Ravenswood Notes: Five Years North

     Poetry is the fire axe behind glass, the bottle of water in your backpack, the thing you reach for when you need to reach for something, and I was glad to see Caren Jeskey bookend her Saturday essay with a pair of powerful poems.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

—Robert Frost

     Skeins of unwoven yarn and instruments unplayed pepper the corners and gather dust on the shelves of our pandemic homes. After a few months of learning chords, a guitar hangs unplayed behind a friend as we Zoom. She guiltily explains that she stopped playing after a few months of lessons. Others mention undone projects that fizzled out. Unused packets of bread making yeast are being frantically given away in neighborhood sharing groups before they expire. Indoor gardeners are pawning off a preponderance of aloe pups and clippings from prolific Wandering Dudes.
     Folks are afraid to tell their friends, when asked, “I laid in bed and watched Netflix for four hours,” or “I scrolled Facebook for most of the morning," or “I ate three bowls of cereal and went to sleep.” However, they will proudly share if they spent a couple hours reading an actual book or another “worthy” endeavor. They feel ashamed at their lack of productivity and as though are being scrutinized by social media or another eye in the sky at all times, won’t often share about the amount of time spent vegging out or simply resting.
     I heard on NPR the other day that during the Great Depression, Americans were urged to take up hobbies. This was partly classist. It’s hard to take up a hobby when waiting in breadlines and coming home to hungry babies, not to mention little to no means for crafting, cooking, or musical supplies.
     Hobbies are a good idea though. Not the kind you spend too much money on and never touch again after the initial good intentions and energy. Baby steps are fine too. A hobby can be cloud gazing. Counting the different kinds of mullions you see on a brisk winter walk, on a bus or train, or in the passenger’s seat of a car. Meditating. Just stopping.
     After days of isolation mostly indoors save the occasional walk, due to an avalanche of work and not enough sleep, I was overjoyed that I had to drive to Wilmette for an errand on Thursday. I took Sheridan Road and ogled the frozen white water at the bend by Calvary Cemetery. I kept within the 15-25 mph speed limit past stately houses and patches of lakefront, and felt soothed. When stressors tried to creep back in, the freedom of driving on a sunny day brought me to the perfect moment.
     I curved around the magnificent form of the Baha'i Temple and by then all of my mental clutter was gone. It was just me, my clean car—since we had stopped for a $3 wash—and a gorgeous 16 degree day, driver’s window down for some real sun rays. On the way back I stopped and contemplated the brilliant white iced-over lake from the deck of the Lighthouse Beach.

     We have learned that stressors of our world community can become a formless, faceless behemoth. Only the very privileged are less scathed by what’s happening down on the ground. The rental market is out of control. Everyone seems to have COVID (thank goodness, not me, but I can’t count the people in my life who do). Medical staff are quitting in droves and have been completely traumatized. Folks still don’t get it and continue to take risks. I get it, but it seems to speak to delusion, diagnosable folie à deux.
     On the up side, this could be a world war, and it’s not, even if it feels that way sometimes.
     I believe that finding oneself in this mess is the key. If we can do that, we can live more mindfully. We can accept our limitations and use our power to affect the changes that we can. I long for a world movement of refining our senses. Instead, I fear that the collective nightmare of this pandemic will end with us being in worse shape that we were before.
     This week I’ve had great challenges that might have completely robbed me of my peace in the past. What saved me was knowing that my inner partner was always there for me. She had my back. She reminded me that the only way out of a mess is to clear the clutter.
     On Wednesday night I took the time to watch a documentary film Five Years North about the journey of a young man named Luis. I knew I had to make this small effort (rather than my guilty pleasure Hulu show that makes me laugh my butt off) to remind me that the world is full of people who have much, much less than I do and I have to remember that in order to stay grateful for all I do have. To appreciate my life and my loved ones now. This is not a dress rehearsal.
     Luis was sixteen when he took the harrowing journey from his small Mayan village in Guatemala to New York City. He spent the next several years working from before dawn until well after dusk to pay his smugglers so that his family in Guatemala would not lose their home. It was more than $20,000. Then he stayed so that he could continue sending money home so his sisters could go to school. One washed dish at a time. He then became a line cook and moved up to being a chef. He may have prepared a meal for me or you one day when traveling was safe.
     Yes, the world is overpopulated. Yes, it’s a sacrifice to care for others.
     What is the purpose of being on this earth? The one good thing this pandemic has done for many of us is to reset and turn back to the simplest things in life. From a place of calm grounding we can move mountains if we try.
     While Ms. Plath in the words below does not seem to see her worth, I feel she cuts to the quick of the starkness of life. And death.

Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
            —Sylvia Plath

Don’t be afraid, it’s just public radio

I've been on WBEZ many times. You talk, the words go over the airwaves.
No non-profit police yank them back.

     When the idea of merging the Sun-Times with WBEZ — OK, we’re being given to them, but allow us a fig leaf of pride — was initially bandied about, my first impulse was to write something mocking the station, perhaps a parody of their membership pledge drives, a regular cup rattle that can send the most passionate National Public Radio listener lunging for the dial.
     But I never got beyond contemplation. Talk about an easy target; what I call a “duck in a bucket.” Imagine: the mallard placidly floating in the pail at your feet, quacking softly as you raise the shotgun. Where’s the challenge in that?
     With readers asking for my take, I remember how for decades I’ve fought my way to the WBEZ studios through the dense crowds packing Navy Pier — trying not to have an eye put out by a churro, reflecting glumly every time at how before the pier was renovated, I scoffed that anybody would go all the way out there. It became the most popular tourist attraction in Illinois. A prophet I am not.
     The folks at WBEZ always seem earnest, professional, young. True, they look at me like some mud-caked rhinoceros lumbering unexpectedly into the Botanic Garden’s annual orchid show. But that could be my own unease.
     Yes, I read the Tribune editorial, snapping open their lorgnette and examining the merger, umm, acquisition, tutting about election endorsements being scuttled by our non-profit status. Having spent five years on the editorial board, let me tell you, endorsements are a nightmare to produce, like running a geography bee over six counties. So now suburbanites will have to pay attention to their own local politics and come to their own conclusions. Or use the Democratic Party cheat sheet in the voting booth. Not the end of the world.
     Readers worry: Will I be muzzled? Will I start solemnly intoning about global warming, instead of my usual chirpy, trivial, out-of-the-blue, oh-my-God-I-can’t-stop-talking blabbery?
     I’m not concerned. The fear seems to be that nonprofits must be neutral. But consider how that plays out in reality. WBEZ is not some generic radio news ticker spewing anodyne information. Listen for 15 minutes and certain political shadings are easily detected. There is a particular worldview, a perspective, despite their non-profit status. WIND it is not.

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The tough part about going on WBEZ is fighting through the crowds at Navy Pier. Getting to the
station without gagging on the smell of honey roasted nuts or having your eye put out by a tourist's 
churro can be a challenge. 

Ready and waiting

     Work on a longer story that's set to run this Monday took me to various locations downtown Wednesday morning, and at one point we passed Racine, a few blocks south of the newspaper office, and I felt a passing desire to stop in, even though I had no reason to stop by and knew there would be no one there. Just to see the place, because it has been ... what? ... three months since I last visited. Quite a long time really.
     In late October, I went to the office because I happened to be downtown anyway—using the special collections room at Harold Washington Library—and I thought I'd check in to see if there was any mail.
    There was mail, some readers thanking me for a particular columns, others complaining bitterly, a few more copies of Poetry Magazine; man, they stack up quickly. Nothing urgent. I looked out at the utterly empty newsroom. It all seemed so ... wrong.  Usual life frozen in time, like a bakery in Pompeii. All that was missing was the ash.
      The paper was the subject of conversation Wednesday with the colleague I was working with, as the Sun-Times' merger with WBEZ seems as if it has gone through, and we talked about how good it'll be when COVID is behind us and everybody is back working in the same place again. If we are ever back working in the same place again. There's an energy, a life, that's has been missing, well, for years.

    Though the whole point of newspapering is seldom to be found in the office; it's usually anyplace but the office. (Except for editors and such; it's hard to copy edit a piece in a dark alley). Out and about, as we were, climbing over fences and clambering over concrete abutments. 

     As I was reminded in October, when I gazed around the newsroom, and noticed this bulletproof vest, slumped against a colleague's desk, as if exhausted, no doubt left there after some summertime disturbance. I wouldn't lump reporters in with cops and firefighters—that's closing your eyes, tilting your chin up, and asking to be socked. But we do  
run toward danger too, sometimes.
     Anyway, it was a long day, Wednesday, with more climbing and clambering than I'm used to. And very cold. So really, apologies, but all I've got at the moment to share with you are these three photos. Above, the homeless encampment under the Kennedy at Belmont. The flak jacket at right. And below, the newsroom as it appeared last time I was there, on Oct. 20. Ready, and waiting. That's two of us. Well, not ready right now. But surely tomorrow. 

‘People are hungry for puppetry’

“The Bluest Eye" will be performed as a puppet drama Jan. 28-30 at the DuSable Museum.

     Chicago is a puppet town. Or was. Not only did the word “puppeteer” first see print here in 1915, but perhaps the most influential puppet show in American history, Burr Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” debuted on TV here in 1947. It not only got parents buying televisions en masse, but — my own pet theory — the funny, ad-libbed program helped spawn Chicago’s live improv comedy scene in the 1950s.
     Chicago is certainly Puppetville from now until the end of the month, as the 4th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival takes over, offering 100 performances from 20 local and national companies at more than a dozen locations, from the American Indian Center in Albany Park to the DuSable Museum in Hyde Park.
     I’ve always felt an affinity to puppets. When the Festival began in 2015, I threw “Puppetry Week” on my blog, and tried to explain the appeal:

     This odd subcellar of culture, part sculpture, part folk art, part vaudeville, also has personal appeal to me. There is a kinship between journalism and puppetry. Both require dedicated craftsmen, albeit in dwindling numbers, practicing a profession that neither thrives nor vanishes, but somehow remains perpetually defunct. Both are rough simulacra of life; both had some legendary moment in the cultural spotlight in the hazy past — Hayden composed puppet operas for the royal court, a popular puppet dinner theater was steps off Michigan Avenue — but now linger on in the margins, practiced by various oddballs and misfits.

     Puppets are generally seen as comic, Kermit the Frog types. So it can surprise some that puppets are also dramatic, even tragic. Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” is being performed during the festival. One excerpt I saw in preview: Nick Lehane’s “The Chimpanzee,” to be performed at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago Jan. 22-24, is a poignant, almost heartbreaking work about a chimp who once lived with a family, now mournfully remembering happier times, a captivity that strikes a chord in our COVID-19 locked-down world.
     “When we see puppets, we see ourselves in the puppets’ experience,” said Chicago puppeteer Blair Thomas, the festival founder and artistic director. “When we are caught up in the suffering of the pandemic, the puppet world is not caught up in that, but reflecting back, a mirror to us.”
     Last year Thomas didn’t consider holding the festival. Why risk it this year?

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Martin Luther King Drive

Barbara Kruger

     I have a benefit that most bloggers don't: my work often runs in print, a newspaper. And unlike the internet, a newspaper is not an endless plain where enormous assemblages of words may be parked. Most days, I can't write beyond 719 words.

     Quite brief really. Thus I write, then I cut. 
     Generally a good thing. You lose a lot of fat. But you also lose some fascination. I didn't really miss the part below until I read Rick Kogan's fine piece on honoring Martin Luther King Jr. by naming streets after him, in Chicago and across the country.
     This graph was cut from my Monday column, explaining the chilly reception that King often got in Chicago: 

     Thus Chicago had is own entrenched Black leaders, men like Rev. J. H. Jackson, powerful pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church, who were more than willing to tell King to go back where he came from.   

      Jackson opposed King's non-violence campaign (because, he said, it suggested that Black people were violent). Indeed, he opposed the word "black" (arguing that "negro" was more inclusive). After King was assassinated and South Park Way was re-named "Martin Luther King Drive" Jackson changed the church address to 405 E. 31st. while denying that it was done to shun King. "You entered from 31st St., didn't you?" he told a newsman.
     "You entered from 31st Street." A reminder: there is always a code. No one says "I'm bought off" or "I'm turning my back on one of the great men in American history." Just in the way Donald Trump gained national political prominence by doubting the birthplace of Barack Obama—a ludicrous, easily-disproved lie that stood in for questioning whether a Black man could ever be a citizen, never mind president. Or calling the accurate portrayal of America's racist past and present as "critical race theory," an obscure academic term that at this point is nearly meaningless.

     Another tangent I really didn't get to explore was King's remarks on Black anti-semitism, which I mentioned just to illustrate that history is not about making you feel good. One Black reader, doubtful that such a thing could exist, since he hadn't noticed it, asked me for my source. It was a Sep. 28, 1967 letter from King to Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee:

     "The limited degree of Negro anti-Semitism is substantially a Northern ghetto phenomenon; it virtually does not exist in the South. The urban Negro has a special and unique relationship to Jews. He meets them in two dissimilar roles. On the one hand, he is associated with Jews as some of his most committed and generous partners in the civil rights struggle. On the other hand, he meets them daily as some of his most direct exploiters in the ghetto as slum landlords and gouging shopkeepers. Jews have identified with Negroes voluntarily in the freedom movement, motivated by their religious and cultural commitment to justice. The other Jews who are engaged in commerce in the ghettos are remnants of older communities. A great number of Negro ghettos were formerly Jewish neighborhoods; some storekeepers and landlords remained as population changes occurred. They operate with the ethics of marginal business entrepreneurs, not Jewish ethics, but the distinction is lost on some Negroes who are maltreated by them. Such Negroes, caught in frustration and irrational anger, parrot racial epithets. They foolishly add to the social poison that injures themselves and their own people.

    "It would be a tragic and immoral mistake to identify the mass of Negroes with the very small number that succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans, just as it would be a serious error to identify all Jews with the few who exploit Negroes under their economic sway."

     The last part that I had to cut was perhaps the biggest loss: King reflecting on the impact that living in Lawndale had on his own children:

     He was concerned at how his own children were being affected, living in a slum two blocks from the Vice Lords street gang headquarters.  
     "Our own children lived with us in Lawndale, and it was only a few days before we became aware of the change in their behavior," King wrote. "Their tempers flared, and they sometimes reverted to almost infantile behavior. During the summer, I realized that the crowded flat in which we lived was about to produce an emotional explosion in my own family. It was just too hot, too crowded too devoid of creative forms of recreation."
     For how many is that true of today?

 

King’s time in Chicago echoes today

Martin Luther King, struck by a rock in 
Marquette Park (Sun-Times file photo)

     Martin Luther King Jr. lived in Chicago, briefly. At 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue. He moved in Jan. 26, 1966, with his four children and wife Coretta, who found the stench of urine in their new apartment “overpowering.” But King felt he had to come to Lawndale to spread his message of non-violent resistance to America’s entrenched racism.
     “There are more Negroes in Chicago than in the whole state of Mississippi,” King said.
On Martin Luther King Day 2022, it is doubly important to reflect on the history of race in this country, because that history is imperiled in a way both real and chilling to any truly patriotic American.
     The Republican Party is at war with the past, part of its general campaign against any reality that reflects the party as it truly is: a totalitarian cult that has turned its back on democracy and freedom. That feels obligated to smudge any shiny surface: science is wrong, the press is fake.
     And history.
     The GOP premise is that any true telling of America’s racial past is some kind of plot to make their children feel bad, perhaps by cluing them in to what haters their parents really are. Talk about snowflakes ...
     They don’t realize that any true telling of history is a challenge to anyone’s inflated sense of self worth. For instance, before we take too much pride in Martin Luther King, Chicago resident, we should understand how hard a challenge the city posed for King. The city’s Black population was far less promising material than King was used to molding.
     “The Negroes of Chicago have a greater sense of powerlessness than I ever saw,” said Hosea WIlliams, King’s chief lieutenant. “They don’t participate in the government process because they are beaten down, psychologically. We are used to working with people who want to be free.”

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Comforting Effect of Unprofessional Environment

 

     It says something about myself—whether good or bad I can't decide— that I've had the same scraps of ephemera stuck to the wall by my desk for more than 30 years.
     For instance, the "Have you forgotten anything?" sign snagged from an Amtrak sleeper compartment in 1979, heading from Cleveland to Chicago at the end of winter break, into an epic snowstorm. It struck me as useful advice in professional journalism. (Both that side and the flip side, which shows a sleeper and the words, "Quiet please.")

     Or the photo of a hangdog pooch snipped, if I recall, from some kind of veterinary magazine I was scanning to pass the time on the night shift back in the late '80s, posted by my desk as an unsubtle "Fuck You" to my bosses.
     Above the dog is the caption: "Terrifying Effect of Unprofessional Environment."
     Why display that clipping? Maybe because I had a job where I had to show up at 4 or 6 or 7 p.m, and do whatever anybody on the desk told me to do, often attend some tedious zoning hearing, or try to find some spot where a crime or fire or accident had occurred and hang around the yellow tape with a few other reporters and wait for some official to come out and talk to us. Maybe because more than a few of my bosses viewed me with bewilderment and contempt, at least in my view. It was all so disappointing. I never had much of a plan in life, but whatever it was I once wanted, this wasn't it. So "terrified" might have been a slight exaggeration to describe my state of stymied ambition, but it wasn't far off. 
      Now of course those fluorescent-lit offices we all scorned and decorated with countless "Dilbert" cartoons bewailing our fate, are a Lost Eden. Remember the colleagues, commotion, desks, chairs, mail, snacks. People would show up unannounced! Coworkers would bake things! And bring them in to the office, cranberry bread and cookies and red velvet cupcakes, simply because they were so kind and generous and what else were they going to do, eat all this stuff themselves?  ("You're going to poison us all someday, aren't you?" I once quipped to an older colleague, a lovely Southern lady, whose stricken expression haunts me to this day).

       Swapped for an endless exile of computer screens and intruding spouses and the same meals eaten again and again and again. The torpid grind of working, or trying to, in some basement next to a washer and dryer, or while the kids try to learn long division, or in some similar dire situation. In a corner of the living room. In a coffee shop.
    Not me of course. I'm very lucky. I've been working at home since 1997, when I quit my job at the Sun-Times and, in allowing myself to be wooed back, inserted the right to work two days a week from home. And it's a pretty nice home. I've always had an office: this one might be the best room in the house, on the second floor, with a bay window, facing trees. I can see the sun coming up as I type this, will watch it transit the sky through the day, eventually setting to my right. Literally able to watch the world turn. If I look up at the right moment I can see birds, hawks. The train occasionally makes itself known. People walk their dogs past.

    But still I keep this woebegone mutt. Why? Habit, I guess. Though when I think about it, now that I'm in an extremely unprofessional environment: no one barging in while I'm trying to work, no hour-long commute, no bothersome dress code, no time-wasting meetings, no interrupting phone calls, no science experiment communal refrigerator in a dreary lunch room. I get to eat in my own luxe kitchen, often in the company of my beloved wife, who is working downstairs. That is many things, but terrifying is not among them.