North Shore Notes: Windy

     I had just lower-cased the N in "New Latin" when it struck me that this might just be a proper term — one unfamiliar to me, despite having studied Latin. It is. Between that, and her bold choice of shelter during the recent storm, Caren Jeskey certainly hits for the cycle in her offering today.

By Caren Jeskey

     Bruce, an old high school friend, left me alone at the Botanic Garden after a nice walk this past Monday. He’s the friend I inadvertently gave a hunk of concrete to as a housewarming gift several weeks back.
     As we strolled, the naturalist he is taught me the difference between opposite and alternating leaves. He pointed out little beards on a prolific type of iris that I’ve studied on many a long walk. Now I can further delight in knowing that they are hipsters. (Am I dating myself? Maybe they’re not called hipsters anymore — the bearded, fashionable skinny short pants people? But I digress).
     I can now better identify members of the Brassicaceae (more often called mustard) family, and know that their leaves grow in an alternating pattern, rather than the opposite pattern of, say, a maple tree. This family was formerly called Cruciferea. I’m not sure why the etymological change, but the B word is more fun to say. 

     Bruce suggested a mnemonic device. (I love these little memory tricks)! Think of the color of brass as it pertains to the yellow color we’ve come to associate with mustard, and then you might be able to recall the word Brassicaceae. Or, Bruce mentioned, “you can just say ‘braaaaa… brasssss…” and let your companion fill the rest in. (Since so many of us are running around with New Latin words on the tips of our tongues. Noted: I was in good company). It had thus far eluded me that Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and kale are also in this family of edible plants.
     After more banter about how to extract opium from poppies and whether or not we like the blue metal cage sculpture in the middle of the lake, (I do, he does not), off Bruce went to his tennis lesson.
     I soon noticed that a storm was quickly rolling in. As a lifelong cyclist and hiker, weather conditions are not hard for me to read. I beelined out of there and hopped on my bike. As I strapped my helmet on, watching a sea of seniors with lawn chairs stream in for Saturday June Band on the esplanade, I figured the good folks at the BG would get them to safety if necessary.
     As I pedaled down the Lake Cook Trail towards the Green Bay Trail, an alert came through bluetooth into my left ear. (I bike and walk with only one earbud in, and at a low volume). “Tornado warning. Flying debris. Seek shelter.”
     As the big fat raindrops started splashing on my arms and lightning streaked across the sky, I took a detour to the little kiddie train depot at Duke Park in Glencoe. I listened to a strange roll of thunder unlike any I’d ever heard before. Is this the train sound before the tornado takes you to Oz? I realized that I was standing next to electric train tracks and a sizable electrical box. I left my bike behind and got out of there, and stood under a tree, surveying my options.
     As the tornado sirens got louder I felt that is was best to find some help. I ran to the first house I saw, rang the Ring, and also knocked. A woman peeked out of the glass to see me mouthing something at her, and she thankfully opened the door. I implored, “can I please hang out in your basement until this passes?” I was scared!
     I know too many people, like Molly Glynn who was in a similar situation back in 2014, who are not aware of the danger they are facing during weather events. My childhood playground’s trees were decimated by a tornado less than 2 years ago right in Rogers Park. There have been more local tornados in the past handful of years, in this area, then I can recall for the previous 40+. Climate change has hit the Midwest.
     I am probably too careful for some, but that’s OK. I won’t be the person recording the black bear chasing me, only to find my phone in his belly one day.
     The kind young woman in Glencoe, her husband, their young kiddo and I headed downstairs as the lights flickered on and off. They brought me a glass of water and a chair to sit on. We chatted for 45 minutes or so, until the warnings had ended, and I took my leave. They offered for me to stay longer as the storm had not yet passed, but I looked outside and at the radar and decided I was safe. They had extended themselves quite enough already. Thank you kind couple Marli and Michael. A class act.
     When I got to my bike I headed back to the Green Bay Trail (which I would not have done had I known then about Molly Glynn, the actress who got killed by a falling branch in a storm nearby in 2014). The sky to the north was clear and bright; the rumble of the storm and dark clouds clearly south of us now.
     I pedaled to downtown Wilmette where I rewarded myself with a delicious piece of tuna and dined al fresco on a wet patio chair.

Book bullies

"The Board of Censors Moves Out," by Eugène Delacroix (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     When Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville announced June 9 that someone is plucking books from their displays and hiding them in the store, they didn’t specify what sort of books are being taken.
     I assumed the stashed volumes were books about queer youth and trans acceptance and such, the segment of human behavior currently singled out for special harassment by those who feel entitled to establish limits on human nature that maximize their own comfort.
     But that isn’t the kind of book being targeted.

     “Any book with a cover showing a person of color on it gets covered up,” explained Ginny Wehrli-Hemmeter, director of events and marketing at Anderson’s, 123 W. Jefferson St., one of the largest independent bookstores in the Chicago area.
     About 50 books have been found tucked behind other books. Police have been notified; a man, caught in the act, was confronted.
     Nor was my next thought — that this must be a freakish anomaly — correct. Can people really be offended by the sight of a children’s book about Jackie Robinson? In 2022? This has to be the handiwork of some lone-wolf, west-suburban hater indulging in repairable acts of racism, I figured.
     Sadly, it is not.

     While other large independent bookstores in and around Chicago — the Book Stall in Winnetka, Powell’s in Hyde Park — do not report similar vigilante mischief, it is endemic at public libraries around the country.
     “The books overwhelmingly being targeted deal with the lives and experiences of LGBTQ persons,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the office for intellectual freedom of the Chicago-based American Library Association.
      But it is by no means limited to them. The lives of Black persons also are a particular focus, she added, “under the false idea that books about Black people are some kind of ‘critical race theory.’ There is a lot of rhetoric that’s being used to vilify these materials. It’s truly tragic.”

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Making coffee

   

      Practice makes perfect.

     And after uncounted mornings of making the coffee, measuring the scoops of Major Dickason's Blend beans into the grinder, filling water into the coffee maker while it grinds, washing the pot and filter holder, setting the filter in place, I've got it down to a science, achieving the steaming pot of Peet's perfection with the minimum of motion. Efficiency of action. Uniformity of result.
     Until something goes wrong. Every now and then, I'll leave the ground beans in the grinder and turn the coffee maker on, realizing my mistake only when I take a sip of hot dirty brown water. Or pour ground coffee into the grinder. Or, as in this case, skip the grinding part and dump the whole beans directly into the coffee maker — the result, I believe, of that bag of ground coffee (Dunkin' Donuts Hazelnut. My wife likes it. What can I do? It's her house too). My theory is, sometimes using ground coffee throws off my game. Introduces confusing variables into my finely tuned coffee system.

     And at first you feel stupid. Gaze at the mistake with bovine incomprehension. Ah gee, I do this every day. I must be slipping. And then, hurrying to fix it, you realize, if you do something long enough, eventually you'll make a mistake. That's human nature.

     Here being a writer helps. Because no matter how good you are, mistakes are always made in writing, and you have to check for them, because they're always there. As I like to say, "Too right is two air." Whoops, what I mean is, "To write is to err." But that's true for life too. Don't beat yourself up over the mistakes. Correct them and move on. Enjoy the coffee, extra steps and all.

Answering dad’s questions

Robert Steinberg, at home in Colorado in February.

     “This is a beautiful house,” my father says, sitting in our living room, looking around. “Everything is so perfect.”
     Our house is 115 years old and not at all perfect. More like a tottering jumble. The aluminum siding is dinged and piebald. Paint peels off the radiator in front of him. There are gaps in the scarred floorboards at his feet. The window panes are loose. One stairway banister snapped in half and is inexpertly repaired.
     “Thank you Dad,” I say. “We like it.”
     I don’t argue with my father, don’t correct him. He can observe the same thing, or ask the same question, over and over, and I reply in a steady, patient voice.
     “Thanks Dad. It’s home.”
     I first noticed him doing it 10 years ago, when we were visiting my parents in Colorado. Dad got stuck on a book coming out.
     “This book, how long is it?” he’d say.
     “Two hundred and fifty-six pages,” I’d answer.
     Ten minutes later.
     “And this book you’ve written. How long is it?”
     “Two hundred and fifty-six pages, Dad,” I’d answer.
     In February, we moved him and mom here. He started in on a new question.
     “When do you think you’ll retire?”
     “Never, Dad. They froze our pension in 2009.”
     “Are you retired?”
     “No Dad, not in the usual sense of the word.”
     One benefit of this repetition is that I can play with my responses.
     “Do you think you’ll retire soon?”
     “... maybe in a couple years.”
 

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Suburban mystery

     The Chicago Botanic Garden is a 10 minute drive from our home in the leafy suburban paradise. A tremendous boon that I've written about here many times. Maybe too many, but you get what you pay for.
      It isn't the only stunning natural expanse we have at our disposal. There is one even closer that I seldom write about because ... well, I'm not sure why. The Trail through Time is itself a wonder, with fields of prairie grasses and large oaks, plus a soccer field and a playground and a large oval around a reservoir. It reminds me of the Valemount trail by my parents' old place in Boulder, except for the Techny Tower, looming in the background. If you haven't been inside, find a way — go to one of their occasional concerts. It's like a European cathedral.
     Friday, after an indulgent birthday dinner of a jumbo char kosher hot dog and fries from Little Louie's, eaten in the downtown park — more natural beauty — we walked off our sins on the trail. By the soccer field, I noticed this tree.

    "Is that a balloons?" my wife said.

    We decided it was a ball. Which raised the question of how it got there? A powerful but misdirected kick? An intentional insertion? Did a kid climb the tree? It's really far in there.
     "If I were a kid, I'd be throwing baseballs at that until it came down," my wife said.

     Kids nowadays, no initiative.

     Or heck, maybe they had, maybe an hour had been dedicated trying to get the thing down. Failed attempts to climb the trail. Baseballs thrown in vain. We'll never know. We dedicated less than a minute to the question before moving on. 

Erecting a billboard for the blind

    

     Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter.
     That’s a key to understanding what’s going on right now, but not something that gets stated plainly. So I’ll say it again:
     Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter.
     Remember when Donald Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote? An uncharacteristic thing for him to say, in that it was true. But subsequent events bear him out, and we free of his mesmeric influence should never forget it. He doesn’t lead a party, but a cult. If your followers believe in you no matter what you do or say, then they are acolytes, not citizens. It’s faith: God is good no matter how many landslides He sends, sweeping away the village school. Ditto for Trump. He is their god. They certainly adore him like a deity.
     The facts presented are clear. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he tried to hold onto power by coining the lie that he had actually won, based on nothing but bluster, then bullied and pressured others to either believe him or act as if they did. He knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t care. Nor did his followers. When Trump could not marshal enough compliant officials to reject the votes cast by the American people, he summoned a mob to Washington D.C. and set it on the Capitol at the exact moment Congress was certifying the election. It was an attempted coup.
     The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol began public hearings Thursday. While part of the country tuned in, aghast and enthralled, a significant segment dismissed it out of hand, ahead of time, reflexively, easily, the way they smirk at climate change and shrug off gun violence. Fox News didn’t even carry Thursday’s hearing.

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The race to lose to J.B. Pritzker

   

     Look at a map.

     Illinois is an oasis of blue state humanity in a desert of red state neo-fascism. Here, women's rights, immigrants welcome and science respected. There, the Handmaid's Tale, build-the-wall and science is what the most conservative parents in a school say it is.
     So despite the mega-millions pumped into the Illinois gubernatorial race, I haven't really been paying close attention, assuming that whoever the Republicans toss up against him, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has to be re-elected. He battled COVID smartly. He worked with the rebarbative Lori Lightfoot the best anyone could. It hardly matters which Republican neophyte he defeats.
     I do have a particular distaste for Richard Irvin, the Aurora mayor and ventriloquist's dummy sitting on the knee of Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois, opening and closing his wooden yap while $50 million worth of advertising spews out. Irvin tarred opponents for voting for Joe Biden without ever revealing who he voted for—not wanting to be outed as a former Democrat, or damned as a MAGA wannabe. Wanting to both lure Southern Illinois's considerable population of MAGA zombies to lope in his direction while not repelling off what old style conservative Republicans remain and aren't really paying attention.

     Then Bailey got on my radar with a single word. He will stop the "indoctrination" of our children. What we used to call "teaching history," but now Republicans are attempting to slur with their dubious practice of attaching a bad word to something unobjectionable, the way gay individuals wanting to marry each other are described as homosexuals pushing "an agenda."

     I'll say it again. No nation is great because everything they did is a chest-swelling jubilee. Part of being a truly great nation is the ability to confront reality, good and ill. Meanwhile, part of being a totalitarian state is fear that the truth will undo you and must be suppressed. Thus, in an undeniable irony, it is the courageous patriot who will stare unashamed at the full, true, sometimes awful history of any country, and the cringing traitor who insists it must be presented as an unbroken triumphal procession, who passes laws trying to ensure that his children pass through the educational system and end up as ignorant as himself. 

      Give Bailey credit: it works. Ya gotta put the slop where the pigs can get at it.

      A Sun-Times/WBEZ poll found Bailey leading Irvin by almost 2-to-1—guess money can't buy everything. Panicking, Irvin rolled out the tagline, “Cut the fat. Clean up Springfield." This is not only a despicable reference to Pritzker's girth, but a sign of typical Republican oblivious, since after years of austerity budgets, there really isn't much fat left to cut. What are they going to take the old meat cleaver to? Social services? Ah, hahahahahahahaha. 

      I don't want to minimize the importance of a Democratic governor. As the Republican Party becomes the party of sedition, state governors play a key role in either preserving or traducing free elections and a safe vote. Whether the GOP elephant, ravaged by the Trump virus, ends up with either Irvin or Bailey on its back, we have to keep a clear eye on what this race is about: preserving Democratic fact-based, human-oriented policy against creeping Trumpism and fascist fantasy and suppression. Pritzker will win by presenting who he is, while Bailey or Irvin will try to win by pretending to be what they're not.

Parson Weem's Fable by Grant Wood
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth