Woodwork would work better, had I started long ago

 

     To be good at anything, you first have to be willing to be bad.
     No one who ever tried anything new, who ever walked out onto a dance floor or an athletic field, would dispute that. Proficiency is hard won, and you have to step on a lot of toes and muff a lot of easy catches to get there. Want to bake well? First you have to bake poorly.
     I know that. But knowing a truth, intellectually, and actually experiencing it are very different, just as writing "hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts" is not anywhere close to extending your digit and bringing down a claw hammer on it, hard.
     The truth of just how badly being really bad at something hurts dawned on me while standing at my workbench at the Chicago School of Woodworking, 5680 N. Northwest Highway, a few weeks ago, contemplating my first attempt to make a dovetail joint.
     How did I get here?
     Paternal love makes a person do many strange and expensive things. It caused me to quit a city I love and move to an anodyne suburb, enduring a quarter-century of reader ridicule and lousy Thai food. It prompted me to spend thousands of dollars on tennis lessons, college tuition, and more recently, wedding cakes. I thought I was pretty much done with that period of life, when my younger son asked if I wanted to take a woodworking class together.
     "Sure!" I said, despite smelling a trap. Nine weeks of 101 Introduction to Woodworking cost $495; I assumed I'd be tasked with making the arrangements and then could later dun him for his share, or more likely, not. My parents inspired me to always be open-handed and generous with my children, though ... choosing my words carefully ... not by direct example.
     Then the amazing part happened. He signed up for — and paid — for the class. I did the same.
     We began in mid-October — with seven others, heavy on the legal and computer professions. "I spend all my days looking at screens," said a cybersecurity expert, when we went around explaining why we were there.
     We identified types of wood and joints, and our teacher said something prophetic.
     "You're learning to cut things by hand," she said. "A lot of times it isn't going to look great."
     Got that right. We began working on picture frames. We busied ourselves at our tasks. My son and I didn't talk much. He has been woodworking as a hobby for a few years — he made a lovely coffee table for his apartment — and were I of a conspiratorial bent, I'd suspect that after a lifetime of me forcing him to learn skills that I was already proficient at — reading and swimming and such — he was now returning the favor, as payback.

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Flashback 1992: A man of letters

Photo for the Sun-Times by Robert A. Davis

     In Monday's column, I mentioned finding the subject of this article in the Yellow Pages under "Currency Engraving." But I've never shared the story. Let's remedy that. 

     Yochanan Nathan's world might at first seem cramped between the nib of a turkey feather pen and a square centimeter of parchment, but to him it encompasses mankind and beyond, to the entire universe, and God Himself.
     "It's a very mystical experience, writing the letters," said Nathan, Chicago's only full-time sofer, or Hebrew scribe. "The letters are mystical in their nature. When God spoke, he created the Word; the Torah is the blueprint of the world, the force of the world."
     Jewish law requires that a Torah - the first five books of the Bible in Hebrew - be written by hand. The scrolls of scripture within mezuzahs, the narrow boxes found on the doorposts in homes of observant Jews, and within tefilin, the prayer boxes worn by Orthodox Jews, must also be hand-lettered.
     A good part of Nathan's business involves laboriously checking over other scribes' scrolls to make sure they meet the strictest standards.
     "There are little problems, a word left out, a letter may not be perfect," he says, displaying an Israeli tefilin scroll that looks like a flawless strip of carefully-rendered Hebrew letters.
     "This raysh may be too square," he says, indicating a letter that looks like an "L" flipped upside down. "I'll ask the question to someone more learned than I, whether it's too square or not."
     If the letter is not sufficiently rounded, Nathan says, the scroll, which took a scribe 10 hours to copy, will have to be discarded.
     While mezuzah and tefilin scrolls are his bread and butter, Nathan also sometimes gets commissions for the massive, eight-month job of copying a Torah scroll (less than a dozen are produced each year in this country).
     "Not too many Torah orders come in," he sighs. "Sometimes it takes some active solicitation."
     Written on parchment, with quills cut from turkey feathers and ink made from the smoke of burning olive oil, a Torah is created by a process unchanged for millennia.
     As required by law, Nathan utters each word, quietly, before he copies it. Nathan, who can copy letters for 2 1/2 hours without a break, says that keeping focused on the job is important.
     "You try to concentrate on what you are doing, so you don't make mistakes," he says. "But a person's a human being." For relaxation, Nathan says he likes to "get out a little bit and walk around."
      Nathan recently finished up a new scroll for the Chicago branch of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews.
     In contrast to his work on the bulk of the scroll, which he copied in solitude in his small, debris-strewn office on California Avenue, near Devon, Nathan penned the last 10 lines of the scroll in public splendor under the soaring, gold-leaf ceilings and rocco sculptures of the Gold Room at the Congress Hotel, with a brass band playing and some 400 Orthodox Jews praying and looking on in a special ceremony.
     Afterward, Nathan took the scroll — now no longer the work of his hands, but the handiwork of God — and led the procession that danced down LaSalle Street, celebrating the addition of one new Torah in the world.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 27, 1992

Trans community is about much more than bathrooms and girls track debates

Six young people from the GenderCool Project gather in 2018 to promote trans awareness.

     Newspaper reporters quickly learn, if they're any good, to find their own stories. The only way to keep your job from devolving into an endless treadmill of zoning board meetings is to figure out what interests you and get busy. Otherwise, you spend your career being told what to do, and who wants that?
     Thus in my younger days I'd scan phone books, looking for ... I wasn't sure what. Something unusual. Once I called a number listed in the Yellow Pages under "Currency engraving," only to find a sofer,or Hebrew scribe. I'd phoned hoping to see a Brazilian bank note being etched and ended up watching a man finish penning a Torah scroll with a turkey feather.
     Once in 1992, I was browsing the classified ads in the back of the Reader and noticed a shop on Elston Avenue selling women's clothing in large sizes to men. "Now there's something you just don't see in the paper every day," I thought, and went over. Another key reporting skill: Go and find out.
     I quickly realized this wasn't a story about dresses; it was a story about people. There was a community here, holding secret dances — I went to one — and maintaining safe houses. Because a guy couldn't keep his female wardrobe in the closet at home, where his wife might find it. Often, she didn't know.
     The story "PRETTY, WITTY — AND MALE CROSS-DRESSERS KEEP CULTURE CLOSE TO VEST" ran over several pages in the paper. I'm proud of it, because there was no snickering. I used the pronouns my subjects preferred.
     Not that I understood it all. The subculture that, in the 1990s, were men dressing as women, seemed to vanish into men who were women and vice versa. I didn't exactly get it, completely, but that was OK, because it isn't about me — another superpower of being a reporter. It wasn't my job to pass judgment.
     When gays and lesbians got the right to marry, I wondered whether the trans community could slip through the door they'd kicked open. They did, for a while; then reaction set in.
     Big time, with the past election, as Republicans ginned up harms to focus on, making fear of trans a central plank. "Kamala Harris is for they/them," one heavily-hyped commercial went. "Donald Trump is for you." If only public health care was given the same attention.
     That not only won but framed the issue in such a way that many don't even realize how skewed it is. When we talk about trans, we talk about bathroom policy and fairness in sports, hormones and surgeries. Controversies, not people. Republicans who fall quaking to the floor if you suggest parents shouldn't bat the diphtheria vaccine away from their kids' arms suddenly are adamant they know best what care is right for youngsters they've never met.

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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.