Mailbox Number 11

    Perhaps it is the fate of children to be always looked upon as children by their parents, even when they are long grown. I have graduated college, written nine books, purchased two homes, poured concrete, installed light fixtures, changed car tires, driven from the West Coast to the East Coast. I can do things. I function as an independent adult in the living world. 

     And yet...

     Have you ever turned the dishwasher on without putting dishwashing detergent in it? I haven't. Though I suppose it is possible. In fact, it must happen to someone, sometime. But in decades of doing the dishes, it's never happened to me, to my knowledge. Nor have I ever worried about doing so. In the days when you had to pour harsh granules of detergent into a little cup, I poured. In recent decades I grabbed whatever tablet or pod—long a complicated packet of liquids of various hues—and dropped it into its little compartment and slid the small plastic door home. 

      It's really not that hard. I can't imagine it being a concern. Until last week, visiting my parents in Colorado. The dishwasher hummed in the background.
     "Did you put the dishwasher on?" my mother asked after breakfast.
     "Yes," I said.
     "Did you put soap in it?" she asked.
     I gazed at her, steadily. Ever see those Time/Life photos of a boron laser cutting through steel plate? I thought of that photo at that moment, imagining my expression as something like that. Though in reality I might merely have looked cross. She asked the question again.
     "Ma, I'm 60 years old," I said.
     "I think of you as half your age," she said, sweetly.
     "That would make me 30," I said, flatly. Still an adult. I don't know why I enter into these exchanges. The child in me, I suppose. I never come out the winner. The next day, after more pressing than should have been necessary, I was finally entrusted with the mailbox key and allowed to go get the mail. Which I did, managing to walk to the mailbox, briskly, insert the key, on my first try, turn it in the proper direction, remove the mail, carry the small stack back to her condo without dropping a single letter. I placed it on the kitchen counter, right where the mail goes. 

     I do not believe that, even with the previous foreshadowing, 100 novelists could come up wth the perfect, inevitable question that was tossed at me at the moment. Pause now, and try to imagine it. Do you have a contender in mind? Compare it to the glory of what my mother crafted:

     "Any trouble finding it?"
     My parents have live in the same townhouse for 33 years. Walk out the front door, turn right, take 75 steps, and there are the mailboxes. They're like the Rockies, right there. It's hard to miss them.
     I considered my reply, carefully, and settled on my default, candor.
     "The mailbox?" I said, more in sorrow than anger. "No."

     The conversation did not end there.
     "I mean Number 11," she replied.
     I marveled, the way one would at a volcano or the Northern Lights.
     "Right there between 10 and 12," I said, surrendering to the moment, almost happy.

Helmut Jahn left his mark on Chicago

 

     For many years, if you stood in Helmut Jahn’s office at 35 E. Wacker and looked out the window, you were confronted with the ugliest building in Chicago: the Sun-Times’ home at 401 N. Wabash, a squat, trapezoidal relic that, next to the Venetian splendor of the Wrigley Building, looked like an overturned gray galvanized metal tub set beside a spun sugar ivory Victorian wedding cake.
     Perhaps to block that view, Jahn kept in the window a model of the latest version of his sailing sloop, Flash Gordon, which won the Chicago to Mackinac Race in 1995. Its presence was a violation of his own edict not to keep “personal things” at work; the reverse being true at his home, which was free from images of the stunning buildings he created around the world during his long career.
     “A place for each,” he told me, when I stopped by Murphy/Jahn for a visit, years ago. Born in Nuremberg, he had a fierce devotion to order, both a very German and very architectural quality: all of his paper clips were red, his push pins gray.
     Jahn didn’t hang around the office much anyway, spending half his time on the road, traveling the world, building dramatic structures in China, Thailand, Qatar, Germany, Poland.
     His main gift to Chicago was the much-loved, much-hated Thompson Center. “Modern Masterpiece or Blue Turkey?” the Wall Street Journal asked when it opened in May 1985, and of course the correct answer is “both.” The soaring 17-story lobby, inspired by the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, was a must-see for Chicago tourists who gawked at its soaring blue and salmon enclosed space.
     They also jammed the glass elevators, making it hard for state workers to get to their offices, one of a number of design flaws that made working there a challenge, particularly the greenhouse effect of that curved whale of glass that had sweltering state employees putting fans on their desks and cowering under umbrellas to protect them from the sun.
     “It’s obscene,” Chicago architect Harry Weese said at the time, one of countless criticisms fired at Jahn, who never gave up on his vision. Just last year, he came up with a plan to save the Thompson Center, repurposing it as a kind of enclosed urban forest.

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Patient with patience

Patience, 1540 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "You're smart, practical, patient," I said.
     "I'm patient?" she laughed, dubious.
     "Well, you're not impatient..."
     "Isn't that a flower?"
     Almost. Impatiens, with an "s" instead of a "t." A common East African plant of the balsam family, flowering in a thousand different ways, some resembling poppies, at least to my eye. Which left me musing on the word, patience. What is the connection between the regrettable discomfort with the pace of events and the flower? Perhaps it blooms early. And how do patient, the calmness in waiting, and patient, the convalescent, connect? They have to share the quality of time, right? Patients being people who wait to heal, patiently.

    Or so went my theory.
    Off to find out with the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines patient as "1. Bearing or enduring (pain, affliction, trouble, or evil of any kind) with composure, from the Latin pati, 'to suffer.'" 

     It might be a comment on the relative comfort of modern life in general and mine in particular that I would focus on the time and not the suffering. The word shows up in the early 1300s in both senses, as forbearance and a person under medical care, the latter at the end of the century in Chaucer.
     Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defines "impatience" as "uneasiness under pain or suffering" and makes this point: "Impatience is not rage, nor absolute inability to bear pain; but it implies want of fortitude, or of its exercise. It usually springs from irritability of temper." A theme he elaborates under "impatience"—"We are all apt to be impatient under wrongs; but it is a christian duty not to be impatient in sickness, or under any afflictive dispensation of Providence." The lowercase, I rush to point out, is his. As for the faith's current abandonment of forbearance for constant complaint over harms more perceived than real, well, no need to ballyhoo the obvious.   
      Samuel Johnson offers up a number of worthwhile quotes, including this, from Pope: "Fame, impatient of extremes, decays/Not more by envy than excess of praise." Yup, lot of that too.

Impatiens walleriana

      Oddly, my OED doesn't have "impatiens" in it. Nor the supplements The online Merriam-Webster traces the word to the Latin. Pati is to suffer, but patiens is the nominative for bear or endure (so impatiens is the inability to do so) and suggests its from the tendency to discharge their seed pods at touch, tracing the word to the relative yesterday of 1785. No wonder that two centuries later the OED hadn't yet let it into the charmed circle.

     Ah well, a deadline awaits, speaking of impatient, and the celebration of Mother's Day. I didn't plan a discussion of patience to fall today, just a happy accident, as motherhood and patience are often synonyms, except of course when they're not. 

Texas notes: Severed

     Soon to be Ex-Austin-Bureau-Chief Caren Jeskey shares her journey home to Chicago.

     Skeeter Sims. Mule Clark. Hoot Owl Hatcher. Turkey Beckham. Baby Beef Chandler. I stepped gingerly around faded Texas stars emblazoned into a sidewalk in Cooper, Texas. As I read the names memorialized in the middle of each concrete star, I thought “how beautiful. This town really loves their animals.” Then something inside of me (I hear her a lot these days, my inner intuitive voice) spoke up and said “Those are the names of people.” I was touched. Imagine your name preserved into a sidewalk of the town where you lived. What an honor.

     I did not know why these particular names were chosen. Were they veterans? I surmised that my question would be answered when I got to the starting point of the display. I made my way down, photographing each and every name since they were all too good to be true. Foxy Roan. Pig Choate. Bat Poteet.   

     But no. All I got was a marker for a Miller’s Pharmacy, and more names. I learned that Goebel Templeton was from the nearby town of Charleston. He seemed well loved and had extra signage. Hubster Doctor Lawyer Teacher Preacher From The Holy Land. He’s someone I might have liked to meet. We could have sat down and had a soda or a whiskey and cigar on a bench near a cobblestone street. I could have listened to his story and marveled that his life was so different than mine, even though we are both “American.”
     I’ve learned in my time here in the Country of Texas that people are more like snowflakes—in a good, individualistic way—than I ever knew before. I have a soft spot in my heart for almost everyone I’ve met, especially countless seniors I spent time with along the way in the hospitals where I worked. There was the man who wanted to set me up with an oil guy. That was before he got pissed at the doctor and went to his truck to get his shotgun. The crisis was averted with the help of local law enforcement, thank goodness. What I will remember about him, more than the threat of feudal violence he displayed, was the time he recited a poem he’d written for his wife when she was 12 years old. At the time of this reading she was in her late 80s without much mental capacity left. As he recited the poem she sat up in her bed & came to life. She murmured the words she could remember along with him, and we all cried. (I won’t get into the fact that I was disciplined for crying at work when a stone-faced bitchy nurse reported my “lack of professionalism.”)

    I reached out to the host on the ranch I am staying on to ask about the names. “They are people who have animal names that have lived in the community. Wolfe Lowery is my husband’s uncle.” Goebel may not be an animal name per se, but it’s the name of a company that makes animal figurines. I am starting to get it.
     As I researched more about Mr. G, I learned that a 500-pound meteorite fell to this part of the earth during the passage of Halley's Comet, bringing some publicity to the community of Charleston in May of 1910, 111 years ago. Mr. G would have been about 3 years old at that time. How did that affect his life? What did his folks think about this comet that fell from the sky?
     It’s not lost on me that I am in the land of flat-earthing non-masking Ted Cruz-loving folks. Did they think the Lord sent the comet for a reason? This land is my land, this land is your land. Staunch Pentecostals and atheists alike are invited! So here I am, exploring this land that belongs as much to me (well, the public lands and thoroughfares I traverse, and sometimes the places I rent) as it does to anyone else. My mind is being blown over and over again in the Big Star State that I am going to leave behind later today.

     So far on this jaunt in Cooper, I got spooked by a horse who was probably more scared than me. I met teens fishing for crappie who’ve never been out of East Texas, the same horse doesn’t like cucumbers and spat the one I offered him back out to me, opting for flowering clover instead, and I almost stepped on a severed drum head. I huddled and quaked under blankets and pillows the other night while 87 mph winds raced across the plains and lightening was continuous. I was terrified. Friends in Louisiana and California followed the radar and texted me with advice and comforting words during the tornado watch, until it passed.
     Tomorrow I will go find the tiny house community I was told about today, and perhaps visit another small town to learn of its charm. Yes, this is the South and I am always aware that certain people are far from being welcomed here, are far from safe, and that makes me sad. I’ll be back in Chicago soon enough where I can continue to do my part to affect social justice while enjoying my “one wild and precious life” in the words of Mary Oliver. Wishing you the same.

The risks we face: bears, cars, COVID-19

     A woman was eaten by a bear in Colorado Friday, shortly after my wife and I arrived for a long weekend. Not just mauled; consumed. A bad end. This tragic and gruesome event didn’t give us pause before hitting the trails, however. Such attacks are rare. Plus, it happened near Durango, the southwest corner of the state. Far from Boulder.
     Just another risk to consider, along with whether I need those ski-pole-like sticks that older hikers use to keep their balance — not yet — or if we should cut our hike short because of the weather — we did, a good choice, since it began hailing, hard, two hours after we left the mountainside. And of course the most dangerous peril of all: driving to the trailhead.
     Not to forget the newest, and therefore scariest, risk: COVID-19. Most hikers wore masks, even though we were outside and more than six feet apart, generally. Those who didn’t have masks would pull out the necks of their T-shirts and tuck their noses inside as we passed, almost as a form of greeting. I am fully vaccinated, so I wore my mask below my chin when nobody was around, slipping it into place as people approached. It seemed the polite thing to do, and I didn’t consider my personal freedom trod upon.
     Back home, Lori Lightfoot announced Chicago will lead the charge returning to festivals, concerts and summertime fun. Will people show up? Of course we will. Dinners and music and trips give life the illusion of significance.
     That’s why I raced to get my shots. We flew to Colorado, a few days before my wife’s “full immunity” kicked in, to help my mother through some minor surgery. Because of the timing, my wife initially decreed we would wear face shields on the plane. That was scary. Face shields strike me as something nurses wear in intensive care units. To wear one in an airport is a bridge too far, like putting on a welding mask to shake hands. But I was willing to humor her. Heck, I once took Metra downtown wearing a kilt, backwards. What is shame to me?
     But the day before the flight, when she practiced putting on the face shield, it was murky—we had bought them online—and she abandoned the idea. I uttered a silent prayer of thanks.

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Home again.

   
     "Yay!" I exclaimed.
     What's rarer than a cheer? Particularly nowadays. Sincere, not ironic. Private, spontaneous, enthusiastic, a cry aloud upon seeing something worth hurrahing about.
     The top of our new tulip tree, planted on the parkway last year. It was bare buds when we left for Colorado last Friday, and sported a full crop of its distinctive, tulip-shaped leaves to welcome us back Wednesday evening.    
     It survived the winter. Which is not something new trees always do. A pin oak, several cherries ... I've planted, or at least caused to be planted, a number of living trees that quickly transitioned to elaborate sticks, dead as 2x4s.
     The tulip tree made it to the spring. We all did. Yay indeed.
     Though it was done on seeing the tree, that exclamation also conveyed general joy of return—one of my favorite parts of traveling is coming home. True for me and, I hope, for most, if they live in a halfway decent place, and probably even if they don't. The end of a long day: the 10 a.m. Uber to the RTD Park 'n Ride, the 10:52 bus to Denver International Airport, 1:45 p.m. flight to Chicago.
     Plus I had extra lower expectations, as the six days we were gone coincided with remote exams week at NYU Law. I didn't even bother going upstairs to say we were home, and had tried to brace my wife.
     "The kitchen will be messier than you've ever seen it in your life," I informed her, in the cab on the way home. "Approach the situation with love."
     It was true that every dish he used was in the sink, and the dish-washer full of clean dishes we left behind was untouched. But it turns out using dishes is very 20th century—youth today consume directly out of the containers and, of course, Soylent complete nutrition beverage. It was 10 minutes' work to set it right.
     I did pause, saddened, at the newspapers, which had been taken in ... and dumped beside the door. Still in their plastic sheaths—"newspaper condoms" as I call them. No relaxing from the rigors of the law with the high quality journalism to be found in the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Gotham-fixated and regularly-led astray-by-flashy-yet-marginal-fads New York Times, which tries, and is generally also worth opening.
     I collected the pile, relocated it to the coffee table and dug in. Home at last.

Event occurs unexpectedly

     BOULDER, Colo—Journalists have a hand in defining what a story is, or did, occasionally leading to a phenomenon I call the "Near Collision." Two jets will either collide on an airport runway or nearly do so, and then the media will start paying attention to runway mishaps and reporting when airliners come close to hitting each other at airports, until they realize that it happens frequently and then stop.
     The underlying phenomenon is reporters being sensitized to situations so they start treating the commonplace as extraordinary.
     For instance, Monday I noticed the Denver Post ran the staggeringly mundane headline "Area is at heart of debate over growth." I tweeted it with the snarky note, "And the Denver Post snags the Generic Headline of the Week Award."  

     After plowing through the article, or trying to, I'd have gone with the equally-long,
"Is Governors' Park filled to the brim?"

     Then Tuesday, having coffee, I noticed another anodyne headline, "Cases per capita 2nd in U.S." Just as bad? Or does it seem worse arriving in the after-echo of the first, like two planes slipping past each other the day after a collision? I began to play a game I think of as, Write the Better Headline. The deficient headline takes 28 spaces (ignoring that a small "i" actually requires less room than a capital "C," and so on). We could substitute the far more urgent, "COVID surges in Colorado" in 24 spaces, tossing in a few spaces for the extra caps.
     I thought of making this a running game, "Beat the Denver Post Copyeditors." Until it struck me that the Denver Post is one of the newspapers gutted by Alden Global Capital. The professionals who know how to write a newspaper headline were probably let go long ago, and to make light of those left behind to flail and founder is like ridiculing a family living under a tarp after a tornado leveled their home. So apologies to those stout souls who remain lashed to their oars at the Post. I only share their embarrassment now as a cautionary tale to my friends at the Trib. Keep pushing to find that benevolent billionaire to sweep in, or someday, after a future Chicago police shooting, the Tribune will be running headlines screaming, "Mayor speaks about situation."