Texas notes: Not All Who Wander Are Lost

 

     It just occurred to me: if she is no longer in Texas, what will we call our Saturday report from Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey? "Texan-in-exile?" "Return of the native?"

    The first time I heard the tap tap tap of their strong beaks at the bottom of the glass door, I was confused. No one knocks on my door these days. I looked out, and there they were. Heads cocked, alert round eyes staring at me. Thelma and Blanche, the youngest of our nine backyard chickens.

     As I prepare to move out my temporary tiny house rental refuge, I realize more and more how much I will miss this whole deal. A brand new high-ceilinged tiny house with a washer/dryer unit and a bidet. Not to mention an electric bed that doubles as a couch and the largest flat screen TV I’ve ever had, taking up much of the wall across from the couch bed. Then there’s the remote control Venetian blinds on the red glass front door, floor to ceiling screened windows that roll open letting fresh air circulate, and a sleek (yes, remote control operated) ceiling fan. 

     To make it even more appealing, it’s backed up to a park in a fabulously walkable Austin neighborhood called Brentwood. Birds chirping all day long. Owls at night. Hawks playing with the wind.
     I’ve decided to use my last walks as an Austinite (for now) to notice what I am grateful to this city for, and to say goodbye. As I walk her streets—over 11 miles yesterday—I am taken by how much of the landscape I have grown attached to. (Austin is either a she, queer, or nonbinary. If she has any he in her, it’s more on the feminine end of the range and somewhat gender fluid).

     On the 11 miler I visited one of my favorite finds. Penny Pocket Park, aka Sparky Park, which I happily happened upon during early COVID walkabouts. It’s tucked into a residential neighborhood and appears to have sprung up organically outside of a now defunct City of Austin Substation. As you enter the park, to the right is a sturdy, wavy and bumpy stone wall where people leave offerings in the little nooks and crannies. A blue marble, a recovery chip, kewpie dolls, photographs, tiny plastic toys and any other bauble imaginable. The wall fits seamlessly into the landscape, and is the entryway to a grassy (well, brambly here in Texas) field. There’s a bench built for two nestled under a live oak in the back corner of the field. Penny Park is always worth a brief stop.  

     Prior to Snowmageddon ’21 copious yucca plants peppered our lawns and parks. When flowering they boast sturdy stalks that shoot up eight feet or more from the center of the plant.  I remember seven years ago when I first moved here, seeing my first yucca flower at Natural Gardener (a more prolific version of Gethsemane Gardens in Chicago, which houses wild turkeys, a goats or two, and a guitar-shaped labyrinth). It was a century plant, meaning it flowers once each 100 years. Everything is Bigger in Texas is a motto that can be fun sometimes. (Not so as far as the roads peppered with trucks the size of the tiny house). 
     After February’s ice, snow and cold shocked, terrified, and beat our foliage into submission, the detritus is a grim reminder. Some formerly well-manicured yards full of native plants are now a mess with giant monocot leaves turned into mushy piles of xylem and phloem. Other yards are the aftermath of a slasher movie— thick cacti leaves the size of a horse’s head mercilessly chopped to the bases of the stems with machetes.      Maybe the storm was the last catastrophe in a long year of destruction that will make way for something new. While I doubt that we are out of the woods, hope springs eternal in my indomitable spirit. I have a plan to say goodbye to the south at the end of April, road trip for a month (to free standing, COVID relatively-safe Airbnb rentals) as I make my way back north to the land of the Yankees, where I might just belong. I get my first dose of the Moderno vaccine today— I will volunteer for seven hours directing traffic at an '80’s themed vaccine “party” (oh yes, there are certainly parts of this fun, music-obsessed city that will be hard to say goodbye to). I’ll come back to you in one piece and in many ways a more well-rounded person than I was in days gone by. For now I can live with cacti and cowboys and it ain’t so bad y’all.

Not in a box, not aired by Fox, not here or there, not anywhere

T.S. Eliot

     The poetry of T.S. Eliot is just the right salve to grease the aging process. Snaking himself into the machinery of existence, like Charlie Chaplin shot through an enormous maze of gears, Eliot applies his lyrical truth to the rusty flywheel of life. “Old men ought to be explorers/Here or there does not matter.” Yup.
     Though Eliot has a problem. And no, not the cat poems. They're easy enough to skip. Something far more troublesome. He was an anti-Semite, and wrote poems mocking Jews, most notoriously “Burbank with a Baedecker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” where he clamps a perfumed hankie to his nose and shudderingly cringes:

     But this or such was Bleistein’s way

     A saggy bending of the knees

     And elbows, with the palms turned out,

     Chicago Semite Viennese.

     A lustreless protrusive eye

     Stares from the protozoic slime.

     Ouch. You don’t need a master’s in literature to figure that one out.
     It gets worse.

               The rats are underneath the piles

               The Jew is underneath the lot.

     Into the dustbin of history with Eliot, then? Off the shelf, in that one-strike-you’re-out purity in vogue nowadays? Umm, no, at least not for me. I love Eliot, and find him a comfort and a guide, the vile bits notwithstanding. How? Because literature, like life, is complicated, and once you start tossing out authors and artists with some loathsome aspect to their resume, the shelves and walls empty rather quickly.
     And no, I’m not joining FoxWorld, clutching at myself and keening because the Dr. Seuss estate announced Tuesday they are pulling half a dozen of his lesser works from publication for containing dated caricatures. I get what they’re trying to do: keep the Seuss money machine humming away. It’s called capitalism. Every company refreshes the product line by ditching old models and adopting new ones. Books go out of print every day.

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Gradually then suddenly

     My approach toward getting the COVID vaccine seems unique, or at least unusual.  It's one that I haven't heard any pundits expressing, so maybe I should try. Here goes ... 
     I'm just waiting.

     Not clicking through various web sites, spending hours on hold and filling out forms, investigating the situation in Lake County, picking over my medical history to find some qualifying flaw. That seems ... desperate. At least if you're not 80 or a cashier at a grocery store or a paramedic or some other profession that puts you as heightened risk or in contact with the public regularly. 

     Not so necessary for a columnist who's home more than he's out.
     My days are fairly isolated, just my wife and I rattling around our big old house. I go for walks with the dog, whose leg is all better, thank you. I wear a mask, even when passing people on a windy trail on the Techny Prairie. The concern being that some smatter of COVID could blow my way. Why not? The mask doesn't hurt—I don't know what all those Texans are crying about, the big babies. When nobody is around, I slip the mask down.

     Don't get me wrong; I'd like the vaccine. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm 60 years old and in good health. I have no underlying conditions beyond a titanium spine and hip, and those don't seem to enter into the mix. I've been safe so far this past year, and I figure I can make it until April or May or whenever it's coming. Our union rep at the Newspaper Guild says they're working on getting the vaccine for the staff, and I'm content to let those wheels turn. They'll tell me when it's time.
    Is that patience? Or passivity? I really like the idea of not pushing my precious self to the front of the line. I'm already ahead of the game, and trying to cut in front of others seems like gilding the lily. Blessed as I am, already, waiting my turn in relative safety seems the least I can do. My way of doing my part, by doing nothing. Certain loved ones suggested I sign up for a shot at a Walgreen's in Peoria, or try to pass myself off as a smoker for my occasional cigar, or some such oily strategy to snag an appointment. But Peoria is two and a half hours away, and it is probably a toss-up whether the five hours of round trip on the expressway is more perilous than laying low for another month or two. Besides, it would be wrong.
     My plan is to minimize risk and wait. I was swimming regularly at the Y, assuming it was safe. Then I got some kind of sinus infection one day after swimming—a month ago? Three months? It all kinda blends together at this point. But If figured, if I could get that, I could get COVID too, and put laps on hold until after I get the shots. I do go out on stories, though I try to do it safely. When I was interviewing the homeless last week at the CTA Blue Line Station in Forest Park, there were a few moments—unmasked homeless guys ranting four feet away from me, like the photo above—that I thought, "This is a bad idea." But a week passed, and I'm okay, so it was an acceptable risk, in that nothing bad happened. I didn't seek out the Night Ministry story, it found me, and I couldn't not go. As I used to tell myself when required to visit a public housing project at night, "If people can live here, I can visit."
    Sometimes when others are debating over what may happen, I sometimes interject: "We don't have to argue; we can just wait and find out." That's my approach to the vaccine. I'm cultivating serenity and waiting for it to come to me.  Those vaccines are on the way. People are getting them, and eventually my turn will come. This locked-down world seems like it has gone on forever, and it will be long weeks and months until it turns around. But the change will come, to quote Hemingway's deathless line in "The Sun Also Rises" about how people go bankrupt, "gradually then suddenly." 

Republicans turn their party into a newt

 

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

      Early in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” there’s a scene where filth-spattered villagers gleefully drag a woman to their lord, shouting “We’ve got a witch! Burn her! Burn her!”
     “How do you know she is a witch?” trills Sir Bedevere, a particularly dim-witted future knight of the Round Table.
     “She looks like one!” the villagers say.
     “They dressed me up like this!” the woman objects.
     Bedevere tries again.
     “What makes you think she is a witch?” he says.
     “She turned me into a newt!” exclaims a large peasant, played by John Cleese.
     The assembled look at him. Cleese glances down at his shoulders, as if detecting a flaw in this line of reasoning.
     “I got better...” he ventures, in a small voice.
     Which illustrates a problem with insisting on ludicrous lies. Even in the outrageous world of Monty Python, at some point you may get called on it.
     Donald Trump delivered two main messages to the Conservative Political Action Committee in Florida Sunday: The 2020 presidential election was stolen; and his followers must defeat every Republican who spoke out against him. A pair of propositions that scream for somebody to draw a line connecting the two.

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R.I.P., Terry O'Brien

Terry O'Brien

     Terry O'Brien had the map of Ireland on his face—I always thought he bore a resemblance to Rich Daley, though with a lineage of service to the city that goes back even further: both his father and grandfather worked for the water department, and he rose to be president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, where he served for 16 years and I would sometimes bump into him, in always cordial and informative encounters. So I was sorry to hear he passed away this week at the too-early age of 64. He and I had a mutual friend, the great Ed McElroy, publicist for the MWRD. Ed made sure that our paths crossed from time to time, so it was not accidental. And out of deference to Ed, I would try to find something to highlight. I particularly remember when O'Brien ran for Cook County Board president in 2010, I met with him, an awkward conversation—he was not a natural politician, which speaks to the quality of the man. But I just couldn't find a way to write anything about him, which perhaps speaks to mine. I had better luck when there was infrastructure around to add interest. Though even then, the subject matter could prove a challenge, as this chestnut demonstrates. And yes, I meant the headline as a kind of pun.

ANNALS OF THE LOWER WORLD

     After you have made your deposit, so to speak, after you have performed the final step in the alimentary process, to use a fancy term, after you have completed the necessary paperwork, to be coy, and flushed, to be blunt, the end result, no pun intended, is shot by a gallon or so of water into the secret netherworld of pipes criss-crossing beneath Chicago.
     There, it joins similar contributions from each and every Chicagoan. The gallons add up quickly—to give you an idea how quickly, the pipe carrying this material is about 21/2 inches wide when it leaves your house, but 13 feet in diameter when it reaches the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District's Stickney plant.
     Stickney is not only the largest of the seven wastewater treatment plants in the Chicago area, it is the largest such facility on earth, serving 2.38 million people in a 260-square-mile area including Chicago and 43 suburbs.
    I have an affinity for matters infrastructural, for pipes and conduits and the overlooked underpinnings that make a great city work. I'd like to tell you that it was my idea to hie out to Stickney and watch the sewage flow in, but it wasn't. They invited me, though I happily blocked out a day because, really, how often does one get the chance to stand on a metal walkway 40 feet above the dark gray River Styx of sewage as it begins its transformation back into clean water?
     "The scum rises to the top," said Reed Dring, an engineer explaining the complex process of screening, settling and treating the waste.
     "As it usually does," I said, before I realized that I was sitting next to the reclamation district's able president, Terry O'Brien. I flashed him an apologetic smile and quickly added, "Present company excluded."
     About 800 million gallons come into the plant every day on average—since the storm sewers are also connected, that number spikes up when it rains.
     What you dump down the drain does have an effect on water quality—the reclamation district has been trying to keep Chicagoans from flushing old prescription drugs down the toilet, because their complex compounds resist being removed and build up in the water.
     Industrial polluters can really foul up the works, the most extreme case being in 1989, when the P & H Plating Company on West Belmont poured 4,000 gallons of cyanide into the sewers. The poison killed off the bacteria used for filtering waste in the district's Skokie plant—not to mention 20,000 fish—shutting the plant down. The company's owner eventually was sent to prison.
     If you want to drop a dime on anybody pouring poison into our wastewater, you can call, toll-free (800) 332-DUMP.
     "We don't ask people's names," said O'Brien. Although they do take just about everything else.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2007

Homeless 'L' riders get Night Ministry care

Dr. Ralph Ryan advises a homeless patient (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Garcia Rezin)

     This is the end of the line, literally. The CTA Blue Line terminates at Forest Park, where L trains arrive every 15 minutes, linger briefly, then begin their 26.9 mile return journey east to downtown then northwest to O’Hare.
     This is also the end of the line, figuratively, for Chicagoans whose combination of mental illness, bad luck, bad life choices and inability to manage in a bad, COVID-ravaged economy forces them to ride the trains tonight, seeking a warm, dry refuge on this 30 degree night at the end of February.
     “It’s been rough,” says Ladislao Vasquez, shortly after 9 p.m. He worked construction for 20 years, he says, but lost an eye after being shot. “Times are hard.”
     He is here because on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. the Night Ministry, the final strands of Chicago’s frayed social service net, runs a sort of field hospital/free commissary/clinic for the homeless, offering services of a social worker, piles of supplies—socks, hats, underwear, combs — paper bags of snacks, pallets of water and a nurse or, tonight, a doctor.
     “I’m setting up my office,” says Dr. Ralph Ryan, a retired cardiologist, unfolding a gray screen by a staircase in the station’s entry, to offer a shred of privacy to homeless patients as they explain their afflictions and addictions to him.
     What prompts a 69-year-old physician to leave the relative paradise of Elmhurst to treat homeless people for free six nights a month? The answer is deceptively simple.
     “I enjoy serving the underserved,” says Ryan, who has been doing this four years. “I started on the bus” — the rolling medical clinic bus that the Night Ministry sends into low-income areas of the city — ”then gravitated to street medicine.”

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Do it yourself.

 

     "You're going to have to put it together," my wife said. Which, in married couple code meant, "Can you put it together? Are you capable?" An IKEA console she was considering ordering online.
     Last summer we had hired someone to replace the water damaged drywall in what we still call nostalgically "The Toy Room" even though there are no toys there nor boys to play with them. In the fall, we had a maple wooden floor put down (by Chicago Hardwood Floors; the best) and painted the walls a marvelous blue—first slapping swatches of no fewer than seven sample colors (we had originally thought "Yellow!" and it took us a while to get to ("Not yellow!") I had installed a grand's worth of lovely white baseboard covers to replace the hideous beige rusted metal covers in place since the late 1950s. And after risking our lives in six or 10 furniture stores, bought a pair of leather recliners (Electric, which has a drawback. "They seem like medical devices," I noted). And a concrete-colored sofa. Consoles that you don't put together, but purchase at a real furniture store, cost a thousand bucks, or two. This one, the "Hemnes" from IKEA, costs $229. And looked pretty nice, at least online. Real wood. The web site links you directly to Task Rabbit, the chore site, which informed me that someone would come to a house in our Zip code and put it together for $38. But that would involve letting a person in the house, and be a personal failure of handiness on my part. She didn't say that. She didn't have to. I knew.
     "Sure,"I said. "I can put it together."
     Every bit of cultural static about assembling IKEA products is about how maddeningly complex they are and how confusing the instructions can be. The Internet is alive with web sites like "25 IKEA Assembly Fails" and "Six of the best IKEA furniture assembly fails." That didn't deter me. I figured, by doing it myself, I would be participating in the larger society that I've been cut off from for the past year, not that I ever was much a party of it. Assembling an IKEA console would be time consuming and vexing, but in a culturally-appropriate way, like going to a Bears game. And. wouldn't get cold. Bottom line, I welcomed the distraction.
     "It'll be a break from writing stuff," I said.
     The console arrived Saturday morning in two flat pack boxes. I threw on a mask, went outside and asked the delivery guys to take them around to the back of the house, where the Toy Room is. I figured I'd give each guy $10 if they did, but didn't say that. The driver looked at me as if I had asked him to dance.
     "We're not supposed to take it up the steps," he said, depositing his box at the base of our steps. The second guy put the second box there. They were heavy. With my back in mind, I kinda rolled them up the stairs, using a corner as a fulcrum to pivot each one up. That worked. Inside, I began to tear the boxes apart in our front parlor trying to open them. My wife suggested we keep the boxes intact, the implication being that I'd somehow fail to assemble them and we'd have to return the whole thing in shame. That wasn't happening. I ripped apart the boxes, and my wife and I carried the several dozen oddly shaped wooden pieces down to the Toy Room, plus enough hardware, screws and metal tabs and stuff, to assemble an automobile, in my estimation. In the Toy Room there was a carpet pad waiting for a carpet that was supposed to be delivered yesterday. That made the perfect staging area.

This one, not that one

     It looked like the photo above.
     I poured a cup of Peet's, twisted in my Air Pods, and set to work about 11 a.m.
     First I read the instructions. Well, not read, since there were no words. Looked them over, carefully, studying the pieces, the steps. Which is maturity. In the past, I'd just jump in, then later consult the instructions to see what had gone wrong. Not this time. I could see that they make a point of not only showing the builder what pieces to use, but which similar pieces NOT to use. That's smart. And useful.
     I assembled the drawers, and was thrown for a momentary loop because the bottoms, with their pre-printed lined liners, were only supported by a groove on two sides, front and back. This seemed a design flaw. Shoddy. They'd bow. I quickly realized that the metal pull assemblies also held the other two sides of the bottoms up. Not a flaw, but clever design. If I had to give one piece of assembly advice I learned Saturday morning, it's this: trust IKEA. They've figured this out. If you think they're wrong, they're not. It's just you haven't figured out their logic yet. It's there, waiting.

     I worked steadily away, finished the three drawers. It wasn't unpleasant, but almost athletic, a kind of IKEA yoga, standing over the parts, stretching, reaching, holding, pounding dowels with a rubber mallet, lining parts up. 

     At 12:37 p.m. I broke for lunch, checked the sterile and pointless online work, then returned about 1:20 p.m. I was glad to get back at it. It was like a hobby that requires focus, like building a ship in a bottle. 

     Maybe the chore gods were with me Saturday. Typically, my wife shows up at the precise instant when I've messed something up, as if my brain sends out a silent alarm and she hears it and comes running to witness the disaster aborning. Which usually makes it worse, looking up as the sickening oh-I've-botched-this realization hits to see my wife vectoring into the room smiling brightly with misplaced confidence in me, here to certify my shame. But now the several times she checked in were all at the exact right moment when I could use a second person—the instructions say you need two—to hold something, or consult over a puzzling glyph, or look for my screwdriver, which I had a tendency to put down and lose.

     We can cut to the chase. Just because I found it pleasant to go through the many steps to put together an IKEA console doesn't mean it's something interesting to read about. I lack the skill to do that, or at least the inclination to try. So I get it done, and flip the console over, and the thing looks wonderful. The wood stained, not painted. Real wood, not particleboard. The black knobs are less than ideal, but I only had that thought because my wife, in her due diligence before buying it, saw the hint online to class up the piece by buying higher grade festive porcelain knobs and replacing them. We plan to do that.

     After admiring it for five seconds, I did notice something amiss. The right side was projecting a millimeter or two from under the top, showing the slightest strip of beige unstained wood. I looked at its counterpart on the left side, and saw that it is tucked under the top, as you'd expect. I must not have pushed the right side all the way in during the initial stages of construction,. My wife saw it too.

     "Is that going to bother you?" she said, knowing my OCD way of being tormented by that kind of thing, and anticipating I might immediately tear the thing apart and begin again. Which I did consider. But then I looked at the physiognomy of the piece, which remember I had just constructed, and thus had not only a certain investment in, but knowledge of. Acting intuitively, I took the heel of my right hand, drew it back, and drove it as hard as I could against the part that was jutting out from under the top. It shifted perfectly into place.

     "There," I said.

     We moved it into its position against the wall. When I dragged the boxes to the recycling, I made a point to see where the Hemnes came from. Any guesses? Not the United States—my wife's guess. Not Sweden—where IKEA is based. Not Canada, source of a lot of furniture.

     Anybody?

     Russia.