Hot Dog Report: Wolfy's

 

    Over the years I've driven past Wolfy's, with its distinctive frank-on-a-fork sign, I don't know how many times. Dozens and dozens. While blasting down West Peterson Avenue, the major route between 94 and the North Side — exit Touhy, slide down Lincoln Avenue, left at Peterson. 
    I always cast the sign a wistful glance. But I never stop to eat because it's not lunchtime and I'm not hungry. Only Friday it was lunchtime — about 12:40 — and I was hungry. I'd had an 11 a.m. appointment on Sheridan Road, just south of Belmont. To watch a 109-year-old bake a pie, if you must know. That should be in the paper Wednesday. And while I could have made it home without collapsing at the wheel from hunger, I sensed an opportunity to fulfill a tacit civic responsibility. Hot dogs are part of the culture of Chicago, and a person of my station has an obligation to keep track of the major vendors. Wolfy's has been here since 1965, and while I have a dim memory of having eaten there sometime in the hazy past, it's been decades. I pulled into the parking lot.

     Waiting my turn — there was one guy ahead of me — I scanned the menu for anything out of the ordinary. Not really. Burgers. Italian beef. A rib-eye sandwich. My eye paused on the ice cream, in chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. But no. We were having guests over for dessert — my future daughter-in-law and her parents — and would be eating Graeter's along with fresh-baked brownies.
     I ordered a hot dog, mustard and relish. "Anything to drink?" the counterman said. "No," I replied, and I thought I sensed a trace of disappointment at such a minimal order. Though that could have been just guilt on my part. The customer behind me ordered two Polish. I had contemplated french fries. Before dessert at home, we would be going out to dinner at Kamehachi. Restraint was in order. I also considered a Green River — exotic. But I don't particularly like Green River, and being rare doesn't make something good. So one hot dog: $3.79, plus tax. Ordering one hot dog is so spartan, it's almost a kind of decadence. 

     I stepped aside and waited. The man already waiting was wearing a black t-shirt celebrating the 70th anniversary of Godzilla. A father and his two children sat eating at a table. The place was clean and well-lighted. My order came quickly. "A hot dog," the counterman said, handing over a crisp white bag.
     The hot dog was boiled — that must be why I so seldom stop by Wolfy's, I'm more a char-dog kind of guy. But hot and good, with that glorious Vienna Beef snap to the casing.  The bun was S. Rosen's, poppyseed, fresh. If you're wondering why I didn't order ketchup, despite vigorously defending the right to eat hot dog with ketchup, well, I haven't had an abortion either, but I believe the ability to decide to have one should not be constrained by religious asshats. Hot dog stand workers tend to be over-liberal with condiments — to ward off complaints, I suppose. Look at how much relish is on the frankfurter below. Ordering both mustard and ketchup would risk a drenched dog. As it happened, there were a few unopened packets of Red Gold ketchup on a piece of wax paper from the previous diner, and I opened one and applied a thin line of red to half the dog, for the ketchup experience.  Eating the dog took a minute, maybe. Then I was on my way home.

    

"To an illegible stone"

     Last May I visited the New South Cemetery in Boxborough, Massachusetts, for no other reason than I was walking down Stow Road and there it was.

     My intent in steering myself onto its gravel path was to walk briskly through the graveyard and keep going. But I noticed a raccoon staring at me from a tree, and paused to stare back.  

     Next thing I knew, the gravestones themselves started catching my eye. Some for their unusual form.  Several were fashioned as benches, which seemed thoughtful — inviting visitors to linger. Here, visit my grave, have a seat.

    Some were noteworthy for the mysteries they held. Charles Brown, born in 1846, was buried here 60 years later, his grave marked by a stone prepared to include his wife, Eliza M., her dates given as "1851 - " and a blank. So ... was she buried there, but no one was left to update the stone to include her presence? Could fate have spun her away and she died elsewhere? She was 55 when her husband died. Could she be buried in another place, beside another husband? Were I Anne Rice, I might wonder, "Maybe she never died..." and be off to the races.

     The most evocative thing I noticed was a pair of headstones along a row — one had tipped forward, and the other back. The words on the one that had tipped back were illegible, worn away by the rain, covered in lichen. The other, being hunched forward, had shielded the writing, and maintained its purpose of recording who was buried there.  The front was almost pristine.

   

    "In Memory of Tabitha Taylor," it began. "Daughter of Capt. Silas & Mary Taylor. Who Departed this Life 3 Jan. 1789, "Aged 4 years, 4 months & 18 days."

    Above the inscription, an engraving of a drooping flower.

     Why had one pitched one way and one another? A tiny error in the setting of the stones? Random chance, a quirk of topography? Something to do with the micro-geology of the ground? We're all big believers in merit, but blind luck has a big role in what is preserved, what destroyed.

     Not that the affected parties care. The body buried under the effaced marker, and little Tabitha Taylor, are equally nonplussed in death, the same way that Samuel Clemens isn't happier in the afterlife than Finley Peter Dunne because his books are still in print.

     Ambition is all well and good, and I'm glad it goaded me forward for the past 50 years. But I'm also glad to be able to bank the fires now. We all end up in exactly the same place, eventually, and there's no harm in acquainting yourself with your inevitable destination a bit before you arrive.

     Of course I thought of T.S. Eliot's fine lines in "Little Gidding":    

     Every poem an epitaph. And any action
     Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

     Or to an illegible stone...

 

   

  

 "Every poem, an epitaph. Any any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, or to an illegible stone."

Hungry, hungry birds

Photo by Edie Steinberg

     "Maybe I'm a bastard..." I said, gazing out the kitchen window on Thursday, watching a dozen brown birds scrabble over each other to get to our backyard feeder. "But I'm only filling the bird feeder once a day."

     This dramatic pronouncement hung in the air for a moment. My wife, doing bills at the kitchen table, glared at me.

     "You jerk!" she hissed, or words to that effect.

     "Otherwise, I feel I'm being taken advantage of," I hastily elaborated, watching the avian feast.
     Habit might be at play here. Usually, I fill the feeder every few days. A task I leap to — can't keep hungry birds waiting.

     (Okay, okay, you're probably wondering what word my wife actually said. Well, she is an officer of the court, so she asked that I not quote her saying this particular word. An obscene agent noun. Let's leave it at that.)

     But this past week, well, a particularly ravenous crew of small brown birds has moved into my yard and taken up residence. No sooner do I fill the feeder than they swoop in, make themselves at home, and get busy.

      (An agent noun, as you may know, is a noun created by adding "-er" to a verb, just as a gerund is a noun created by adding "-ing" to a verb.)

     Part of me suspects my problem is with the quality of these ravenous birds. If the peckish birds were cardinals and woodpeckers and orioles and such — colorful birds — I'm sure I'd just bite the bullet and keep the seeds coming. But this lot ... I don't know. Somehow, filling the feeder twice a day seems like spoiling them. Like I'm their servant or something.

     (The word begins with "f" and rhymes with "pucker." Does that help?)

     Not that birdseed is incredibly expensive. About $20 for a 40 pound bag at Ace Hardware. And that's good for ... I don't know ... several weeks. Or was. This new accelerated rate of consumption ... well, I suppose it's me who'll do the adjusting. I don't know how long I can hold out watching birds fighting over a few stray seeds. Eventually, they'll wear me down, these birds.

     Not to forget the squirrels and rabbits — really, sometimes I look out my back window and feel like I'm gazing onto some kind of idyll menagerie. I'm waiting for the Teletubbies to come bounding into the frame. 

     (Which is another reason to be frank. My experience is, by attempting to conceal something, you end up drawing attention to it. Better to just let the word fly and be done with it. You'd have forgotten it by now. But I try to be respectful — one should be able to speak in an unguarded manner without worrying that you'll end up in a blog post).

     So what do you think? Feed the birds as much as they can cram into themselves? Or stick with the one refill a day rule? 

Don't be full of shit.

     It's not that I'm a fan of obscenity, per se.
     Rather, I like effective communication, and occasionally that means a well-delivered swear. There is "please be quiet" and "shhhh" and "shut up" and "shut the fuck up," each registering the same idea with varying degrees of emphasis. But that last one is the fire axe behind glass, when you really want someone to stop talking.
     That name of this blog, as I've remarked before, is meant to be exclusionary. Like one of those "You Must Be This High" sticks at the entrance to a roller coaster. If you can't measure up, this is not for you. If "every goddamn day," ruffles your feathers, then stay the fuck away. "Not everything is for children," as the great Robert Crumb once observed. "Not everything is for everybody."

     Which makes it ironic that I write for a newspaper, one of the few media realms where obscenity is tightly restricted. Oh, we make exceptions — when Donald Trump called Haiti a "shithole," we ran that unexpunged — a sort of precursor to this week's Supreme Court ruling. If the president says it, it's printable.
     I wish the situation were otherwise. Every time the paper gets a new editor, I ritualistically suggest writing a column that begins, "Fuck this," introducing the word into the Sun-Times lexicon for the first time in 76 years. They always say no, which gives me a hint that, yet again, we're being led by editors more concerned about offending a few readers than they are about attracting a lot more.
     Part of it might be generational. I was recently at the Apple store with a lady about my age who, in buying an iPhone, deployed the Germanic monosyllable for excrement — see, it's plainer just to say "shit." The sales clerk, a woman in her 20s, seemed genuinely taken aback, so much so that my companion apologized. Later, the clerk admitted she sometimes uses the word herself; the "I'm just not used to hearing it spoken by old people" went unvoiced.           

     Politics is another realm where dirty words cause notice. You don't expect obscenity in the state of the union, for instance. And I was surprised, in a good way, to see Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, say in her personal X feed: "Anyone who claims that I would say that we can't win in Michigan is full of shit."

     You go, girl. I felt like sending her tweet to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which, if you recall, got its underwear in a knot because I quoted one of its musicians saying "shit," twice. There is a backstory there. I found the usage so refreshing, uttered in the grandeur of Symphony Center, that after I wrote my column, I phoned my boss and asked if we couldn't, this one time, use the word undashed, so as not to soften its impact. He said no, unsurprisingly enough, and I went along — I follow style, I don't set it.

     But I share this background because some readers felt I used the quote maliciously, when I really, sincerely included it admiringly. Though the admiration curdled when the CSO informed me that my attention was no longer welcome. Writing has consequences, or should. Which is why so many do it badly — it isn't that they can't assemble words, though that is often a problem too. But they aren't willing to take the heat.

      "Shit" is a good word because it conveys the noxious quality of the substance being discussed. It's "dog poop" when deposited on a lawn and scooped up in a plastic bag, but dog shit when you step in it. That's a valuable distinction. I probably use it more as an interjection, "Shit honey, we need to do our taxes...." than as a noun.

    Originally the word was a verb related to separation — shit was the thing left behind. Thus the word "schism" is related; it's "scheiße" in German, a word I sometimes deployed in younger days, influenced by Thomas Pynchon, trying to give a vaguely menacing Teutonic air and, I imagine, failing miserably.

     "Shit" is a milder obscenity than "fuck." We can see that in Norman Mailer's 1948 war novel "The Naked and the Dead." He was forced, famously, to replace "fuck" with "fug," but "shit" was fine, unleashed 14 times, including the essential "shit-storm." 

    As late as the 1970s, my 1978 Oxford English Dictionary ignores one of the most common words in the English language, moving straight from Fucivorous,"Eating, or subsisting, on sea-weed" to Fuco'd, "beautified with fucus, painted." 

    But Shit, on the other hand, gets the full treatment, after the prim trigger warning, "Not now in decent use," posted before unspooling, "Excrement from the bowels, dung." and giving a first usage dated 1585, ""Dond flytter, shit shytter," though it appears in Alexander Montgomerie's poem, "The Flyting Betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart," that seems to have been actually published in 1621 and is described as a "lyrical joust" between two poets, quite similar to rap put-downs.

     The OED truncates the full line, which should be shared in its entirety: "Dond flytter, shit shytter, bacon bytter, all defyld!" The poem is quite fond of the term, using it 11 times, and I'm not sure the OED took the best example. I liked: "They fand the shit all beshitten in his own shearne," that last term being a synonym for shit.  (And yes, Wednesday morning I looked up from my dip into obscene Scottish insult poetry, at the summer rain falling hard, and thought, "I'm living my best life!")

      The second OED definition is "A contemptuous epithet applied to a person," and this usage is older still, also Scottish. "A schit, but wit.'   

     There are some noteworthy cognates. The aforementioned "shitten," "defiled with excrement" goes back to 1386. Shitfire "a contemptuous epithet applied to a hot-tempered person" deserved reviving, as does Shit-breech — though I would update it to "shit-pants" and apply it to the young. Shit sack "an opprobrious name applied to non-comformists" would also come in handy, though there really isn't a public morality to conform to anymore.

     In his notes to Capt. Francis Grose's "A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," Eric Partridge gives a lengthy explanation of how "shit sack" was tied to nonconformity during the Restoration, involving a frightened preacher and the sack he was hiding in. He also explores its World War I usage: "In 1914-1918 the soldiers used either shit or shit-house of any unpopular person (very rarely of a woman); they used it also as an expletive, cf. Fr. merde! ... Pre-War was in the shit, in trouble; but a specifically military application was: in the mud and slush, in mud and danger, in great or constant danger; and shit meant also shelling, especially shelling with shrapnel."

    There's more. Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" gives a dozen more definitions that are almost too familiar —- lousy merchandise, poor performances, "any talk or writing intended to deceive" not to overlook the essential "shit list."

     I won't go through all the phrases — "shit on a shingle," etc. — though did admire "shit in high cotton" defined as "To live more prosperously, pleasantly or luxuriously than one has formerly."

    Though my copy dates to 1975, Wentworth and Flexner note the growing acceptability of shit. "Wide Armed Forces use during W.W.II and the general loosening of moral restrictions and taboos has encouraged 'shit' uses among all strata of the population."

    Even the governor of Michigan. About time. Linguistic daring implies courage in other realms. Our nation needs that. Because otherwise we're up shit creek without a paddle.

Words are weapons in fight for freedom.

     We live in an odd house. There is a dictionary stand in the dining room. Bought on a whim at a resale shop. But my office is too jammed with books to accommodate the stand. So we tucked it near the dining room table, to refer to during family Scrabble games, increasingly rare in recent years.
     There is also a copy of the Constitution in the kitchen. Any room where three lawyers periodically break bread together should have one handy to resolve arguments — not used much lately either, until Monday. I was alone, drinking coffee, reading the Sun-Times and thinking about July 4. How this year the holiday finds a bitterly divided country, loping toward an election where one party promises to win or seize power. This was the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law doesn't apply to the presidents if they can couch their wrongdoing in the trappings of office.
     What is there to celebrate? The rule of law is a candle guttering in a rainstorm.
     I sprang up. The little booklet, published by the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, was in a cabinet, nestled beside plates. To read the whole thing now — it takes only a few minutes — is to realize once again how problems of the past echo today.
     Article I, Section 2 goes straight to elections: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People ... ."
     If you're wondering where the Constitution allows elections to be ignored if the will of the People isn't to your liking, that line isn't there.
     The pamphlet also reprints the Declaration of Independence, the reason for Thursday's holiday, marking this "Action of the Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776." I read it aloud, beginning to end, my voice echoing off the granite counters.
     The self-evident truths begin, "all men are created equal." The word "men" is significant because women wouldn't get the vote for another 144 years. And enslaved Blacks didn't count because they weren't even considered human beings, never mind "men" with rights and dignity.
     I mention that not to make you feel bad about America but as a reminder: Our entire history is one gradual widening of whose voice gets to be heard. Freedom is always a work in progress. As is oppression: There are always Americans fluttering their hands, clutching their pearls and crying, "Oh no! Surely not these people too!"
     The famous beginning gets all the attention. But the bulk of of the Declaration — easily 2/3 of the text — is a direct complaint against King George III, starting with, "He has refused to assent to laws ..." and faulting him for thwarting the popular ballot, "a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only."

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2012: Maybe tomatoes don’t taste like sun

     A reader wrote in, praising my use of metaphor. I considered writing something on that subject, then realized I had already done so, a dozen years ago. This column somehow managed to combine the subject of metaphor, tomatoes, slavery and LGBTQ.

     ‘Eat a tomato, boys,” I urged, spearing another fat red chunk of home-grown, vine-ripened bliss and transferring it greedily to my plate at dinner Monday night. “It’s like eating the sun.”
     A strange phrase, granted. “It’s like eating the sun.” Why say that? A bit of advertising puffery. A plea for help. The tomato crop is crazy this year — my plants are tossing off tomatoes like a pitching machine firing fastballs. Try as I might, my wife and I can’t eat them all. The boys weren’t touching any and wouldn’t, without encouragement. Heck, they probably wouldn’t with encouragement but I had to try; the idea was to evoke the sun-blessed, deep, resonating goodness of fresh-picked tomatoes. It didn’t work.
      “Like eating a vast ball of exploding gas?” scoffed the teenage boy to my left, busily picking the pasta out of his pasta salad, ignoring the non-pasta parts. “It would kill us in an instant.” I tried to speak ...
     “A mouthful of superheated plasma...” mocked the teenage boy to my right or words to that effect, I wasn’t taking notes — I was eating dinner, or trying to.
     What I meant to say was, “It’s like eating sunshine” — warm, dense, moist ...
     Oh heck, sunshine isn’t moist, is it?
     See, that’s the problem. All metaphor is imperfect. The world is not really a ball — it doesn’t bounce. Love is not a rose — it isn’t pollinated by bees. There is no metaphor you can’t shoot down. Buttons are not cute. Feathers, in sufficient bulk, are not light.
     Yet metaphor is crucial to communicating the feelings behind the flat facts of our lives. When we say our day was “hell,” we do not mean we were immersed upside down in a pool of molten lead in a fiery underworld of unimaginable woe while winged demons jabbed at our smoldering feet with pitchforks. What we mean is, it was a hard day. The computer crashed. The boss yelled at us.
     But that doesn’t resonate with other people. “Have pity — my supervisor scolded me” doesn’t quite do it. “My day was hell” is an attempt to draw indifferent others into sharing our own emotional state.
     Metaphors and similes (a simile is a metaphor that uses “like” or “as” — “like eating the sun” is a simile) are helpful not only in expressing feelings but in condensing arguments. That’s why people always compare situations to Hitler — it saves time and delivers a complex emotional punch or did.
     Metaphors are risky — not only can they be overused, as with our old pal Hitler, but as my boys illustrated, they have flaws that can be easily seized on and used to try to discredit whatever a person is trying to say.
     For instance, last week, in my column I used religion’s reaction to slavery as a metaphor, relating it to two situations where religion would like the final word today: gay marriage and abortion, realms where the freedom of affected individuals would be swept aside by fervent third parties who feel entitled to use their faith to trump the liberty of others. Rather as was done with slaves.
     Agree or disagree, the argument is clear. Some readers, rather than address the point, went after flaws in the metaphor. For instance, comparing the two situations therefore meant I was suggesting they are the same in all regards, that I was saying that being forced to work on a planation is the same as being forced to live in the closet.
     Some felt obligated to explain the difference between being black and being gay.
     “An African American had and has no way of disguising her identity to receive fair treatment while the traits of being a homosexual surely and are at times masked to further one’s career and financial goals against inherent bias,” wrote one reader.
     Even long-established metaphors are easy as pie to pick apart. “Easy as pie? Are you crazy. Have you ever made a pie? Pie is hard.”
     We expect our metaphors to be accepted. It’s a shock when they’re not. If you said that a certain friend has a heart of gold, it would be jarring if the reply were an angry, “What? Impossible! A heart couldn’t circulate blood if it were made of gold. You’d die in minutes!”
     At dinner, beset from both sides, I paused to form a little speech: “Someday, boys,” I was going to solemnly intone. “You will be tomato gardeners, too ­— all good men are. You will think back to the luscious, fire-engine red tomatoes of your father and how he offered them to you with an open hand. How they sat before you in perfect beauty, untouched. You will wish in your deepest heart that you had partaken of the fruits of his honest labor, your father’s tomatoes, instead of scorning them with the glib pig ignorance and shrugging indifference that are the hallmarks of wasted adolescence. You will be scoured with regret, and wish you could apologize. But I of course will be long gone by then....”
     Rather than blurt this speech out, I composed it carefully in mind. But when I went to tell my sons, they had already leapt up and were gone. Probably just as well.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 29, 2012

Biden is faltering, but what he represents remains strong

     People try to "live in the moment" without realizing what that really means. Living in the moment is fine if, at the moment, you are hiking in the Colorado Rockies, pausing to sip cool water and admire the vista.
     But how often are you living in that moment?
     My father, Robert Steinberg, 91, lives in what I call "the immediate moment." Whatever is happening right now is all there is or can be.
     There is no past — his 30 years as a nuclear physicist at NASA have vanished.
     There is no future. He has no volition. There is nothing he wants to do. He won't be attending my older son's wedding next month — the crowd would confuse and frighten him.
     There really isn't much of a present, either. A sofa. A television. And if I'm there too, I also exist, for the moment.
     "How's the world treating you, Neil?" he'll ask, and I'll tell him. It's the only thing he says to me, those exact words. Over and over. I think of those cheap little music boxes, with a cylinder plucking metal tines. Turn the tiny crank and a dozen notes of "Pop Goes the Weasel" tinkle out: ba-dump ba-dump, ba-daddidy dump ...
     No shame in that. Just nature taking her course. But to not recognize what has happened would be irresponsible. My father holds patents in nuclear reactor design, but I would not ask him to design a nuclear reactor now, nor would I want to live near one he had worked on recently.
     At some point, responsible parties must close the door. Three years ago, my father was driving the car, despite my telling my mother, repeatedly, "He's going to kill a child in a crosswalk and it's going to be your fault." When we moved them to Belmont Village Senior Living in Buffalo Grove, we sold their car.

To continue reading, click here.