And John went down into the land of Indiana

   

     Facebook has been increasingly aggressive with its advertising. In my perception, anyway. Not only are there more commercial intrusions, but the plugs seem of a lower calibre, more off-point and unwelcome. Here, a kit of grooming devices and hair-removal creams for — I kid you not — men's balls. Immediately following, the columns of John Kass.
     Regarding the the former, I took the time to click a button so I'll never see it again, wondering all the while if I could have posted anything to make me a target for such a product.
     And seeing the latter, against my better judgment, almost mesmerized, I began to read his latest, “'Have Laptop, Will Travel,' and the Demise of The Chicago Tribune." Kass's July 27 offering. It begins:
     "When the editors of 'the paper' that I served faithfully for 40 years recently decided to team up with angry leftist trolls in a vengeful 'gotcha' exposé on our new home, I wasn’t happy about it."
     As a media savvy guy, I knew what he was referring to: Bob Goldsborough's July 13 Elite Street column, "Former Tribune opinion columnist John Kass purchases Indiana home for nearly $300,000," detailing the self-imposed Indiana exile of the erstwhile arbitrator of the Chicago Way.  I was alerted to the story on Twitter.

     The move makes sense to me. Illinois tacks increasingly blue, an island of freedom in a frothy sea of GOP rights-drowning red. Next door is Indiana, the Mississippi of the Midwest, home of Mike Pence and the Klan. The state practically echoes with the forging of manacles.

     Indiana might be a better fit for Kass. Perhaps there he will finally find that elusive sense of home, of security.  Among like-minded citizens who also fancy themselves the greased hub around which the universe spins, who don't see the point of following a moral code that isn't also being forced upon everyone else. So yes, good that Kass will be tightly swaddled in Indiana, warm, safe, enfolded by the similarity he obviously craves. Free of menace at last. 

      Wanting to join the fun, I tapped out a tweet: "You mean he moved to Indiana VOLUNTARILY!?" Then immediately deleted it. There's no upside in remarking upon Kass. I've already had my say early last year. And while I did enjoy the waves of love that resulted, there's no need to pile on. I accept that people read him, perhaps for the emetic effect. There's also a market for testicle shavers, apparently. Who am I to judge? The man quit his job and moved to Indiana. What greater punishment could I add atop that? When Dante encounters Judas being gnawed by Satan in the frozen bowels of hell, he doesn't kick him. Let sufferers be.

    Plus: so what? Kass could move to Mongolia and live in a yurt and his work could not become further removed from the day-to-day world of real life in Chicago. He could live in a box at State and Lake and the essence of the place would elude him.
    Besides, I am among the blessed, and the lucky shouldn't mock the unfortunate. Years ago, I made the decision to always be who I am, which by necessity means to acknowledge that I live where I actually live. Because once you start pretending to be someone you're not — perhaps even convincing yourself, if no one else — living somewhere you're not, the fear of being uncovered must be overwhelming. The tone of Kass's column borders on hysteria.
     “Why won’t they leave us alone?” Kass has his wife demand of heaven. He places a manly hand upon her quivering shoulder.
     "Because this is how they play," he intones, like the hero in a Left Behind novel. "This is who they are. They won’t leave us alone. They’ll never leave us alone."
     Kass then does that patented, Fox News mind-reading trick. He doesn't need to inquire; he knows the motivation for sharing news of his real estate transaction.
     "Some at 'the paper' are angry," he decides. "Bitter. This is not the old Tribune. It’s the new left-leaning Tribune. I see the woke media for what it is, what it’s done to the city, how they’ve avoided the truth of what’s happened to Chicago. And the left hates my guts."
     Another big difference between us. Were I curious as to why Bob Goldsborough wrote about my move to Indiana, I wouldn't simply slip open the gate of of my corralled nightmares and let the slavering beasts of my paranoiac id roam free. I'd  simply ask Goldsborough why he wrote what he did. That's called being a reporter. At least I would have to try. 

     Which I did. So why'd ya do it, Bob? Out of spite? On command from your vindictive Tribune masters? On direct orders from George Soros?
      "No," replied Goldsborough — not to be confused with his father, a successful mystery writer of the same name. "I never was ordered by my editors to write the story. I largely come up with story ideas on my own, and I had come up with this one on my own as well. When it first looked like he'd moved to Indiana, I ran the idea past my editors, months before Greenfield broke the news. And they were supportive of the idea. (I have great editors.)"
     The Greenfield he refers to is John Greenfield, who broke the story, spurring Goldsborough to return to his excavation of the Kassian Cheops established on the shifting sands of Indiana.
     "John Greenfield, who contributes to the Reader and is the co-editor of Streetsblog Chicago, got a tip that Kass was living in St. John and started tweeting about it," wrote Goldsborough. (Another reason to feel sorry for Kass; turned in by his own neighbors, perhaps, who might have dropped a dime to the media that he was cowering among them). "That spurred me to dig some more to finally confirm the Kasses' purchase once and for all. I have to hand it to Kass — he didn't make it easy for me to confirm that he'd bought the house in St. John."

     Goldsborough dug into the story, not at the behest of his Tribune puppeteers or the woke mob, but inspired by Kass's own frantic efforts to hide his whereabouts. The guilty flee where none pursueth.
     "The house to which Kass and his wife were tied had an owner who had bought the home in 2020 through an opaque Indiana land trust (similar to the Chicago Title trusts that so many bold-faced names in Illinois use to try to mask their purchases). Was it the case that Kass had bought that house, but was trying to keep his ownership a secret? I didn't know."
     Do you notice something about Goldsborough's tone? A candor, a cadence of normal humanity, of a regular person doing his job, living in the world of the actual. Devoid of petulance or grievance. 
     As opposed to Kass's column, which ended ... which ended ... actually, I didn't get to the end. Not at first. Halfway through I bailed out — not out of hatred, I should add, but its polar opposite, indifference. Nothing is easier to cast aside than a column by John Kass.  Yes, I was smiling as I moved on, but not at the unintentional humor of the column or the relief at abandoning it.  

     Rather, I was smiling at a decades-old memory.
     In 2000, I moved to the suburbs. Since certain columnists were already manifesting their lifelong habit of presenting themselves as living on Evergreen with the ghost of Nelson Algren, warming their hands over scrap lumber fires in 55-gallon oil drums on Lower Wacker Drive, when in fact they were hiding in Western Springs, hoarding dried food against the collapse of civilization, I was very public about my move, even writing an article about it for North Shore Magazine , which ran a photo of me, my wife and kids sitting on the front steps of our 1905 Queen Anne farmhouse in Northbrook. Nothing to hide.
     This caught the attention of the very same Goldsborough, who noted that while I shared the tableau of a neighbor stopping her car in the street before our house and leaping out, door flung open, to demand, "How much did you pay for that?" I did not actually share the purchase price with my readers.
     "But Upper Bracket will share," Goldsborough chuckled. "Steinberg paid $370,000 in June (although the sale closed in October) for the house on a half acre, according to public records."
     Or, I blushingly point out, about 25 percent more in 2000 than Kass paid for his Hoosier haven in 2022, which should give you an idea of the relative worth of life in the Chicago suburbs versus life in the blasted conservative hellscape of Indiana. 

     My reaction to my private real estate deals ending up in the pages of the Tribune was very different from Kass's. I remember reading Goldsborough's report with surprise, raising an eyebrow, and thinking, "'Upper bracket?' I wish!"  No collapsing to the ground and clawing at myself. No dragooning my wife as a Greek chorus of alarm.

     There did seem a whiff of mischief about it. Since I asked Goldsborough about his motivation regarding Kass, I also asked he cast his memory back and see if I had missed the doorjamb-gnawing rage that Kass detects. 

      "You have a great memory — I did indeed write about your move to the suburbs in 2001," Goldsborough replied. "You took it the right way — I didn't mean it with any harm or really anything more than just a mild tweak."
     So what's going on here? You have to remember the central place that fear occupies in the conservative mindset. Kass dwells in the realm of panic rooms and alarm systems and doxxing, the fear — perhaps justified — of encountering the baked-in malice of people such as himself. The fear that the harassment they inflict on others might be returned. Then mix-in self-importance. Perhaps he is genuinely terrified that if the liberals he imagines are so tormented by his fierce sweeping beacon of truth knew what state he lives in, he might wake up one morning and find his lawn crowded with outraged trans protesters barking through megaphones, waving signs as young folk who believe in reproductive rights link arms with Jane Fonda and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and trample his petunias.          

      To be honest, I initially shared Kass's underlying conceit: this isn't worth writing about.  There's something disreputable, almost cruel, about highlighting Kass's deficiencies. It's too easy. He disgorges his words without critical reason ever being applied to them. So to abruptly shine the light of logic on them, uninvited, to flush out his thoughts, like blind albino worms, forced from their subterranean realm, yanked from lightless caves and exiled into the blazing noontime to wither and die under the relentless sun of reason. Is that not cruel? Maybe you're not supposed to think about what Kass writes; perhaps doing so violates some kind of unspoken contract. It's like bursting into a toddler's birthday party and ruining the magic show by explaining the simple tricks. Leave him be.

     Ready to dismiss the matter, I returned to Kass's column to read the end — unfamiliar territory, to be sure — and found something that absolutely demanded today's effort. As an act of mercy.
      "I can’t recall 'the paper' ever dedicating so much precious time, resources and space, when newsrooms are strained, to other columnists at the Tribune who bought or sold a home," Kass complained, ending with this coda: "Just me. Curious. Hmm."
     Oh poor John! To be singled out like that. It's so mean. He must be set straight. "Can't recall the paper ever dedicating..." A prod to action. "Just curious."
     We men in our 60s sometimes do fail to recall things, and how welcome it is to have your memory primed. To find a friendly face, filling in the lost details, showing you how to work the self-checkout, offering a helping hand. How could I not  step up and aid a fellow columnist? Besides, isn't a general lack of curiosity perhaps the defining characteristic of the writer in question? Here he is, finally wondering about  something; we can't then just leave him hanging. I feel compelled to reward this rare, perhaps unique, moment of inquisitiveness by providing an answer: Jan. 21, 2001, and, plus many, many other times, that would be clear to someone whose eyes were not thickly cataracted with fear, self-pity and injured pride.

     "He wasn't targeted any more than the column might 'target' a starting pitcher for the Cubs who buys a condo on the Gold Coast," Goldsborough explained. That's what the column does: write about the real estate doings of the locally familiar. 

    So the news, John, is good, and I'm happy to be the one to share it with you and the world. It isn't you being picked on, or victimized, or paid back for your daring ... umm ... whatever it is you do that has made you the cynosure of a Dick Tracy rogues gallery of villains, in your own mind if nowhere else. We are brothers here. I too have felt Bob Goldsborough's lash. Or his fleeting professional attention, anyway. The Trib's real estate Torquemada gave similar treatment to a newbie nudnik more than 20 years ago. So you aren't the victim of vast conspiratorial forces arrayed against you.
     Reassured? I didn't think so. See, that's the problem with the whole unable-to-process-new- information-contrary-to-your-own-long-entrenched-beliefs thing. But that's a column for another day. 

Changing careers to boost health at BIÂN

The Football Players, by Henri Rousseau
(Guggenheim Museum)

     “Bring one hand to your heart, one hand to your stomach, and just breathe. Start to feel gravity drawing the navel toward the back body. I want you to inhale, fill up the lungs with air. Exhale through your tailbone and your neck, heavy into the mat. Letting anything that happened before this class begin to dissipate. Filling up the body with air, vitality energy. Exhaling anything that isn’t serving you.”
     Jacob Frazier, a trim, superbly fit young man with a neat beard, leads three shoeless women and a male visitor through their paces in a softly lit exercise room, warmed to a gently challenging 85 degrees. We are at BIÂN Chicago, which once might have been referred to simply as a “health club” but describes itself as a “private, members club built on the foundation of holistic wellness, vitality and social well-being.”
     Three years ago, the space BIÂN fills with beige drapes, blond maple floors and large, blurry, vaguely Gerhard Richter-ish photographs was the empty shell of the former Japonais restaurant in the Montgomery Ward warehouse at 600 W. Chicago, and Frazier was a professional dancer.
     BIÂN opened in November 2020 at the height of COVID restrictions. Frazier was among millions of Americans— a Harris poll released last year said more than half of our nation’s employees want a career change — prodded by the pandemic to swap one profession for another.
     “There was no more work, at the time, for dancers,” explains Frazier, who danced professionally for five years. “‘I’d always cross-trained to sustain my body, so it just felt like a natural shift.”
     Leaving dance was easier than an outsider might imagine.
     “The life is very hard because you are living in poverty most of the time,” Frazier says. “So no, it wasn’t hard to give up. I was ready. I was sick of living that way.”
     If talking to dancers-turned-fitness-instructors and nibbling cucumber, apricot, pistachio and yogurt salad seems off brand for me, it was. I was slogging through my own COVID-induced doldrum when Justine Fedak — who used to be in charge of brand strategy for BMO Harris Bank and now does marketing for BIÂN — suggested a visit might perk me up.

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A beautiful wooden horse

     The Art Institute is playing around with its American art wing. Which is nice because, well, when you visit the place as often as I do, everything becomes familiar, and familiarity and wonder are not friends.
     After exiting the Cezanne show — not bad, if you like Cezanne. I enjoyed the painting of his father, but that might have been because he is reading a newspaper — I checked out the American wing, paused to study, yet again, Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." Then I saw this carousel horse or, as the Art Institute calls it with surprising specificity, this "Middle Row Jumping Horse (Carousel Figure)."
     The row a carved horse occupies on its merry-go-round has unexpected significance: the outer horses are generally the better horses, more finely crafted, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, boasting about its "Outside Row Standing Horse (Carousel Figure)."
     "The animals," the Met explains,"especially those placed on a carousel’s outside row, feature extraordinary attention to detail intended to delight riders young and old." They don't quite spell it out, but the suggestion is since the outer ring of animals is the one easiest for potential patrons to inspect, it was reserved for the craftsmen's best work. And I want to draw attention to that "delight riders young and old." Almost a bit of showman's ballyhoo, a whiff of sawdust and cotton candy, preserved in a bottle and influencing the curator's academic description.    
     Both Chicago and Gotham horses are the work of Philadelphia's Daniel Müller, renown for his realistic horses. The Art Institute scholars also determined the steed is made of basswood and "possibly painted" by Angelo Calsamilia, "who traveled the country to repaint carousel figures in active use."
     That enigmatic detail made me want to follow Calsamilia around 1950s America, in his battered old Chevy, from fair to carnival — this horse was featured in Rock Springs Park, West Virginia from 1924 t0 1970. His oil paints and brushes in the trunk, his lonely wandering life, consulting tattered maps, dealing with the locals, missing his family. I'd read that novel.
     Regular readers might recall that I have a particular fondness for carousels, the melancholy of merry-go-rounds, and appreciate the Art Institute allowing me to admire this one. Which I'm happy to share to you.
     That's it. No larger point. A beautiful wooden horse on a beautiful summer day to celebrate the end of July.

A reader on Twitter asked to see the entire horse (Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Northshore Notes: Tart Cherries

     By week's end my head wasn't a very good place to be, and I appreciated our North Shore correspondent, Caren Jeskey, taking us on one of her trademark rambles through a world that seems much more expansive and welcoming than the cramped confines most of us inhabit, cages of our own construction.

   By Caren Jeskey

 The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.
                 —John Larson, Rent

     This week I got tired of analyzing every goddamn thing. I wanted to just say “anything goes!” and throw caution to the wind rather than trying to live a carefully measured life. Why not? What’s the point of taking things so seriously when there’s so little that can be controlled? Existential theory suggests that it is possible to shape our own existence. As Sartre said “any purpose or meaning in your life is created by you.” If that’s true, I have a long way to go if I’m going to be content. I have not fully embraced the concept that my destiny is in my hands and sometimes I think it's not based on inner and outer resources or lack thereof.
     I spent almost four days indoors. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and until 5 p.m. on Thursday. A friend who’s currently in Denmark helped me feel less bad about it. “There is nothing wrong with a period of hygge,” which Wikipedia defines as “a word in Danish and Norwegian that describes a mood of coziness and ‘comfortable conviviality’ with feelings of wellness and contentment.”
     I realized that my friend was at least partially right. I like my cozy abode. I did, after all, play flutes, talk and tend to happy plants, cook healthy meals, soak in lavender baths, dance, meditate, and stretch between long work days and lying on the couch watching Prime. I felt I could not deal with people, not even in passing on the sidewalks. I just needed to hibernate a bit after the world got so scary. Science explains all of it, but Armageddon embodies how it feels.
     It’s not as though my dance card is empty. It’s that all of my invitations during times like this are “nos.” And besides, I’m supposed to be (and usually am) a champion of the value of solitude and being good company for oneself. Still, hermit days are harder to bear when it’s perfectly temperate summertime in the Midwest.

     Rather than more work on Thursday night after my last client of the week, the call to get out there finally came from within, and my Birkenstocks and I hit the pavement. We strolled intuitively — I like to walk down the streets that look the brightest with the clearest paths — and noticed a little art school on Park Drive. A mile west, we stopped and drank in the expanse of the azure lake from the overlook at Kenilworth Beach.
     Thumping music led us to Plaza del Lago where the lead singer of The Molly Ringwalds enchanted us with a gorgeously sung German intro to "Ninety Nine Red Balloons." I treated myself to whitefish and Pellegrino on the patio of Convito with a front row seat to the band, noise cancelling ear pods (iLuv brand, cheap and good) protecting the hearing that I have left.
     Fine dancers from 2 to 92 embodied the adage that all things are possible. Maybe Cocoon was a true story. At first I thought “that’s how old people look dancing” until I realized that I will be they one day in the not too distant future, if I’m lucky. Maybe I look like that already, who knows? I suddenly saw them with new eyes. Children in grown up suits, like all of us. I noticed their couture styles, talent, and joie de vivre. Their lack of flexibility, wrinkles and stooped spines disappeared.

Alone in one’s mind.
Open to the sea of one.
Fear will disappear.
        —Haiku

     That’s what I am seeking, these sacred moments of calm connection that are always within my home and myself, and just outside the front door for the taking.
     I thought back to my Austin walkabout days when the pandemic started. With few family and friends nearby and COVID job loss, I had plenty of free time to walk and walk. Usually upwards of 10 miles most days. I was in a state of hygge partly thanks to denying certain realities such as economic uncertainty and housing instability. Still, I spent thousands of hours putting one foot in front of the other and communing with whatever I came across on the journey — a nature trail, a lizard, backyard goats, a neighbor, a park bench. The grounds of the Elisabet Ney Museum, where their kind docent Oliver (who invited me and 2 friends in on my birthday for a small private tour), died of the cancer he’d told me about. A loss to Austin.
     “Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year," the New Yorker noted in a 2016 article on the practice. "With those necessities secured, Danes are free to become ‘aware of the decoupling between wealth and wellbeing.’” Lucky them!
     Since I’ve last written I did one very bad thing, throwing caution right out the window. I jumped into a private “no swimming” lake and took a short swim to the middle and back. The friend I was with said “please don’t do this.” It was warm and rainy and the placid lake had tiny divots where the raindrops hit. I needed to feel differently in that moment. The water beckoned. I was wearing shorts and a top that could easily pass as a swimsuit. I took off my rain boots and dress and jumped in. I was instantly gratified, and I swam and floated on my back, raindrops hitting my closed eyes and lips. I could have stayed there forever.
     When I looked back at it the next day, I realized that I could have been cited. Arrested even. A scary thought.   

     I found safer moments of contentment after that dip. A farmers market with my father. Sweet-tart cherries, basil plants, and baskets of peaches. Discovering prolific muralist Max Sansing working on his newest creation in Evanston. I’d noticed his work on Grand near Milwaukee when I moved back to Chicago last year, and also on the housing shelter behind the Wilson red line, and had even snapped photos. It was a treat to come across Max, filling in the outline of his mural from top to bottom on a bright orange mobile hydraulic high rise work platform.
     As a friend recently asked, since we are atheists and "we don’t bow to a white sky daddy in the sky” then what IS the point of working so hard to be good? Trying to change bad habits and becoming more peaceful? Better cogs in the wheel? Spreaders of peace? I’m not sure, but I cannot let myself off the hook. Have I inherited a chronic sense of Catholic inferiority where I will never be good enough, the sinful human that I am? That others are not good enough? I hope I have not been cursed forever.
     As I warred with myself on and off this week, my solace has been in a pleased client caseload, growth and less suffering in their ranks, enjoyment on my part of our sessions together, Irish jigs played on my silver flute, sitting down to write this, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a feeling that it’s, overall, good to be alive.

Judas, Benedict Arnold and Donald Trump

      The Circle of the Traitors — Dante's Foot Striking Bocca Degli Abati, by William Blake

     “Trump and his accomplices are the most pathetic traitors ever,” controversial Democratic fundraiser Scott Dworkin tweeted to his million followers in mid-July. “Cowards who need to be arrested immediately.”
     I know you’re not supposed to think about tweets. They’re just random shots in the Twitter free-fire zone, tiny sparks flying off a burning lumberyard.
     But occasionally one ember will lodge under the skin. In this case, the word “pathetic,” which I took not for its current popular meaning, “miserably inadequate; of very low standard,” but for its original sense of “arousing pity.”
     Rinse off the contempt and there is indeed something pitiable about traitors. Merely feeling scorn for them is too simple, too easy, and ignores the essential tragedy of betrayal.
     Start with the original traitor of Western culture, Judas Iscariot. Why did he betray Jesus? The 30 pieces of silver are what’s remembered, but that’s a smoke screen. Small payout for the magnitude of his crime. (One of the several ways Donald Trump is outstanding in the traitor field: Unlike most, he’s playing for large stakes. The average traitor gets but little. Jonathan Pollard sold his country for a $2,500-a-year Israeli salary.)
     Silver aside, Judas’ betrayal was almost preordained. If the Bible is to be trusted, Jesus seems in on the plan. He announces that one of his disciples will betray him. The Gang of 12 immediately demand to know who. Jesus says the person he’ll hand this bread to is the bad guy, and gives a chunk of challah to Judas, saying, “Do quickly what you’re going to do.”
     Which kinda undercuts the obloquy that Judas has been held in for 2,000 years, doesn’t it? As Joan Acocella put it in The New Yorker: “If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act?”
     I could see an argument where the least responsible party in the current betrayal of America is Trump himself — he arrived on the political scene a long-established grifter and con man, congenital liar and serial fraud. How can he be held responsible for what followed? Can a man without convictions, devoted only to advancing himself, be said to betray anything? There’s almost an innocence to Trump, the great orange man-baby, kicking and crying, pooping and dribbling, demanding his needs be met now.

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Routine is your friend

     Routine gets a bad name. It's equated with boredom, sameness. But routine — the same thing, done in the same way, every single time — can be your friend. It is not only efficient, but protective. You break your routine, even a little, even doing something that makes perfect sense in itself, and you're asking for trouble. You're asking for coffee grounds in your shoes.
     I guess I'd better just tell the story.
     So every morning I make coffee. Nothing dramatic there. A complicated, multi-step process. Which I have down to a series of smooth, efficient motions. Take the bag of coffee beans and the filters from the cabinet to my left. Rinse the pot and the filter holder from the day before in the kitchen sink to my right. Grind the beans while water runs in the pot. Dump and return the pot and the filter holder and insert the paper filter. Take the canister of ground beans and dump it into the filter. Fill the water chamber.
     The only variant is whether I use the ideal coffee that God intended us to use, Peet's Major Dickason's. Or Dunkin Donuts Hazelnut, the preference of ... let's say, a certain person who lives with me and probably shouldn't be exposed to the public shame of preferring hazelnut coffee to regular Joe joyously drunk by decent people.
     Though the Dunkin' coffee is already ground. That is easier. While Peet's needs grinding. 
     Where everything fell apart Wednesday is because something new entered my finely-tuned system. On Monday, as I tapped out the ground coffee from the little clear container, well, it didn't seem so clear. Not entirely clean. It was ... yes ... dirty. From months of coffee being ground into it. Not wildly dirty. Not filthy. Just a little. Since nothing about the coffee making system should be dirty, I took the little clear container and cleaned it out with a soapy sponge, and set it aside to dry.
     Honestly, I felt thorough, observant. No detail ignored.

     But a detail was ignored.

     Do you see what's coming? I didn't.

     Tuesday passed. I didn't make coffee Tuesday. I drank what was left over from the day before. An economy. My wife winces at that. I consider it manly.

      So I began preparing the coffee Wednesday. Everything normal. The sense that something was amiss came to me after I had returned the pot and filter holder, placed the unbleached filter, and reached for the clear plastic canister in the grinder. My fingertips touched coffee grounds. That's not supposed to happen. But it did happen. Because the canister was still to the right of the sink, where it had been placed to dry on Monday. I had obliviously ground four scoops of coffee while they spilled out of the grinder, across the counter, onto the kitchen floor — a rough slate floor, just the thing for trapping coffee grounds forever. My blindly reaching over had further spread the mess. Onto my top-siders. Even inside one. Have you ever gotten coffee grounds in your shoe? I have. Now.
     Here I must have uttered a wild beast cry of pain, because my wife came running, calling "What's wrong!?!" from the stairs.
     "Don't come down here!" I replied. Why? Maybe I thought I could somehow clean this up and conceal the blunder from her. Avoid diminishing my heroic stature in her eyes. Or maybe I knew she would just make it worse, by taking charge of the clean-up, as if, having fomented this disaster through my carelessness I was now to be deemed incapable for cleaning up my own mess. 

    Which is exactly what happened. She didn't quite body check me aside with, "Out of the way, you clod, haven't you done enough damage for one day?!" But the tone was there.
     I grabbed the Dustbuster and dove in. Between the two of us, we made short work of the spilled grounds. And she did make the useful suggestion that the grounds, spread across the clean granite counter, could merely be slid onto a plate and then put into the coffee maker and brewed, which I did, at least salvaging that.
     "You do the same thing every day, you're bound to screw up eventually," I said, trying to put a bright spin on my oversight. Then a larger concern, in that vein, dawned on me. "I wonder what the column version of this will be?"

     Twenty-six years and counting. But one fine day... a misfired joke. An underchecked claim presented as fact.
     "That's what editors are for," she said.

     Later in the day, I managed to wreck the ending. I noticed the clear canister, still among the dried dishes, to the right side of the sink. In all the commotion, it hadn't moved from its spot. I might have had the whole disaster happen again, a second time. Wouldn't that be a great ending? But this time, I grabbed the canister and slid it back where it belonged.

You can’t go dome again

     Again with the dome.
     Forgive me for lapsing into Yiddishkeit. But to see Mayor Lori Lightfoot drag out the dome will-o’-the-wisp, like a much-adored toddler’s blankie now worn to a nubbin, and wave it over her head, as if it were an original genius divination of her own — it taps into a well of deep Chicago nostalgia. It makes me want to set up a cart in Maxwell Street and start selling bottles of Professor Steinberg’s Amazing Old World Cure-All.
     Because if people will buy the dome notion, they’ll buy anything.
     For years, decades, well over half a century, the idea of putting a dome over Soldier Field, or building a vast domed sports complex nearby, has been dangled in front of the city’s eyes by whomever is currently parked on the 5th floor of City Hall, joined by anybody else with a dog in this race who can find their way to a podium.
     In 1964, it was the general superintendent of the Chicago Park District, Erwin Weiner, observing it would cost $8 million to put a dome over Soldier Field (say it in a Dr. Evil voice: “Eight MILLION dollars!”) and transform the stadium into “a modern, all-purpose sports arena.”
     The timing wasn’t accidental. In the early 1960s, Major League Baseball created two expansion teams. One became the New York Mets. The other was slated for Houston, provided they could build a covered stadium. (Which might confuse native Chicagoans. A dome? In Houston? Whatever for? It never snows there. Answer: the Texas weather was considered too hell-like for human beings to play sports in a venue that wasn’t air-conditioned.)

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