What can you do? Go birding.

Bob Dolgan looks for woodcocks at the Glenview Park District's Kent Fuller Air Station Prairie. 

     Usually, birds come to me. To my backyard feeder: robins, sparrows, wrens — little brown birds, mostly, with the occasional red cardinal, gray dove or blue warbler offering variety.
     I'm generally content with that setup, though chasing off squirrels is a constant challenge. They adapt.
     Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, however. So when Bob Dolgan, publicist for the Newberry Library, said he is a regular birder and invited me along, I could not refuse the opportunity to seek out birds. Anything is better than sitting in the kitchen, staring gape-mouthed at the newspaper.
     We met in the parking lot of the Sheraton Northbrook and, to my amazement, took just a few steps and might as well have been on Egdon Heath. We were on a grassy bluff above a body of water carrying the lyrical name Techny 32B inline reservoir. A strong, steady wind ruffled our clothes. He carried with him a tripod and a 60x Bushnell spotter scope.
     A few dozen European starlings vectored past.
     "Europeans starlings — we kinda hate them, right?" I said, tucking myself into the fold of birders. An invasive species, introduced in Central Park by some fool who wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to be found in America, crowding out native birds. A reminder of how much lasting damage one idiot can cause.
     "Today, I'm feeling very generous, so I'm not going to say that," Dolgan replied. "They were introduced more than a century ago. They just take up a lot of habitat from other species. They're not a great bird."
     Great birds came fast and furious. Three mallards on the water. A killdeer — a large plover on long legs.
     "You have a life list, right?" I asked.
     "I have been a little bit less focused on my list and more focused on the experience," he said, not offering the number of distinct species he's seen in the wild in his birding career. I deliberately didn't ask for the figure. Guys have a way of turning every pursuit into baseball, every activity into a batting average, a numbers game.
     "If you look at birds just to check a name off a list, a lot gets lost," Dolgan said. "There is less a connection to nature and joy of discovery. At the same time, I am keeping up with it. Looking at how many I've seen in Illinois, how many in Cook County. I report it on ebird.org."
     Ebird.org is an engaging, well-crafted website. There Dolgan listed the 22 birds we saw over the next hour — well, birds he saw. I sorta squinted in the direction he pointed, though the geese were my contribution; hard to miss geese.
     For those keeping score at home, in addition to my Canada geese, we noted examples of: blue-winged teal, northern shoveler, mallard, green-winged teal, killdeer, Wilson's snipe, lesser yellowlegs, greater yellowlegs, pectoral sandpiper, ring-billed gull, American herring gull, great egret, great blue heron, barn swallow, European starling, American robin, house finch, song sparrow, eastern meadowlark, red-winged blackbird and common grackle.

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Bob Dolgan spying a noteworthy bird on a watery mud flat in Northbrook.

Flashback 2013: Egg salad (eww) delicious for many

     Passover ends Sunday, and with it my annual stiff-arm refusal of hard-boiled eggs and all their manifestations.

     I don’t like egg salad.
     That’s it, end of column. Thank you very much for reading, please exit to your left and enjoy your visit with the other fine features in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.
     Still, here?
     Oh all right then. We are bound by the limits of the form, aren’t we? Ann Landers once left the last quarter of her column blank, when writing about her divorce, as a tribute to a marriage that ended prematurely. Very dramatic, though it was an extraordinary circumstance. Someone who made her living telling others how to manage their lives couldn’t just shrug when something so vital in her own life went off the rails. Smart.
     My marriage is fine, as far as I know. The egg salad though . . . I don’t like eggs hard-boiled, either. Which makes for an awkward moment at Passover, when my wife passes me the bowl of hard-boiled eggs, taking one for herself with a flourish of anticipatory joy. She really loves hard-boiled eggs.
     I shudder with visceral revulsion and quickly pass the bowl, averting my gaze as if it held kitty entrails. I do not, however, say, “I avoid these eggs because hard-boiled eggs are gross — bland white goo surrounding a yellow sphere of chalky disgust.”
     I don’t, in fact, say anything at all. Because I have learned a vital truth that, judging from my email, many adults have not mastered. One I would like to pass it on to you. Ready?
     You are not the final arbitrator of all things. No one is. I’m certainly not. While an educated person, proud holder of a degree from Northwestern University, my tastes are nevertheless not the template quality can be measured against. What I like, and what is good on some objective scale, assuming such a scale exists, are two separate things.
     This shouldn’t be a revelation. Yet so many just assume that what they like, and what is indeed good, bear more than an accidental relationship. So leap they do, aided by God, whom I’m beginning to define as: “the imaginary cosmic force that people conjure up to add weight to their own personal biases.”
     I wish more people understood this. On Sunday, I wrote about the utter greatness of “The Book of Mormon” musical, laying out, necessarily in abbreviated, canyon-floor-rushing-up-at me form, why I think it’s a superior work of art. This prompted a number of readers to write back along the lines of, “I saw ‘Book of Mormon’ the other day and it was the worst thing I have seen in years.”
     Period. Well, stop the presses. I’ll go tell the producers and they’ll close the show. Some writers, perhaps aware that something more is required, offer up rationale — it was “sophomoric,” which I take as the five-dollar word meaning it has swears in it. Or “racist,” which, thanks in part to the vigorous efforts of the Rev. Jesse Jacksons of the world, has gone from meaning “an unacceptable, even illegal act of racial hatred” to “anything that involves race that I don’t like.”
     Now, a solid case could be made for either complaint — that obscenity ruins a work by jarring tender sensibilities. Or that stating frank truths about any particular people — such as suggesting that Uganda is a poor and violent place where many people suffer from AIDS — is unacceptable racism in a world gone mad to flatter everyone at all times.
     But my correspondents didn’t say that — they just said categorically they didn’t like it, often that they didn’t like it because it wasn’t good. And I’m not embarrassing them by name, because to do so seems mean, since they are guilty of such a common lapse.
     As the years grind on, I’m starting to see we are all ego junkies, so busy shooting up our own opinions that, as junkies will do, we ignore the rest of the big blue world. I’m as guilty as anyone. I can’t tell you how many times, talking about opera, I’ll be whining about seeing Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1994, and what a soul-shattering experience of badness it was, only to be truly surprised when the person I’m talking to juts out his lower lip and says, in a small voice,“But I love Berg.”
     You lose friends that way. And boldly thundering your opinion, without any sort of explanation, assumes people care, and they do not, particularly if they don’t know you. That’s important enough to write a column about, I think, because if society is a continuum, where on one side is a hive of selfless bees all laboring mightily to make the communal honey, and on the other is Robinson Crusoe, padding along his island alone, we have swung about as far toward Crusoe as you can get and still occasionally catch sight of another person. Our politics are a disaster, our schools in crisis, faith a shambles, in large part — I believe . . . in my opinion — because each of us has become so enamored with ourselves, our tastes, our sensibilities, our lives, that we forget there are other people on this trip too. So enjoy your egg salad. I’m sure it’s wonderful stuff.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2013

Blooming blossoms

 

April 6
 

     Long week. Lots of running around, reporting stories that will be in the paper next week. Trying to keep myself distracted. As the national shame reaches the end of its third month — Sunday — the weight of what our country is going through, with worse sure to come, has begun to press upon those with the strength to keep tabs on what's happening. 
     I won't outline it for you here — either you already know, or never will. Best to keep busy.
     The good news is the blossoms on the saucer magnolia in front of my house have been unusually splendid and long lasting. Friday they were going strong, a dozen days after I first snapped them. This despite one day where the temperature dipped into the 20s for a few hours — usually that's enough to change them to the color and shape of scorched marshmallows.
     Yet they survived.

     "Notice the magnolia blossoms as you go out the door," I'll tell my wife, seeing her off to work.

     I wondered why the blossoms would be so hearty and full this year, whether it might be that we had the tree trimmed last fall. Cutting back the deadwood — the tree is 50 years old if not older — might have encouraged new growth. Which was enough to make me think that the tragedy — well, one of the many tragedies — about our current situation is that pruning the government, had it been done with deliberation, humanity and care, and not with wild abandon, targeting the most vulnerable, might not have been a bad thing. But the reckless, wholesale, sloppy way that the richest-man-in-the-world-and-palpable-force-for-evil did it was not a good thing. Just the opposite. A bad, terrible thing. 

     All the news is not bad. Opposition builds, let by Harvard of all places...
     Sorry, saucer magnolia blooms, some six inches wide, on naked branches awaiting their leaves. The moment I had the thought, "They're really lingering this year," at that very second, I looked down and saw the first fat petal on the front steps, a vanguard for the general surrender liable to arrive any day. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good. Or the bad.

April 18

Blowing up the government, again

 

     Timothy McVeigh was so upset that the government used tear gas on children during the Waco siege that he killed 19 kids in a day care center. Agitated by the deaths of 76 Americans at the hands of federal law enforcement in 1993, he killed 168 more, lighting a two-minute fuse on a rental truck and walking away. The bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exploded at 9:02 a.m., April 19, 1995, 30 years ago Saturday.
     Toxic hate against American government did not die when McVeigh was put to death by lethal injection in 2001. Instead it grew and spread, so that our national infrastructure can be blown apart before our eyes — a sort of slow-motion, nationwide, institutional destruction — and reaction ranges from numbness to joy.
     Just as Britons in areas that most relied on trade with the European Union pushed hardest for Brexit, so red state Americans who lean most heavily on the government cheer its wholesale destruction since Jan. 20.
     People seem only dimly aware that services they depend on are being scrapped so that money once used for their benefit can be given in tax breaks to billionaires.
     The government isn't even keeping track of who's being fired. News organizations estimate that about 12% of the 2.4 million strong federal workforce have lost their jobs in the last three months, with more layoffs every day, and no end in sight.
     To add insult to injury, the fired workers are being told it's their fault. Even though, clearly, no assessments were done by the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's youthful wrecking crew created by executive order and given free rein.
     Again and again, offices are eliminated, only to be reinstated when an adult realizes that, oh, hey, they've let go people they need to keep nuclear reactors safe, or to check food for contamination.
     Not to forget the billions of dollars in research grants being eliminated, wholesale. Not in any connection to the merit of the work being done, but as retribution for institutions that do not adjust their programs to the government's liking. Harvard resisted, and not only are $2 billion in federal grants being withheld, but its tax- exempt status is immediately challenged, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Americans are not taxed more because of what they teach. Well they weren't, up to now.

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Flashback 2012: Classical stars surprise Thompson lunch crowd

     Wednesday's column on the Department of Motor Vehicles made me wonder what other DMV columns I've run. And while this only mentions the DMV in passing, I'm sharing it anyway, as a reminder that while working at home is convenient as heck, we do miss out by not going downtown.

    Mike Koetting, a deputy director at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, had just gotten off the L at the Thompson Center on Monday and was heading toward the elevators to go to a meeting when the haunting strains of "Vocalise" by Rachmaninoff snapped his head hard to the side.

      He moved toward the center of the lower level food court like a man in a trance, his battered leather briefcase held limply at his side.
     "I’m a music fan," he said.
     A few feet away from Koetting were two of the great musicians of our era, soprano Renee Fleming and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, performing a brief unannounced recital for the lunch crowd, passersby, jurors on their break and a select group who had been tipped off ahead of time, including Gov. Pat Quinn.
     Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra backed the pair, making their debut performance together.
     Some came without exactly knowing what to expect. Judy Kaufman had heard from a friend who volunteers at the CSO that something musical and noteworthy would be happening, and so brought her daughter, Vered, and grandson Jonah, 3, who just started studying the violin.
     "She told us to make sure we didn’t miss this," said Judy Kaufman, who lives downtown. They were delighted to learn who they had come to hear. "We had no idea. We are tremendous music lovers, and are so impressed with Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma, the giants of opera and classical music."
     A few minutes before the performance began, people going down the escalators were handed programs explaining that the event was a joint production of the CSO and the Lyric Opera, and is part of programs at both institutions designed to encourage music in community settings and foster a greater public appreciation for the arts.
     "Awesome," said Fanny Clonch, a French teacher from Curie High School, taking a program. She was giving a tour to 17 students from France, and steered them over to listen.
     Three students from the Tribeca Flashpoint digital vocational school happened by to patronize the Panda Express when they noticed the commotion.
     "Who is it?" asked Jack Whelan, 18, sipping a Mountain Dew. Told Yo-Yo Ma was playing, Whelan, a musical recording arts student, replied, "he’s sick," a slang term of approval meaning "cool" or "awesome."
     Choruses from Lake View High School, the Chicago High School for the Arts and Merit School of Music began the three-song program about 12:40 p.m. with a traditional South African folk song, and it was ended with a rendition of "America the Beautiful." It was to have been a sing-along, but few in the crowd of several hundred tried to compete with one of America’s premiere vocalists.
     While some patrons stood on chairs or crowded for a closer look, others blithely talked on their cell phones or continued their full-throated conversations or listened to their own music on earbuds. The door to the Department of Motor Vehicles office was open, but the music heard inside was very soft, nearly drowned out by booming announcements such as "Now serving B291 at counter No. 6."
     Fleming, the creative consultant for the Lyric, said that she and Ma, creative consultant to the CSO, had spent the morning talking with students, and that, coupled with their performance, had buoyed the artists.
     "It’s inspiring to us and gives us a lot," she said.
     The entire performance lasted less than 15 minutes and Mike Koetting headed to his meeting. What did he think of the music?
     "It was great," he said, and then laughed. "They’re good."

        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2012

Farcical Real ID regulations swamp Illinois DMV centers

 

     While much of the country reels from the federal government being torn apart — jobs slashed, agencies gutted, funding withdrawn — Alexi Giannoulias is facing the opposite problem: a mass of new federal requirements crushing his agency.
     "I haven't been this frustrated, professionally, maybe ever," the Illinois secretary of state said Monday. "Because we've done so much work to create efficiencies, and they're all being unraveled by this unprecedented demand."
     Real ID is a ticking time bomb of security theater, signed into law by President George W. Bush on May 11, 2005. A law designed, basically, to keep the Sept. 11 hijackers off those planes, ex post facto, by ensuring that people given special driver's licenses really, truly are who they say they are, making them jump through documentation hoops.
     "We have zero control," said Giannoulias. "We're required to scan and send this information, this crazy paperwork and documentation requirements. It's not something we put in. We have to take it. We have to put it in a scanner. It's brutal."
     Years of prepping the public, begging them not to wait until the last minute, proved insufficient, and now collective lifetimes evaporate in blocklong lines as frustrated Illinoisans battle to DMV windows only to find their paperwork not in order.
     "I had carefully reviewed the Real ID checklist on the website and believed I had the required documentation," wrote my neighbor, an insurance executive who often travels by air. Normally the most placid person, I bumped into her, irate, coming back from another failed attempt to get her Real ID, thwarted because she changed her name when she got married.
     "The need for a marriage certificate to verify a name change should be called out more explicitly — especially as it often applies to women," she wrote in a complaint I nudged in Giannoulias' direction, prompting our conversation. "It’s an easy detail to miss, and not something people carry daily. Yet it can derail the entire process."

     Nor is this a local problem. From coast to coast, DMV offices are swamped.
     "This is national. It's literally chaos and mayhem around the country," said Giannoulias. "In Florida, they're sleeping in their cars, in tents, in front of the DMV. Other states are shutting down their systems."
     And for what? To create reams of data that former staffers who are no longer at decimated federal bureaus won't ever look at.

     "I'm not a national security expert," said Giannoulias. "But to me, it seems an enormous waste of time and resources for this little star on your license."

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And they got rid of all those historic "Whites only" signs!

Columbus monument, Madrid.

       Sometimes I despair at answering readers — what's the point? If they haven't figured it out by now, they never will. But often I can't help myself. And there is a value, for me if not for my correspondent, as I sometimes discover arguments and hone language by preaching to deaf ears.

        Every single reader who wrote in disagreeing with Monday's column about censoring history did so with what they considered the same a-ha-gotcha! argument: what about those statues of Robert E. Lee, those Confederate flags, cancelled by anti-historical liberals?  

     This, from Brian M., will stand in for all:

     I hope that your Passover was a fulfilling one for you and your family. I enjoy your articles
     Even when we don’t align in our thoughts.
     Todays article on history I find interesting. You mention several times that basically history with all of its warts needs to be ‘out there’.
     Why then is the Columbus statuaries still missing from our local landscape? Only the history that the liberal position must be saved?

    I'd ignored others. But he was polite enough. And like Anne Frank, I like to think people are good at heart, so tried to help his reader by explaining the situation as clearly as I could. I replied:

     Good question. Because statues aren't history — they're honor. Let me try to explain the difference. I would demand that Nazism be fully addressed in any 20th century high school history textbook. That does not mean I want a Nazi flag flying in front of the school. Do you see the difference?
     That's a sincere question: do you?
     Thanks for writing.

     I did not expect an answer, but he surprised me.

Good point! Keep writing. Have to keep newspapers viable!

   

     See? That alone is reason to keep communicating. "Good point" is not "Let's move boldly into the future together." But it's a start.