Flash: Most reader letters are nice.

     I believe I've been guilty of promulgating an untruth, or at least a misperception.
     Over the years, I tend to share outrageous, vile, deranged reader feedback, for several reasons. To reduce the sting by casting it in hue of connoisseurship—look what an amazing specimen of insult this is. To amuse my non-crazy readers. To humble brag about being made of strong enough stuff to take such abuse. And perhaps because it can be seriously funny.
     In doing so, I've created the impression that I write my column in a hailstorm of scorn, and that really isn't the case. First, because contempt tends to come from a certain small subset of masochistic regulars, who keep reading while purporting to despise everything I write. Those go straight to spam and are usually never seen, never mind read. Still, they write, continually, sometimes for years.
     And second because I gets lots of appreciative email, much more than the negative stuff. Much gratitude, many kind words, Which I don't share because, well, first so as not to brag. Showing off praise, it's unseemly, is it not? I don't think I've ever posted a bunch of complimentary emails, though I do admit occasionally forwarding a particularly positive note off to my boss. "See, SOMEBODY likes this stuff!" 

     Besides, praise is, well, seldom quite as interesting as condemnation, in the same way that Inferno is a far better read than Purgatorio or Paradiso.
     After my Monday column taking aim at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for their ham-handed attempt to influence Joe Biden by barring him from communion unless he recants his heresies, several readers commiserated about the bulk of nasty mail I must be getting. On the contrary. I was struck by just how positive most were, and a number of the remarks were quite witty, the top by far being from John F., who writes, "The Eucharist is not a 'dog biscuit' given for good behavior." 
     Margaret B. left the church half a century ago due to its entrenched sexism. "What did it for me was Father," she writes. "It still drives me nuts that priests are 'Father' but nuns are 'Sister.'”
     I never thought of that before, but she's right.
     The open manner with which people talked about their faith was impressive.
     "I used to explain my staying with the church by using the crazy uncle's explanation that there are a few bad apples in every family but most of us are good and just ignore the goofy relatives," writes Christine P. "But 2016 changed everything for me. When the conservative folks thought it was okay to support the prior president on one issue and ignore all his other dangerous and harmful qualities, my heart sank. To single out Biden as the bad guy, Biden who really cares to make a positive and caring difference in the world, makes me so sad. If everyone truly examined their souls, none of us would be worthy of receiving communion."

     There are dozens more, and I won't belabor the point. I'm very grateful for readers who take the time to respond, to compose their thoughts, and often am educated and enriched by what they have to say. I try to answer every well-intentioned email back, while ignoring completely the mean, the sarcastic and the deranged.  I thought I ought to set the record straight. Not that there really is a record. But you know what I mean. Most of you, anyway.

Bishops use sacraments to pressure Biden

     One beauty of being Jewish is that you can’t get excommunicated, Spinoza notwithstanding. Sure, there are various boards of rabbis here and there. But no central authority, the way Catholics have their U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Nor do Jews have sacraments, like communion, that can be withheld as punishment for apostasy. The way the bishops voted overwhelmingly Friday to draft “a formal statement” forbidding Catholic public officials like President Joe Biden from receiving the eucharist if they insist on supporting one particular legal American right that conflicts with Catholic theology: abortion.

     The most important aspects of Judaism: lighting candles on Friday night, atoning on Yom Kippur, pushing back against dogma, can’t be yanked away by some board of overlords.
     In fact, being heretical is almost the Jewish brand. That’s why the faith is so studded with people like Spinoza, or Freud, or Einstein, or Lenny Bruce. When my son came back from sophomore year and gravely informed me he is questioning the value of his religion, I smiled and replied, “Buddy, I hate to tell you, but doubting Judaism is the most Jewish thing you can do at this point in your life.”
     Yes, like all faiths, Jews have our own strong ultra-Orthodox wing, where wearing a pearl gray Borsalino hat will get you in hot water, never mind pushing back against doctrine. But the Hassidim have about as much influence on mainstream Judaism as the Pennsylvania Amish have on the Philadelphia club scene. They do encourage weak tea Jews such as myself to say certain prayers, but are smart enough not to try to punish us if we don’t. Which I respect, even while their lifestyle puzzles me. You’ve got one life. Are you really going to spend it dressed for 18th century Vilnius and arguing obscure points of Deuteronomy dietary law? Don’t let me stop you. It’s a free country.
     And I’d like to keep it that way. Which is why we need to resist the bishops, and remind them their authority ends at the church door. Yes, they are free to define the contours of their own faith. But to inflict a special penalty especially on government leaders is not religion but politics. Not just their business, but ours too. It isn’t as if regular lay Catholics are being punished for their beliefs, not anymore. If some Board of Rabbis were to announce that U.S. senators couldn’t eat latkes at Hanukkah unless they keep Kosher, the ridicule would be Biblical.

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Flashback 2000: "Scarier than scary stories"

2000

     I heard a noise downstairs Saturday and went to investigate. It was my younger son, freshly 24, stopping by for a visit, a quick lunch, stock up on a few groceries and then back into the city, where he now lives. 

     I can't tell you how happy that makes me, to have him pop by like that. A marvelous pre-Father's Day gift, though as icing on the cake, he'll circle back to my brother- and sister-in-law's, where we'll eat brisket and then go out into the park for a game of catch and a Rocky Patel.

      It might have worked out otherwise, as this column from 22 years ago reminds us. Every parent knows that only constant vigilance and the occasional timely spot of luck stands between any given moment and disaster. Happy Father's Day, hug 'em if you've got 'em.

     The shorthand I've come up with to convey the entire parenthood experience to my childless, noncomprehending friends is this: "Being a parent is realizing that your entire world can choke to death on a penny."
     I meant it as a glib line, a wink at the frantic safety-making that parents usually put themselves through.
     Before our oldest could roll off his colorful blankie, we had already brought in a safety consultant to walk through our place, pointing out hazards. We dutifully installed all sorts of netting and wooden gates and coffee table edge guards and window locks and electrical socket covers.
     I thought all this stuff was keeping us safe. Only this morning did I realize another factor, as important as childproofing, was protecting us as well: blind, dumb luck (or a benevolent God; take your pick. I don't want to get in a spat over theology).
     Anyway, I was on the sofa with the boys, making up scary stories—"Mr. Roboto," about two young boys building a robotic monster in the basement of their apartment building, and "The Skeleton Cave," about two young boys discovering a buried grave site. Which is hard work, since the boys demand newer, ever-scarier plot lines.
     Tiring of this, I suggested breakfast. My oldest called for "Pancakes hot from the griddle!" I sprang to make them. My wife was somewhere, upstairs, sleeping I assumed.
     Each boy cracked an egg. I made sure that they washed their hands afterward—vigilance against egg-borne salmonella! The pancakes sizzled. I shooed the boys away from the hot griddle. "Go sit down boys," I said. "The pancakes will be ready in a minute."
     As I tended the final moments of the pancakes' progress, I heard a whimper. I almost didn't investigate immediately, but I turned to gaze into the living room.
     Right by the kitchen door, as luck would have it, both good and bad, we had placed a big pile of unformed cardboard boxes. Our 2-year-old had stuck his head through the plastic band holding the boxes together and pulled them down on top of himself.
     When I saw him, he was crying and losing the struggle to keep the two dozen flat boxes from toppling over on him, tightening the band around his neck as they went.
     You never saw a fat man move so fast. With both hands I pulled the band away from his neck. It budged a little, just enough for him to breathe. I tried pushing the boxes back against the wall, but that seemed to tighten the band, too. I called for my wife. Then yelled. Then screamed, the most urgent, loud, throat-stripping sound I think I've ever produced.
     After an eternal 10 or 15 seconds, she came running, wrapped in a towel. She found a scissors and cut the plastic strap. The 2-year-old was left with a nasty 3-inch red welt around his neck. He forgot about it a minute later. His dad was hoarse for the rest of the day. His mom reacted so quickly, once she heard the shouts, that she somehow fractured her foot flying downstairs.
     The whole thing happened so fast that, when it was over and I returned to the grill, I flipped the pancakes and they weren't burned.
     Which is a roundabout way of saying: Watch out for big piles of cardboard boxes. Or plastic bands. Or anything a kid can get his head in.
     We're all resting comfortably now. And I've got my next scary story all ready: "The Fiendish Boxes."
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 23, 2000

Texas Throwback: Does and Bees

     One rarely breaks away from a place cleanly. Our former homes exert a gravitational pull. So while safely landed in her native Chicago, our former Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey feels the tug of friends left behind.

     When a single person such as myself enjoyed meals al Fresco at fancy Italian joints in COVID safe Austin last summer, sometimes interesting characters would appear. While dining at Asti on 42nd and Duval, two dapper men in casually rumpled linen and felted Goorin Brothers hats sat with me on the sparsely populated patio. I wanted to go right over and join them. “What’s your story?” I’d say.
     Alas, I was far from decked out in my sporty wear during a long walkabout, and did not want to disturb their refined dining experience. Destiny had a different plan. I was wearing a button on my jean jacket and the astute waiter said “if you like buttons, you should talk to Jesse.” Jesse was the good-looking, mustached, longish reddish haired fancy man at the table across the way.“What the heck?” I thought, and I went over. Jesse and Stan were every bit as classy, reserved, and charming as I could have imagined. Jesse’s generous and loving spirt led him to present me with a one of a kind original, a button he made that stated “Ride The Ever Present Now.” I promptly affixed it to my fanny pack and promised to do so.

     This was the beginning of a sweet friendship. My favorite thing about Stan is his calm, slightly bemused, twinkly-eyed demeanor. Jesse is warm and sends inspirational texts JUST when you need them.
     One day, Jesse left a box of haute button-up shirts, padded hangers, and inspiring buttons on my porch. He asked me to donate the clothes and dole out the buttons to folks who needed a pick me up. I gave several of the buttons to my friend Kaitlin, who's a teacher. She was excited at the thought of including them in goodie bags for the kids she teaches.
     Every time someone complimented a button on my fanny pack, I'd remove it and hand it over to them. They were delighted, just as Jesse delighted me.
     Jesse loves bees. He created feeders for the yellow and black little buddies of ours, and regaled me with photos of them chomping down on sugar water. Jesse loves deer. He developed special friendships with the four leggeds who frequented his home in the hills of north Austin, giving them names like Cornbud and Cabbage Leaf, and I gleaned from his delight when he’d send me photos of his visitors.
     Since I have been back in Chicago, Jesse checks in regularly with cheerful messages that remind me that there is goodness in the world.
     “I’m listening to Klaus Schulze’s Moondawn on Spotify right now because the moon is shining in the skylight right over my room” and “I think Chicago is your placeYou settle in there for a while and find a place to fly your flag! I think you’re gonna have a great time there!” That’s a lot of rainbows. Thank you Jesse. It’s people like you who make the world go ‘round without much squeaking.

Stan and Jesse

Do we always have to care about others?

 

David Alfaro Siqueiros, "Our Present Image" (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)

     Last Father’s Day my wife bought me Air Pods Pro, a delightful pair of white ear buds. The sound quality is so pristine it brought tears to my eyes. The devices sleep in their own little sleek white lozenge that closes with a satisfying snap. Just the thing for the dad in your life and only $250.
     Walking the dog around my leafy suburban paradise, I wear them, listening to podcasts and audio books and music. They do block out the world, so if Kitty starts straining toward a passing dog, I’ll ask “Is your dog friendly?” while plucking the tiny marvel out of my left ear so I can hear the reply.
     Invariably, it is, and we humans chat superficially while our pets exchange sincere sniffs, tails wagging happily away. Then I slip the pod back in and float along like a bubble in the warm current of good feeling that is my life, for the most part.
     There was that thin young man who approached me Monday on the three-block stretch that passes for a downtown. He had on the standard summer uniform: shorts, a baggy pastel oxford shirt, untucked. Perhaps more sunburnt than is typical. He could have been 30, could have been 50. Hard to tell in the three seconds I appraised him. He asked me something, I removed my earbud and smiled encouragingly, anticipating his question: sometimes people step off the train and need directions. I love giving directions. It makes me feel so useful.
     “Can you buy me some food?” he said.
     “No,” I replied curtly, automatically, jamming my Air Pod Pro back into my ear and hurrying away, surprised and rattled. I twisted my head, trying to track him out of the corner of my eye, in case he followed me.
     Surprised because the refusal wasn’t me. I’m the sort of guy who would clap him on the back with a hearty “Of course!” and usher him into one of the fine eating establishments all around us. We were in front of Oliveri’s. Excellent lemon chicken. Across the street, Graeter’s, with its French pot process ice cream. That would perk up my new friend, and you’d now be reading the sad tale he’d unspool between bites of hot fudge sundae.
     But that didn’t happen.

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Illegal abortion leads to circle of tragedy

     An abortion cost $50 in Chicago in 1941.
     Kinda cheap—$800 in today’s dollars—considering it was an illegal procedure, performed in secret, condemned by the church at a time when organized religion had even more of a stranglehold on American society than it does now, which is really saying something.
     Chicago women back then had abortions anyway, for the same reasons they do now, ranging from medical, financial and emotional necessity. It was a fairly routine procedure in 1941. Your doctor would jot down an address—190 N. State—and you’d hurry to the Gabler Clinic on the 6th floor.
     The Gabler clinic had been open since the early 1930s, mostly. It would be periodically raided, only to open again. Leading to the question of how this criminal procedure was performed an average of five times a day in the heart of the Loop for almost a decade.
     Therein lies the tale.
     One reason religious zealots have such success restricting abortion is that it is seen as affecting only women. So they marshal their zombie army of imaginary babies and send them off to do battle against actual living people—mostly young, poor women—and thus approach the New Jerusalem, in their own minds.
     While it is true that women are the primary beneficiaries of abortions, and suffer most when abortion is restricted, they are not the only victims of criminalizing a highly popular medical procedure. With the U.S. Supreme Court taking a case arising from Mississippi’s draconian abortion laws, and Texas’ “Heartbeat Law” criminalizing abortion after six weeks, now seems an apt moment to remember a case that rocked Chicago 80 years ago. A taste of what’s in store for us should the faith-addled fanatics Donald Trump placed on the high court overturn Roe v. Wade.
     They called it “The Million Dollar Abortion Ring,” for the nearly 20,000 abortions, at $50 a pop, performed at the Gabler Clinic. The clinic went from open secret to front page news after Detective Daniel Moriarity, a 15-year veteran of the state’s attorney police force, went to 4367 N. Lake Park, pushed past a maid, and fired five shots into what he thought was the sleeping form of Ada Martin, who ran the clinic.
     It wasn’t Martin. It was her daughter, Jennie, 24.

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Eric Zorn takes the buyout

Eric Zorn at L. Woods.

     Impossible to say how many times Eric Zorn wrote the column I was too scared to write.
     Or didn't think to write. Or meant to write then forgot. Or got distracted by some trivial bullshit and wrote about that instead, while Eric concentrated on the Big Important Thing I was missing. Or kicked open the same door I had been gazing at, uncertainly.
     He did it again a week ago Sunday, in a lovely tribute to his parents, at first. He began with his mother knowing the words to the summer camp standard "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" better than she knows him—thank you dementia!—slipping in this wonderfully sly description of of the tune as a "nonsense ditty about the four-named apparent victim of identity theft"—if the cleverness flew past you, remember the "that's my name too!" part.
     Identity theft.
     Head-bowed respect at that one.
     After lovingly and accurately addressing this heart-breaking malady that I can't even allude to in my own column because my mom would be mad at me, using facts and perspective, he pivots the column to his family, an update on his wife and kids. A sense of dread rushed in, so strong that it became hard for me to keep reading. Because I knew what was coming. It was like how an object gets heavier and heavier as it nears the speed of light. Or watching a horror movie you've seen before. This is the part where he goes down the dim hall. There's the door. You know what's in the closet. I literally stopped reading the column, fled over to my blog to write this now, to put it off what I knew was coming, what has to come. A columnist doesn't bring his family onstage for a round of applause unless this is goodbye, and since I don't want it to be, I'm sticking my head in the sand here for a while. A sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If you don't open the box, the cat is alive.

     Of course I knew him first through his writing. I remember covering some suburban trial, and then reading his piece and thinking, ruefully: "Eric Zorn was in the same room with me, and I didn't know it!"

     We eventually met, more than 25 years ago. My second book, "Complete & Utter Failure" had just been published by Doubleday, so this would be in the mid-1990s.  He liked the book and wanted to meet its author. We had lunch outdoors on Broadway, I believe. I remember thinking, "He's very tall," the sort of in-depth intellectual observation that has fueled my writing ever since.

     At first I was frequently combative. Insecure people are often combative. I nicknamed him "The Professor," for his deliberate consideration and tendency to draw in experts. I don't like to do that, because it involves both more work and someone talking who isn't me.  That did not keep me from starting my third book with a vignette about Rob Sherman I lifted, uncredited, from an Eric Zorn column. 

     Our lives sometimes seemed to parallel each other. When Kent was born, I had the Tempo section with the column about the birth of Eric's twins, folded up in my back pocket as we rushed to the hospital. Reading material.
     We kept in touch. Some years I got the sense that, for Eric, that was like pulling up a lawn chair next to a car wreck and gazing, finger ruminatively tapping on his lips. I remember sitting with him at Harry Caray's, sucking at my lunchtime Jack-on-the-rocks, nodding at a waiter. "Why yes, I will have another." That could not have been fun for him.
     We became better friends after Jeff Zaslow died. Maybe now I was a friend short and needed another. Maybe it was that 600 mile round trip we took together in a day, driving to his funeral and back. We stopped at Eric's parents' house in Ann Arbor and I met them, the people he wrote about. A very long day, but we talked and got through it.
     I could still keep up a tone of joshing competition. In 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I used Eric as a ventriloquist's dummy to mock terrorists. I'm not sure what he or anybody else felt; I found it deliciously funny. But we were more allies than competitors now. We'd meet at lunch at L. Woods, between our two homes, compare notes, bitch and brag. He and his wife Johanna and Edie and I even went out for burgers at Hackney's once, the kind of convivial normality that usually eludes me.
     Last summer, during the pandemic, the only house I went over for lunch was his. And he came over to mine. We sat there, talking, because really, how many newspaper columnists are there? How many white-guy-in-their-60s newspaper columnists, who can discuss the sudden frenzied undergraduate drama that has infected our profession? In April, Eric wrote a thoughtful column on slain 13-year-old Adam Toledo and was roasted alive on Twitter. "You might as well have shot him yourself," I said, as a crowd of growling ivory tower academics and wet-from-the-womb radicals skipped around him as if he were a maypole, jeering. Credit the ingenuity of humans: it takes a kind of genius to turn tolerance into just another form of cruelty, and racial sensitivity as a pretext to dismiss and trivialize opinions that don't precisely mirror your own.
     We can talk later about Zorn jutting out his chin and accepting responsibility for John Kass, by taking time off for his kids. "Then-City Hall reporter John Kass pinch hit in my column space while I was gone." OMFG. That's like me tossing off in the middle of a post about 1980, "That was the year I reached around Mark Chapman outside the Dakota and shot John Lennon, thrust the gun into his hands and disappeared into the crowd."

     I can forgive Eric Zorn leaving the door unlocked so John Kass could sneak into professional column writing, rendering Tribune punditry into a nauseating mess, like some drunk intruder crapping on the sofa. Because really, the sort of people who value a Kass ... well, I suppose their coin is good too, and a newspaper is a universe, or should be, or used to be, and if running astrology charts, "Love is..." and a gerbil-on-a-wheel of mouth-breathing right wing fuckery keeps readers happy, well, so be it. 
     I guess I can't put it off forever. And I suppose I could be mistaken. No, actually, I can't be. I've been writing a column for a while myself, and know how this shit works. Calling your family up one by one for an update, by name, like the end of "The Sound of Music," means something. Let's go see what it means.
     A cliffhanger. Eric gets to the point where he brings up "the crazy times here at work' and just stops.
      "No space left for that particular topic today!" he writes. "But stay tuned."
     My God, that's like the rocket in the last episode of "The Prisoner." I initially thought it was a very Steinberg move, to divide your farewell into two parts. But I flatter myself. What a sharp piece of writing.
     I started to tweet it. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck..." I began, then, feeling a rare pang of decorum, changed into, "Damn damn damn damn," about 10 times, then castigated Alden Capital. See, this is what they're tossing away. Stripping away the heart and liver of the Chicago Tribune, a civic institution since 1847, its frequent revanchist politics be damned. Hoping that the violated near-corpse blunders blindly forward for a few years while they make their money.

     I don't blame Eric. I wouldn't have done any different. The moment the buy-outs were offered, I was on the phone to him. I wasn't even certain why — the way you automatically reach out to someone whose house burned down. I couldn't give him my house but I felt like giving him something. Advice? My go-to advice is always "Keep the day job." That year snaps by so fast and then you're a person who used to work at a major newspaper.
     But the inevitability of the Alden Capital vivisection changed the calculus. Jumping through a window is bad, but if somebody is coming up the stairs to shoot you, then by all means, jump through the window and run away, bloody but alive. The choice was take the big trough of cash now, eight weeks' pay plus a week for every year, and leave, or stay and be fired in a month with far fewer muffins in your basket when you're turned loose into the dark forest.
     I wrote this, tweeted my distress at his leaving, and then sat back to watch the furor rise. And a shocking thing happened. Nothing. Crickets. Readers didn't even perceive that the column was his clearing his throat to say goodbye. "Half resignation letter, half suicide note," I explained to a colleague. My wife didn't see it either. Nobody seemed to, at least nobody I could see on social media. For the first time in my life I felt like calling up Robert Feder, the media critic, and rattling his cage. Are you on vacation? Didn't you read that? Well, make some noise, because apparently nothing is real until you say it occurred.

    That was enough to raise doubt. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was working out some deal with whatever human beings might be associated with Alden. Maybe someone there actually cares what kind of newspaper they publish.
     With that thought in mind, I couldn't inject myself into the dynamic and who knows, somehow fuck things up. Maybe negotiations are going on. So I put this on the shelf and waited, checking in on it every few days, like looking in on rising dough. That's why it's so long. Kept adding bits. 

     I waited for Wednesday's column which was ... about Bitcoin. Maybe the Alden folks won't let him go. Realize the Trib needs some intelligence and decency to balance the acid malice and juvenile irresponsibility of John Kass.  

     When everyone else figures it out, or he makes his formal announcement, then I'll pull the trigger. Which is why you're reading this today and not 10 days ago. It wouldn't matter anyway. The thing Eric and I do, comment intelligently in a well-written fashion, isn't what's driving the conversation anymore, not the way wild extremism does. Fanatics glitter in the spotlight while moderation creeps off to die alone in the shadows.

     How does it feel? Like a brontosaurus, under a darkening sky, up to its knees in a bog, slowly chewing a big mouthful of decaying vegetation, gazing uncomprehendingly at the heaving ribs of a stegosaurus that has toppled over on its side and is breathing hard, eyes staring, fixed. 

     Something like that.

     Ah, I see Eric has formally announced it. Robert Feder of course has the news. Time to pull the trigger. 
     I'm not sure how much of this protracted reaction is due to the obvious harbinger of my own professional mortality. Somewhere between a bit and a lot. Then again, Eric getting someplace first and doing it well usually meant that I had no need to go there at all. So maybe I've got a few years left before it's my turn, and the big thumb of doom squashes me down too. When Mary Mitchell retired, the paper held her a bash at a swank West Loop club, with a live band and an open bar and the mayor and special custom-made cookies and moist-eyed tributes. The place was mobbed. Clearly, I thought, Mary must be the greased hub upon which the city spins.

     "You're setting the bar pretty high for when I retire," I shouted over the crowd noise to the then-editor-in-chief.
     "You're never retiring," Chris Fusco said, and I peeled away, wondering if that was a complaint, a compliment, a plea, an augury, or some combination of the four.