Not among them either

     Lord George Gordon Byron did not, I feel safe saying, ever tramp his gray suburb on a cold February evening. Block after empty block, his only company a small dog who, though perky as always, could not herself populate a neighborhood the way, oh for instance, people could.
     Where is everybody? Inside, of course, scrolling TikTok, making dinner, watching television, or poring over the grim news — I'm not speaking of anything specific, just the general dismantling of the country by bad people. Couldn't there be another dog walker, kids playing, anything? Someone in the distance? A car? This is like one of those austerity sets that the Lyric Opera inflicts on their audiences where Valhalla is represented by a blue lightbulb and some twisted tinsel. 
    So to make things worse, I conjure up Byron ... why?
    As reproach? To torture myself. The dashing romantic hero. Profile like an alp. He swam the Hellspont — first person to do so.  Fame, intrigues, travel. To use him as a personal yardstick is nuts. 
    So why then? As comfort? That makes more sense. I was a Eugene O'Neill fan as a teen, and that snatch of Byron in "Touch of the Poet" lodged itself in my bowl haircut Ohio head:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered it's rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee
Nor coined my cheeks to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo, in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such, I stood
Among them but not of them...

     Because I was special. In my own mind, if nowhere else. How grandiose is that? I loved those lines for the same reason Cornelius Melody does in "Touch of the Poet" — trying to present himself as something better than his drab surroundings.  A gem in the muck. Brush the hay from my shoulders and quote Byron. Those lines prompted me to read "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" — I remember nothing of the book but writing a paper on it for Bonnie Brown's World Lit class in 12th grade.

     In my 30s, I did grasp at reproducing Lady Caroline Lamb's famous assessment of Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." I failed mightily. 

     Byron receded in my later life — he doesn't quite go with middle age. No Philip Larkin he. I did not have the good sense that Byron did to die at 36, fighting for Greek independence. Spared himself the sour years. 

     Coward. Being dashing romantic heroes is easy, I imagine. Tougher to be the lone watchmen of Center Avenue, walking the streets in a dead patrol. Smart enough to know that not every day is golden. Some days are February. Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear...

    Actually, Byron left behind a little help here, some bracing words for those of us who are, far later than we should be, still sprawled in the middle of a messy pile the small parts of Life as sold by Ikea, trying to figure out how to put the damn thing together. In an 1821 letter to his biographer, the Irish poet Thomas Moore, Byron recounts how he met a young visitor, who seemed disappointed in meeting a great poet.

   "But I suspect that he did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce monosyllables, instead of a man of this world," Byron wrote. "I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?"

    Or as I like to think of it, if you ever hope to reach mountaintops, on rare occasions, then you must be willing to spend most of your time plodding up the sides of mountains. Which can be hard, lonely work. But worthwhile nonetheless. Or so I recall.

Rice cakes of the night

Live tilapia at the Super H in Niles.

      Did you have a fun Valentine's Day? I sure hope so. We sure did. My wife bought us a day at King Spa, the sprawling Korean pleasure dome in Niles. The passes were good for the next three months, and I actually hesitated when it came time to go, thinking: "But that means ... I won't be home ... working. Maybe another day..." I contemplated that gambit, then dove in. Let's go!

     When I first visited, over a decade ago, I found that I had difficulty simply lolling. "Can you even loll through force of will?" I wondered, gazing at the clock, champing at the bit to get to the next pool of relaxation.
     Good news. Age hasn't brought wisdom, but it certainly has improved my ability to recline for protracted periods, doing and thinking nothing. Four hours flew by. Very restful. 

    The venue is pretty much the same — the price has doubled in 11 years, from $30 to $60, so it's less of a bargain. But the place was well attended, almost crowded, with the same smorgasbord of humanity — couples, friends, families, individuals, a spectrum of ages and races. The food was excellent. 
      Of course afterward we stopped next door at the Super H, an enormous Asian supermarket, where we wandered the stacked bags of rice, the unwieldy exotic fruit, the wildly enthusiastic boxes of mysterious products. My wife loaded up on mushrooms for a promised mushroom stew. I pondered a half gallon of matcha soy milk, took it, checked the carbs, put it back, then went for it — you only live once! — along with assorted goodies, like little round walnut cakes.   

      I enjoy studying the unusual packaging from other countries. Shorn of familiarity, some seem over-the-top, almost crazed, with their pop-eyed characters shouting nonsense syllables. For some reason the deadpan slogan of a Moon Pie-like Korean product, Choco-Pie, caught my fancy: "It's fluffy." I'll bet it is. Maybe I was just in a good mood. This not working thing — it grows on a person. I could get used to it.

     Then there were the yellow boxes below. Oh my. "Puto" is a male prostitute in Spanish. Though that's more of the sedate definition; it's actually a highly derogatory anti-gay slur. That couldn't be the intention. Back home, a moment's digging showed that, in Tagalog, it's a popular steamed rice cake served with — judging from the photo — a big pad of melty butter on top. Popular in the Philippines. I wonder how their sales to Spanish-speaking countries are? I imagine certain Hispanic men stock it for its camp value, the way I'd put a box of Kike toothpaste in my medicine cabinet if I ever came across such a thing.

Donald Trump is absolutely right ... about the penny

     Why yes, I am a coin collector. Not that I've acquired a new coin in 50 years. But being a coin collector is a permanent condition, like being a Marine. And I still have my pathetic childhood collection of Morgan silver dollars and a fine 1883 "no cents" Liberty nickel, which I can happily expound upon: a Roman numeral "V" on the reverse, but no "cents," so fraudsters would gold plate the nickels and pass them off as $5 gold pieces.

   Scary to consider how much numismatic minutia I jammed into my head between the ages of 10 and 15; even scarier to recognize how much is still there.
     For instance, I don't have to check to know with 100% certainty that the Lincoln penny was introduced in 1909 to mark the centennial of the 16th president's birth, replacing the far prettier Indian Head Penny. Or that it originally had sheaves of wheat and a bold ONE CENT on the back. Replaced in 1959 with the Lincoln Memorial.
     Forget the design. It became clear long ago we shouldn't have pennies at all. The Lincoln cent became a rebuke. A symbol of inertia, aversion to change, everything wrong in our country. Address climate change? We can't even get rid of the penny. Civilized countries — Canada, Australia, Britain — ditched theirs decades back.
     Only in America do we stick with a coin that costs more than three times as much to make than it is worth, not that people spend them much. I wouldn't bend over to pick up a penny. Would you?
     So when Donald Trump paused from vandalizing our government Sunday to kill the penny, it took my breath away. It's a ... good idea — no, a great idea. Who uses coinage of any kind? Or cash, for that matter? About time. Bravo, Mr. President! And I have to say that out loud because the liberal superpower — and curse — is we approach situations rationally and can find value even in those we oppose. This isn't the first accomplishment for Trump — he also fast-tracked the vaccine against COVID-19 after ignoring the pandemic. And others.
     That said, we don't want to make too much of results while ignoring method. If somebody breaks into your house and washes the dishes, it's still a crime. They could steal stuff next time. Given the blizzard of executive orders of questionable legality pouring from the Oval Office, odds are one or two will resonate with most everybody. We are still hurtling toward the abyss. There are too many Americans willing to live in a country where one man is above the law. If he were Donald the Just, issuing commands steeped in the wisdom of Solomon — spoiler alert, he ain't — I'd still be uncomfortable with the change to a country that used to have a powerful Congress and respected courts and unquestioned elections.
     Still. It's a healthy exercise to think positively, even for a moment, about a generally loathsome person. This reminds me of when I was researching Henry Ford a few years ago. You might think of him as the genius who created the Model T and the assembly line, and he was. But Ford was also driven nuts by wealth and success — it didn't start with Elon Musk — and lurched onto the international stage, trying to end the first world war by sponsoring a voyage of peace activists to Europe and becoming a roaring antisemite.

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Migration complete

  

     On Saturday, May 11, 1985 — nearly 40 years ago — I picked up my first computer, a Kaypro 2X. It was considered portable at 22 pounds, and had a handle by which it could be lugged, with effort. I liked the gunmetal gray case; I used to say it was the sort of computer that Army sappers would have dragged ashore in a rubberized bag at Normandy Beach to calculate artillery azimuths if, you know, they did that sort of thing back then. I liked the way the keyboard — a very solid keyboard — folded out of the base. The Apple McIntosh that had just gone on sale the year before seemed, by comparison, cheap and plastic, transparent and toylike. Besides, it had that stupid mouse, which required a hand to be lifted off the keyboard, an idea which, as a touch typist since the 7th grade, I dismissed out of hand.

   I thought of the Kaypro Tuesday, when I took delivery of my latest computer, a new iMac. The Kaypro was an 8-bit machine, while the iMac has 16 gig, or 250,000 times the memory, I am told.  At almost exactly the same price — the Kaypro cost $1650 in 1985; the iMac cost $1495 now, plus $400 tacked on for the 1 terabyte memory I needed to transfer all the crap over from my old machine, including 73,000 photos.

     The old machine is a 2012 model iMac. Honestly, I'd have kept using it forever, or tried to. I'd never have had the courage to replace it — set in my ways. But my wife pointed out, repeatedly, that a 13-year-old computer is not a thing, and with Donald Trump disrupting the international supply chain, along with much else, prices are certain to go up, and I'd better get one. Still, I dithered like Hamlet, placing an order and cancelling it twice. The first time in December, when I realized I'd ordered the wrong keyboard. The second time a couple weeks ago, just out of the sheer stress of making the change while continuing to write a column and breathe air and all the other stresses placed upon me
    But the third time was the charm, as they say. I finally remembered, that if I didn't take my wife's lead, I'd still be a single guy living in a one bedroom apartment in Oak Park. I'm composing my first blog post on now, tapping at its new, perhaps a little stiff keyboard, the same as the old, but cleaner, and with a special round key to receive my right index fingerprint to wake up the computer without need of a password.
     To be honest, I hadn't wanted that Kaypro 2X either — my dream writing instrument was an IBM Selectric II — self-correcting, which would lift up mistakes with a touch of your right pinky. A blue one, so it would rhyme — a baby blue Selectric II. Then again, when I entered First Grade I was nostalgic for kindergarten. 

     Alas, even I could see that technology had thundered past my dreams. Why should manuscripts be cut apart and taped together when you could just shift around electrons on a glowing green screen? Though there was a value to retyping copy, you massaged the material as the words passed from the paper, through your eyes, into your brain and out your fingers.

    I don't remember buying the Kaypro as being particularly traumatic, even though I was earning $14,000 a year at the time as the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. I was also 24, and pushing forward is what one does. What I did, anyway.

    Now I was worried about ... well, lots of things. Getting all the data from the old computer to the new. At first I thought of having the Apple store do it. But that would involve dropping my old computer off for a day or two. Meaning I'd have no computer at all, except a laptop. Then I thought I'd pop $60 for the special lightening cable to connect them. In the end, I let the migration assistant do it through the air. When I first unboxed the new computer and began the process, the migration assistant said the transfer would take 60 hours. But that turned out to be pessimistic — it ended up requiring a little more than six, files flying across the room through the aether from one machine to the other. 

     In between the two machines, how many others? Big boxy Dells, beige plastic monitors shipped from Texas — the ease of return and the consumer service were what kept me a loyal customer. I remember once having three monitors in various states — arriving, being boxed up, sent back. And one long night a technical rep had me on the floor with the back of the computer off, pulling boards out. It somehow got back together.

     Apple swept that away. It started with an iPod, a cool brushed aluminum lozenge with music inside. Just hold it made me proud to be a human being, to belong to the same race who did this. And now I have a laptop and an iPhone, AirPods and this smokin' hot iMac. I never considered any other brand.

     The point, Neil, you must be straining. Get to the point. I think the point should be clear — with all the transferring data from old iMac to new, and the getting the fonts just right and downloading apps I couldn't run because my machine was so old, I didn't have time to think of a proper post. This will have to do.

     The Kaypro is still in the basement, wrapped in plastic. I keep it, not as a potentially valuable relic of the early consumer computer era — I see on eBay you can pick one up for a couple hundred dollars — but just in case I need to read something off those boxes of floppy discs I also have stashed somewhere. You never know.

    For now, I've left the old one set up, on the roll top desk behind me, — purchased with paper route money when I was 14, because a writer needs a roll top desk. Where I imagine it'll stay for a few weeks, as a backup, until it starts getting in the way, and will go into a plastic bag and into the basement next to the Kaypro, which hasn't been opened for nearly 40 years. Better safe than sorry.

Diana's wins frozen chocolate banana 'beauty contest'

   
     Bananas are alive.
     They breathe long after they are picked, taking in oxygen, expiring carbon dioxide.
     As they ripen, bananas radiate warmth.
     "The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment," a banana importer tells Nicola Twilley in "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, our Planet and Ourselves," one of those relentlessly fascinating books that takes readers on a guided tour of something we've known about all our lives yet never thought to be curious about.
     From colonial entrepreneurs sawing up ice on ponds and shipping it to Australia insulated in sawdust, to Chicago's own Gustavus Swift realizing it's a lot cheaper to ship steaks instead of steer, if only a way could be found to keep them cool, "Frostbite," published in 2024, is perfect February reading.
     And in one of those delightful coincidences, I had just reached the lengthy section on bananas Monday when it was time to head over to Diana's Bananas, whose West Side plant keeps busy supplying our nation's hunger for frozen chocolate-covered bananas — on a stick, or sliced into 10mm "thick hockey pucks."
     "The key why the brand works, is, it's quite simple in ingredients, but not simple in process," said Neil Cox, Diana's CEO. "The actual handling of fruit is quite challenging. Guess what? No two bananas are the same. Machines like to see uniformity. If it's not the same size and shape, a machine doesn't work that well. "
     The main product has just three ingredients. The aforementioned tropical berry — bananas are not technically "fruit" — plus quality chocolate and the secret ingredient, peanut oil, that helps the chocolate shell not shatter and fall into your lap after you bite it.
     Diana's Bananas grew from a booth at the Taste of Chicago run by Jeanine Gits-Carmody, whose family had a candy company, Aunt Diana’s Candy Makers. The product wasn't invented there; Affy Tapple made Frosty Bananas in the 1970s, and Newport Beach, California, had a stand in the 1940s. The product picked up a little street cred when a chocolate banana became a plot point during the second season of that saga of Chicago culinary stress, "The Bear."
     Diana's bananas come exclusively from Ecuador. As if coping with the vagaries of banana physiognomy were not enough, Diana's "upcycles" its bananas, meaning rather than buy perfect bunches heading for supermarkets, it scoops up strays.

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A flickering fingerhold on the living world

 

     Yahrzeit is a Jewish tradition to commemorate our departed loved ones. Sort of a semitic Day of the Dead without either colorful skeletons or morbid baked goods — the latter absence being very off brand for us. Usually, we're all in when it comes to pastries.
     In fact, the only elements yahrzeit really requires is a candle in a glass cup, such as this one, which my wife lit for her father on the 20th anniversary of his death —"yahrzeit" is from the Yiddish word for "anniversary." Plus, I suppose, if you're feeling ambitious, a prayer for the dead, which we also said.
     Twenty years is a long time, though I remember his passing very well. A bad beginning to a difficult year. We still miss him.

     The candle burns for 24 hours, and cautious Jews, not wanting to push up their own deaths, tend to put yahrzeit candles in safe places, where they won't burn down the house at night. The kitchen sink is popular. Or the stove, as above. My parents put theirs on top of the refrigerator — I suppose the idea was to keep it out of our reach — and I can still recall seeing it high up there, flickering at night, like the soul of my dead grandfather awakened and sputtering atop the refrigerator. It was scary.

     This was my father's father, who died when I was 3, introducing the concept of death into my world. I don't remember his funeral, but I remember playing among the headstones a year later, at the stone setting, another Jewish funerary rite — a year after a death, you unveil the headstone, your purchase on permanence. It's as if we're trying to gift wrap death with rituals, pretty it up a little, make the loss comforting instead of awful. It doesn't work very well, does it?

Focus on Black History Month: Ronald Reagan

     Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States and the only one born in Illinois.       
     He was also the only president to live in Chicago as a youth. Lincoln, born in Kentucky, practiced law here, but always went home to Springfield. Grant, born in Ohio, never got closer than Galena, which at one time rivaled Chicago, with its location near the banks of the mighty Mississippi and thriving lead mine.

     Reagan was born in Tampico. His family moved around a lot, living above a store on the South Side of Chicago, then Galesburg and Monmouth before settling in Dixon, where Reagan went to high school.
     He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a degree in sociology, and took an interest in broadcasting. Feeling the lure of Hollywood, he moved west in ...
     What? Why are we going over the particulars of Reagan's life? Because it's February. Black History Month! I think with our nation being whipsawed by Trump 2.0, we might have forgotten that. A time when we can examine the rich heritage Black people have brought to this country.
     Reagan's first movie was "Love is in the Air" with June Travis. The movie took three weeks to film, and Reagan received $200 a week. It was well received — the Hollywood Reporter called Reagan "a natural" — he should have been, given he was playing a radio announcer, a job he had been doing in real life for years.
     Okay, okay, Ronald Reagan is not technically a Black person. But if I've read the current political mood correctly, that's okay. Black History Month, which I previously saw as a chance to look at important parts of the past often overlooked in America's rush to celebrate whiteness, can now be viewed as a genocide against white history. If corporations can leap to scrap their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, to curry favor with, or at least not provoke wrath from, the Trump administration, then surely I can use February to celebrate a president who was the oldest in American history when he left office — 77, but still a year younger than Trump was when he started his second term. Three weeks ago.
     Beside, I believe Reagan is a key figure in explaining what is going on right now. He didn't invent animosity toward federal government — that goes back to the founding of our country, and Southern states passionate about preserving slavery.
     But he did perfect it, ushering in the age where Republicans realized, if you can't directly advocate against people you despise — immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ ‚ you can kneecap the government that supports them.
     That is why our shadow king, Elon Musk, is running around, ripping down parts of the federal government — include scientists, doctors, and impartial law enforcement officers among the ranks of the despised now.
     They call that "efficiency," though how it is efficient to destroy programs that help Americans to give the money back to rich people as tax breaks, is a mystery.
     That it mainly hurts white Americans — most people in poverty are white — doesn't matter.           That's a point that doesn't get understood about racism. Sure, it hurts the victims, big time. But it also hurts the racists themselves. When federal courts demanded that public swimming pools be integrated in the 1960s, small southern towns filled in their public pools rather than let Black residents — their neighbors — swim in them. They'd rather their own children swelter than share the pool.

     Remember that dynamic; it explains a lot. You can draw a line from the shuttered pools to next week's move to eliminate the Department of Education. If deploying national standards mean we're to learn actual American history, then there shall be no standards at all!
History is a bad place, often. To get an idea just how bad, let's return to Reagan's biography  Those of more tender sensibilities — a state sadly encouraged by the left as well as the right — are invited to bail out here.
     Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 believing that companies should be able to do whatever they like, unencumbered by the interference of government — another belief as current as tomorrow. He opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on Constitutional grounds. He was also an unashamed racist. There is a 1971 tape from the Oval Office that has him yucking it up with Nixon about United Nations delegates.
     "To see those... monkeys from those African countries," Reagan said, as Nixon laughed. "Damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes!"
     That Reagan would go on to be elected president, twice, and become the godhead of the Republican Party prior to Donald Trump blinding them with his golden glory, well, it might be a shock. But it shouldn't come as a surprise.