't be a vector, don't be the dim cat sharing your limp prize. If you didn't bring Kass up, I'd never think of him at all, and isn't that a happy place to be? Even as a Tribune subscriber. I can look at a page he is on and his column doesn't even register. My eyes dance over him without perceiving one word, the way you step over a turd on the sidewalk without needing to study its topography. I don't even realize he's there. Originally, I grabbed his headshot to illustrate this page, but I had to remove it, because otherwise my eyes couldn't focus on the words underneath. 
      Yes, it galls that the Tribune would keep Kass while showing the gate to such luminaries as architecture critic Blair Kamin, arts maven Howard Reich, and restaurant reviewer Phil Vettel. It is what I used to call, in the years that David Radler ran the Sun-Times, the Bean Soup Theory of Journalism, where occasionally you look into the bowls of soup you're selling and think, "You know ... I could pluck out a few beans, and it would still be bean soup." Until you find yourself with a bowl of broth and three beans.
     I'm glad that the Sun-Times seems on the way to becoming the preeminent newspaper in Chicago, but sad it had to happen this way. This is like winning a 100-yard dash then, as you cross the finish line, turning to see your opponent 30 yards back, writhing in the cinders, clutching his calf. It's good to win. But not like that.
     So if keeping Kass means that Eric Zorn will have a job a little longer, I am all for that. Remember, Fox News didn't turn rural America into gobsmacked haters who will buy any lie provided it's idiotic enough. Rather, Fox found them that way, and printed money by parroting their stunted biases back at them. The right wing media is like those vibrating mattresses once found at seedy motels. The Magic Fingers don't give you a bad back, and they don't make it better. They just provide the illusion of soothing your damage while charging you a quarter a minute. John Kass didn't lead that mob, he followed it. They're all followers, sheep beseechingly bleating for a shepherd, cattle in a chute. That's the problem.    
      Okay, you get the point. No mas. I do prattle on, and I apologize for that. One of the central if unspoken tenets in journalism is, "You have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it." You have to empty the bucket within reach of the readers.  So if the swine snuffling around the Trib are hungering for a big trough full of John Kass's musings then, soo-EEE, come and get it. If Fox News can keep Sean Hannity on the payroll, a truly evil man, a traitor and genuine abetter of terrorists who should probably be on trial in the Hague, then the Tribune should have no worry about its moaning Hannity homunculus, its wan Tucker Carlson wannabe, who does no harm to anybody but himself, and probably fattens the Tribune's thinning bottom line while he's at it.
     So I throw my full and enthusiastic support behind John Kass, for all it's worth. Besides, when I have doubts about myself as a columnist, as often happens, all I need do is think of Kass, his brow uncreased by doubt of any kind, and suddenly I find serenity and pride, confidence and satisfaction. I might not be much, but I sure ain't that. So for selfish reasons alone, I hope that the Tribune ignores calls for his firing, and keeps the man for as long as Chicago can stomach him.

Texas notes: Good cog

 

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey puts up some covering fire for her homophone namesakes. 

     Karen Karen Karen! Who is this not-so-mysterious creature? Neil’s recent piece had me thinking about her again. Karen was the third most popular girls name in 1965 (says Wiki). In the 70s she was a Carpenter with a voice few ears were able to refuse. In the 80s and 90s she did not get much attention. Today she is a household name—this incarnation of Karen finally bearing the attention she has so sorely craved.
     There are multiple ideas about where the meme originated— a Dane Cook comedy routine, Black Twitter, Reddit, and “an evolution of an AAVE [African American Vernacular English] linguistic term referring to ‘unreasonable white women.’” (Wiki again).
     They are known to call the police on people of color, such as the Central Park Karen who tried to have an innocent black man arrested in Central Park by falsely accusing him of attempting to assault her in May of 2020. The next month, a San Francisco Karen called the police on James Juanillo as he stenciled Black Lives Matter in chalk on a concrete wall on his own property.
     The most horrifying part of this is that the Central Park Karen, and many others, may have gotten away with having an innocent black man sent to jail on false charges of attempted assault. It is well documented that innocent black men sit in jail for crimes they did not commit. Many have been murdered for glancing at a white woman. A culture of extreme fear of black men permeates our society and sickens it.
     This part of the meme’s meaning is the most important. Yes, it’s unfortunate that a woman’s name is being used to make a point. Women suffer enough hatred and subjugation as it is. I’d love to launch a successful campaign to rename Karen. How about Jerk? Or Donald? (Sorry Donalds, I trust this will not stick).
     What’s more important than the name is the meaning behind it and it’s good we are naming this behavior. When we try to live happily in a world with people whose emotional intelligence, ability to practice self-control, and perhaps something more nefarious is fueling them, we are all in trouble.
     These days it seems a lot of people espouse the right things. They pepper their yards with BLM signs, loudly vote against an oppressive system, and fancy themselves good-enough. My next door neighbors sometimes play music, and the bass comes right into my tiny house with a thump thump thump. I went over there around the 1st of the year with a bottle of Prosecco and wished the man who answered a happy new year. I was scared to do this, but I took a deep breath and let him know that sometimes I can hear their bass, and it was so loud at times that I was unable to have the peace needed to watch a movie in my little tiny quarantine space. I told him “I’m sure you don’t realize it, so I just wanted you to know.” I offered some acoustical solutions (which are quite simple), and offered to help pay for any supplies needed.
     He glanced in at his wife who must have been gesturing to him, and handed me back the Prosecco. He said “you’ll just have to call the police.” I said, “I’m not going to call the police. Thanks so much for being such good neighbors at the time of a global pandemic,” and I left.             Was I being a Karen? I don’t think so, since I was calm and friendly; well, maybe a bit with the snarky pandemic line.
     My neighbors are Austin originals with an upgraded Airstream trailer parked in their back yard. They always have fun giveaways placed out on the curb. Up until I asked them to be mindful about noise they were friendly. 
What we are missing in this world is humility, and a lack of regard for how others feel. You and I might see that we have been guilty of this. We feel an urgent need to get there first in traffic, and rather than yield to the person trying to merge we “stand our ground.” We want the person in front of us at the store to hurry up, not giving them time to put their credit card away. We say we care about front line workers but treat them like hired help, even as they put their lives in jeopardy to keep the wheels turning day by day. We park in parking spots not designated for 
us.
    We are easily annoyed, especially under stress, and we are all under stress.
     When I heard the thump of music the other day I practiced what I preach. I told myself, “it’s not that bad.” “Nowhere is perfect, there will always be some outside noise.” It worked. I have been practicing kind thoughts towards them. When I walk by their house I think to myself “may they be well, happy and peaceful.”
     If we can walk this earth together, hand in hand, it will be better for all of us. We will be happier if we learn not to succumb to our anger, rage, depression, anxiety, impatience and sense of entitlement. If we see others doing so, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. If we slip up, we can apologize, forgive ourselves, and try to focus on doing the next important thing.       A yoga teacher once reminded me to “always try to be a good cog in the wheel.” I have failed many times, and yet with ardent inner work and help from mentors, family, and friends I feel more well-oiled than every before. Self-care is essential. If we are not rested and well-nourished by food and support it’s hard for us to be the best versions of ourselves. Let’s minimize the Donald in us and remember that we are each others’ keepers.

Star-spangled banner still waves over us

     “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a strange song for a national anthem. Not just for its notoriously hard-to-sing melody that lurches over an octave and a half, straining toward that high F, “o’er the land of the freeeeeee.” Nor that fact the tune is an old English drinking song, repurposed.
     I mean, what the song is about. It isn’t a celebration, like Australia’s. “We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil.” It isn’t a call to arms, like “La Marseillaise.”
     No, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about surveying the wreckage. It’s a morning-after song, about waiting for the sun to come up to see if the British Navy, which has been shellacking Fort McHenry all night during the War of 1812, has prevailed.
     “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?”
     Is our flag still there?
     Those “broad stripes and bright stars” were indeed still there. The British guns were ineffectual at the range they were being used, and the ships didn’t dare come in closer, within range of the fort’s battery.
     And though I’ve been singing it all my life, with more gusto than tune, the song’s meaning never really sunk in. It never seemed a perfect fit for the moment, until Joe Biden’s inauguration Wednesday. When Lady Gaga came out in that enormous poof of red dress and sang, our nation emerged blinking from the four-year assault it has been enduring.
     Into the very bright light of Wednesday morning, squinting into the swirling smoke, asking: “Are we still here? Are we still a nation?”
     Yes. Yes we are.

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Flashback 1998: Secrets of the lost-and-found

Untitled, by Jannis Kounellis (Hirshhorn Museum) 

     I was looking for clips related to the Museum of Science & Industry, and I found this. It's the kind of column that I really like, in that it's filled with things, yet imbued with an overarching sense of humanity and all its inscrutability. 

     Caitlin's "Petite Miss" diary is there, as is Alicia A. Wilkey's purse. There is a pair of skis, plus many pillows, blankets, suitcases, eyeglasses, wallets, sets of keys, cameras and cell phones. At least a dozen Bibles. Four coolers. Mike Hoffman's wallet is waiting, the cash still inside, as is Ivory Thomas' LaSalle Bank savings account bankbook.
     All are inventoried and stacked in the tidy little lost-and-found room in the basement of Union Station, a treasure trove of mystery presided over by Amtrak agent Steve Napoli.
     "What I can't understand is the wheelchairs," he said. "I've had three wheelchairs. How do you forget a wheelchair?"
     Almost every large public place in Chicago has its own lost-and-found—museums and shopping centers, concert halls and office buildings. Sad collections of ownerless ephemera, keys that will never find their locks, photograph albums that will never draw a spark of recognition.
      While lost-and-founds have certain things in common—wherever people go, they tend to lose the same things—each has its own particular brand of mystery and drama.
     "We typically have things like wallets, keys, lots of sunglasses and favorite dolls or stuffed animals," said Kate Desulis, membership and visitor services coordinator at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, who also manages the lost-and-found. "A couple of times we've had shoes, usually one. I often wonder how people manage to hike back from the trail with only one shoe."
     Desulis said it is particularly satisfying to be able to reunite a doll with its owner.
     "We often get frantic calls from the mothers who want to know if little Betty is found," she said. "They're very excited when we can tell them, `Yes, we have your doll.' "
     Carlton Bolden, special-projects coordinator for visitors services at the Museum of Science and Industry, says the most common items are sweaters, though he has noticed the shoe mystery, too.
     "The only thing I can assume is either somebody changed shoes or, who knows, maybe they bought new ones and thought this would be a good dumping ground for the old ones," he said.
     One rather personal and expensive lost item sticks in Bolden's mind.
     "At one point we had a retainer turned in," he said, noting it was never claimed. "I would think you would miss it, you would look for it. Those things aren't cheap."
     He also recalls the time a child lost her Giga Pet.
     "We kept getting calls for it," he said. "It was just like a lost baby."
     Most lost-and-founds will take steps to reunite items to their owners, though not all. If you lose your wallet at Northwestern University's Norris Center student union, you're out of luck. "We have a few wallets with IDs," said Stephanie Carr, class of '98, who works at the front desk. "For some reason we don't really call people."
     Mike Sawyer, the house manager at Orchestra Hall, says they do just the opposite there, going to great effort to reunite patrons with their belongings. He once drove to the home of a disoriented elderly patron who donned two coats belonging to his box mates, leaving his own behind.
      "We traced him through the ticketing department," Sawyer said. "That was very unusual."
     Sawyer said that the contents of the lost-and-found box varies with the seasons. "We're mostly lost gloves in the winter," he said. "Spring and fall, an awful lot of umbrellas turn up."
     One thing they don't hold past the end of a performance is food.
     "We hold them until the end of the concert and then down the tube they go," he said.
     Amtrak's Napoli said they also get lots of food. "We'll open up a bag and find a hot dog in its bun," he said.
     But they also get far more valuable items.
     "I had a bag of rubies, diamonds, emeralds," he said. "There was also a set of cruise tickets. I found (the owners) through the cruise tickets, in Florida."
     The most surprising thing about the jewelry incident, Napoli said, was the couple wasn't as frantic as you'd expect people losing a bag of jewels would be.
     "When I called, they were so matter-of-fact," he said. "They were like: `Oh, you found them. Thanks.' "

                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 19, 1998

Happy people who treat everyone nicely

A Rotary International luncheon in Fairfield, Illinois in January, 2017.

     Not much changes in Fairfield, Illinois.
     “Honestly? No. It really hasn’t changed much,” said L. Bryan Williams, who owns an insurance company there.
     The seat of Wayne County is right where we left it four years ago, 275 miles due south of Chicago, when I visited just before the inauguration of Donald Trump.
     Why go then? Well, if you line up Illinois’ 102 counties by how they voted in the 2016 election, Cook County was at one end, with 74.4% voting for Hillary Clinton. And Wayne County was at the other end, with 84.3% voting for Trump.
     Why return now? As we enter the Joe Biden administration at noon Wednesday, it seems worthwhile to circle back to Fairfield, and see how they’re doing and what they think about the four years past, where we are now, and where we’re going. Perhaps it’ll give a glimpse of what’s ahead.
     There is one change here: even fewer jobs. When I visited in 2017, the big employer in town, Airtex, an automobile fuel pump manufacturer, had just shut down, sending nearly 1,000 jobs to Mexico and China. But the lights were still on and several dozen people were still here, administering. Now the lights are off. Even the skeleton crew is gone.
     ”The community has adapted to not having Airtex here,” said Williams. “It’s become a little bit more of a bedroom community. But you wouldn’t see anything startling.”
     That depends on what startles a person.

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