Flashback 2008: Father's Day

     I took a stab at writing something about the big stretch that the concept of fatherhood is undergoing for me this Father's Day, from tending to the shell of my own father, to twisting streamers and blowing up balloons, metaphorically, as father of my two sons whose weddings are rushing toward us. 
     But the essay was stillborn and, wrapping it in newspaper and tucking it into a dumpster, I instead fled into the past looking for something I'd written for Father's Day. This, from 2008, seems worth sharing.

FATHER'S DAY

     Coffee at sunrise is a ritual for me — hot, strong and black. One morning last year my son Ross popped up and asked for a cup. I poured him one; I didn't see the harm — caffeine stunting children's growth is an old wives' tale from the era when frugal parents would substitute coffee for milk.
     For a few days he joined me, and it was wonderful to sit there together in the kitchen, to clink coffee cups and silently sip, reading the newspapers.
     When he asked for a second cup, I said no. One cup is plenty for a little boy. OK then, he ventured, would I sign a note so he can drink some of the coffee that his teacher brings? Or could he take his own thermos to school, so he could drink coffee at lunch?
     "I need it," he said.
     They never teach you in rehab about what to tell your children about being an alcoholic, and I'm sure plenty of drunks and addicts struggle with what to say. The tempting route is silence. While overcoming an addiction is some of the hardest work you will ever do — I think of Virgil's line about fleeing hell: "But to retrace one's steps and escape to the upper air; that is toil; that is labor" — it is not the sort of achievement you typically brag about to your kids.
     Silence might be most comfortable for the adults, but it doesn't help children, who are invariably dealing with their own concerns and fears. But what do you tell them? Rehab stresses honesty, and that seems the best approach. Answer the questions your kids may have. While addiction is thought to be partially genetic, and the risk for children of alcoholics is certainly greater, it is not a preordained doom, and you can use your understanding of your situation to guide your kids. My boys haven't reached high school, the age where problems typically begin. But at least I know where to go if they need help; they won't have to wait 25 years before they take a hard look at themselves. I'm planning to tell them that while alcohol is a joy of life, drinking alcohol is no fun if you have to.
     Nor is drinking coffee. My boy's words in the kitchen startled me. "I need it." I took a deep breath and gazed intently at him, carefully framing my reply.
     "You know what happened last year," I began. "And the problem that I have."
     He nodded.
     "Well, if I've learned one thing being an . . . alcoholic, it's this: if you need something, you can't have it. So if you can drink a cup of coffee with me and then stop, then you can have one. But if you are going to have to drink more and more coffee, because you need it, then you can't have any at all."
     He seemed to understand, and stopped asking for coffee. I filed away that chilling phrase — "I need it" — and moved on. Father's Day is supposed to be about passing along traditions — fishing and football, golf and gardening. But not every tradition is a happy one. The key is to not be angry or ashamed, and approach the difficult family legacies with the same love, thought and care that you bring to the joyous ones.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 15, 2008

You be the ethicist

 

     Things happen. Unanticipated events — acts of nature, accidents, problems, confusion. Which is why we have legal and moral precepts. To help guide us when things go wrong. But they don't always offer a clear direction.
     Maybe it's best to just say what happened.

     Blufish is an excellent Glenview restaurant, on Willow Road. Good food, good service, good prices. A definite Manhattan vibe to the room, with its high ceiling and chandeliers. My boys love it. I do too, and go there whenever I can. Twice this week, to celebrate their being home. The first time, Wednesday, with the older boy. We both ordered chirashi bowls — raw fish over rice and daikon. I ordered an extra piece of tobiko — fish eggs — and he asked for an ebi, or sweet shrimp. One ebi. Tuck that thought aside.
     Friday I was back with my wife and the younger boy. I got the chirashi, again — I really like the chirashi. He got a salad with chicken, and ordered a sweet shrimp. The boys love sweet shrimp.
     The meals came — the waitress apologized that the sweet shrimp was on the way. When it arrived, it was not a sweet shrimp, singular, but eight sweet shrimp. We all looked at the plate, and immediately explained we hadn't ordered eight.
     "But I checked with you!" she said. I instantly realized what had happened. My son had asked for "a sweet shrimp" and she had asked back, "eight sweet shrimp?" Say it out loud. "A sweet shrimp." "Eight sweet shrimp." Sounds almost the same, particularly in a loud restaurant.
      She hurried away. We ate in silence. The plate of sweet shrimp sat there, untouched. Then she returned, said it was no problem, we should enjoy the extra seven shrimp, adding, "I'll have to pay for it." That brought us all up short. It didn't seem right. But we didn't know what else to do. I suggested she take the platter of food — $42 worth of sweet shrimp — for herself. No. But we didn't want seven extra sweet shrimp, especially not paid for by this young lady. We had plenty of food. I don't even like sweet shrimp. We left it on the table.
      I pondered what to do "Do you want me to talk to your manager?" I asked her. I figured, explain, ooze some charm, get the waitress off the hook. She said no. I asked my wife — maybe we should split the cost with her? Both parties are to blame. She thought not — we had ordered plainly enough. The fault wasn't ours. I decided to pretend it hadn't happened, paid the bill — after checking that we had been charged for one sweet shrimp, not eight — adding the typical 20 percent tip. She had apologized at the end, which counts for a lot in my book. But I left with a gnawing sense of unease. The meal felt mitigated, reduced. The misunderstanding might have been hers, but we participated in it, albeit unwittingly. Maybe we should have split the cost of the wasted meal. At home, I had to stiff-arm the urge to go back, slip her a $20. I'd never miss it and it might help her. But I shook that notion off. Maybe the experience would inspire her to get the order right next time. What do you think? Did I do the right thing?

Mayor Brandon Johnson sure looks good while running away from questions

     Why yes, $30,000 does seem like a lot of money for a man to spend in a little more than a year having his hair cut. And make-up, don't forget. Television makeup, one assumes. I hasten to add that we are free to festoon ourselves however we please, and I would never judge anyone. I have no idea what a tube of lipstick costs nowadays, but imagine it's expensive.
     So I am not criticizing Mayor Brandon Johnson because he spent $30,000 in campaign funds — $82 a day, every day, 365 days a year, quite a lot really — on trims and concealer. It shows. He's always so ... soigne. So put together.
     Honestly, when I first read my colleague Bob Herguth's fine piece outlining the mayor's greasepaint tab, my initial reaction was relief: At least he didn't steal the money from taxpayers. So kudos there.
     Then, concerned about possible hypocrisy, I started toting up the price of my own vanity. Visits to Great Clips cost $21, if there isn't a coupon — and those have been harder to find lately — plus $5 tip for the stylist. With me going at least every other month, that's ... urggg, doing the math ... about $156 a year. Plus razors. That's gotta be another $2 a week. Add shampoo and we're up to around $300 a year.
     Or 1/100th of the mayor's tab. I would never have waded into this topic were it not for what Johnson said when asked about the money his campaign spent to make him presentable.
     "It's always appropriate to make sure that we're investing in small businesses. Especially minority-owned, Black-owned, women-owned businesses," Johnson said after Wednesday's City Council meeting, piling on more verbiage, never answering the question, his go-to move. "I encourage all of you in this room to support small business. Go get your hair and makeup done, by Black people in particular."
     Ignore the question while turning the topic into a racial issue — the usual Brandon Johnson playbook. I'm just glad he didn't use his own family as human shields, again, as when discussing the migrant crisis.
     Nor did Johnson run away, like in that clip of him fleeing Mary Ann Ahern, which I predict will be his undying image no matter what he spends on cosmetics. Honestly, Johnson could hire a private jet to fly Tom Ford in to thread his brows and the central image the city has of him will still be the mayor's stylishly clad backside, vanishing into the distance.

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Drowned in the Gulf of New Mexico

     John McPhee has been a pole star my entire professional life. From his choice of topics, like "Oranges," a book about ... wait for it ... oranges, to "La Place de la Concorde Suisse," where he goes on maneuvers with Switzerland's citizen army, McPhee has been a reliable font of fascination since I was in kindergarten. Brilliant structure — "The Search for Marvin Gardens" alternates a game of Monopoly with a tour of Atlantic City, whose streets line the board — coupled with detailed observation and gorgeous, unforgettable language and metaphor. In "Coming into the Country" he falls in a river in Alaska. The "gin-clear water cold as an ice bucket."
     When I was writing my first book, on college pranks, one chapter was to be about Ditch Day at Caltech. There was plenty on the annual student spree, and my first inclination was to save a bunch of time and money and assemble the chapter from published reports. Then I thought: "What would John McPhee do?"John McPhee would go. So I pried the secret date out of the senior class president, bought an airplane ticket, and flew to Pasadena. It was the right move.
     Yes, I have not read all 32 of McPhee's books — he took a detour into geology that left me behind. The fault, I assume, is my own. But now, at 92, he is offloading his lifetime knowledge, and it's a cold compress on the head of any fevered writer. Well me, anyway, but I assume others.
     Plagued by idiotic covers? John McPhee was plagued by idiotic covers. Tormented by typos? John McPhee let some doozies through. As did writers he knows or is related to.
     In "Tabula Rasa" in the May 13, New Yorker, he tells the story of a son-in-law, Mark Svenvold, who wrote a book called "Big Weather."
     "When 'Big Weather' appeared in hardcover, a sentence in the opening paragraph mentioned 'the Gulf of New Mexico,''' McPhee writes. "Where did that mutinous 'New' come from, a typo right up there with 'pretty' for 'petty'? Mark said it was unaccountable. For a start, I suggested that he look in his computer, if the original manuscript was still there. It was, and in that first paragraph was the Gulf of New Mexico. Remarkable, yes, but think where that paragraph had been. It had been read by a literary agent, an acquisitions editor, an editorial assistant, a copy editor, a professional proofreader, at least one publicity editor — and not one of these people had noticed the goddam Gulf of New Mexico."
     Some errors just lodge in your mind. I can't tell you how many times I've called the Edward Hopper masterpiece in The Art Institute "Nighthawks at the Diner." It's just "Nighthawks." "Nighthawks at the Diner" is a Tom Waits album. I make the error, Bill Savage corrects me, then two years pass and it happens again. Bill must be exasperated, but I can't stop myself.
     But that isn't the story I want to tell.
     Deep breath. Okay. The way participants in a 12-step program meeting will be emboldened by someone's tale of woe, I will now tell mine. I worked very hard to keep errors out of my most recent book, "Every Goddamn Day." I dragooned friends who were imbued in Chicago history to give it critical reads, invoking Lee Bey's classic dictum, "Read it like you hate me." Three, count 'em, three academic readers reviewed the book. I was feeling pretty confident as publication approached.
     Particularly about the introduction. That image of history not being a place or an artifact. Quite proud of that. I would read it for pleasure, to reassure myself, as publication loomed. Including this sentence on the second page:

     "History gathers at certain places — battlefields, coastlines, cities — and congeals around certain dates. The arrival of the shock: Dec. 7, 1941. Nov. 22, 1963. Sept. 11, 2001. Jan. 6, 2020..."

     Wait a second. That isn't right. It's 2021. Jan. 6, 2021. I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. A frantic email to my editor at the University of Chicago Press. Then a desperate phone call. I'm sorry, he said. There is nothing to be done. It's too late. The book has gone to press.
     That was unacceptable. I'll buy up the initial press run, I said, mulch it, and go to a second printing. We can't do that, he replied, because it would delay the publication by three months. We've set up events, publicity (plus it would have cost me, oh, $20,000 that I didn't have. But it's a sign of how desperate I was that I made the offer without even doing the math).
     This error was on the second page. It wasn't something readers would miss. People would see it, and would think, "This guy's an idiot. He can't even get the year of the insurrection right." The whole book was ruined. Two years' effort, kafloosh, down the toilet.
     As it happened, I was meeting my old NU classmate, Rush Pearson for sushi that day. You may know Rush as a skilled comedian, actor and longtime star of the Mud Show at the Renaissance Faire. I of course gave an agitated rendition of this terrible blunder, and how humiliating it was.
     "I dedicated that book to my boys!" I moaned. He smiled wickedly and raised an eyebrow.
     "Did you spell their names right?" he asked. That stopped me dead, and I laughed. A lot really. Being able to laugh at the disaster was highly therapeutic. I've always loved and respected Rush — he is a sui generis individual — but I love and respect him double for that.
     This is going on too long, but I can't stop here. There is a coda. That afternoon, Timothy Mennel, my editor at the University of Chicago Press phoned. "You're the luckiest son-of-a-bitch on the face of the earth," he said, or words to that effect. The editors at the Press were sitting around, saying how sad it was that this midlist nobody's book they were generously publishing was forever marred by this forehead slapping blunder. And someone looked at — in my mind's eye — a clipboard on the wall and said, "Actually ... you know ... they're pressing the big red button at three o'clock." Or words to that effect. The printing hadn't started, but was set to. In an hour. Calls were made. A few electrons rearranged. And the date became "2021" in print.
     So if I seem a little bit more grateful, these past two years, well fate has been kind to me. As has John McPhee, who generously shared a few of his own blunders and disappointments. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. I do not share much with John McPhee, in the talent or effort or reputation. But we both fuck up in exactly the same manner.

Never bang a drum, slowly or otherwise — a CSO percussionist takes center stage.

Cynthia Yeh

     Picture a symphony orchestra: the conductor, front and center, standing before the strings; violins to the left, violas and cellos to the right. Beyond that, woodwinds and brass. Then way in the back, off to the left, out of sight and pretty much out of mind, except for the occasional cymbal crash, are two or three percussionists hidden behind their elaborate kits — snare and bass drums, tubular bells, and timpani, aka kettle drums.
     Not tonight.
     Tonight — May 30 — is the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s “Procession,” written especially for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal percussionist, Cynthia Yeh.
     A drum set, plus vibraphone and glockenspiel — sort of a baby vibraphone — are to the immediate left of the conductor, where a guest violinist might stand.
     Sure, it felt odd.
     “I’m not up there often,” said Yeh, who had the unique position of being both inspiration and featured performer of the piece. “I’m never under his nose. I’m always surprised by how hot it is there.”
     Classical music does not serve up many drum concertos — major musical compositions featuring a specific instrument, usually piano or violin.
     So how do you get a concerto written for yourself? If you’re Cynthia Yeh, it’s simple.
     “I asked her if she would,” Yeh said. “She shockingly said ‘yes.’”
     Maybe not so shocking, considering Yeh’s reputation.
     “She is incredibly devoted to the passion of the music,” said Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor at the premiere. “She has a technique which is unbelievable. Really accurate. She knows everything, actually.”
     Montgomery has been composer-in-residence for three years at the CSO, and this piece caps off her tenure here.
     “I am forever grateful to Cynthia Yeh, who urged me to compose this work and who has been an extremely patient and thoughtful collaborator as I navigated my first large work for percussion,” Montgomery wrote in the program.

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Welcome the 9th most important Jewish holiday

 

   The cheder boys on scooters showed up Friday, as they always do, asking me to pray. I was upstairs, scrolling through social media, and almost sent them away. I'm too busy a man to be expected to go through this arcane religious ritual, and why? Because I paused to talk to them on the street at the end of March and foolishly pointed out which house is mine when they asked. 
     Send them away, tell them not to come back. Enough with the ritual already.
     But nowadays, it's smart to take what social connections presents themselves. I went downstairs.
     "Let's do this," I said, sticking out my right arm, while Elchonon indicated the left, proper arm, and wrapped it in a shiny leather band, while his partner, Mendel, busied himself with Kitty. Someday I'll get it right.
     I repeated the ancient words after him, managing to string a few together myself. Someday I'll get them down pat. Or, more likely, get tired and stop doing this entirely. He pointed out that Shavuot was coming.
     The regular reader might have perceived by now that I'm a Jewish person who is at least passingly acquainted with my faith, even the more arcane particulars. Not only do I knew what a pidyon ha-ben is, but my older son had one ("Redemption of the first born," an obscure ritual where the first son is purchased from God. Five pieces of silver are required, just like with Judas, and I went to a coin store and bought five old silver dollars to give to the rabbi. My in-laws were Orthodox). 
    But Shavuot? I'd heard the name. But for the life of me, it doesn't register. If I started reeling off Jewish holidays, given $100 for each one I could name, there would be Passover and Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah, Purim and Simchat Torah, T'Bhish Vat and Tisha B'Av. I don't think I'd ever get to Shavuot, unprompted.
    "What's Shavuot?" I asked. Elchonon explained that it celebrated being given the Torah 3,000 years ago on Mount Sinai. Which doesn't count, apparently, in attaching Jews to that particular spot on earth. But is true nevertheless. 
    "And what do we do on Shavuot?" I pressed.
     "On Shavuot we eat cheesecake," he said. My ears perked up. 
    "Why cheesecake?" 
    "It's nice, and fancy, and tasty," he replied and the yawning chasm between these pious teenagers and a fairly cynical and agnostic 63-year-old closed to a hairsbreadth. Eat nice, fancy, tasty cheesecake — if more religions came up with requirements like that, I think they'd fare better in this modern world. I shot off an email to Marc Schulman at Eli's — is this not a marketing opportunity — and circled the beginning of Shavuot, the evening of June 11. God knows I have enough cheesecake in the freezer. 

Put down the Colgate, honey.

     A thought experiment:
     Pretend, for a moment, that instead of nominating religious fanatics to the U.S. Supreme Court, Donald Trump had instead packed the high court with dentists.
     And instead of reversing Roe v. Wade, the ruling that for half a century protected the right of American women to make their own reproductive choices, this new court of oral activists allowed state legislatures across the country to mandate what brand of toothpaste women must use.
     Men, of course, would be free to continue using whichever toothpaste they like.
     Certain states, such as Illinois, would continue to allow their female residents access to the range of available brands. Crest. Colgate. Herbal toothpastes like Tom's. Sensodyne. Their choice.
     But other states would rush to make that decision for women and mandate a particular brand — or even bar toothpaste entirely. Use a rag and baking soda, honey, just like in the good old days.
     How would people react?
     Some would no doubt shrug and do whatever the state says. Freedom can be stressful, and there's always a big slice of the population that resents the pressure of being expected to run their own lives. The secret shame of totalitarianism is that a slice of the oppressed like it. Slavery is freeing, ironically, to them. No need to think for yourself, to agonize over choices — your betters do that for you. All you need do is obey.
     But others would rebel at the idea of the government telling us what dentifrice to put in our mouths. We saw how people resisted being told to do something as simple as wear a paper mask during COVID. And gratifyingly seven states — including backwaters like Kansas — rushed the abortion question onto their ballots, protecting the right of women to figure out their lives themselves. These initiatives didn't fail anywhere, because Americans overwhelmingly want the right to choose to have an abortion. Just like Mexico, Ireland, the rest of the Western world.
     Which brings up the connection between undermining voting rights and pushing mandatory religious fundamentalism. What the far right is doing is not popular. Most people voters don't want it — there are heartening signs that Americans are standing up and making their will known — so voting has to go. Since that's too naked a totalitarian flex, even for religious zealots, it's disguised as fighting election fraud, which scarcely exists.

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