History is a journey we all must take together

Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950

     Winning the Pulitzer Prize nauseated Gwendolyn Brooks.
     That gets left out when the story is told about how the Chicago poet became the first Black writer to win the honor. Brooks skips it herself in her interview for the American Folklore division of the Library of Congress.
     It’s an important detail. Imagine: it’s May 1, 1950, about 6 p.m. in her modest residence at 9134 S. Wentworth Ave. Dusk, and the power is out — her husband, Henry Blakely, no mean poet himself, is having trouble at the auto shop. But their phone still works, and it rings. The Chicago Sun-Times calling — no wonder I like this part — to congratulate her.
     “On what?” Brooks asks.
     Reporter Jack Star tells her:
     “You just won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.”
     “I didn’t!” she screams, feeling “sick in the stomach,” she later wrote in her journal.
     Whenever somebody tells any history for any reason, it’s smart to pause and wonder why they’re telling that particular story. Toward what end? Diving deeper into Brooks’ win is worthwhile because of the innocence of her “On what?” and the shock of that “I didn’t!” I love that; it makes me feel I’m seeing her before me, not as an about-to-be-famous poet, but as a regular person, a woman standing in a darkened room, finding out that after 20 years of constant effort — she published her first poem, “Eventide,” at 13 — her life has changed. The scream itself is a poem. There was no one there to hear it except her small son. But a few minutes of me tapping on a keyboard, and you can hear an echo now, and maybe think about Brooks. Maybe feel connected to her and seek out her poetry.

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Hardier and hardier

     One drawback of only going into the office every few months is that you miss out on seed catalogues. If you haven't seen a seed catalogue lately, they are no longer modest affairs listing various types of flower and vegetable seeds for sale, but glossy, expensively-produced celebrations of lifestyle and philosophy and nature—think Vogue magazine, but for produce—that create this entire world of beaming, gorgeous children and barefooted Earth Mother types emerging like Venus from rustic farm buildings, carrying wicker baskets bursting with cornucopias. 
     I'm usually fairly immune to this kind of thing, flipping through more out of idle curiosity.
But three years ago I was leafing (sorry) through the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalogue, ogling the Kyoto Red Carrots and Mary Washington Asparagus, when I noticed the "Chicago Hardy Fig." 
     I couldn't resist. You can get the full backstory here.  

From small figs, mighty trees come.

They sent me two seedlings, thank God, because I credulously planted one outside (Chicago Hardy Figs, remember?) And the bag said they were good in Zones 5 through 10, and Chicago is on the northern border of 5, meaning we should just get in under the wire. I glossed over the part about planting it in pots and dragging the pots into shelter for the winter, as well as the line "These tender young plants generally have no resistance to cold," Rather explicit, now that I look at it.

      The first winter turned one of the CHF into a blackened stick. Suspicious soul that I am, I dragged the second CHF inside before the frost, just in case, where it wintered upstairs in my office next to my desk. Each spring for two years I muscled it outside. Last summer, sitting next to the front steps, it squeezed out two small green figs that I knew better than to try to eat.      

     This year I was a little worried. It had grown bigger, maybe two feet tall, and after I brought it in, to the dining room—in a bigger pot. I wanted to give it as much room as possible. So a terracotta pot as large as it could be and still move. Taking it upstairs was out of the question.
      When I first moved it into the dining room, just before the first frost of November, the shock of moving—or because it was autumn—turned all its leaves yellow.They all fell off except one, and I worried I had killed the thing, or that it was infested, investing in some expensive anti-bug leaf soap that I carefully spritzed on each leaf. 

     For  a month it sat leafless. But I kept watering and hoping and look at it now, above. My Chicago Hardy Fig keeps on pushing out these enormous vaguely hand-shaped leaves and, well, it's February and freezing outside, but my CHF is putting on a botanical show that I had to share. Maybe that's where its name comes from—the thing keeps pushing. (Actually, it seems that the plant became popular here). I have a good feeling about the future of my CHF.

     Or should I say our Chicago Hardy Fig, speaking of sharing, as my wife has practically adopted it. I tried to water it Monday morning and she all but yanked the watering can out of my hands with the snarl of an angry she-lion protecting her young. She would take care of it. Didn't want me overwatering. I had already killed one. 
     I did some reading, and the CHF can grow 15 feet tall and a dozen feet wide, which ought to provide some interesting dinner party conversation. I haven't told my wife that part yet. The tree seems to want to grow horizontally, and I'm trying to use a few notched sticks to encourage it to grow upward. They'll also kick off 100 pounds of figs with "sweet and juicy with a rich, honey-like flavor." Something to look forward to.

Chicago is a fine place and worth saving

     There's a back story to today's headline. I recently read Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which contains my second favorite line from his work: "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for." (Second to, from the end of "The Sun Also Rises": "Isn't it pretty to think so?") When I finished today's column, I originally thought to echo that with "Chicago is a fine place and worth the fighting for." But given the grim toll of gangs fighting over turf, I thought I'd better not, and give it the slight twist above.

     One evening a few years ago I was walking in Harajuku, Tokyo’s trendy fashion district, when I noticed a bright neon sign: “CHICAGO.” I went in. There is joy in finding evidence of home when you’re far away, plus a special insider delight in noting what they get wrong, like those palm trees on the sign. Or the fact the store sells used kimonos.
     So when an email from the mayor’s office hit my inbox, announcing the “Chicago Not Chicago” publicity initiative, highlighting Chicago’s global impact, I felt ready to play along. Not to snarkily tick off the many ways the world misinterprets Chicago. But to elaborate on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s theme that “Chicago is truly a trailblazing city of firsts” that pulse out of our beating heartland and animate the world.
     Where to begin? The city is right to stress architecture, one of Chicago’s most obvious global gifts to the world — Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, a parade of greatness right up to Jeanne Gang, who used to be described as a top female architect, and now is just a top architect. When Tom Cruise does his stunts on the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” that’s a designed-in-Chicago building he’s bouncing off of, created by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Adrian Smith.
     Next? Let’s pick music. The first composition considered to be jazz by musical scholars is Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues” published in Chicago in 1915; the New Orleans transplant so appreciated the welcome given him by Chicago, which he found not nearly as racist as St. Louis, he renamed the tune “The Chicago Blues.”

     Chicago drew the greats to itself. From Louis Armstrong to Willie Dixon, a house musician at Chess Records, who in one three day stretch played bass on both Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" and Chuck Berry's "Maybelline." (Which is not even. the most significant product called "Maybelline" to come out of our city. That would be the cosmetic Thomas Lyle Williams created after watching his sister Mabel highlight her eyes with a concoction of coal dust and Vaseline during World War I).
     I could fill three columns with ways Chicago music rocked the world. The Rolling Stones are one of many bands sprung root and branch from the Chicago sound. Their name, remember, is based on a lyric from a Muddy Waters song, and they came to Chess in 1964 to record his “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” which a year later they reinvented as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
     The mayor mentioned cell phones, debuted in the parking lot of Soldier Field. Don’t forget the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction was achieved at the University of Chicago, which also discovered REM sleep while inventing sleep research. Videotape debuted here. And loudspeakers. And shortwave radio.

     The most iconic piece of technology to come out of Chicago has to be Shure’s Unidyne Model 55 microphone, its distinctive look inspired by the grill of a 1937 Oldsmobile, a rare piece of electronics almost unchanged for 80 years. To convey that a person in a picture is singing, and not just standing there with their mouth open, a Model 55 microphone is the go-to prop.

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'Good places for a pipefitter to work'

     Sometimes I give the impression that my mail is one raging septic river of abuse—probably because there is something empowering about sharing a really nasty letter, using the writer's momentum against him, so instead of wounding me, he wounds himself, or would, were he capable of shame, which I can assure you such people are not.

     But I also get far more interesting letters from smart, decent people that are valuable for a variety of reasons such as this, reacting to Friday's front page story about candy company closings. Read it and see if you can detect the reason I want to share it:

I was saddened to see another candy plant closing. Not because of our candy capital status, as I honestly was not aware of that. But because of the jobs lost. I am a member of the Chicago Pipefitters Union Local 597. I retired in 2018. Over my 37 years I worked at many candy plants. Brach, Wrigley, Tootsie Roll, the Butterfinger plant by O'Hare, and also the Mars plant. Candy plants were always very good places for a Pipefitter to work. There are miles of pipe needed to manufacture candy. Candy cannot be conveyed through pipe without be heated to its melting point, so a lot of steam or high temp water pipe is needed. A lot of candy is run through “jacketed pipe” which is a small pipe placed inside a larger pipe, with steam running through the “jacket” in between the 2 pipes. The candy runs through the smaller, inside pipe with the steam keeping it in liquid form. Building jacketed pipe, the necessary boiler work, and all of the related piping is good work for a Pipefitter. And a candy plant is a much more pleasant place to walk into in the morning than say a corn plant, a steel mill, or an animal rendering plant. And you smell much better to your family when you walk in the door at night! Sorry to hear another one has closed.

Love your articles!
Tom Mandernach
New Lenox, IL

    No, not because I've been to the Pipefitters Union Local 597 training facility in Mokena, and wrote a column about it in 2014. But good memory. What I found very cool are jacketed pipes. A pipe within a pipe. Amazing, right? Even though I'd toured the pipe fitters' facility, jacketed pipes somehow escaped my notice until now.  I had to share.

 

Notes: Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. (Rumi)

      It's odd to see yourself reflected in your friends. Like Caren, I subscribe to the New York Times and the Sun-Times, and like her, I ritually read the Sun-Times first. You have to dance with who brung ya. I happened to now be reading Harold Bloom's  "Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles." Much of which has to do with "Paradise Lost." And here today is Caren, well, maybe I better just let you read it. Enjoy.

     “You’ve been served!” bellowed the voice on the other side of my front door after a loud banging that had me jump out of my skin. That was earlier this week.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
                                                      —Walt Whitman

     It’s been a strange week over here in Ravenswood. I can't say much due to a pesky non-disparagement agreement, but that's probably for the best. Due to said agreement, I had to axe most of today's blog. It will suffice to say I've had a but of an exhausting battle on my hands. Such a thing can wear on you, but I am here to say that we can overcome. We cannot let haters rent space in our heads for too long. My wish for all of us today is that we focus on the good in our lives. Savor delicious moments. Find joy where we can. Be silly. Take ourselves less seriously.
     I’ve turned to poetry, baths, and naps to get there. I took most of this week off to soothe my jangled nerves from a stressful situation.
     I found solace in e.e. cummings:

your homecoming will be my homecoming —

my selves go with you, only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming

(an almost someone always who's noone)

a noone who, till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies….

     For me, this poem means that I am coming home to myself. Carl Jung’s inner partner; bell hooks’ self-love. I find this to be the only answer to tolerating the warring factions of 2022. I will not trash talk those who unjustly "served" me. I will not trash talk Trump supporters. I will not spew vitriol at people who do not vaccinate. I will feel angry at times, and I will be honest about that anger, and I will do what I can to advocate in small and big ways. Yet I cannot let terrible drums rule my life.
     I am moving tomorrow, so I’ll be sitting in a cottage on the north shore (within walking distance to the Music Center of the North Shore where I started learning flutes at age 6), sipping rich coffee with heavy cream and reading the New York Times in quietude. (Of course I’ll read a bit of the Sun-Times first).
     I will breathe deeply, hug my parents, my sister, my niece and her father. I will bike to the Botanic Gardens. I will walk to charming downtown squares and find cafes. (No, I will not eat and drink inside yet).
     A wise man with the initials NS once reminded me of Milton’s words in Paradise Lost. “The mind is its own place, in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
     May we all find heaven in our minds today.

Chicago’s candy crown slips with Mars exit

     Jelly beans grow like pearls, around a grain of sugar instead of sand, while tumbling in drums that look like cement mixers.
     I know this from seeing it happen at the Ferrara candy factory in Forest Park, a rare glimpse inside one of Chicago’s secretive, dwindling world of candy companies. When I heard we’re losing another, that Mars Wrigley — the two merged in 2016 — is closing its West Side plant, dubbed the most beautiful factory in America when it opened in 1928, with its Spanish-style architecture and red-tiled roof, I must admit my first thought was not that Chicago is losing its grip on the “capital of the candy universe” brag, nor the 280 jobs lost. But a pouty, “Now I’ll never get to see the place.”
     I was badgering Mars just last summer, for all the good it did. Put it this way: Every time I interact with candy companies, I suspect anew that in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the Willy Wonka character, rather than being Roald Dahl’s flight of fancy, is closer to straight reportage.
     Like children growing up in a family of oddballs, Chicagoans don’t quite grasp how unusual all this candy is. We are, remember, a city with a chocolate factory at its very heart: Blommers, seven blocks north of Union Station, one that, when the wind is right, bathes downtown in the most delicious aroma of warm cocoa.
     Have you ever walked up Michigan Avenue, and noticed the allegheny nickel skybridge that William Wrigley Junior threw between the 14th floors of his new pair of Wrigley buildings? (You do know there are two, don’t you? Right next to each other, built at different times, with two separate addresses: 400 and 410 N. Michigan Avenue.) A flourish of architectural whimsy more at home in Venice than in our pork-fed Midwestern city, famous for its Miesian brutalism.

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I hope your mother is okay.

 

     I try to be the person I wish other people were.
     But it doesn't always work.
     Sometimes it seems to never work.
     For instance.
     New neighbors moved in on our block. I'd better not say exactly where. People who don't care at all about their behavior seem to still care about publicizing that behavior. The embarrassment, I suppose, from caring what people think about you in general, as opposed to what any specific person thinks. There's a lot of that going around.

     So let's say, they moved to a place within sight of our house, and leave it at that.
     "I should bake them a pie," I said, to my wife. An old half joke. When we moved here, 21 years ago, well, it took a bit of time to get to know folks on the block. Whenever the doorbell rang, I'd say, "It must be one of the neighbors, bringing over a pie." It wasn't.*
     So I try to welcome new neighbors. Not with a pie. I've never baked a pie in my life. But with a plate of cookies, something. To show up and say hello. I assume they appreciate it, because I sure would have. 

     But maybe I'm wrong.
     I decided on a gift box from Misericordia, full of cookies and sweet breads. They have a bakery in Glenview. I wasn't sure anybody would be home, so took a Sharpie and wrote, "Welcome to the neighborhood! The Steinbergs" on the box lid. Planning ahead. I strolled over and stood in front of the side door; for some reason, it looked like one of those houses where nobody uses the front door. I knocked.
     There was a wait. I stood there. Finally, a man about my age came to the door, holding a cell phone at his ear.
     "I'm on the phone!" he said, with asperity. I could see that.
     What do you do at that point? Apologize and promise to come back later? The box was in my hands. I blundered forward.
     "Hello, I'm Neil Steinberg," I said, brightly. "I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood." I raised the box, as if to draw attention to it.
     He opened the door and took the baked goods.
     "If you ever need help with anything, I live right across the ..." I continued.
     "Thank you," he said, and shut the door.
      He never even said his name, a fact that echoed in my head as I walked away.

      I don't think I can describe how the encounter took the wind out of my sails. How to describe it? Semi-amused, semi-desolate. Because of course, this is how people are.  Sometimes, I feel like my whole life has been like this. Scraping my fingers across the brick wall of other people. Not to make it all about me. Maybe it was a really important phone call. That must be it. To a doctor, regarding his mother's fragile health. A surgeon, a specialist, hard to reach, on the phone now, discussing options for her care. Yes, that must be it.

* CORRECTION: "Someone did bring us a pie," my wife said at breakfast. "I've told you before, but you never remember. Elisa Staniszewski brought a pie from Three Tarts Bakery. I think it was triple berry. I remember because it was so effin' fantastic."