First you need a mountain....

Avalanche Peak, Yellowstone National Park, 2009

     So ... almost two weeks since the presidential election, and I still haven't assembled my reasons for Kamala Harris's defeat. It seems every pundit has done that long ago. Lack of focus on the economy? Her laugh? Too much support for trans folks? Too little outreach to pugnacious young men?

    I suppose my short answer is: it doesn't matter. Every disaster is a confluence of circumstances. The example I always use is a plane flying into a mountain. How does that happen? Well, first, you need a mountain. Shrouded in fog. The pilot, distracted by a balky warning light. The radar on the fritz. The co-pilot in the bathroom with stomach flu. 
    You can debate all those factors. "First you need a mountain"?! There are mountains everywhere. Planes don't typically fly into them ... it's the pilot's responsibility to see to that. Though the co-pilot should. As for the fog...
     It becomes kinda pointless, by the time you're using tweezers to pick passengers off the slope of some alp. However it happened, it happened. Learning lessons is a self-soothing fraud — ponder enough and it won't happen next time. Sure, sure, but right now we have to deal with it. 
     Or not. As the truly shocking appointment of yes-men and toadies to cabinet posts explodes in the press, a daily dowsing bucket of cold reality, I just can't dive too deeply into why Matt Gaetz shouldn't be the attorney general. I keep circling back to the quip which, alas, Louis Armstrong did not actually say when asked to explain jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know." A New York Times pundit already compared Trump nominating Gaetz to Caligula trying to appoint his horse as a consul. Not much rhetorical room beyond that.

     And if we I recall, we weighed and evaluated, thought and pondered aplenty before the most recent disaster. Maybe pondering is the problem — the other side seems to do just fine with hardly any thought at all.
     Honestly, I take a certain comfort in just how wrong these appointments are. I mean, appointing a Russian asset to head our intelligence services? That's World Class Fuckery. The thing about Trump is, there was nothing subtle about him. I almost said "nothing hidden," though I assume there are subcellers below the apparent, as hideous as that is to think about. The country bought the ticket; now they get to take the ride, dragging the rest of us along.
    But it isn't as if the full disaster wasn't there in 3-D living color for all to see. Or not see. Turns out, half the country just didn't give a damn. Well, if that worked for them before the election, maybe it'll work for us after. A guy can try, can't he? 

Flashback 1990: Criticism hurts Edison employees

Crawford Generating Station

     Part of the shock of Chicago historian Shermann Dilla Thomas being summarily fired by ComEd is this: I generally LIKE Commonwealth Edison, as an organization. They not only keep the lights on, but are also receptive — at least they responded to my inquiry about Thomas, which isn't a given anymore. Plus, when the power went out on the West Side, and TV stations were castigating them because their trucks were seen parked at fast food restaurants — as if their crews shouldn't eat while they coped with the crisis — I contacted ComEd and asked to talk to the guy who got the call when the power failed, and they put me in touch with an engineer. That impressed me, a view that lingered — golly — for over a third of a century. This is the story that resulted, a pleasure for us fans of infrastructure. 

     Carl Segneri, an engineer for Commonwealth Edison, was working in the basement of his Naperville home at about 10:15 p.m. Saturday, July 28, putting up studs to build a wall.
     Segneri's wife, Claudia, was eight months pregnant with their fourth child, so it was high time to convert the unfinished basement into a recreation room for his growing family.
     At the same time, at Edison's Crawford Station, 3501 S. Pulaski Rd., something was going wrong with a section of 2-inch, lead-sheathed copper cable inside the high-voltage power-transfer station.
     The cable cracked, spewing 12,000 volts of electricity. Circuit breakers, which should have shut down that part of the system, failed to open "for reasons not yet clear." The powerful arc of electricity burned everything it touched — copper wire, lead shielding, steel and concrete.
     For Commonwealth Edison, the Crawford Station fire was the beginning of the late summer blues, an eight-week period during which there were four major power failures — three on the West Side and one in Streeterville — and a killer tornado that wiped out power lines, poles, transformers and 345,000-volt transmission towers southwest of the city.
     For employees like Segneri, the problems meant a grueling series of 16-, 18-, and even 24-hour days. Their thank yous came in the form of excoriating criticism, if not ridicule, from the public they were trying to help.
     "I was there until Sunday night at 8 p.m.," said Segneri, whose job was to assess damage. "Someone drove me home. It wasn't just the hours, it was the stress of having to deal with the problem."
     "People don't realize the human side of the company," said Don Petkus, an Edison vice-president in charge of communications. In the storm of accusations to follow, it somehow got overlooked that Edison does not strive to create major power failures and, in fact, exerts a great deal of human effort to fix them once they occur.
     Though the Crawford Station fire burned in a small area, it spewed dense smoke, playing havoc with delicate electrical circuits and relays.
     Inside the Crawford control room, the warning board lit up. Some protective devices automatically removed Crawford transformers from the citywide grid. Others had to be removed, manually, by the Crawford staff, the first of the Edison personnel called in. By day's end, more than 1,000 Edison employees were called in for emergency service.
     "It's amazing how many people get quickly involved," said Tom Maiman, vice-president of engineering. "They spring into action, and from that point on, until service is restored, it's a 24-hour-a-day job."
     As engineers such as Segneri tried to cope with the technical problem of repairing the scorched system, other employees such as John T. Hooker, administrator of government affairs, addressed the logistical problem created by 40,000 people in a 14-square-mile area suddenly being without electricity.
     Hooker was beeped at 8 a.m. and spent the next 16 hours assisting irate aldermen and coordinating community service activities. For Hooker, it was the beginning of a pattern that would become too familiar in the weeks ahead.
     "Every outage caught me at different times," said Hooker. The morning after the Crawford fire found him in a promising game at the Terry Hill Golf Course in Flossmoor, one over par at the fifth hole. "I paid off my bets and left," he said. The second, he was about to meet his mother at the airport. He sent somebody else. When Streeterville went, he was closing a deal on a new car. He lost the deal and had to buy a different car.
      Not even the highest levels were spared. James J. O'Connor, Edison chairman, was in New York to attend his son's wedding the morning after the Crawford fire when he got a call about the power failure. He was on the next plane home.
     "He is the type of person who has to be there," said Petkus. "He's so anxious to have problems corrected he wants to pull the switch himself. It's not only how he responds, but in general how people in the company respond."
     "In our company, the Crawford fire is akin to the assassination of President Kennedy, or other momentous events," said John F. Hogan, director of communications. "People know where they were at the time they heard of it."
     Hogan said Edison employees were stung by the criticism they received.
     "Daley drives by on the Laramie Avenue overpass and doesn't see anybody outside of Crawford, so he says nothing is being done," said Hogan, who guessed that the mayor expected to see people "in the yard, raking the grass."
    "For the poor guy working 12 or 24 hours, that hurts," he said.
     Edison employees point out that emergency response is really the nature of their job since it is inevitable that, at times, the power will go out.
     "Electrical things fail," said Maiman. "Trees fall down and hit transformers. People in cars hit poles. Our people are used to responding all hours of the day and night."
     While the firemen were still inside Crawford, engineers tried to bring the Columbus Park Substation, 1010 S. Laramie, back on line by rerouting power to it. That worked, for a while, but without the high-speed circuit breakers inside Crawford, the arrangement was lacking an important backup system.
     That backup system would have come in handy one week after the Crawford fire — Sunday morning, Aug. 4 — when the Columbus Park station blew up.
     "We were within one hour of installing a high-speed relay at Columbus," said Maiman. "That would have cleared the problem in a tenth of a second. Without it, by the time the back-up acted, the transformer had failed. It ignited the oil, blew the pressure relief, and a huge fireball went through the ceiling, all of which Channel 5 captured on video. We had it back in service in six hours, but it was, `Edison did it again to the people on the West Side."
     At the same moment flames were breaking through the roof of the Columbus Park Substation, Carl Segneri was getting ready to go with his family to St. Joan of Arc Church in Lisle. The phone rang. His family went without him.

          — Originally appeared in the Sun-Times, Oct. 7, 1990

Update: Carl Segneri worked for Exelon, ComEd's parent, for 29 years. He's now vice president/grid solutions at Quanta Technology. The Crawford Generating Station, one of the last coal-powered electrical stations located within a city in the United States, closed in 2012 and was demolished in 2019.

ComEd lured TikTok historian out of safe union job, then fired him

Shermann Dilla Thomas, right and ComEd president and CEO Gil Quiniones in happier days.

     Commonwealth Edison has 6,600 employees, none as well known as Shermann Dilla Thomas, power grid manager by night, Chicago TikTok historian and roving South Side tour guide by day.
     Leading new Bears and Bulls players through Bronzeville on his custom luxury bus, appearing on television, pinballing around the internet, always giving props to his bosses at the electric company.
     That was the case, least, until ComEd fired Thomas in late September.
     "I cried for a week," he said. "I loved being there."
     Even more surprising is how it happened.
     Thomas joined ComEd in 2011, as a meter reader, rising to meter technician, substation operator, then area operator. A safe union berth with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and an important job, a troubleshooter, literally keeping the lights on.
     "We manage the power grid for the city," he said, as if he still worked there. "If somebody downtown loses power, we'd get power restored. I was mostly underground, inside manholes."
     But it's hard to work at night and build your business during the day, while raising a family. Thomas worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., arriving home in time to help get his younger kids — he has seven children, aged 4 to 26 — to school.
     "You're a zombie," he said. "My wife would ask me every day what day it is, and I would say, 'I have no idea.'"
     Meanwhile ComEd began to notice there was something special about this particular employee — the Sun-Times might have had a hand in that, splashing him across the front page in April 2023. 

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Great at medical marvels; at communicating, not so much.

     As a professional communicator, I find this whole diabetes odyssey an essay in confusion and uncertainty.
     Start with the written material, that seems gauged at persuading morbidly obese persons who have no intention of altering their lifestyle to do something. Readers trying to find relevant information are constantly warned of all sorts of dire outcomes — you can go blind, lose your feet, lose feeling in your fingers, etc. — without ever being told the key, "...if you ignore this for years and years" part. I get the utility of scaring those reluctant to change their habits; but what about reassuring those of us already scared and doing all we can?  Would that not have value? It sure would for me,  at least at the start, before I finally pressed doctors who admitted, almost as an afterthought, yeah, that probably won't happen if you toe the line.

     The technology, on the other hand, is flawless, first rate. Every time I use one of those insulin injector pens, I want to write a mash note to whoever designed it. A masterpiece of functionality. Even at 6 a.m., before coffee, half asleep, the process is over in seconds. It's quicker and easier than flossing, and almost impossible to mess up. You don't feel the needle go in — another detail you're never told in books or brochures.
     I'm keeping track of my blood sugar via a marvel of technology known as a Dexcom G7 — a quarter sized monitor that sticks on the back of my arm, sharing my glucose levels not only with your cell phone, but with various doctors. If my levels dip in the night, my phone pokes me with with a "hey, wake up" chirp. Dexcom is a California company, founded in 1999, doing a cool $3.6 billion in the sensor trade last year.
     Good for them. The device is a wonder. But when I read the Dexcom materials, nowhere I noticed did they say that, when attaching the device, blood might start trickling down your arm. But it did last week. Oh look at that. With my left arm bleeding, quite a bit, I used my right hand to plug "bleeding Dexcom G7" into Dr. Google, where Dexcom informed me it "can occur if the needle pierces a blood vessel."
     Yeah, I got that, I thought, phoning tech support, but what do I do about it? Dial this number. Quickly I reached an actual human being, who instructed me to take off the G7 and throw it away. So I did, then reapplied a new G7 without puncturing any blood vessels, the tech rep staying on the line. 

      Immediately, though, there was a question — my prescription gives me three G7s a month. Each lasts 10 days. By throwing this one away at the start of its shift, I'll be one G7 short, and so will have to fly blind. For ten days. Not a good idea. The company materials say it'll sometimes send replacement devices. Would Dexcom, I wondered, send me a replacement for the one now in the trash? Seeing as how I applied it properly, and was following their advice in pitching it. Left to my own devices, I might have just kept it in place and hoped the bleeding stopped.

     The person on the phone said a lot of scripted gobbledygook that boiled down to: probably. They'll likely send one. A decision would be made by persons unnamed and I would get an email confirming the matter. When? Soon. I tried to get a hint: in situations such as this, do they end up sending one? Cause I kinda need it. Answer: most likely, you'll find out.
    Except I didn't find out. Twenty-four hours later, with no email, I figured, if it doesn't come in a day, it's never coming, and called again. Oh, sometimes it can take 48 hours to send the email the person on the phone said. That's fine, I blustered, I am patience incarnate.

     The next day I did indeed get an email from Dexcom. Here it is:

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Dexcom Technical Support regarding bleeding on 2024-11-07.
Please visit the Dexcom Help Center, FAQ section, at www.dexcom.com/faqs where most common questions have been answered.
Thank you again for contacting Dexcom Technical Support.
Sincerely,
Dexcom Global Technical Support

     Notice anything missing? Of course the FAQ section offered nothing relevant to my concerns. Nor did the email give the information it was supposed to provide. That is, whether or not they're sending another G7 unit. The not knowing part was more stressful than the bleeding part, in that it lasted far longer and there was no bright red blood to occupy my attention.

     As it happened, I told this story Tuesday to my diabetician — a sort of diabetes doula who acts as a stopgap for the woeful shortage of endocrinologists. He cheerfully offered me a spare G7 from his store of freebies, which I indeed appreciated, more than the information he provided, all of which I knew by heart a month ago. I asked him: should God forbid this happen again, and the prescription can't somehow be finessed, and I have to buy one, what do they cost? He said he believes the G7 system runs $400 a month. Or $133 for a wafer sensor and shaving cream can-sized applicator that can't cost $1.33 to make. Ouch.
     But at least I had enough units for now. One of the more daunting aspects of diabetes is the never-goes-away part, which is something to think about, endlessly, between the uncertainty of a nation entering the night of fascism in general and parlous employment in professional journalism in specific. 

     Which is why I smiled with surprise when, on Wednesday, a small box showed up. We've been getting tons of wedding presents — safer than the newlyweds' place in the city — so I figured it had to be a gift for the honeymooners. But I checked the address. The package was for me. What could it be? I genuinely couldn't imagine.

     Dexcom sent the G7 device, which is good. What is bad is they couldn't communicate they were sending it. Not a whisper. That's strange right? We live in a society clever enough to create this marvel of sensor technology that's tiny, doesn't hurt going on and clings to the back of your arm like a barnacle for 10 days. Sensitive enough to tell if your blood sugar is sinking low and wake you up, while keeping your doctors apprised of what's going on. But yet, a system not nimble enough to answer the question: is the gizmo coming or not? Maybe I expect too much.

The uneasy man at the banquet

      On Sunday I never left the hotel, except to dash onto the sidewalk to pose for wedding photographs, protected from the drizzle by the marquee of the Pfister, a sort of mini-Palmer House in the heart of downtown Milwaukee.
     Otherwise, from putting in an hour on the treadmill in the basement gym at 7 a.m., through a flurry of duties and deliveries, conversations and formalities, leading up to the big event itself at 4:30 p.m. — well, shortly after 5 p.m., once the inevitable crisis, a misplaced grandmother, was sorted out — to dinner and speeches and dancing at a party that didn't wind down until near midnight, all transpired in the same place, opened in 1893, "The Grand Hotel of the West."
     At this point some readers are no doubt wondering, "Didn't his kid already get married?" Yes, Son No.1 in July in Michigan. But through that lack of coordination at which boys excel, Son No. 2 arranged to get married four months later. In Milwaukee.
     Beforehand, I worried that a wedding on Nov. 10 might be negatively affected by events of the previous Tuesday. That a dark cloud might hang over the festivities, the faint sound of lumber being hammered, detention camps built, locomotives assembled, clanking in railyards as the cattle cars are hooked together, readying for their long procession south.
     But I worried for nothing. Little of that got through the soundproof walls of the Pfister. The groom and I sat in a small executive dining room, waiting. While we did talk of the political situation, we might as well have been a pair of toga-clad Greek philosophers in a cave, speculating whether all existence traces to a store of apeiron, the boundless chaos from which the universe is wrought.
     An hour passed. I almost blurted out, "This is going to be my favorite part of the wedding!" But that seemed a diminishment of the expensive celebration to come, and I manfully resisted. Hopping up, I studied a framed photo, taken in the same Imperial Ballroom where he'd wed in a few hours, on Oct. 16, 1899, when the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Milwaukee threw a banquet for President William McKinley and his cabinet.
     All men, naturally, all white. The beloved past that some seem so desperate to claw their way back to.
     But even then, change was afoot, if you examine the evidence carefully. Most men wear white tie, because that was what a guest who had to be a white man had to wear on such occasions. But a few wore black ties — more casual, the vanguard of the tattooed, T-shirted, multi-colored men crowding the bar in the lobby below. Given their druthers, most people want to be less formal, less restricted by rules. They want to be free.
     Change is always there, if you look for it. You can gauge the age of men in the photo just by noting their facial hair. The oldest men have full beards. The middle-aged men, just mustaches.  And the youngest are clean-shaven — there is not a clean-shaven old man, nor a bearded young one.
     The Pfister cocooned me. But if I'm honest, I carry that cocoon with me. Like the men in the photo, I've got mine. I have my place. And yet ...

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Meet Virginia

 

     Regular readers are familiar with Kitty, our half-Bichon, half Shih Tzu mix for the past, ulp, 14 years. I'm happy to report she's as spry and adorable as ever, her coat glossy, her eyes clear.  

     Yes, there is a slight ticking that grows louder, more insistent at times. Prompting me to kneel down, stroke her fur, say, "Kitty, you're here," to underscore our good fortune. Though at times that haunting Mary Oliver line, "How many summers does a little dog have?" sounds like a muted bell tolling softly far away. Off in the distance, still. But not as far away as before.
     For a day last week, she was joined by Virginia, our son's rescue dog, en route to his wedding in Milwaukee. She is, according to a DNA test, a poodle, chihuahua, a bunch of other things mix, though I don't see it. I think of her as a coiled knot of muscle, practically levitating at the end of the leash as I try to walk her and Kitty.
     "I wish they could bottle some of that so I could have it," I say, an older gentleman's phrase if ever there were. My store of summers is also running down.
     She is rarely still a moment, which is why I immediately shot the photo above, when Virginia paused to soak up the sun in our living room. Ordinarily she is racing around the furniture, her beloved stuffed mallard duck — well, actually Kitty's — clamped in her jaws. Better the duck than the key fob to my Mazda, which also found its way into her mouth. She made short  work of it, a wet clump of masticated electronics. 

     A new fob was acquired, expensively, the dog immediately forgiven. My fault for leaving it on a coffee table. Now she's a welcome albeit periodic and temporary addition to our home — the fob secured safely in a drawer beforehand. I admire her boundless energy, though do breath a sigh of relief on those rare occasions when she goes into relaxation mode and just exists for a while, we two together.

     "Thus we sit myself," Oliver writes. "Thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world."
     How rich it is to love the world. That, I believe will be a useful yardstick in the years to come. We measure wealth in billions, lately, but that seems the wrong metric. We should really ask: how much do they love the world? Quite poorly, based on their words and deeds. My sense is many supposed wealthy people are not really well-off at all. Not in the way that I, and I hope you, are, on our better days.

Flashback 2011: Tiny Tim versus the Republicans.

     The election past, we can now peer through weary eyes at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Well I can't — my younger son got married over the weekend, so I've been on vacation, and went looking for columns involving him, and found this, from 2011. A reminder that our once and future president — I'm trying not to say the name, it gets said too much already — is not a cause, but a symptom. The groundwork was laid, and he was summoned, like a demon.

     This season, I avoid most trappings of Christmas; no tree in the living room, no wreath on the door, no caroling. I do this, not out of any liberal media “war against Christmas” — are they really going to ride that hobbyhorse again? — but merely because I’m Jewish; it’s not our holiday, and so failing to observe it is done out of respect for myself, and for the Christians to whom Christmas has actual meaning, and isn’t just a twinkly time of generic wintry celebration.      There are exceptions. I’m not a zealot. I will, for instance accept a well-wrought Christmas cookie, if offered. I do own a rock-stars-sing-Christmas-carols CD, and have been known to play it — I’m a particular fan of Tevin Campbell’s "O Holy Night."
     And Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol," which I used to read to the boys when they were small. To skip "A Christmas Carol" because it’s about Christmas is like avoiding Moby-Dick because you don’t support whaling. Art transcends politics.
     Thus my younger son and I went to the premiere Sunday of the stage version of "A Christmas Carol" at the Goodman Theatre. I’d never seen it, because of my aforementioned Christmas aversion. The production is a holiday favorite and now I see why: It’s great. Lovely sets, generous helpings of music and — best of all — Larry Yando as Scrooge. A seasoned Shakespearean actor, Yando plays Scrooge for the fourth time and is simply perfect — his long elastic face going through the gyrations of greed, fear and amazement Scrooge exhibits in a night of ghostly visits.

       "A Christmas Carol," as you probably know, is a story of personal redemption. The lonely miser — who confronts a request for charity with his famous retort "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" — is forced to see the chances for love he enjoyed then squandered in his Christmases past; the brave forbearance of poor but joyous Bob Cratchit family at Christmas present; and the specter of his own death on a future Christmas, an occasion for joy among his debtors and the pawning of his bed curtains.
     Is this fate certain? Or can Scrooge change, become a better man, in time to save himself and, of course, Tiny Tim?
     The story was written in 1843, but watching it in 2011, in this time of political turmoil, it felt ripped from the headlines.
     The national debate — to the extent that it can be considered a debate and not merely each side firing up their supporters and damning their opponents — is about the same question that "A Christmas Carol" hinges on: Do we live for ourselves alone, for our own greed and profit, or do we try to help the poor boy huddled in the doorway?
     Republicans will no doubt say: "Aha, but Scrooge is an individual! We encourage people such as himself to bear the entire burden of helping the less fortunate, while the government is reserved for creating an environment where the Scrooges of the world can earn the biggest fortune possible to spend — or withhold — as they please."
     That, basically, was the status quo in Scrooge’s time, when debtors went to jail, children were executed for theft, and society was built along lines that would have brought joy to Ron Paul’s anthracite heart (in debates, the Libertarian candidate seems like he’s auditioning for the Scrooge role, patiently re-stating his firm commitment to an indifferent, almost inhuman worldview to those who can’t quite believe he’s serious. "Why yes, I would step over the sick baby.")
     What those who want to strip millions of Americans of the hope of health care, to abandon the elderly, and bury the idea that government should police the excesses of commerce overlook is that we’ve already tried all that, back in the 19th century, and every law, regulation and agency today was created, over years, by a society aghast at the result — though not too aghast. Aghast eventually. Never forget that we created organizations to prevent cruelty to animals, first, and then, out of embarrassment, took the legal protections established for horses and extended them, grudgingly, to children.
     Spoiler alert! Scrooge goes through his wondrous transformation, and basks in the joy that generosity and kindness can bring. Alas, such epiphanies are generally confined to the realm of holiday fiction. Don’t expect those from a certain political party to realize how far they’re strayed from what they once were.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 1, 2011