‘We draw you in with beauty’

     Humanity’s first home was a garden. And while biblical Eden is no longer available to stroll through, alas, the Chicago Botanic Garden is very much with us.
     I’ve visited hundreds of times — the place kept my wife and me sane during COVID. While encouraging people to visit isn’t in our selfish interest — crowds — going at least once certainly is in yours.

     Particularly now. This summer the garden is celebrating its 50th anniversary, showing off 10 large commissioned outdoor artworks, and the second half of August might be an ideal time to explore a place I often describe as “heaven-like.” (“Edenic” just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.)
     Half the size of New York’s Central Park — 385 acres — the Chicago Botanic Garden isn’t actually in Chicago, but Glencoe, immediately east of the Edens Expressway between Lake Cook and Dundee Roads. 

Chicago Daily News
Jan. 27, 1965.

     

     Visitors are led through the wide range of natural habitats, from formal English walled garden to wildflower-bedecked prairie, from a carefully-cultivated Japanese island garden, complete with teahouse, to a woodland walk under towering oaks where only the blazed trail lets you know you’re not in virgin forest.
     There are vegetable gardens and groves of birches, water lilies and desert cacti. I’ve seen deer, otters and, on one memorable occasion, a hooded merganser duck. One of the joys is shifting in scale and perspective, lifting your gaze from close-up examination of a gorgeous lily to peer across the lagoon at a bridge in the distance, flanked by weeping willows.
     The place is so big, we recently spent an hour there walking and never went inside, merely circled the perimeter.
     One of the more astounding aspects of the Botanic Garden is, no matter how often times we visit, and we often go three times a week, it’s always fresh, new, interesting, because of the changing light at different times of day, the seasons of the year, plants waxing and waning, annual shows — orchids, jack-o-lanterns, a light show at Christmas. My wife and I visit in February when it’s 20 degrees, as the garden is beautiful in snow.

To continue reading, click here.

"Be secret and exalt"

     "Now all the truth is out," William Butler Yeats writes. "Be secret and take defeat/From any brazen throat."
      The beginning of an odd little 1916 poem with a breathtaking title: "To a Friend Whose Work has Come to Nothing." 

     Easy for Yeats to say, who straddled the world in his own lifetime, and would linger longer than most. Whose lines are used as movie titles: "That is no country for old men..."
      In the poem, he seems to brace his unnamed friend, "Bred to a harder thing than triumph," presenting his own success as somehow unfair. 

Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor's eyes?

     It might seem odd that Yeats might cast himself as a liar, but it's a theme he would return to, such as in an even shorter 1916 poem, "The Coming of Wisdom with Time." This is the whole poem:

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

For how can you compete 

Though leave are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth.

      It's unclear whether it's himself or the days of youth that are lying; my bet is both. Either way, withering into the truth sounds painful. Though not without advantages. The life work of most people either comes to nothing or very close, on the grand scale, and whatever impact anybody manages merely holds back obscurity for the briefest time. 

     This is a long way of saying, I had mixed feelings when my colleague Eric Zorn returned to the John Kass well for a definitive drink, "The truth about John Kass’ dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild." He begins well, promising he will "summarize the controversy," though I don't believe any piece of writing nearing 5,000 words can be considered a summary unless it's addressing the history of the world. 

      While I'm confident that Eric has certainly stylishly and thoroughly retired the topic, I hope, if not buried it in a lead-lined coffin, I was still tempted to pick up the theme he began, like one jazz musician riffing on another's melody, and expand upon it, as we did to so much fun and effect earlier last month. 

     That post got 20 times the average readership, so obviously people, for whatever reasons, are primed to laugh at John Kass. Unlike Yeats's friend, splashing around in the kiddie pool of untruth does not shame Kass in his own eyes, apparently, though it does him in a negative light with certain others.

     But my heart isn't in it. Nobody is entirely bad. I have a colleague who tells a story about Kass. She was in the City Hall Press Room when some disturbed person, upset over something she wrote, burst in, shouting, and made to attack her. But Kass leapt across a desk and tackled the man. He saved her.  

"To a friend..." first appeared in the
May, 1914 issue of Poetry Magazine.

    Does a moment's physical courage counterbalance years of caustic fuckery?  Hard to say. Remember, the people he writes for are already debased, soul-dead Trumpies, lost, looking for their daily fix of fear and self-victimization. If Kass didn't sell it to them, someone else would. It isn't as if, were he unavailable, they'd start reading David Hume instead.

     Bigotry is the collision of ignorance and fear. As much as the hostility and damage caused by haters tempts the clear-eyed to simply hate them back, we have to consider the keyhole view of life they limit themselves to, all they miss, the essential tragedy of their condition. They can't listen and they can't learn and so they wander, dazed survivors after an accident, in the sunlit center of a glorious world, eyes squinched shut, lashing blindly out at their imagined enemies. They're hurt and hopeless and you can't scorn them, for long. Or shouldn't, anyway.

     So as much as I enjoy heartily ridicule, I tend to eventually come out the other side, shaking contempt off like a dog after a bath. I grew to genuinely pity Jay Mariotti, and wish I had been nicer to him, wondering whether he might not be genuinely ... well, he's a litigious cuss, so I'd better not say. Afflicted with problems more severe than just being an asshole. 

     Even Bob Greene. I don't regret a bit of BobWatch. Fun, and well-deserved, at the time. But should he pitch forward today into the sand at Sunset Bay, metal detector pinging plaintively beside him, unheard, I don't think I'd use the opportunity to revisit his shameful exit or the deeply weird nostalgic rathole he plunged down.  He did hang with Michael Jordan — I certainly didn't hang with Michael Jordan — and had a column in Esquire, and a regular gig on "Nightline," and rang the journalism bell far more loudly than I ever will. That he could vanish so completely is a reminder of just how completely we all vanish, good bad and indifferent. That's the lesson. The warning.

     "Be secret and exult" Yeats ends his poem. "Because of all things known/That is most difficult."

     Or so imagines Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As so often happens with those simply guessing at life, based on themselves, he's quite wrong. It's not difficult at all. In fact, it's easy. Almost mandatory. What other choice is there? "Soul clap its hands and sing," as Yeats himself instructs in "Sailing to Byzantium." Now there's a plan.

 

 

Northshore Notes: Howl at the Moon

     I don't know why it never occurred to me before. But I was reading today's report by Northshore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey, and suddenly it struck me. "Here, I always thought Austin, Texas was this quirky, cool place, where EGD's correspondent was bopping around, gathering color. When in reality, it could be as boring an anodyne as a generic shopping mall, with Caren generating her own heat and light, as she does here. Well, aided by the moon.

 By Caren Jeskey

“Humans aren’t entirely rational beings; we’re aesthetic beings, we’re romantic beings and, as Sagan hinted, we are also frightened beings — haunted by our own mortality and the enormity of a universe we only partly comprehend. If a supermoon serves as a comforting night light, we’ll happily take it.”
                            —Jeffrey Kluger

    Thursday night boasted the last supermoon of the year. It pulled me to the lake for the moonrise. For my last client of the day I headed over to Mallinckrodt Park, in all of its midsummer full bloom glory. It’s been a great season for things that grow in the Midwest, as you have noticed if you’re here. The grassy fields and bountiful fragrant roses of the park dance and preen for us.

     I found a soft patch of grass under my favorite local weeping willow tree. When we hopped on Zoom, my client got to see the fronds of this magnificent tree gently swaying in the breeze, with the expanse of a perfectly manicured field and a very blue sky behind me. She smiled broadly. It’s amazing what a change of scenery can do. My client does not live in the safe bosom of Kenilworth Gardens as I do. When we were saying goodbye she cautioned me to be careful in a park alone. “I watch too many crime shows not to worry.” I assured her that I would.
     I took my leave from the willow’s canopy and started the trek. After a quick stop at a coffee shop for a pick-me-up of green matcha, I crossed Sheridan where I’d planned to hop the fence to the beach. Luckily for me, since I really don’t want to be cited, they’ve posted a hundred more signs than usual reading “No Beach Access,” and they also repaired the area of the fence where ne'er-do-wells like me used to pop over to prevent having to walk another quarter mile or so. This led me to walk south like a proper person to a proper beach entrance.
     There’s a little spot secreted between lakefront homes that leads to a mountainous sand dune. When you step off of the street and into this haven, indigenous trees and green and flowering things adorn the well manicured landscape. Sometimes you’ll find a person or two scanning the area for invasive vines, pulling them firmly so the roots come out, and bagging them up to be destroyed. It’s a well appointed area with trash and recycling bins and bike racks. There are stairs built into the sandy cliff, which descend to a winding path that’s peppered with charming wooden benches. There you can take a quick rest, or sit the afternoon away — a view of the lake visible though obscured by old, tall conifer trees.
     Emerging at the lakefront, I headed along the water’s edge to a clump of boulders. It was nearing dusk and the lake was full of movement. A couple of boys were tossing boogie boards into the wet froth, gingerly jumping aboard and riding them back to shore, gracefully skimming the water. Deeper in, gaggles of teens were hopping the five foot waves. Their screams of delight were muffled pleasantly by the thunderous volume of lake sounds.
     I spontaneously sang and howled for fun (no one could hear me) and felt like a carefree child. I stretched, and let the wind give me an invigorating bath. 
     It was 8:03, 13 more minutes to the scheduled moonrise. Gradually I noticed what looked like sun rays radiating out of the horizon to the southeast. Moon rays? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen moon rays before. Not like these. Then the whole sky dimmed to a darker blue cloudless dusk.
     It was windy. I started shivering but it felt good, not like winter shivers. It was a much cooler night than I’d planned for. I left my rocky perch and nestled down on the beach. I tucked my knees close and draped my dress over them, tucking the bottom under my feet. Warmer, and cozy, I rested my back on a sandbag hill at the base of a “lawn” of one of the homes (that would be more appropriate as a public park if you ask me). I hoped no one would shoo me away. Alas, a heretofore unnoticed guard beelined towards me almost immediately. (‘How can a person OWN the beach?’ my mind screamed). I got up and found another place to sit, closer to the laughably tiny public beach area with a good crowd of people drying off, lying around, and creating TikTok clips.
     At the best drive-in ever, I kept my eyes towards the screen of the horizon, and wondered where that moon was. At about 8:20 I finally noticed a flaming orange chord of a circle start to peek up over a retaining wall in the southeast sky. Thar she blows! She rose quickly. I leapt up and walked briskly towards her. I wanted to keep walking to her face, and gaze directly up at her like so many Disney characters have gotten to do. Dozens of people of all ages were on their feet now, from the Plaza del Lago condos all the way to Gillson Beach. Everyone was staring, laughing, talking animatedly, or taking photos and videos.
     I gazed for a good long while until she was much higher in the night sky. I felt complete, and was ready to make the few mile journey home. I walked barefoot down a paved path in the middle of the parking lot, and noticed how tall the flowers, bushes, and prairie grasses had gotten since a few short weeks ago. I popped my Birks back on and as I ascended a pedestrian incline back to the street, I thought I heard a voice calling out to me. I wrote it off to the wind. But then there it was again. A lovely woman, visiting from Phoenix, was calling out to ask me to walk with her. “Buddy system. Safety in numbers,” she said. "Of course," I replied, then I assured her that we were as safe as Norman Rockwell characters. We chatted for a while, found a lot of common ground, and entertained the people passing us who could not help but comment on the spectacle of the moon we had all just witnessed together.
     One of the passers by was a lady named Mary Jane Kale. Somehow it came up that she had gone to Mundelein College, where my mother went, and where I went to preschool. Modern feminist badass women like Mary Jane and my mother call themselves Mundle Bundles. My Phoenix pal, Mary Jane, her husband and I laughed at the cool coincidence. It was one of those nights where all felt right in the world.

Librarians get the job done

     The Richelieu Reading Room at the National Library of France in Paris is beautiful. No, you can’t get in, unless you are a registered researcher or skilled at talking your way past librarians.

     Don’t fuck with librarians.
     In the newspaper, I’m using a weaker word than “fuck,” the watered-down euphemism required by the kabuki of daily newspapering. Which in the freer online world I can ignore. Why not? The nation is in continual crisis, if not circling the drain. Norms are trashed left and right. Newspapers are wan imitations of themselves as it is. Time to unleash all the words.
     Librarians are badass. At least I can say that in print.
     Yes, the National Archives is not, technically, a library so much as a repository of public documents. But it has its own library and a chief librarian, and is in charge of all presidential libraries. We’re on safe ground considering it a library.
     And yes, those busting into Mar-a-Lago on Monday were not librarians, per se, but FBI agents acting as their proxy. Still, going down to Florida to collect their overdue materials was certainly a boss librarian move. The sort of hardball I’ve come to associate with librarians.
     Librarians can’t be milquetoasts. They must deal with the public. Frequently wrangle other people’s children for hours. Librarians can’t suffer fools. Busting in, guns drawn, blowing the safe, is very on-brand for librarians. “I believe you have something that belongs to us!”

Mrs. Rachel Beers, circa 1978,

     Experience has given me special respect for librarians. Not to be confused with affection. Closer to the survivor nostalgia that Marines feel for abusive boot camp instructors at Parris Island. There was Mrs. Rachel Beers — I remember her name — fixing me with her deadly laser stare from behind the circulation desk at the Berea High School Library. She once printed up school library rules on a special handout, personalized for me, and hand-delivered them, since I obviously didn’t seem to understand that the library rules applied to me, too. Especially to me.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2011: Spiders can bite you in many ways

   
      Monday I finally did something I've been meaning to do for months — walk through the Chicago Botanic Garden with its president, talking about the artwork installed for the 50th anniversary. That'll run Monday in the Sun-Times.

     During our walk, I mentioned this column, about hanging out with spider expert Jim Steffen, and thought I'd share it here. That word in the third paragraph, "epigyne," means exactly what it seems to: the female sex organ of an arachnid.  A reminder that the language, like nature itself, can be wonderfully specific. Steffen was an emeritus senior ecologist at the garden until his retirement last year.

     Determining the sex of a spider is not so very much different than determining the sex of a human baby: You flip it over and check out the equipment.
     Unlike with the baby however, with a spider, you need a microscope to get a good look at its sex organs, which are both very small and very complicated and — also unlike the baby — you really want the spider to be dead.
     “You can imagine, if you had a live spider and you flipped it over, it’s not going to sit there,” said Jim Steffen, an ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, as I peered into a microscope and admired the dainty epigyne of a crab spider collected in the Mary Mix McDonald Woods, a 100-acre oak forest within the Botanic Garden, which for the past 23 years Steffen has been nudging back toward its pristine state.
     Nature is interconnected, so caring about trees — the oaks have been here 10,000 years while the ash, the Norway maples and the other riff-raff less than 200 — led Steffen to focus on leaf litter, the fallen leaves and debris on the ground under the trees.
     “I was interested in what was happening with the leaf litter,” he said, “because what we have discovered with woodland restoration, as invasive species invade the woodland the litter layer degrades.”
     And by figuring out what’s happening with the spiders in the leaf litter, Steffen gets insight into the ecosystem as a whole.
     Invasive species, both plants and animals, are hardy imports from around the globe that have a tendency to crowd out local flora and fauna. Some have suitably awful names — leafy spurge, poison hemlock, goutweed, hairy fireweed — others do not: baby’s breath, Queen Anne’s lace, wild strawberry.
     And buckthorn. Longtime readers will recall my endless War Against Buckthorn. I smiled, encountering my old nemesis in the Botanic Garden, like Sherlock Holmes detecting the hand of Professor Moriarty in a particularly sticky business.
     Somewhat like a character out of Conan Doyle himself, Steffen is trim, 60, with a neat white mustache. He lives in Winthrop Harbor. Perhaps all you need to know about his personal life is that when I asked him what he does as a hobby, he answered, “I collect seeds on the weekend.” He also gardens.
     Learning that the spiders are killed in order to study them gave me pause. I feel bad when called upon to kill a spider. Didn’t Steffen, as a man devoted to nature, also feel bad?
     “No,” he said. “If I took you for a walk through this part of the woods here, you would probably kill several hundred thousand insects — springtails and spiders — walking. Every time you put your foot down you’re stepping on something.”
     Somehow I reached the age of 50 without ever hearing the word “springtail” — it’s a tiny (¼-inch long or less) primitive insect-like thing with a curled tail used to hop away from danger. We looked at a few under the microscope — a springtail looks like a brown crumb with personality.
     “It’s a group of organisms not looked at too closely,” Steffen said, noting that a volunteer, studying creatures that showed up in the spider traps, found about half a dozen new springtails that science had yet to give names.
     We ended up at the Botanic Garden’s ecology lab, and I was struck by the contrast between the wild disorder of the green, sun-dappled woods, with hardy oaks and nefarious buckthorn, and this cool, pristine white room with its gray counters, sleek microscopes, rack of Kimax lab glassware, orderly rows of metal boxes of slides and spider-filled little vials. On the bookshelf, apropos titles: Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, All About Weeds by Edward Rollin Spencer and How to Know the Grasshoppers, Crickets, Cockroaches and Their Allies by Jacques Hefler.
     After two hours I was just getting started, but Steffen began sorting slides, and I realized I was keeping him from important work. Besides, I’d already collected enough information for three columns (I haven’t even talked about the sex lives of spiders. Male spiders engage in foreplay and treat their beloved to dinner — a male will wrap a fly in silk and present it to the female, though, unlike men, or at least unlike most men, he will then do the deed while she’s still eating).
     Nor have I touched on spiders’ solitary quality, nor their venom — almost all spiders are poisonous, though only a few have poison in enough quantity or strength that can harm humans. Nor have I mentioned our outsize fear of spiders, which are everywhere.
     “You’re never more than a meter away from a spider, wherever you are,” said Steffen.
     Whether that’s good or not is up to you.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 2011.

Trump isn’t toast yet

Gen. Douglas MacArthur signs the Instrument of Peace during Japanese surrender ceremonies on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945. (US Army Photo)

     World War II lasted exactly six years. Six years and one day, to be precise, from the German Panzers rolling into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, to the Japanese signing articles of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
     A long time. An era.
     Speaking of experiences that seem to go on forever, Donald Trump has already been gleaming at the center stage of our transfixed national attention for longer than World War II was fought.
     From June 16, 2015 — setting aside his previous career as real estate tout and TV game show host — when he descended that glass escalator in the gaudy marble lobby of Trump Tower and announced, “The American dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better.”
     And people believed him.
     To Monday, when the FBI raided his equally tasteless Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, reportedly looking for classified presidential records that he took with him instead of turning them over to the government, as the law requires.
     Seven years, plus seven weeks. And counting.
     Of course, unlike the ceremony in Tokyo Bay, the Mar-a-Lago milestone is not the end. Nowhere near. If the nation has learned one thing from the entire Trump fiasco — and it might not have, but let’s pretend — it’s to never put too much emphasis on any one event or statement, no matter how jaw-dropping or norm-shattering or horrific.
     Never count Trump out. So long as the former president has breath to lie with, he’ll plow forward, masses of supporters furiously following along in his wake, like pilot fish hungry for chum.

To continue reading, click here.

A couple of crows on a tree in my backyard

     Between my backyard and the village property beyond is a line of trees — healthy pines, with the exception of one very dead tree that no doubt will be removed soon. Stepping onto the back deck, I glance at the top, and was rewarded by seeing a large black bird, a crow, perch there, soon to be joined by a second. They surveyed their surroundings while I watched them.

      Usually, crows are encountered on the ground, flapping a few dozen yards off. Up close, they can be unsettling. They always give me pause, as harbingers of something. It must be their impenetrable black color. Their size. Some big birds are impressive —herons, hawks. Crows are just large. There's something ominous about them.

     I'm relieved to see this isn't a bias peculiar to me.

    "The Night-Crow cried, aboding luckless time," Shakespeare's King Henry VI exclaims.
     "Crows are most associated with corpses and dark death," Diana Wells writes in her essential "100 Birds and How they Got Their Names." A question she doesn't answer while skipping through the numerous ways crows impact our language, from scarecrows to Jim Crow to eating crow. My favorite being "crowbar," which she suggests is named for "the crow's strong curved bill."
     A bill—I'd call it a beak, though the words are synonymous—used to sometimes eat other birds, or steal their eggs, or pluck their feathers to line their own nests, a quality put to good use in a letter by Horace when chiding a lesser colleague, encyclopedist Aulus Celsus, in this translation by David Ferry:

    ...He's been advised, and surely
It's good advice for him, that he should write
Out of himself and out of what he knows
And stay away from those old writers he reads
In Apollo's library on the Palatine.
Someday the flock of birds might come back asking
To have their brilliant feathers given back
And the crow, stripped naked, is certain to be laughed at. 

     Lines Robert Greene surely had in mind when defaming William Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers."For me, the duo in my backyard echoed, not Shakespeare, but Thomas Mann, whose "Death in Venice" is crammed with auguries. Gustav von Auschenbach at first rejoices at being on holiday in the plague-bound city, thinking back to his Teutonic home, "the scene of his battles in the summer, where the clouds blew low across his garden, and terrifying storms put out the lamps at night, and the crows which he fed were swinging in the tops of the pine trees."
     Wells doesn't address "to crow," as in boasting, and I thought of my game of which usage came first; in this case, the bird or the brag? But of course the bird would have to come first, its distinctive "caw" or "crah" easily applied to self-congratulations, noises that would have to explain its name as well. "Crow" is practically an onomatopoeia.
     The OED starts with the great Dr. Johnson's definition, "a large black bird that feeds upon the carcasses of beasts." Though they'll eat just about anything: carrion, insects, berries, with a particular fondness for cultivated grains — hence scarecrows. The usage is over a thousand years old.

     Among the crow-based phrases the OED touches upon, "to have a crow to pluck or pull (rarely pick) with any one" is to have a disagreeable, awkward matter that must be gone over with another person. That would seem a bit more evocative than the standard "bone to pick." The boasting, swaggering meaning is 500 years old.

     In my research, I got sidetracked to scarecrows. They're such literary figures, stars of horror stories and "The Wizard of Oz." And in the 19th century, metaphors — governments were tossing up this and that as scarecrows. I wondered how useful scarecrows actually were.

     Plenty, apparently. John Armstrong's 1840 "A Treatise on Agriculture: A Concise History of its Origin and Progress;the Present Condition of the Art Abroad and at Home and the Theory and Practice of Husbandry" recommends them. After a discussion of keeping insects off cherry trees by burning a mixture of pitch and sulfur, Armstrong notes, "Birds are here a more potent enemy; and the best remedy against them are old fishnets thrown over the trees, clapboards, scarecrows, and fusees."

     Fusee is an old term for flare. Clapboards hardly need explanation, except to note that they are still used. Little corellas, small white cockatoos that flock by the thousands, chewing on streetlights and causing "stress and concern" for residents of Alexandrina, according to their web page, which passes along "scaring techniques" from the South Australian Little Corella Management Strategy, including:

     "Two pieces of timber (approx. 400mm long x 35mm thick) with a door hinge at one end to join the two timbers together. Hold the clap boards up high and start clapping the boards together loudly when birds are present."

     Alexandrina is on the southern coast of Australia, not far from Adelaide. And here, it strikes me that we've come quite far from two crows on a tree in my backyard. They stayed there quite a while — a least five minutes, which I felt in my arms, holding up my phone to snap their exit. Finally, my patience was rewarded: one flew off and then, after another long pause, the other followed.