Happy E-Day!

  

     It's Easter, again. Being a full-service columnist, I should come up with some Easter content, for those who celebrate. Though I'm at a disadvantage, having never observed the holiday myself, beyond gobbling what Easter candy strays within reach.

     In the past, I did not let this gap in my upbringing stop me from taking a swing at Easter. Two brief posts, then, from when the column filled a page and was made up of little items. 

OPENING SHOT

     Happy Easter! Do you know a good way to kill bunnies? Because I've got them --my lawn sometimes looks like that old Teletubbies TV show with scatterings of rabbits gazing stupidly back at you.
     I never minded before — cute wittle bunny wabbits, right? Until now, with spring in early bloom, I made my initial survey of the yard and garden, noting happily the fat pink scoop magnolia blossoms opening, the yellow breaking out on the forsythia, the daffodils daffodilling.
     And where was my vinca, flats of which I've been planting for the past two or three years, as ground defense against weeds? "Vinca," I called sweetly, "Oh vinca?" It was gone. All gone. A few stubs of nothing.
     "Rabbits," said the woman at Red's Garden Center. "They're bad this year."
     Well I can be bad, too. My first thought was to sit on the back deck with a pitcher of lemonade and a shotgun across my knees. Maybe scatter some carrots as bait.
     But my house backs up against the Northbrook Village Hall parking lot, and the concussive shotgun blasts, not to mention my bloodthirsty cries of glee, would no doubt draw unwelcome police interest, and they might misinterpret the situation.   
     So what? Poison? Blow gun and poison darts? Small coils of anti-rabbit concertina wire? I loved that vinca, with its dark glossy little leaves; it must be avenged. How do the experts do it?
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 16, 2006

     Editor's note: the vinca is long gone. The rabbits remain, in abundance. Or their great-great-grandchildren, rather.

Ask the Jewish ethicist

Dear Jewish Ethicist:

     Easter is Sunday, and I don't know what to do — should I give my kids hollow chocolate bunnies and let them color eggs? Or would that be wrong? All their friends have fancy Easter baskets and we feel left out. Help!

Signed,

Hankering for Peeps.

Dear Hankering for Peeps:

     You bring up a dilemma. On one hand, we love our children and hate to deny them anything fun, and to this end violating the basic tenets of faith seems a small price to pay. On the other, we feel uncomfortable casually taking up the trappings of someone else's religion.
     As well we should. Holidays are rewards to the faithful for their ceaseless adherence to a creed. While you might be forgiven for palming a few malted milk ball eggs at work on the sly, if you indulge in your own faux Easter party, you're taking a victory lap you are not entitled to, skimming off the colorful pageantry while ignoring the meaning. That puts you in the same league as Madonna and her red string and gang-bangers with their stars of David and all the other people who thoughtlessly pin medals on themselves that they did not earn.
     Jews who dye eggs with their kids — or put up Christmas trees — are like people who crash a wedding reception. They don't know the happy couple, and they weren't invited, but they can't bear to miss a swell party so end up in line to the buffet.
     Resist if you can.
     Or, if you just have to dye eggs, wait for a few weeks — it isn't like Christians own the idea. Decorate them in May. Or is there a reason you need to do it now?

Signed,
Neil "Somebody Had to Say It" Steinberg

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 25, 2005

Works in progress: Jonathan Eig

Martin Luther King Jr, by Joseph Stein (National Portrait Gallery)

     If I had to point to the most significant writer in Chicago today, it would have to be Jonathan Eig. His books send ripples across the country and world. The highest compliment I can pay is that his books are enjoyable even when I have no interest in the subject, such as Al Capone ("Get Capone") who normally I can't cringe away from fast enough, or Lou Gehrig ("Luckiest Man"). His book on G.D. Searle developing Enovid ("The Birth of the Pill") is an unexpected journey through the struggle of women to control their reproductive health, and his most recent book on Muhammad Ali ("Ali: A Life") was a key contribution to scholarship on the most important athlete of the 20th century.

     Next month, he offers an even more ambitious biography, "King: A Life." It reads like a novel, in that I could not put it down, being treated with an unending stream of fascinating details and character studies. The New York Times called it "monumental," though that is completely backwards: the book isn't an enormous edifice, but something far better: it's fine-detailed and human.  EGD asked Eig to pull the curtain back a bit on the process, and he kindly obliged. Take it away, Jonathan: 

     I remember the moment I told my kids I wanted to write a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. We were eating dinner. The girls were 13 and seven, an eighth grader and a second grader. They both firmly opposed the idea. King was boring, they said. Luckily, I didn’t listen to them. Today, those kids are 19 and 13, a college sophomore and an eighth grader. And the book is done. It publishes May 16.  

     I sometimes wonder who’s learned more in the past six years, me, or my kids? Thanks, CPS!
     I know I’ve learned a lot. I got to meet King’s close childhood friends, his Montgomery barber, his Dexter Baptist Church organist, and the list goes on. I hung out with Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis. I even managed to get Mavis Staples to sing to me over the phone.
     I often look back and think about all the questions I didn’t ask in my career. I met Dizzy Gillespie and never asked him about Charlie Parker. I met Phil Rizzuto and didn’t ask him about Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, or Mickey Mantle. You might reasonably ask at this point what the hell I did ask them, but let’s not go there…because, for once, I got it right. I recognized that I had the chance to interview dozens of people who knew Martin Luther King Jr. – that I might be the last biographer with the opportunity – and I jumped at it.
     So, what did I learn? You’ll have to read the book (please!) to get the full picture. I learned King chewed his fingernails. I learned he had a dog named Topsy. I learned he suffered so much from depression that he had to be hospitalized several times. I learned the FBI’s assault on King was much crueler than I had known, and that Lyndon Johnson deserves a heavy portion of the blame. I could go on.
     But the biggest thing I learned, probably, is that the man had more courage than I ever could have imagined. He dared to believe he could follow the call to serve God and that a divided nation and a violent world might be repaired, that we might finally get past our racism, our materialism, and our militarism. He believed people might be united, that humanity might make genuine spiritual progress. And he was willing to risk his life to prove it.
     I know I’m getting a little emotional here. But King does that to me. Even now, after six years.
     If you read the book, I hope you’ll see why.
     Maybe my kids will overcome their skepticism some day and read it, too.

Next mayor has his work cut out for him

     Well, look at that. Turns out Paul Vallas wasn’t a Republican after all. How can I tell? Easy. His swift, gracious concession Tuesday night after losing the race for Chicago mayor to Brandon Johnson.
     “It’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together,” Vallas said.
     Recognition of electoral reality is not the standard GOP go-to move. It isn’t just Donald Trump and Kari Lake. Look at the key state Supreme Court race up in Wisconsin this week.
     “I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede,” complained Dan Kelly, of the pro-choice woman who thumped him. “My opponent is a serial liar. She’s disregarded judicial ethics; she’s demeaned the judiciary with her behavior.”
     Classy. The only reason Kelly couldn’t challenge the results was how badly he was drubbed — 10 percentage points, 55 to 45, a reminder that, given a say in the matter, most Americans don’t want Republicans peering down their pants, checking their business.
     Returning to Vallas channeling the Beatles. “Come together.” But how?
     First by recognizing just how perilous the city’s situation is right now. Take the usual urban woes — crime, schools, jobs, pensions — and mix in the unprecedented, seemingly endless post-pandemic hollowing out of downtown, and you have a recipe for a cake that looks very much like Detroit. That’s bad.
     What should Johnson do? They say that to a hammer every problem looks like a nail, and, since I am a centrist, I’m going to plump for the middle way. It’s the only path to navigate a city that voted 51 percent for a fire-breathing union organizer who thinks a 3.5 percent flee-for-the-hills income tax is a good idea, and 48 percent for a corporate water carrier so in harmony with big money interests that gazillionaire Ken Griffin was blowing him kisses from Florida.
     Start with the cops. FOP capo John Catanzara has been threatening that a thousand police officers will quit rather than work for a man who doesn’t roll at their feet like a puppy. Somebody should observe that maybe Chicago wants those particular officers to take a hike, in the hopes they’ll be replaced with new hires who maybe don’t think their choices are limited to a) do whatever we want without consequence or b) curl up in a fetal ball and whine about how everybody hates them and they can’t do their jobs. There must be a third choice. Other professions sure don’t act that way. “If you’re going to insist the cookies not be poison, then maybe I won’t bake anything at all!”
     Here Johnson has some freedom. Because as the former Defund-the-Police guy, he will never win over the FOP crowd. He can shut off their body cameras and rename Chicago “Coptown” and it won’t help.

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"Time would find them generous"

Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Smithsonian)

     Gordon Gregg was my friend in kindergarten, and still is.
     True, our relationship was not as close as I'd have liked it be in the 55 years after he moved to Arkansas in 1967. But I didn't forget him either, and when the internet became a thing, tried to track him down but couldn't. A lot of Gordon Greggs. So I was overjoyed when he reached out to me on Facebook in 2021. I sent him the book of mine — Complete and Utter Failure — where he makes a cameo, and while I haven't taken him up on his offer to visit him in Montana, I'm certainly open to the trip. It sounds like fun.
     That's me. Call it loyalty. Call it neediness — probably a blend of the two. I still think about everyone I ever cared for, even those who did something jerkish 25 years ago and vanished. The door is always open.
     Except of course for those who've died. Death makes friendship problematic, though I still manage to maintain a sort of relationship with my dead friends, still consider them, remember them, try to learn things from them. Each offers valuable lessons, for instance, on how to live, and how to die.
     Roger Ebert comes immediately to mind. Though I have to qualify my use of the word "friend." That seems like putting on airs. I was a colleague, one of his many fans, well removed in the third tier. We had lunch together once. Attended each other's parties. He was kind and generous to me, and I admired him.
     As he died, of two particularly cruel forms of cancer, Roger was unflinching and honest, without a drop of self-pity — that last part is going to be hardest for me. I'm more of a gnash my teeth and wail sort of guy. I hope when the dread times come, I'll not only think, "Be like Roger" — that's a certainty — but then I'll have the fortitude to follow through. Dying is a long-haul process.
     Except when it's not.
     Andrew Patner is a reminder of the occasional rapidity of death. I was doing his WFMT radio show one week, he was dead and gone the next, or so it seemed. A matter of days or weeks. You never know when your time has come, thus it's smart to live your life like you'll be dead tomorrow. Jeff Zaslow conveys that lesson even more plainly. One icy road, one speeding truck, and it's all over. For you, anyway. For your family and friends, it has only just begun.
     Which brings up Steve Neal. His lesson is clear: time will pluck you away soon enough. Don't hurry its hand. Suicide is a grotesque abuse of your loved ones. It offloads your pain to everyone who ever cared about you. Don't do it, if you have any say in the matter —  I know that survivors who have lost their loved ones to suicide find comfort in the idea that they don't, and I certainly don't want to argue with them. But we aren't automatons. We have free will. We can resist bad impulses. Tu ne cede malis, as Virgil writes. "Yield not to evil."
     The overarching message: enjoy every sandwich, best you can, long as you can, as Warren Zevon said when asked what cancer taught him.
     Speaking of cancer's lessons. Bill Zehme died a couple weeks ago. After I wrote his obit, I did what I believe every writer would want done to mark his passing — pulled down one of his books, Intimate Strangers, and started to read. Checking the inscription first, which startled me with its warmth. He was such a kind man. 

     Beginning with his 1995 profile on Sharon Stone, because it contains what I think it the best quote ever extracted from a celebrity (though I can't say for certain, since I haven't read every celebrity profile; in fact, I hardly read them at all, except for Bill's, which were masterpieces).
     The star of "Basic Instinct" arranged to have his-and-her massages with Zehme at her home.
     "Oh, look! It's your butt!" she playfully says, while they are under the masseuse's sheets. "I saw your butt."
     "You did not!" Bill countered, then writes: "Thinking fast, I said that I've seen hers, too."
     "Who hasn't?" she retorts. "Anybody with seven bucks can see my ass, buddy. What's your excuse?"
     There's something sublime about that, particularly when she adds, "Actually, it doesn't feel like they've seen my butt. That butt belongs to fictional characters, you know?"
     That's revealing, not only of Stone, but of all actors. The way they try to preserve some of their selves from public scrutiny. I suppose we all do that. While Bill getting naked with the "Basic Instinct" star gets mentioned a lot — I thought of putting it into his obituary, but didn't — even more marvelous is that, at Stone's direction, he skipped down a mountain trail with her, hand-in-hand. They baked cookies together.
     That is a life richly lived. At least on the celebrity metric. Which is not actually the yardstick by which life should be measured. I don't think Bill's passing was so deeply felt on the Chicago scene because he knew a lot of famous people and wrote about them very well. For me, I didn't care that he gave Madonna a lift in his car, impressive as that is. I doubt I ever asked him anything about that aspect of his life. 
     To me, Bill Zehme was a mensch, as my people say. He was reliable, caring, generous. He helped me when I really needed help. When I was in recovery, I'd phone him, we'd have coffee together. Bill was comforting in a world suddenly lacking in comfort. "It's a scary thing, buddy," he'd say. He got that right.
     But life gives to us, only to claw back. I was fortunate in getting lost in a mess that I could find my way out of, with time and his help. A labyrinth with a string marking the way out, something I had never noticed before, right there at my feet.
     Bill wasn't so lucky. Life served him a decade's worth of torment and an early death.
     Which, being Bill, he turned into a sharp, funny Chicago magazine piece called "What Cancer Taught Me." I'm reluctant to summarize it; just read it. His emphasis on humor. I hope I never go through chemo, but if I do, I'm spelling it "keemo," the way he did, to inject some desperately-needed silliness into the experience.
     He knew how important it is to be nice to the people helping him.
     "New people will begin to populate this key stretch of your life. Doctors. Nurses. Technicians. Orderlies. They’ll see and know things about you that you would never dream someone else would. You’d better be nice to these people. These are the most important relationships you’ll have."
     As far as previous relationships, those were deadweight holding him back. He chose to fight much of his decade-long battle without the discomfort of being under "the frightened eyes of friends."
     "I didn’t want people trying to cheer me up," he wrote, in boldface, and followed through. That was a hard choice for me to accept. I wanted to swoop in with cookies and company. I tried to respect that, even though I found it frustrating and dispiriting. I had to remind myself: this wasn't my fight, it was his. That's one lesson Bill taught: you can't choose when you die, but you can choose how.
     That said, he tried to be kind.
     "The people who are in my life, I love them more than I did before," he wrote. "Even if they don’t hear from me."
     So he was clear about that. And I decided, eventually, to trust him, and tried to remember he was adapting to a new and terrible situation. Who knows how one will respond to the dread news? Maybe I'd do the same.
     Maybe not. At the moment I imagine, being me, I'd want a conga line of friends working their way past the foot of my bed, in party hats, holding the hips of the person in front of them. Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump, "GET!" Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump, "BETTER!"
     But if I don't, I am going to make sure, at some point before the end, I call every single person I ever gave a damn about and thank them, specifically, for enhancing my time on earth, for tolerating me and talking with me and putting up with all the crap I'm sure I served up to them, in person and in print. You can't mold people to your liking — I've learned that much — but you can try to be the person you'd like for yourself. So when my turn comes, I think those farewells will be a little bit more intense, colored by the ones Bill didn't make. 
     Unless I don't — sickness and illness can change a person, and not in good ways. Ill people can become self-absorbed, perhaps by necessity. So I'm not judging them. But I don't want to emulate them either. Such is my plan anyway. Which might get quickly abandoned. Everybody has a plan, as Mike Tyson says, until they get punched in the mouth. Life punches us each in the mouth, at some point or another.

    When Bill died, I regretted his passing, especially the years and years it's been since we spoke, and felt bitter, until I thought of some comforting lines from James Fenton's threnody, "For Andrew Wood." The poem isn't perfect — some lines clunk — but the key part resonates for me. He imagines the dead, gathered in their post-mortem cave, and wonders: What do they want from us? What do the dead demand of the living? His answer:

I think the dead would want us

To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

     I'm lucky. And recognition of one's luck can't help but make a person grateful. And forgiving, particularly of those less fortunate. The past 20 years, for me, have been a struggle to be kinder, more generous, and less self-engrossed. That challenge is a privilege to take on, and a plan worth clinging to, in health and in sickness. When I think of Bill Zehme, I remember so much. The first time I saw him, at John F. Kennedy Jr.'s George magazine party in 1996 at the Art Institute. I was glad to meet Kennedy, and Norman Mailer, and pleased to see Kevin Costner, and Aretha Franklin, but flat-out thrilled to finally meet Zehme. I remember us standing at the bar — in the Knickerbocker Hotel, I believe. In black tie, having escaped some unendurable dinner or event. We talked and drank — there was nobody as fun to talk with and drink with than Bill. That night, I poured my martini into his — he was 6'5, and could drink me under the table. Then turning to him, again and again, to help guide me through recovery. And the last time I saw him, when I forced him to go to dinner, even though he was sick and didn't want to, in the cracked theory that seeing me would somehow make things better for him. It didn't, and I'm sorry about that, though my heart was in the right place. As was Bill Zehme's. He had one of the biggest hearts of any man I ever met, and I only wish I could have helped him at the end in a fraction of the way he once helped me.

Thank God it’s finally over

     Passover begins Wednesday night. The holiday where Jews sit late into the evening, delaying dinner while they give thanks for freedom. Our most comfortable holiday, in that it blends food (eventually), family and gratitude. Not to forget obligatory pillow leaning and mandatory wine drinking. What’s not to love?
     Yes, a lot of the gratitude is scripted ritual in a language most participants don’t understand. And being Jews, who often have trouble sticking with the program, Seders often turn into general celebrations of freedom from all sorts of oppression. There is much ad-libbing. I certainly plan to give thanks for freedom, finally, from Chicago electoral politics, which have filled the airwaves for months, the past five weeks supercharged by the mayoral runoff.
     The simplistic solutions and buzzwords hammered by candidates must offend anybody grounded in the real world. If fixes were that easy, you want to scream, how come nobody’s done them yet? With crime the No. 1 issue, you’d think the choice was: a) let cops do whatever they like so they don’t feel sad and instead start arresting people again so crime goes away, the Paul Vallas plan; or b) fix everything in society — jobs, schools, families — so crime goes away, the Brandon Johnson solution. Good luck with either of those plans.
     There are valid reasons to be thankful for the election beyond that it is finally over. The campaigns were surprisingly civil, for a Chicago election. While race was always a factor — how could it not be? — there just wasn’t as much poisonous racial rancor as in years past. A low simmer rather than a rolling boil.
     Yes, great white hope Vallas played footsie with the Fraternal Order of Police. But he didn’t come close to Bernie Epton’s notorious “Before it’s too late.” At least not in so many words.
     And yes, Johnson, in one of what seemed like daily debates, accused Vallas of being “dismissive to a Black man.” Which approaches the Lori Lightfoot poor-me, you-hate-me-because-I’m-Black-and-not-because-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing quickstep. But both candidates were generally civil.

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Into the tent of Sarah

     "How did you know about this place?" I asked my wife. We were in Sarah's Tent Kosher Market, a sprawling supermarket/religious goods store on Oakton in Skokie.
     "I've been coming here for years," she said, narrowing her eyes. "You've been here before." 
    I have? No memory at all. 

    "Years ago," she said, in my defense. In its early manifestation as Hungarian Kosher Foods. We had come here now to pick up pupiks — chicken gizzards, somehow essential for soup — in preparation for Passover, which begins at sundown Wednesday. She picked out various esoterica needed for the holiday, and I began wandering the aisles, soaking everything in. Obscure Jewish foodstuffs. Ceremonials objects and garments. 
    Some was surprising, like a silicone mold to fake braided challahs. 

    "That's just wrong," I said, showing it to my wife. Who does such a thing? Is it really that hard to divide a loaf's worth of dough into three parts, rolling them into logs and braid them? Even I've done that. The mold seems an odd, unnecessary cheat. Though who am I to judge. Maybe when baking 50 challahs, you lunge for the mold.
      The vibe was different, and not just because some of the women were in sheitels — the wigs that Orthodox women wear. Shoppers greeted each other, paused, gathered, talked. When my wife accidentally took somebody else's cart, the woman laughed it off when my wife found her and returned it. I half expected them to go get a cup of coffee together.

     I puzzled over the "Sarah's Tent" name. It's a biblical reference, to a passage in Genesis when Isaac takes Rebecca "into the tent of Sarah, his mother." Without going into detail, it's considered a metaphor for "the quintessential Jewish home" where the candles never burn down and the bread never goes stale.

     For me, the store was a reminder of the vast world of tradition I generally turn my back on. It's kept going, by people who aren't me, and when I show up, on rare occasions, to load up on pupicks and kishke and carrot jam (how often do you get the chance?) it's always there, waiting.  I admired a display of beautiful havdalah candles — used to mark the end of the sabbath, and for a moment considered buying one. But then I'd have to use the thing, and that was a bridge too far.

    

     

Israel today, America tomorrow

     In my home office is a globe. Two globes, actually — it’s a big office — but the one I’m looking at is an old 16-inch library globe, quite regal with its three carved wooden lion’s feet. Manufactured, it informs us, by Replogle Globe of Chicago, Illinois — still in business here, I should add, having moved to Indiana, tested the waters in the Mississippi of the Midwest, found them bitter, then returned home, howling.
     There’s no date on the globe, but it seems very mid-20th century — there’s a French West Africa; the future Vietnam is “INDO-CHINA.”
     As a tool, the globe still works. When I needed to confirm that yes, contrary to expectation, in Chicago you turn Northeast to pray facing Mecca, a globe is the best way to see that. Republicans would love my old globe, as it shows Ukraine being part of a vast orange “UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS” spanning 11 time zones.
     And with the globe I can see that the United States is right there, on the surface of the earth, and not, as many Americans seem to believe, floating above it, some kind of special star twinkling in its own separate empyrean, a realm apart that the rest of the world looks up at and envies.
     We’re earthbound, in the midst. What happens elsewhere can find its way here. COVID should have taught us that. A virus dripping off some dead bat or sick turtle or whatever in Wuhan in December showed up in Chicago one month later.
     Nor is influence limited to physical contaminants. Bad ideas spread too. In June 2016, I knew for certain, in my gut, that Donald Trump was going to be elected president after the British bailed out of the European Union because they were afraid membership might mean that a Turk could move next door. Brexit was a disastrous blunder, akin to throwing yourself off a cliff to feel the breeze.
     Nationalism was in the air. Still is, around the globe. From Vladimir Putin lobbing missiles at Ukraine to Lopez Obrador fomenting violence against journalists in Mexico — at least 16 were killed there last year. Would-be tyrants are busy seeing just how much they can get away with. Short answer: a lot.

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