"Doesn't Kill to Ask"

 

     The 1960s and the 1970s were the heyday the public service advertising — the brightest minds of Madison Avenue focusing their creative genius against littering, smoking, forest fires. The idea was to push the public toward good behavior, and the commercials could be wildly creative.
     Lately, I don't see much of that kind of thing in the shattered remnants of the old school media. Which is a shame, because we still need it, as I was reminded by this poster spied earlier this year by Union Station. Sadly, too much of the debate over a sane gun policy falls into a 0-or-1 non-debate over laws. When, obviously, we aren't ready for more laws. What we need is to prepare people with more education. The Ad Council thundered against smoking for years before cigarettes were banned in restaurants (I remember people seriously suggesting that nobody would dine out if they couldn't light up after a meal). It's a journey of small steps.
     The suicide rate for gun owners is 9 times that of people who don't own guns. Buying a gun endangers yourself and your family — the odds of using to deter crime are tiny compared to the odds of accidents and self-harm. The time to find out if there's an unsecured, loaded gun in a night table drawer is before you send your kid to play over a friend's house. It "doesn't kill to ask," as the sign suggests, "if there's an unlocked gun in the house." In fact, asking might save someone's life. People ought to understand that, and the only way they will know is if somebody tells them. Over and over again.

The Great Mothball Debacle of 2023

Sergio Mejia, the hero of this story, in the basement of our home.

     Had the chipmunk not poked its head out from between a gap in the bricks of the foundation of our 1905 farmhouse at the exact moment I looked up from planting bulbs, none of this would have happened.
     Had I not said, “Oh look!” to my wife, also planting bulbs, and suggested the hole be blocked up, perhaps with steel wool, none of this would have happened.
     “Toss a mothball in,” she suggested. Had she not ...
     We had a 2-pound box of Enoz mothballs, divided into four eight-ounce packets. I trotted to the garage, grabbed one of the bags, returned to the house and poured it into the gap.
     That was the staggeringly stupid part. Doubly so, because I know how vile mothballs are, had marveled how the intense smell punches through triple layers of plastic.
     I knew this. And poured the whole bag in anyway. My thinking, to stretch the term, was: “I’m outside.”
     You know what’s inside? The inner wall of the foundation. The mothballs tumbled into the inch-wide hollow gap between the inner and outer walls of the brick wall. Irretrievable. The odor permeated the entire house.
     Our first move, after opening windows, was to grab a hose and spray water into the hole. Float them out or melt them. Mothballs don’t float. Nor melt. What to do?
     Sunday night we headed to Lowe’s for a new shop vac. Bright and early Monday, I duct taped a section of thin garden hose — to fit in the gap — to the shop vac and snaked it in through the gap. It didn’t work.
     My wife read online that vinegar eliminates mothball odor. We poured a couple gallons into the wall. That only works once the mothballs are gone. The smell intensified. We also read that mothballs are pesticides that can cause cancer, eye disease.

     Monday afternoon I took a drilling hammer and a cold chisel and loosened a couple bricks in the basement where I thought the mothballs might collect, and dug out a lot of dirt that had drifted into the wall over the years. But no mothballs.
     As a homeowner, you know you’ve screwed up when you find yourself hammering bricks out of your foundation wall.
     Monday ebbed, the thought that I ruined our house intensified. My wife said, “Call a professional,” and I did. Three: US Waterproofing and other basement fix-it types. I also ordered an endoscope online. A tiny camera on a snaking black wire. Thirty bucks.
     Monday night we slept in our older boy's room, where the smell hadn’t yet reached, while I played an endless loop of “You’re an idiot” in my head, wishing passionately to go back in time. Why didn’t I just stuff the whole bag in, on a string, so it could be pulled out? Why? Why?
     The endoscope arrived about 5 a.m. God bless Amazon. Dawn found me out front. “I can see them!” I said. Inches from the opening, little groups of mothballs, twos and threes. Inches away. See them, but couldn’t reach them, not even when I took the drilling hammer and chipped the gap wider.
     Off to Ace Hardware for one of those little flexible four-pronged grippers. I taped the endoscope to it.
     My improvised tool worked. I bloodied my hands, manipulating the device into the wall but didn’t care. Over three hours, I withdrew 23 mothballs from the front of the house. Hope flickered.
     Tuesday afternoon, one of the companies said I needed a mason. “Can you recommend one?” I pleaded. One gave me the number of someone named Sergio. I called Sergio. He said he could come by early the next morning.

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In companionable silence

    

     My older son and I sat on the riverside park bench in companionable silence — his term, coined years ago to describe those rare intervals when his father shuts up and just lets everything be.
     A feat I like to think I'm getting better at. Shutting up, as I've said before, is an art form, and like any creative discipline, requires practice. I'm aided in that of late I sincerely have nothing to say to him. Not that my life is uninteresting, I hope. It's just that it's interesting in the same way now as it was last week and last month and last year and the year before and five, 10 and 20 years ago. I write a newspaper column, tend to a century plus house, am the lesser half of a stable marriage. There isn't a lot of news, particularly since we talk every week, more or less. So rather than fill the silence with endless prattle — my go-to move — I've learned to just sit. In companionable silence.

      Jersey City was never on my mental map before he lived there; how could it be, with the supernova of Manhattan glittering across the water? I wouldn't have been able to tell you whether it was 100 miles away or, as it is, one PATH train stop beyond Lower Manhattan. Jersey City is a very livable little urban environment — that is, if a city of more than a quarter million people can be called "little." It manages to be both populated and deserted. We walked around quite a lot, and barely had to look both ways crossing the street. The only peril was the light rail system, and the narrow train blares a horn if it seems as if you're about to blunder in front of it. Otherwise, empty block after empty block --  everybody seemed somewhere else, except for the big street festivals, which seem to take place every night we're in Jersey City.    

     Thursday, I shared a leafy photo taken Wednesday from across the Concord River, near the Old North Bridge in Massachusetts.  Today I thought this  very different view, calming and marvelous in its own way, approaching the complexity of nature. Another panorama across another river — the Hudson, at what my son calls FiDi — the Financial District of New York, dominated by One World Trade Center, the former Freedom Tower, which was built, finally, after long dithering, next to the footprint of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, now converted to a very moving memorial — well, moving to those who remember the day. Now that I think of it, a single candle would be a moving monument to that day, to those who remember  it.

      Rambling is a survival skill to the dwindling band of us whose jobs involve filling space in newspapers. But in life, it's good to sometimes just sit and watch the river go by, particularly in good company. I would steal glances in his direction. The same face as when he was a toddler, now trim and angular and bearded. But the same contours, the same blue eyes. I tried not to speak, and generally succeeded. 

"My husband wouldn't like that"

     Sometimes there's a scrap of information that just doesn't fit into a particular story. But you just can't let go either. For instance, I spoke with veteran newspaper photographer Bob Black for my big Sunday story on how the Sun-Times covered racial issues that ran early this month.

     We of course talked about other things besides race, and he let this quote fly, which really seems a postcard from a vanished world:
     "This was in the beginning of a social change in so many areas," said Black. "It wasn't just civil rights — also women's rights were starting to take shape at that time, I remember we used to do society assignments. We'd go up and ask the women their names, they would always give their husbands' names: Mrs. John So-and-So. When that began to fade away the paper was in the forefront. The paper started asking us, when we took down names, to ask the ladies for their names, not their husband's names. Some of the women were reluctant to do that. Others said, 'Yeah, I'll give you my name. I'm Margaret So-and-So.' Some of the women would talk among themselves, wondering if they dared, and they'd say 'Oh, my husband wouldn't like that...."

     I thought of holding onto that, building a story around it. But this is one of those mornings when I'm in transit — heading home after 10 days away — and think its legs are strong enough to stand on its own. A reminder that, if for some guys the whole Me-Too movement seems just too much, that it's a pushback against something, against women not even feeling comfortable withj their own names. A reminder that a married woman couldn't have a credit card without her husband's permission until 1974 and the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

     I've been around enough to remember that world first hand, although my memory, naturally, has a lighter spin. I was the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal, and got a letter signed "Mrs. Pierce Hiscock." Right, I thought, like I'm going to fall for that. The letter was halfway to the garbage can when I thought: you never know... I phoned the number. A lovely older woman answered. 

     "Is this Mrs. Hiscock?" I asked.

     "Yes...." she replied. "It is."

      "This is the Wheaton Daily Journal, and we've received your letter."

      "Oh good."

      "We we like to run it. But, ah, we were wondering if, umm, we could use your first name. What is it?"

      "Jane" (or some such thing; it's been 40 years).

      "So we'll sign it, 'Mrs. Jane Hiscock.' Would that be all right?"

     "That's fine."

So Mayor Johnson’s NOT going to Mexico?

     Media folks can be so negative.
     After Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he was going to the southern border — America’s, not Hegewisch — I was licking my lips. This is what we journalists — OK, just me — call “a duck in a bucket.”
     Imagine: the large galvanized pail, filled with water. The placid mallard, gazing up innocently as I raise the metaphorical double-barreled shotgun of scorn, squint one eye, smile, then squeeze both triggers. A simultaneous blast and quack of alarm, cut short, and gone in a cloud of feathers.
     Too easy. First, the border inspection tour is a cherished cliche of the right wing. Put on your Carhartt coat, slap a look of Ted Cruz concentration on your mug as you stare fiercely at a group of miserable refugees huddled a safe distance away. Use ing their misery to buff your image among those not savvy enough to be disgusted.
     For the mayor of Chicago to volunteer to perform that charade — it’s like his attending a Trump rally to see what they’re like.
     Besides, Eric Adams, mayor of New York, just went to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia to tell them “New York City is full,” an empty gesture immediately denounced as a “paid vacation.” So Johnson’s trip, had it happened, would have been parroting a bad New York idea. Next he’ll suggest that Chicagoans pile garbage on the sidewalk.
      I was rubbing my hands. Christmas is coming early this year ...
      And then Johnson has to go and ruin it by canceling his trip, in reaction to the chorus of ridicule along the lines of, “Why don’t you investigate the city that you are theoretically mayor of instead, and acquaint yourself with the myriad problems right the flip here?”

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Autumn lake

    

      If I were a big important national columnist, with a big important national following hanging on my every word, I would feel obligated to weigh in daily on the ghastly news continually arriving like so many shells raining down on us.
      But here, on this hobby blog, with my ragtag bag of fans, who for some unfathomable reason like this stuff, I don't have to pretend to make sense of the insanity of the Israel-Hamas War, as it is now being called, according to official AP style. I don't have to try to explain what is to be done with immigrants — that's Friday in the Sun-Times — or set up a felt board and use Mr. Sun and Miss Moon to illustrate what Jim Jordan's double defeat in his attempt to become Speaker of the House means for the future of Trumpism. 
     Instead I can share with you an image of this lovely lake, which is ... well, better not say, in case you decide to rush there. What I will say is that the view, in this direction, was the solitude and serenity of this weathered old grey wood building, crouched amongst the explosion of yellow leaves, placid before still water. Though it was not an isolated lake. There were lots of people all around me. But I chose to face away from the crowd, for a few precious moments. I recommend it highly. The problems will all still be there waiting when we turn around. 

Is razor sharpness heritable?

Cafe reader, Amsterdam

     For all my vaunted rationality, there is an undercurrent of mysticism in me. That's nothing to be proud of — it's as common as dirt. But nothing to be ashamed of, either . . . I hope.
     What do I mean? I was reading the New York Times obituary of Louise Glück, the great American poet who died Saturday. How to describe her? Kind of the anti-Mary Oliver. If nature in Oliver's poems is affirming, redemptive, serene — those reassuring wild geese flapping into view to tell us everything's okay. -- then Glück's world is “bleak,” “alienated” and “austere.” When Glück writes "I set myself on fire" the reader wants to blaze alongside her.

      The future Nobel laureate allowed me to use seven of her poems in the literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I wrote with Sara Bader, and I was grateful, and felt perhaps an even stronger kinship than the one inspired by reading her poems, since we'd spoken several times and money changed hands. I wrote about her three years back, and you can read more here.
     The Times spoke of Glück's "remorseless wit and razor-sharp language" and then dropped this little factoid: "Her father, Daniel, was a businessman and a frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife."

     Say no more! My mind instantly connected that "razor-sharp language" to the small triangular heads of those hobby knives. As if her incisive genius were inherited, almost pre-ordained.
     Which is both silly and how people think. Though why should it be? We do take something from our parents — that's undeniable. Maybe the silly part is anthropomorphizing the X-Acto blade into Glück's raw voice. Very Mary Oliver-ish of me, now that I think of it. Oh well, I suspect that, as much as I admire the Glücks of the world, I'm really a softie at heart.