Remembering Michael F.

     I'm on vacation this week. Which means of course that I'm working — another Rotary magazine article to finish, my fourth over the past year. But I can't let my EGD responsibility slide, so I'm looking over pieces that I wrote but decided for some reason not to post. This was written four years ago — I know why I held it back; because I didn't want to poke a stick into a wound that was still fresh. But four years is a while, and I think I can post this now with a minimum risk of upsetting anybody. With time comes perspective, ideally, and an ability to see the saddest situations in a positive light.

     "To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck." 

                                                           —Tennessee Williams, Memoirs

      Only one friend came over the house that first horrible week, after I was allowed to come home. Then again, Michael didn't have very far to come: out his front door, turn left, walk a few steps, up five stairs, knock on my door. Bearing two cans of raspberry soda water and a bag of potato chips.
     We sat on the porch and talked. Which is what you most want to do when you first go into recovery: talk and talk and talk, trying to sort out how the greatest thing in your life has suddenly become the worst. How it somehow snuck up on your from behind and bit you, hard, in the ass. How to pry its jaws off you.
    It was October, 2005, so I don't remember anything we said. But I do remember, when we were done, we stood up and Michael hugged me. He was much taller than me, a good four inches, and I had a face full of plaid flannel.  Geez, I thought, not only do I have to give up booze, but now I gotta hug guys too?
      Afterward, we would go to meetings for more talk. Sometimes walking to the church around the corner. Sometimes he would pick me up in a big old car, some 1970s Cadillac he inherited. It was like an inverted echo of high school, but instead of one of my buddies who had a car coming to get me so we could hang out and delight in the combination of beer and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, we were two newly sober adults on our way to AA meetings in the Northwest suburbs.
     Meetings, meetings, meetings. How I hated them. Michael liked them. He believed. He had a sponsor, and diligently climbed the 12 Steps, and was an avatar of How It Works.
     Only it didn't work. Not for him. Not long term. For some unfathomable reason, sobriety didn't stick with Michael, while it worked for me. Who knows why? Maybe it was simply professional pride: I had a recovery memoir coming out and didn't want to make it into a lie. "I don't want to fuck up my memoir," was how I put it, along with not wanting to be another Kitty Dukakis (an editor at Simon & Schuster, in rejecting my book, said I hadn't been sober long enough to write a memoir, saying that they'd published Kitty Dukakis's recovery memory, and she rewarded them by drinking nail polish remover on her book tour). 

     Maybe it was luck, some combination of neurons and random chance. Or some other aspect of my circumstance.
     Maybe it was mere necessity. Michael came from money. That could be what did him in. Because I had no choice but to pull myself together and get back to work, while he could retreat from life and climb into the bottle and the bills would still get paid.
    When the news came that Michael was in the hospital, I only thought of the good stuff. He was our neighbor for, geez, 17 years. We'd sit on the porch and talk and smoke cigars, hour after hour. Of course he had his quirks. 
    "You know, I sometimes sneak into your yard at night and shoot your rabbits," he once said.
    I chewed on that, weighing my reply.
    "Just don't shoot the boys," I finally muttered.
    He had taste, humor, integrity. Qualities that fluttered back to mind when I heard about the failing liver and kidneys.
      "Maybe this will be a wake up call," I said to my wife, half-heartedly.
      "The divorce was the wake-up call," my wife replied, grimly.
      A wake up call that he let ring and ring. Michael died a few days later. A few days after his twin boys had left for college.
     So what do you say? The important thing is, to me, to remember that he was like before: a good man, considerate, methodical, a runner, who took care of himself and adored his children. He was the sort of neighbor who would hurry over to your house during a flood and help pump out your basement. Who helped you clean your dryer vents. His bad end didn't come because he was a bad person, but because he was a person, period, a person who fell in a hole and couldn't get out. The thing about alcoholism is, it's a disease that looks like a decision. To the uninitiated it can seem that Michael pondered his options — hmm, should I stay with my beautiful wife and three great kids and see them off to college? Or should I go drink myself to death at my mother's house? — and made the wrong choice. 

     But that isn't a choice at all, not one that any rational man makes. Addiction is another word for diseased thinking. When I heard the bad news, I thought really of all the happy times, and what a good, decent man he was, and not what happened later, toward the end. I hope his wife and kids do the same. I hope the kids realize that how well they turned out is a reflection of the man he was, at heart, before the disease took him. And if his memory has to be a scar as well as a comfort, well, then it should be a scar worn with pride. Because he certainly fought the thing, hard, for years, before it overwhelmed him. I was there, I saw him fight. He fought hard but he lost, that's all. Sometimes people lose. A difficult truth, but one worth remembering.

"Dear God..."

        "God the Father," by Ambrogio Bevilacqua (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Even writing every goddamn day, some scraps don't get posted. Like this missive to the Supreme Being, drafted at the end of October. I noticed it, scanning back over old material, and felt it could liven up the last day of November.

Dear God:

     I see that, in Your infinite wisdom, You have personally chosen to elevate Mike Johnson, obscure Republican of Louisiana, as the Speaker of the House. That's how he views it anyway:
     "The Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority,” said Johnson, attempting to give his new post a shimmer of the divine. “He raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific time."
     Does that count for Joe Biden? The president of the United States? Or was he snuck into office while You were busy elsewhere, perhaps molding galaxies. (A process I've always thought of as being similar to making a snowball. You scrape an infinity of cosmic matter in one of Your enormous hands, pat it into a vaguely spherical shape, then set it twirling on Your divine fingertip in one of the further reaches of the universe, then step back to admire Your handiwork for a moment, or a billion years, then proceed to the next one. Thank You for that, Lord, for those spinning galaxies. They're so cool. And for Saturn. That's also very... 

     Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, religion screeching into the United States Congress. And the stunning hypocrisy of conjuring up Your Holy Approval, for people Republicans approve of, generally themselves alone, and Your Divine Scorn, for people they don't like. 

     Not to forget the plain weirdness of it all, the contortions they manage while imagining Your will. Johnson, who is opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage, explained his absent wife, Kelly, this way:“She’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And, um, she’s a little worn out.”
     That's the downside of the current trend toward just vomiting forth verbiage and worrying about what kernels of sense can be picked out later. Setting aside the locker room prurience of Kelly on her knees, a man offering up the image of his wife beseeching the Lord for the last "couple of weeks" not only smacks of desperation, but is kinda an insult to the Deity. I mean, you are many things, O mighty God, but slow on the uptake is not one of them, supposedly. 

     And isn't that a contradiction to Johnson's first statement, about government power being foreordained by You according to Your Divine Plan? Either you are looking out for the benefit of your flock by anointing wise and prudent leaders like Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Or you are harkening to the entreaty of politicians' wives (and, of course, husbands), desperate to advance their spouses' fortunes.  It can hardly be both.

     Anyway, You've got better things to do, Mr. Omniscient — I hope reading my letter didn't distract You too much, Lord. (Though it would explain Gaza. Distracted by some obscure politician's wife, groveling in the dirt, demanding advancement for her man, you let all hell break loose in Your promised land). 

     But since I have Your Infallible Attention, I might point out that were a particular but unspecified member of the human race to be suddenly riven by a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, charred to a cinder on the back nine at some garish golf course, well, that would be more than enough to make this peace-loving non-believer forevermore convinced of Your Divine Majesty. Truly. I'll start lighting candles on Fridays, and preach Your unquestionable existence. Is it a deal? Or do you only slaughter toddlers hiding in basements?

Your humble servant,

Neil Steinberg

Push back against the world’s woes

     Scary times, these. If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention. With wars in Ukraine and Gaza — the latter on pause, for now, but that will change, and either could easily explode into a greater conflagration — and thousands of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees flowing into a Chicago still wobbly from COVID-19, there’s a line around the block of Big Frightening Problems to worry about. Did I mention the real chance of democracy dying in America next year? Or that the world is on fire? Those too.
     But fear is not a success strategy. You don’t solve problems by fretting about them. You solve them by doing something. Tuesday was Giving Tuesday, an online effort to get people to pause from fire-hosing their money at streaming services and sports betting apps and direct a few trickles of cash at worthwhile causes instead.
     My household supports The Night Ministry — the last strand in Chicago’s social safety net — and The Ark. You might want to get behind Heartland Alliance or Catholic Charities.
     If your heart goes out to those who come to Chicago seeking a better life and end up sleeping with their kids on a police station floor, consider supporting Refugee One.
     There are many more — you did, I hope, support groups you’ve already been supporting. If not, a few minutes spent consulting Prof. Google should do the trick.
     You might think this story is a day late. But it’s supposed to run on Wednesday, because Chicago Public Media has dubbed Nov. 29 CQ as “Giving Newsday.” Part of the trick of surviving in the media is to find a way to stand out from the general roar, and by focusing on the following day, the hope is we’ll take advantage of the spirit of holiday generosity while not getting lost in the crush of worthy causes.
     The Chicago Sun-Times is owned by Chicago Public Media, a 501(c)3 charity that also owns WBEZ 91.5 FM, and though I’m biased, I’d argue that, in a way, supporting us is even more important than backing some other charity, because we’re how you learn about everything going on in the world.

To continue reading, click here.

Eli's Cheesecake: a holiday tradition

Marc Schulman, Eli's president since 1984, shows guests through Eli's Cheesecake World.

     You know the holiday season is upon us in earnest when the Art Institute's proud lions are wreathed in greenery, the air is filled with festive music, and Eli's Cheesecake ads go up on everygoddamnday.com. 

     To mark the occasion, the family headed over to Eli's Cheesecake World on Saturday to get a quick tour from its owner, Eli Schulman, who took the family around his expanded factory — business is booming — before we settled in to coffee, conversation and, of course, cheesecake.

Passion fruit curd olive oil cake cheesecake

    The challenge being, if presented with the delightful dilemma of being invited to dig into literally any type of cheesecake that Eli's makes, from chocolate chip to key lime, apple streusel to blueberry swirl, peppermint bark and salted caramel, which one to choose? You can browse the available flavors at the Eli's website.
     As difficult as that sounds, it was actually an easy decision: passion fruit curd olive oil cake cheesecake made with mascarpone mousse, inspired by Natasha Pickowicz's "More than Cake" cookbook — because really, how often do you get the chance? (Who is Natasha Pickowicz, you ask? For shame! She is only the wildly popular "NYC pastry wunderkind" and "The Queen of Sticky Buns." Okay, I had to look her up, but I was glad to get to know her — eating cheesecake and learning about the new generation of rising pastry chefs)
    So how did her cheesecake taste? Smooth. Sublime. Lovely. Light. I usually like my cheesecake with a heavy dose of chocolate crumbled over it. But this was obviously something more advanced. My wife raved.
     I also learned the meaning of "POG" — it stands for "Passion Fruit Orange Guava" and was the flavor of one cheesecake we took away with us — at Eli's Cheesecake World's store you can get all sorts of exotic flavors, unavailable to the masses who have not made pilgrimage to the mothership.  I think otherwise you have to be flying First Class on United to Hawaii to be given the privilege of trying the POG cheesecake, which was extraordinary. As was the Tiramisu Cheesecake, which was the other. I'd have gone home with more — I have my sights set on the Hot Chocolate Cheesecake, which sounds heavenly. But I limit myself to three cheesecakes at a time in the freezer. Restraint.   

     So welcome the traditional holiday cheesecake ad, which you will notice on the left side of the EGD homepage. Click it, and you'll be ushered into the world of gustatory delight that is Eli's. Today is Giving Tuesday, and while I hope you are digging deep to help those less fortunate than yourself, I'd also advise you to remember yourself, and your cheesecake needs — doctors say that the average American only consumes 25 percent of their daily metabolic requirements for cheesecake. 
     Oh, that's a lie. While cheesecake is good, and nutritious, there isn't an actually FDA requirement for it, though imagining how delightful a world it would be if there were. Even though a certain tone of fabrication infects social media, more and more, we try to play it by the book here on EGD, which is why we hope you'll support us by giving yourself the gift of cheesecake.
     Let me take this opportunity to say how glad I am that EGD, now in its 11th year, has been supported by Eli's Cheesecake for every second of its existence. Many, if not most, Chicagoans love Eli's Cheesecake. But how many can truly say they are loved back? Enfolded in the cool, sweet embrace of the nation's foremost cheesecake.  It's a wonderful thing, and I consider myself blessed that the holidays have rolled around again, bringing light, laughter, family, friends and lots of Eli's cheesecake. And that's the delicious truth.
 

Not scared.

     One of the most fascinating aspects of my several conversations with 107-year-0ld Black Chicagoan Edith Renfrow Smith was related to her recollections of the Civil Rights era.  While the typical — almost inevitable — stance of people alive during that troubled time is to puff up whatever relationship they had to the great struggle, she was 180 degrees opposite: it didn't affect her. Not her concern. I was dubious, almost incredulous, and pressed her on the matter — c'mon, you said you couldn't shop at Marshall Field's. What about that? 
     “I don’t want to go there anyway,” she said defiantly. “They don’t have anything I want."

    She had decided that these issues didn't affect her. And that was it. She was going to live her life as a full person as good as anybody else — "Nobody's better than you" — and if others chose to think differently, that was their problem, not hers. 

     My personal take on being Jewish in America is something similar. It isn't that anti-Semitism doesn't exists, or isn't spiking in reaction to the war in Gaza. I see that. It's just that, personally, it doesn't touch me. Maybe I'm oblivious. Or just lucky. The anti-Jew mob, with their torches and nooses, was going east on Monroe when I was walking, hands in pockets, whistling west down Madison, admiring the buildings.

     Part of it was growing up only a couple decades after the end of World War II. At times, it seemed like the whole religion was about the Holocaust. A sort of death cult. Judaism was Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto with pauses to light candles and spin dreidels. I hated that. It felt suffocating.

    The reality has to be more complicated than that. Maybe because, when I meet anti-Semites, I immediately discount them, because their scorn is coming from a hater. Consider the source. It isn't about me, it's pus from a wound. Their wound, not mine. Nobody is a hater because they're so brave, and Jews are the oldest, largest, easiest target in the world. That collegiate Americans would decide to sign on to Team Anti-Semite is sad, but also typical, the familiar blend of enthusiasm and ignorance that so defines the young.

     Now that I think of it, I get anti-Semitic screeds almost every day — gathering unread in my spam filter, waiting to be flushed away.  Most aren't even read. Flushed away with the rest of the shit. If I do happen to notice one, they seem more mentally ill than anything else. Who cares why a mentally ill person you never met decides to fixate on something? If the source of that fixation happens to be me — what are my responsibilities toward that person? None. I'm not a doctor. 

     Why let the poison in? Why be any more conscious of their presence than you have to? You can't make them go away, or change. People in marginalized groups have the distressing tendency — and I think this is really what Edith Renfrow Smith is pushing back against — of acting like they're auditioning for the people who despise them. I'll get notes from Jewish readers ponderously chiding me for this or that opinion because they feel that it makes the Jews look bad in the eyes of anti-Semites, as if the haters are coolly evaluating us, and forming conclusions based on our behavior. When in reality they start out by hating us and cherry pick facts they feel shore up that hate. This isn't a contest. 

     Israel's actions in the war in Gaza are just an update on the Jews killing Christ. The bad thing that Jews did that permits them to be locked in their synagogue before it is set it on fire. That rationale, the specific bad thing Jews did changes, but it is always there, and always will be. If the creation of Israel — the naqba — was such a shock, then what did the Jews do wrong in 1947 and 1946 and 1945 and 1944 and 1943 and 1942 and 1941 and 1940, what was our crime then that so agitated so many people against them? Oh right nothing. Mere existence. Their original sin. Our original sin. We're heeeeeeeeere! 

     The photo above was taken in September in the tiny Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, now a tourist site.  I was taken aback — somewhere between surprised and aghast — to see they'd put up a big yellow Magen David in the middle of the street, the way the Puerto Rican stretch of Division Street in Humboldt Park is marked by a stylized PR flag. 

     The yellow star? Really? Maybe it's unintentional. Historical. Maybe it's trying to take control of the touchstone used against you, the way gays repurposed "queer." Maybe there's some other cultural factor at work I don't understand. But I found it ... confusing, at best. The Germans used this exact device to single us out for abuse ... and now we embrace it. Okay then. How's that workin' for you?

      Maybe that's my approach. I don't embrace anti-Semitism, I register that it's there, intellectually, then step around it, like a turd on the sidewalk. The less I think about that shit, the happier I am. I suppose I could be afraid — people obviously are afraid. I see that — and I don't want to discount their fear. It's awful to be frightened. But that's also what the haters want. Not being afraid, not even caring, seems the best revenge. 

A fine time

     Wonder should not be picked apart. It's too delicate, too fragile. Best appreciate it in real time, while it's happening. Then label it simply, "We had a good time," and set aside on a shelf in memory. No point writing a treatise about it. You wreck it that way.
     And so much gets wrecked as it is. Like any good cynic, I take a dim view of the forced festivity that takes place this time of year. Often quoting, in my own mind — nobody wants to hear it — lines from "Cold Comfort," a Michelle Shocked dirge: "You know, winter will soon be here. And except for the holidays, except for the holidays, it's a fine time of year."
     True, generally, and maybe that mood will set in well before Christmas.
     But it hasn't yet. This year, with the relentless dispatches of horror from Israel and Gaza, plus the ominous — no, terrifying — political situation at home — a few days off seemed in order. Time to regroup, and visit with the boys and their beloveds, our houseguests.  To do little and think about less.
     A recipe for ... surprisingly ... something special. This year the holidays caught me off guard, and I not only am enjoying them, but realized I really needed them. It wasn't so much Thanksgiving itself, which is like planning the Normandy invasion only with food. But immediately after. Just having people around. The boys and their fiances and Edie and I all went to the Chicago Botanic Garden Lightscape  Friday night. 
    And it was all so ... magical, not a term I often  employ. So much, I did something unusual, for me. I decided not to even try to write about it. The music, the sense of difference — you enter through the side of the Garden, through an enormous glowing wreath, and with the dark and the music and glowing spheres, tunnels of arches, sweeping lasers, flashing, twinkling lights, the familiar grounds become strange and wonderful.  I didn't even take many pictures, except of the kids, and I'm not sharing those, lest social media decide to judge them. 
     I hope you'll forgive me. "Not everything's for the newspaper" I sometimes say. Or the blog. I'm sure you can manage to wring wonder out of your holidays on your own. No need for a road map from me. At least not today. I don't even know if I can dredge a point out of this, to stick my landing at the end. Maybe the key is that I wasn't particularly looking forward to Lightscape — we had such a good time last year, what were the odds of topping it? And it was so warm last year — a rare November day in the low 60s. It was so cold, in the low 30s Friday. That could be trouble. And would these four adults, in their late 20s, enjoy it? As if they might not be charmed by whimsy and music and hot cocoa. In the hours before we left, my mood curdled, and I found myself exhausted and annoyed. Which turned out to be exactly the coiled crouch I needed to spring into the air, and the momentary sensation of flight, of being airborne, free of all this. Gloom turned to fascination. 

     Which might be a contradiction — seek but don't expect it. Request but don't demand. Work hard then relax into the holidays, and let them flow over you. Go and see what happens. Hang out with those who love each other and you and wait for it. Anyway, five weeks and it'll all be over and we'll find ourselves blinking at the dark, frozen expanse of January and February and March. Enjoy this if you can, while it lasts.

"Eternity's hostage"

"The Romans Taking Old Dutch Men as Hostages," by Antonio Tempesta Italian (Met)

  
     "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune," Francis Bacon writes in one of his most famous essays, Of Marriage and Single Life. "For they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
     True enough. But the key concept in Bacon's first sentence is "given" — there is an unmistakable sense of the voluntary around the first definition of "hostage" in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Pledge or security given to enemies or allies or the fulfilment of any undertaking by the handing over of one or more persons into their power."

     Nothing voluntary in this recent batch of hostages, the Israelis captured by Hamas during their Oct. 7 attack, and it's painful to realize that once enemies would sometimes willingly hand over people to make sure agreements were kept. We think of the past as far more brutal than today, but we seem to be holding our own when it comes to barbarism. 
     Which makes etymology a welcome distraction from the headlines. While waiting for Hamas to release the first group of hostages on Friday — 13 Israelis, 10 Thais and a Filipino — more are supposed to be released today — I found myself focusing on the word "hostage" itself.
     "Hostage" has gone through changes over the past thousand years. That initial "h" tends to come and go, depending on what language is massaging it — the original Latin, obsidatus, "being a hostage," blending with hostis — "stranger, enemy" — turning into hostia, "victim, or sacrifice," which is how the Eucharist in the Catholic Church became known as a "host."
     Looking over the way the word and its cognates have changed, it's almost as if the  opposite views of how outsiders in your midst are to be treated is engaged in a verbal tug-of-war, the dichotomy in clear relief. There is "hostile" and "hospitality," "host" as in welcoming guests and "host," as in the body of an army.
     The very act of ransoming hostages seems more Biblical than modern, and indeed, there's hostage-taking in the Bible, as when a King of Judah breaks down the gate to Jerusalem in 2 Kings: "He took all the gold and silver and all the utensils which were found in the house of the Lord, and in the treasuries of the king’s house, the hostages also, and returned to Samaria." The whole "Christ the Redeemer" concept pivots on Jesus being the guy who pays our ransom with his suffering.

      In the Talmud, redeeming captives is a mitzvah, or charitable act, one so important it has its own name, pidyon shvuyim, and tops all other good works because being a hostage incorporates most of the ills that charity tries to address.

      "The redeeming of captives takes precedence over supporting the poor or clothing them," wrote Maimonides. "There is no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives for the problems of the captive include being hungry, thirsty, unclothed, and they are in danger of their lives too."
      It might sound odd at first, but if you think about it, there is something humane about hostage-taking, compared with simply killing enemies. It's a practice based on the value of life, the idea originally being that your kinsmen or country would buy you back (Proverbs 13:8 says that rich men purchase their safety, while the poor are never even threatened — which is wistful; more likely, the poor are simply killed, without hope of ransom). There is something strange to see Hamas, eagerly murdering everyone in sight Oct. 7, but also tucking these folks away for future reference, a kind of grotesque parody of mercy that of course is all about self-interest. They had just started the war and were already looking to purchase the cease-fire that their advocates around the world have been demanding.
     The process of exchanging hostages shows how artificial war is — two sides shift from trying to kill each other with all their might to conveying a fortunate few back from the dead through intermediaries. A reminder of the enormous range of human behavior, how we slide from vile to noble and back again, depending on the circumstances.

     As I write this, the news has begun to trickle out. A list of names. That the returned Israelis range in age from 5 to 85. What horrors they must have endured, what stories they must have to tell.

     The Russian novelist Boris Pasternak wrote a lovely little poem, "Night," that suggests all creative people are hostages, obligated to see the broad sweep of life and convey it. The poem begins with the image of a pilot flying over sleeping cities, then shifts to the insomniac writer trying to grasp it all. The clunky translation I found online ends:

Fight off your sleep: be wakeful,
Work on, keep up your pace,
Keep vigil like the pilot,
Like all the stars in space.

Work on, work on, creator-
To sleep would be a crime-
Eternity's own hostage,
And prisoner of Time.

     That penultimate sentence felt a little awkward, so I checked the original Russian — "Ты — вечности заложник" or, literally, "You: eternity's hostage." Also true. But would make the ransom ... what? Death.