Ravenswood Notes: TKO

     One of the more difficult parts of being a professional writer is learning to trust the people you work with. Sometimes my book editor will make a decision that rubs me the wrong way, and I'll have to pause and remind myself that I had no trouble embracing his judgment when he was praising me, so maybe I ought to consider that he still might be right about this edit I disagree with.      

    With Caren Jeskey's Saturday offering below, I was nearing the end, and references to me  started thudding down like hail. I was just at her last paragraph, thinking, "All this has to go," when I got to the part where she says that no, Neil-be-damned, it has to stay. Well, okay. If you insist, but it goes against my better judgment. Speaking of which, I thought it high time to add a formal bio of Caren to the blog, and you can find it on the right hand side of the page, under mine.

“The world feels dusty when we stop to die; we want the dew then.” 

          —Emily Dickinson (who died at the age of 56, with ten of her poems published).

     Lately I’ve been reminded that time is short. How do I want to live my one wild and precious life?? My first choice would not have been to experience a deadly pandemic on a dangerously warming planet with the threat of oligarchy at our heels right here on US soil. But what choice do I have?
     I am no Pollyanna. I’m dismayed at the state of the world, and sometimes scared. My saving grace is savoring micro moments. Simple pleasures are all around us all the time, if we pay attention. Helping others—(trigger warning: virtue signaling ahead), which this week came in the form of coordinating a donation and delivery of furniture to two young Afghan men who’ve recently relocated nearly 6,000 miles away from home—helps me remember how lucky I am, and brings light to others. Warm baths, long walks, connecting with people, fresh air, stretching, resting, playing music that makes me happy, taking deep breaths, reading EGD to keep me laughing, and keeping a house full of plants helps too.
     One of the most delightful things that happened this past week was noticing that mushrooms had sprung up among the peppers I am growing from the seeds of a big red, orange, and yellow pepper I ate last year. I dried the seeds and did not follow propagation protocol the babies popped out of the rich dark soil anyway. When I noticed that fungi had voluntarily joined the party I did what anyone would do. I laughed and smiled and talked to them. Then I snapped some photos for others to enjoy.
     I’m not sure what prompted it, but I also ended up in a Facebook chat with a friend who lives on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. Sir Sidney Poitier’s name came up, and my friend shared some thoughts that a Bahamian local, Leslie Vanderpool, had posted on Facebook about Sir Sidney. I quoted Leslie in last week’s piece, and then I had the true pleasure of a 90 minute Zoom conversation with her yesterday.
     Leslie is the founder and Executive Director of the Bahamas International Film Festival, which is entering its 18th year. Leslie was born in The Bahamas, where her father Dr. Cyril Osborne Vanderpool was the first government dentist in 1960, before starting his thriving private practice. Dr. Vanderpool played golf with Sir Sidney. The Doctor and the Sir were dear friends. “I was always hearing great stories,” the kind where “you wish you could live them out again. They were such gentlemen. They loved life. They loved to have fun. They lived as if life was going to be their one last day.” Leslie had the good fortune of having Sir Sidney in her life, and he became a lifelong mentor.  

  “He was loving and unguarded; one of the memorable," she said. "Because of Sir Sidney, I always knew I wanted to act— since the age of 10. Having him around when he was in town, my father referring to him, seeing this larger than life person” made an impression. 

      Through her studies in performance schools, and throughout stints of living in New York, LA and The Bahamas, Leslie experienced Sir Sidney’s comforting presence as a constant thread. “He was a gift who came into my family’s life that I will never forget. That shining light that never lets you go.” They may not have spoken often, but when they did Leslie felt “in my adult life I had somebody who knew my family, and had my best interests” in mind. “He was honest. He did not tell you things you wanted to hear. He was intuitive. His daughters Anika and Sydney always talked about how he’d never hurt a fly. Or an animal. Or an ant. He was always so present and conscious.”
     “I see Sir Sidney in his children. They all have unique personalities. Charm. Gentleness. Concision that Sir Sidney had. Conviction. Tenacity.” Their mother is “the classiest lady. They all exude love and kindness. My breath was taken away in his presence. I felt comfortable, loved. He instilled in himself and others a sense of wanting to do the best we can. He strove every day to be better than the last day."
     Leslie feels that “his generation really wanted to nurture and guide and mentor. They knew they had nothing to lose by giving. They always shared. I remember several conversations” where Sir Sidney said “'I am talking to you as though you are my child. I want the best for you.' He was a mammoth of a human being, this soul that had my back. And that was enough. I still make decisions based on what he told me, keeping those thoughts and discussions present. An actor of that magnitude, the intuitive ability he was gifted with, it was so strong."
     "He really respected himself and wanted to make sure people gave him that respect. Everything was serious, with light-hearted undertones. He was adamant about what he wanted to convey and how he wanted to deliver. What he wanted to see in The Bahamas. He constantly made sure arts were prevalent in The Bahamas. He made a video for me on our website" to help make sure people come to the film fest.
     “The last time I saw [Sir Sidney] was in 2017, in LA. I remember being in his home office. He was always curious, very curious. He was still wanting to learn and know what’s going on in The Bahamas."
     Leslie feels a strong calling to continue to bring arts to The Bahamas, and seeks to use film to "celebrate, entertain, and educate."
     “We need people who are mentors and see the vision we don’t see for ourselves. We have to continue to lift people up. There are people who believe in others. You are blessed to have Neil in your life.” 

     I am. The experience of writing for this blog has been one of the most fun and exciting things I’ve experienced. It also gave me a part of my purpose since the pandemic began, and I lost most of my livelihood. As Leslie said, mentors like Neil help people like me “continue that torch and flame” of talent within ourselves. Leslie shared a little ditty where "Muhammad Ali's wife used to ride my horse," and showed me a photo of Ali holding her in his arms, lifting her off of her horse. Another giant we all love.
     When I think of the fact that I write for THE Neil Steinberg, I do get a little bit starstruck here and there. He's the same guy I've read for much of my adult life, who my parents have read at the kitchen table for many years, and who they revere and respect. He's the guy whose signed book I read and re-read years ago. I am sure Neil will try to edit this out, but I'll try not to let him. Talking to Leslie was another delightful moment in my week. She reminded me that it's important to express gratitude. So thank you Neil. It's time we continue to knock this thing called life right out of the ring as we support, celebrate, and uplift each other.
     Over the last several days the ‘shrooms did some funny things. They morphed and turned gray. Some passed away. New ones keep sprouting. It’s quite the journey and I’m grateful to be here for all of this, drinking from the dew of life. Thank you, dear readers.

Stalking the elusive present participle

    When I was in third grade, Mrs. Nemeth handed out a mimeographed worksheet listing phrases that students had to deem either “possible” or “impossible.” One was “a pig with a bushy tail.” I checked “possible” and she marked it wrong.
     This offended me to the bottom of my fussy little 8-year-old soul, and the next day I marched into class with my Giant Golden Book of Biology, and showed Mrs. Nemeth the page about salamander body parts being grafted onto each other. If the leg of a big salamander could be attached to the body of a small salamander, I huffed, was it not possible that a bushy fox’s tail could be grafted onto a pig?

     I think she hated me after that.
     Correction by students — either rightly or wrongly — is one of the countless challenges of being a teacher.
     When I was cobbling together my faux English class for Wednesday’s paper, parsing Lori Lightfoot’s very schoolmarmish “You’re not listening!” (really, our mayor has more snaps than a onesie) and surfing grammar web sites, it did cross my mind that I was out of my depth and should enlist an English teacher to check my work.
     But I was fairly confident — always dangerous — so I shrugged and decided, were I wrong, well, somebody would correct me. And besides, wouldn’t being wrong add a layer of verisimilitude to my classroom presentation? A sly dig.
     Consequences began rolling in. Here’s Peg Cain, who taught literature for 20 years at Nazareth Academy in LaGrange:

     “Are listening,” of course, is a compound verb. “Listening” is, in this case, not a gerund, but the present participle of the verb. ... “Not listening,” therefore, cannot be a predicate nominative because “listening” is not a noun in this sentence. “Not” is merely an adverb, hanging around ...

    So not a gerund but ... a present participle?
     Jeanne Parker, who was teaching English at Palatine Township High School before I was born, joined in:

     In the sentence “You’re not listening,” listening is indeed a verb; you’re the contraction, does indeed contain the subject you as well as the verb are, which is NOT, however, the main verb but rather an auxiliary verb, making are listening the main verb phrase, NOT a predicate nominative.

     So ... a main verb phrase?

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'Those in peril on the sea'

 

YOKOSUKA, Japan (Sept. 20, 2021) Sailors assigned to U.S. 7th Fleet flagship, USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19), operate a firehose during the general shipboard firefighting and self-contained breathing apparatus (GSF/SCBA) course at Service Warfare School Command (SWSC), Engineering Learning Site (ELS) at Commander, Fleet Activities Yokosuka. The purpose of the GSF/SCBA course is to train Sailors to properly combat damage control casualties. Blue Ridge is the oldest operational ship in the Navy and, as 7th Fleet command ship, actively works to foster relationships with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific Region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Trinity Benjamin).

     Like many boys, I love ships and sailing, at least in theory. I wrote a book about crossing the Atlantic on a merchant marine vessel, the TS Empire State out of Ft. Schuyler, and seldom pass up the opportunity to climb aboard a water craft of any kind, from kayaks and rowing sculls to a three-masted wooden sailing ship and a modern missile frigate. 
     And as a member of the media, I regularly receive big packages of canned stories about sailors from the U.S. Navy, keyed to their hometowns. I try to take a few moments to gaze over them. I've gotten some interesting stories, such as this one, about that "slab-sided techno-iceberg" of a ship, the USS Zumwalt.

Jason Timmos (US Navy photo)

   In the latest offering, there was Chicago's own, Aviation Machinist’s Mate 3rd Class Jason Timmos, in the Philippine Sea, performing, as the Navy describes it, with characteristic thoroughness, "maintenance on an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, assigned to the “Black Eagles” of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron (VAW) 113, in the hangar bay of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group (VINCSG) is on a scheduled deployment in U.S. 7th Fleet to enhance interoperability through alliances and partnerships while serving as a ready-response force in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific region."
     Not to take anything away from Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Isaiah B. Goessl, who took the photo, but, well, compare it to the firefighting photo above. Now THAT is something that would enliven a man's blog on a cold January day. Hats off to Trinity Benjamin, who took the shot.
      Anyway, I thought both worth sharing, one for its visual pop, one for the person it highlights. If this blog post somehow finds its way to the service members involved, please know that your country is grateful that you are out there, sailing the mighty oceans, keeping our nation safe, from external enemies anyway, and Chicago is particularly proud of Jason Timmos, and ready to welcome him with open arms, cold beer and hot pizza.

     Until that day comes, a parting thought. I once had the pleasure of visiting the USS Constitution at the Charlestown Navy Yard. The oldest ship afloat, "Old Ironsides" was launched in 1797. At their gift shop I bought a keychain that on one side shows a Cracker Jack seaman in a peacoat and and the words, "US Navy—Lone Sailor" and on the back, a sentiment that the sailors I mention, or their families, might appreciate. I'm not much into prayer, but this is a good one:

Eternal Father

Strong to save
Whose arms hath bound
the restless wave
Who bids the mighty
Ocean deep
its appointed
limits keep
Oh hear us when we
cry to thee
for those in peril
on the sea.



The chaos IS the education

     All right class, settle down. Are you glad to be back? I’m sure glad to be here — at this point, I‘m glad to be anywhere. I bet your parents are really, really glad you’re here, and not pinballing off the walls at home.
     How was your week off? Fun? Good. We’re going to have more fun right now. Today we’re going to diagram a sentence. Just three words.
      [Walks to chalkboard. Squeaking chalk.] 

     “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING.”

     Can anyone tell me who said this? C’mon, you’re not reading your newspapers. What? Yes Shirley? Sigh. Newspapers? Well, they’re like web sites, only printed on paper, wrapped in plastic and thrown at your house in the mornings. Don’t your parents get one? Very big in their day.
     [Taps board with chalk.]
     Anyone know who said that? Yes Claire? That’s right. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, chewing out the Chicago Teacher’s Union in that distinctive my-way-or-the-highway manner that wins her so many friends and allies.
     Though in this case ... it worked, kinda, for the moment.
     Back to the sentence. Who can find the verb? Lester? “Listening?” No, you fell into my trap. While “listen” is indeed a verb, here it is what is known as a gerund — a verb with “ing” at the end that acts as a noun. In this sentence “listening” means “in a state of compliance.”
     Anybody? You’d think your schooling hasn’t been a chaotic jumble for, well, a long time. How are you going to thrive in the dystopian hellscape of rising totalitarianism played out against social collapse and global warming if you don’t know good grammar?
     Don’t answer that.
     The verb in the sentence is tucked within the first word, “you’re,” which of course is a contraction of “you” and “are.” “Are” is a verb, here acting as the second person plural form of “to be.” Here the mayor is telling the teachers that by not holding class in person, because COVID protocols are still the disordered hash they were a year ago, they are failing to heed her orders.

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Flashback 1992: Making a Tombstone, Sending Out a Message

Hosea Knox, 1992 (Photo for the Sun-Times by Robert A. Davis; used with permission)

    

      Sunday's tribute to newspaper photographers got a lot of attention. One of the shooters I mentioned, the great Bob Davis, wrote on Facebook: "Our mutual curiosity in human interest stories brought value to the readers. There are a million stories in the naked city! Just get on the bus and ride!!"

    "Get on the bus..." conjured up a 30-year-old memory. We did just that. Hopped on a CTA bus, randomly, to see where it took us. It took us to Elmo's Tombstones.

     Knox died last year at 82, incidentally. Elmo's Tombstones Service is still in business, run by his daughters.  The column is quite short: it might have been more of an extended caption for Bob's photo. Actually, its brevity is a blessing; I like to think I wouldn't write "the sign boldly announces its presence" in recent years. Though its clunkiness isn't the central flaw: I should have gone back, talked to customers (which, I can tell from the photo captions, Bob indeed did, to continue our theme of photographers as goad and pole star).  

     You can't miss the little building on South State Street. The signs boldly announce its presence, as a monument of sorts, to Chicago's casual familiarity with sudden death, from gang fights, guns, drugs and other causes.
     "Tombstones Made While U Wait," a huge sign declares. "Be 4 You Go Call Elmo."
     Inside, Hosea Knox, who took over the business when founder Elmo Williams retired eight years ago, is buffing the surface of a fresh tombstone for a 17-year-old boy. On one part of the tombstone it says: "Son-Brother" on another, his nickname "Lil Key `G' " and a Star of David.
     "That's a gang symbol," said Knox, pointing out the star, which the family selected from a book of patterns. Knox was uncertain how the teen died. "You really can't tell what happens to them, for sure."
     Knox makes five or six tombstones a day, sometimes while people wait.
     "I usually say, `Get a cup of coffee, or something,' " says Knox.
     While he has no way of knowing how many of his customers are from the fraternity of murder victims—about 700 so far this year—he has his suspicions.
     "What I try to do is, I try not to ask them what happened," he says. "A lot of the time that opens up wounds and they are trying to forget. But I can see the date of death. If they're a teen, unless they were sick, they were killed."
     The shop blares with the noise of the Ingersol-Rand air compressors and it's heavy with the smell of enamel paint. Fresh gravestones wait to be engraved, while others, with the names newly carved, wait for the families to pick them up.
     Knox points out that oftentimes the tragedy of a teen's murder is compounded by the grim practical reality of the cost of burial. Even his budget tombstones cost about $350, plus there is $200 or $300 more to prepare the gravesite for the stone, not to mention all the other costs of burial.
     "A lot of people don't have the funds to do what they had in mind," says Knox.
     Knox said that people spend months paying small sums toward a tombstone. "If I get half, I'll cut (the stone)" he says, although he doesn't let the stones out of the shop until he is paid in full.
     He says he doesn't spend too much time speculating on his position in the tragic chain of violence in the city.
     "It's just a business," he says. He doesn't think that gang members, driving past his business, ever view the stacks of tombstones as a warning sign. They never think the tombstones may be waiting for their names.
     "People don't believe they will get shot," he says. "You show it to them. They see it. But they just don't believe."
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 20, 1992

Roseland Community Hospital vs. Omicron: ‘People are exhausted’

Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin. 

     Jean Joseph’s patient is struggling against him.
     The respiratory therapist is in one of 19 small rooms ringing Roseland Community Hospital’s busy emergency department, each occupied by a COVID case, each room’s air negative-pressurized to keep droplets of infection from wafting back into the ER. Joseph is trying to draw blood from the man’s right wrist to get a reading of oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
     But the 79-year old twists and writhes.
     “He was fighting with me,” said Joseph, coming out, peeling off a yellow plastic protective gown. “When you get COVID, you cannot function. The carbon dioxide makes you lethargic and confused.”
     “Cannot function,” “lethargic” and “confused” are apt terms to describe our national response to COVID, a roiling, contradictory crisis: medical disaster intermixed with scientific triumph. The selfless, exhausted labors of skilled doctors and nurses here, butting up against selfish, stubborn public resistance and ignorance there. A roller coaster disaster of peaks and valleys, with no end in sight as our nation finishes its second year fighting COVID-19.
     The first case in the United States of what the World Health Organization dubbed 2019-nCoV, for “2019 novel coronavirus” was diagnosed Jan. 20, 2020. 

     The arrival of vaccines one year ago offered the promise of getting the pandemic under control. Then last month, the highly contagious Omicron variant jammed hospitals coast to coast.
     “It’s getting worse,” said Joseph, comparing the start of 2022 to last year’s peak. “Because we have more COVID now.”
     Roseland Community Hospital is a reminder that not every hospital is a sprawling, flush medical center like Northwestern or Rush. At 125 beds, it is neither big nor wealthy. The Far South Side hospital’s facilities have been described as “no better than those in Third World countries” without argument from hospital administrators.
     And while there has been improvement since then, put it this way: There is no self-playing grand piano in its lobby off West 111th Street — in fact, there’s no lobby at all; that was curtained off last year and given over to COVID testing and vaccine injection. Recently, the line to be tested stretched out the door, around the corner, down the block, all the way to Wentworth Avenue.

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Working with photographers

Ashlee Rezin, left, at Roseland Community Hospital on Wednesday.

     One of the best things about working at a newspaper is working with newspaper photographers. 

     I can't begin to recount what I've learned over the years, the insights, the tips, the stories that came my way. Just doing our jobs together. Cruising slowly through a low-rise CHA project with Pulitzer-Prize winner John H. White, soft-spoken and wise. Running out of the newsroom after Brian Jackson because of the Rose of Sharon Church was on fire. After a hose split in the sub-zero cold and my feet got wet, Brian dragged me into a bodega, and the owner gave us tea while I put my feet on the radiator. Covering a candlelight vigil for a murdered woman with Bob Black. Scottie Stewart, himself a paramedic, knowing everything there is to know about fire fighters. Rich Chapman, covering a Playboy photo shoot.

     Bob Ringham and I driving downstate to cover the Mississippi floods, talking, him telling me about lying in a foxhole in Vietnam, severely wounded, after a shell killed the other guys in it.  Then years later, allowing me into his home, to write about a story about his wife Peg as she died of Lewy body dementia.  

     And Bob Davis. We were a team, and really should pull a book together about the stories we did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That day in 1991 at the medical examiner's office. Him getting up close, right into the face of a corpse that had lain on the floor of a transient hotel for two weeks in August. Clinging to the boom of a tower crane atop the Park Hyatt. Traveling up the Mississippi on a gravel barge after they re-opened the river following the floods. Holding onto the back of his belt as he hung out the window of a cab hurtling through Taipei, capturing the colorful blur of nightlife. 

     During one visit downstate during the Mississippi floods, finding an enclave of Harlan County coal miners who had retired to the paradise of Southern Illinois, only to have the river destroy everything they owned.  "What's it like inside?" Bob called to a gaunt man sweeping off his porch. "Can't get inside," the old man said, and Bob and I put our shoulders to the door and pushed it in—a couch had floated against it. The waterline was a foot below the ceiling, with framed photos face down in the muck. Bob stepped in first, turned, and framed the man looking in the doorway. "A poor man can't get a break in this life," the man said. 

      Then in 2013, the Sun-Times, desperately trying to keep afloat, fired all of its photographers. Twenty-eight people. Reporters were expected to fill the gap with our iPhones. It was a terrible, false economy, like putting out your eyes to save on mascara.

     Working without a photographer began to feel like the regular routine, the new diminished journalistic world we all had to live in, if it could be called living. We got used to it, or tried to.

      But that has been changing, for a long time now, actually. At least five years. Now we have people like Ashlee Rezin. I won't embarrass her by going on about her too much. We've worked together on a number of stories, particularly medical stories after COVID hit. On one, about an overworked head nurse, Ashlee provided so many important details that I wasn't there to see, I shared the byline with her, something that hardly ever happens. She called me Monday and pointed out that hospitals are heating up again. The words "...so get off your ass" were not required—and of course Ashlee would never say that, but I got the message, made the call, and Wednesday we were at Roseland, on the far South Side, which you can read here. 

     I do want to point this out. When I wrote my lede sentence, it was, "Jean Joseph's patient is thrashing around." She read it in the paper's system, and observed that I was overstating the case. I instantly saw that she was right, and dialed it back to "is struggling against him."

      That sensitivity to nuance, and willingness to speak up—hey, this isn't quite right—without drama or fear that it would be taken wrong, is a rare and valuable thing.  We both know we're trying to tell exactly what happened.

     Nor is she alone. The 2013 firing created so much ill-will against the paper, I think some readers somehow don't quite realize that we have photographers now.  Not only is there Ashlee, but people like Pat Nabong—she took the wonderful portrait of Sister Rosemary Connelly that ran on our front page a week ago Sunday. Energetic youngsters—Tyler LaRiviere, Anthony Vazquez, Brian Ernst—I've worked with them all. They're out there, every day, exploring every corner of the city. 

     With the endless COVID lockdown, and all the terrible isolation that comes with it, I think it's extra important to recognize the value of working with other people, for a spectrum of reasons, from camaraderie to a second set of eyes to, with photographers, the resulting pictures, which really are worth 1,000 words. Or more.

      Could we use additional photographers? Sure. But that doesn't negate the constant, gerbil-on-a-wheel work that the newspaper's photographers are doing every day. If you haven't seen the best of their 2021 photos, give it a look. Chicago should be proud to know they are out there, capturing our reality, today and for all time. I know I am. I wrote Monday's Roseland story. But Ashlee gave the push that got it written.