The vagal response

 

Salvador Dali, "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach" (1938)

    Occasionally a reader will remark that they had to look up the definition of a particular word in a piece of mine. Not so much as a reprimand, but just to let me know. And I don't feel sorry for making them do so, because there are a lot of words, nobody can know them all, and regularly checking definitions is both a hallmark of curiosity and the path to acquiring knowledge.
     I look up words myself, all the time. For instance, I was having my coffee and Cream of Wheat Friday morning, reading the Sun-Times — I always read it first, before the New York Times, out of loyalty.
    My attention focused on David Struett's article on testimony at the Jayden Perkins murder trial. The sort of story a reader naturally is drawn to — a grisly murder, a gripping trial, a fainting juror. Five paragraphs in, the doctor, who Struett said "switched from giving testimony to helping the juror" — smoothly put — said, "I think you probably just had a vagal response."

     "A vagal response?" Does that mean anything to you? It didn't register with me, and I groped at what "vagal" might mean. Based on the first three letters, I immediately thought, "vaginal." But surely that couldn't be it. Perhaps a matter of shared derivation. 
      What does the word "vagina" actually mean? I felt a momentary chill, because I was straying into gender politics territory. Best be on my guard. Center? Cleft? Fundamental? Those didn't sound right. As I often say: no need to guess, we can just find out.
     "Vagal" is the adjectival form of "vagus," and according to Dr. Google AI: "The vagus nerve, also known as cranial nerve X, is a crucial part of the autonomic nervous system, playing a key role in regulating involuntary bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing." Who knew? Not me. While you can't always trust AI — on Tuesday, when I joyously nosed the car into the drive-thru at the White Castle on 111th Street, AI told me that a cheese slider is 340 calories, when that is actually two — that definition sounded accurate, and I did no more digging. You have to go with your gut on these things, provided you have a good gut.
    So what is the etymology of "vagina"? It traces back to the Latin word vagina, unsurprisingly enough, which in ancient times meant, not a sexual organ, but the scabbard you sheath your sword in.  The word took on its current meaning in the Middle Ages, which seems apt. 
     The unchanging quality of the word reminded me of something I was thinking of about 3 a.m. that morning, when. I was awake and musing over the alphabet, which I sometimes do, trying to sleep (it's soothing; judge me harshly if you must). The opening letters of the English alphabet, A, B, C, D, line up with the opening letters of the Hebrew alphabet, א (aleph), בּ (bet), ג (gimel), ד (dalet). (The "C" and "G" sounds being very close). Which means a kid learning his ABCs down the street is going through the same drill of the same sounds that a Jewish boy in Babylonian captivity learned on letters drawn in the dirt.

    See what I mean? Something comforting about that.

Grandmothers to the rescue, with wisdom, patience and doughnuts

     Social media tears down girls. According to a UNESCO report, there is a direct correlation between how much time a girl spends online and increased emotional damage. A Facebook study found that a third of girls say when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Girls are 50% more likely than boys to report being cyberbullied. Plus — stop the presses! — TikTok is addictive.
     How to combat such a widespread, happiness-destroying influence? In Chicago, one of the most powerful forces for good known to humanity is being sent into battle, a voice of comfort and wisdom going back to the beginnings of time:
     Grandmothers.
     "I come here every Tuesday to sit with the young ladies and do different projects — planting flowers, or making different objects they like," said Delores Durham, 62, waiting in the office at Wendell Smith Elementary School on West 103rd Street in Pullman, bearing donuts. "Just having normal conversation to see where their mind is at. What goals they have in life. I'm just trying to be an encouragement to them. I raised two daughters on the West Side of Chicago myself."
     A volunteer who joined Grandmothers Circle last year, Durham was met by Erinn Boone, a licensed clinical professional counselor and coordinator of the program run by the Juvenile Protective Association, a venerable Chicago social service agency founded by Jane Addams in 1901. Originally the Juvenile Court Committee, its purpose was to provide probation officers to the first juvenile court in the nation, founded here in 1899 to keep children from being sent to adult jails.
     She hands around a piece of paper showing various emojis: happy, angry, bored, surprised.
     "I need you all to tell me how you're feeling," Boone says. "Pass it around."
     The girls warm up. They are happy and tired. Goofy and tired. Quiet and tired. Boone detects a theme.
     "Everybody's tired — is it the weather?" she asks.
     Or maybe something else. Students at Wendell Smith face troubles beyond social media — 94% live in poverty, according to the Illinois State Board of Education, and almost a quarter are homeless. The chronic truancy rate is 32%. And layered upon that, all the usual pressures facing middle-school girls.

     "I was having a conversation with another school and we started talking about friendship, and how you can tell someone is a friend," says Boone. "Then we started talking about rumors, and how rumors get started and drama — but I know that's nothing you all deal with here, right?"
     That challenge — preventing the adult world from getting its hooks into kids — continues.
Durham and Boone go to greet nine sixth grade girls, ages 11 and 12, just finishing lunch on trays — chicken fingers, applesauce, cartons of milk. The girls barely register their arrival.
     "Y'all energy seems real low today," observes Boone. "It's a very Monday kind of Tuesday."

To continue reading, click here.

'People are still funny'

      People think of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain as wits. And rightly so. But while they said a good many smart things, they didn't say everything attributed them; countless quotes are laid at their doorstep that they never said, sometimes never could have said. I'll see some powerful, contemporary thought tacked under a portrait of Hemingway, think "He never wrote that," and be halfway to fact-checking a meme before I realize that, once I plunge down that rathole there's no escape.
     But Dave Barry really did write, in a column of 25 things he learned at 50: "You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at the moment."
    I've quote that line for years, never realizing it was Dave Barry. Great advice, the general dissemination of which could spare the world countless awkward encounters, painful both for the blunderer and for the woman accused of being with child. 
     I asked Barry about it Tuesday morning, in an interview for Wednesday's column, and he said, yes, he believes he indeed coined that phrase. The conversation went all sorts of places I couldn't fit into the column and still say something about the reason we were talking: his excellent new book, "Class Clown," published Tuesday.
    What I really wanted to talk about with him was Gene Weingarten. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose collection, "Fiddler in the Subway," should be pressed into the hands of every sentient human being. Reading it made me proud to be in the same profession.
     But he also wrote this, in a blog in 2021, destroying his career:

     The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports ... and curry.
     Indian foods are the only ethnic cuisine insanely based on one spice. If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes! If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.)

     "Based on one spice." Is that ignorant? Sure, in the sense that there are all kinds of spices in Indian cuisine. I know that by direct, hand-over-fist experience. He did too. It was what we call in the profession "a joke." Not a particularly good one, true. But was Gene's crack the language of hate? I don't think so. Didn't matter — he was frog-marched out the door at the Washington Post. No party. No big farewell section. Hasta la vista, baby. It seems now a dry run for the kind of professional collapse the newspaper would do at the feet of Donald Trump.
     "That had to be scary  to someone whose written 1000 jokes more offensive than that," I said to Barry, who was edited for years by Weingarten. "It must have been sobering for you when Gene got the heave-ho."
       "Yeah, I kept going back over it," he said. "I've known Gene for 40 years. To see him shoved off a cliff over that. He makes it really clear, 'I'm an idiot but I'm pretending to be a genius.' It couldn't be more obvious. His schtick is, he starts out with this long thing how he respects Indian culture. I don't think if it happened that same thing would happen. That happened at the absolutely the height of 'Let's everybody be so sensitive that we really can't say anything,' mania. That was awful, to have Gene called a racist. Gene's not a racist." 
     I'd planned to highlight some other points we talked about, but honest, I want to shift over to something a reader in Florida, who had worked as a first responder, sent in on Wednesday. He wrote:  

     Our rescue crew were the one’s who responded to Dave’s son after he was involved in a bike vs. car crash. His column about the experience mentions us as ambulance guys. It is one of his very, very few serious ones.
     He rode with us to the hospital, certainly shaken (Who wouldn’t be?) but very humble and cordial.

     I read that column and thought, "Wow, what an excellent, excellent column." It made me regret not paying closer attention to the man's work over the past 40 years — I think it was conceited of me — and glad that I've been able to remedy that, a tiny bit, this past week. Better late than never. He's still humble and cordial.

Is nothing funny anymore? Dave Barry gets serious in a new book

     Humor's been on the ropes, for years.
     Between lingering cancel culture and an opera buffa administration that daily defies parody, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing is funny anymore. The Onion stuck in there for a while, but lately it seems to be crafting press releases for the Department of Government Efficiency.
     Even Dave Barry threw in the towel, retiring from his regular column 20 years ago.

     So the good news is that the wildly popular funnyman — once syndicated in 500 newspapers, with dozens of books under his belt — is back, with "Class Clown — The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." (Simon & Schuster: $28.99).
     I'll be honest — as heir to the sophisticated urban wit of Robert Benchley, in my own mind if nowhere else, I generally avoided Barry's column and, jeez, 45 previous books, including "Boogers are My Beat," which neatly explains why.
     Plus Barry was syndicated in the Tribune, which for many years I refused to touch, since doing so seemed like laying flowers on the grave of its former publisher, xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker Col. Robert McCormick.
     But a publicist invited me to talk with Barry and I couldn't see why not. We newspaper columnists are a vanishing breed, and I rarely get the chance to talk with one. Heck, I hardly talk to anybody anymore.
     "I never set out to be an artist," Barry told me. "I set out to be a joke guy."
     Mission accomplished. Though "Class Clown" begins seriously, with his parents — alcoholic father, depressive mother — in vignettes that are moving and real. I admired the details. A Swedish friend of his father, also named Dave, pronounces his name "Dafe," which made me think of the tailor in "The Inferno" squinting in the twilight. Making me the first critic to compare Dave Barry to Dante.
     The book surprises, practically poking me in the eye.
     His father, Barry writes, "was a fan of the great humorist Robert Benchley and owned several books of Benchley's collected columns. When I was somewhere around eleven or twelve I read those books and became obsessed with them; they definitely influenced my writing style, and I still read them today."
     Ah. Did not see Benchley coming.
     "I was a huge fan — still am," Barry said. "It's definitely a sobering thing if you are humor columnist, to realize nobody read him anymore."
     I learned some unexpected facts about Barry, such as he attended Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, once bumped into Bobby Kennedy, literally, the revered brother of JFK, not the anti-vax nutjob.
     Being a veteran journalist myself, albeit playing AAA ball compared to Barry's big big leagues, I enjoyed his recounting the profession, from his early days at the West Chester, Pennsylvania Daily Local News to his rise at the Miami Herald and the go-go 1980s. In 1987, he and a photographer spent $8,000 to rent a helicopter to get a photo of a garbage barge, adding that today "you cannot spend $8 without prior written authorization from at least three executives."
     That's not so much satire as dry reportage. Last month, in order to be compensated for a CTA bus ride, I had to secure a note from my editor, vowing that the expense is valid, and I wasn't just trying to steal $2.25 from the paper.

To continue reading, click here.
 

Pistachio pudding

 

     Were someone to ask me about the surprising aspects of being a diabetic — and no one has, so I'll have to just jump right in — I'd say, "There's more pudding than I expected." The pancreatically-challenged can't always eat what we want, and yet life has to retain its savor, somehow. So I've been making a lot of sugar-free Jell-O brand instant pudding.

     The stuff isn't particularly low in calories, since I use 2 percent milk, for reasons too complicated to explain. But those are fat calories, which are our friends, as opposed to sugar calories — boo, hiss —  so I can use it for midday treats without having to shoot up insulin, which I try to avoid, as doing so tends to crash your blood sugar if you're not careful and, really, how careful can a person be? That's diabetics in a nutshell: being careful. All the time.

     So hurrah for pudding. Having sated myself on the chocolate and chocolate fudge varieties, I grew daring, and experimented with vanilla and banana cream, butterscotch (shunning only the cheesecake variety, out of loyalty to Eli's) and, as pictured above, pistachio. Which is one of those flavors, like almond, that doesn't actually taste like the nut itself, but some kind of confectioner's fantasy of what the nut must taste like in heaven. Though in an unexpected nod to the natural world, which doesn't have a whole lot of influence on a product like sugar free Jell-O brand instant pudding, there are actual bits of pistachio thrown in, for verisimilitude.

     At least I hope they're bits of pistachio. They're bits of something.
     There is also a lemon sugar-free flavor, which I'm keen to try, but haven't found it in the wild yet — not at Jewel, not at Sunset. I might have to break down and order it online, being a particular fan of all things lemon. I tried making the regular, full-sugar lemon Jell-O brand pudding version, cooked on the stovetop, just to see if I could eat it. 

      I really can't. You know you're reach some sub-hell of austerity when you take a cup of Jell-O from the fridge, eat a single teaspoon's worth, and put it back. I'm encouraging my wife to eat the stuff.

     Not to short-change pistachio. The nut itself is backed by no less authority than the Bible, Genesis 43:11, when Jacob tells his sons: "Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift — a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds."
     You're probably wondering about the maraschino cherry. I add them as a garnish, for festivity's sake, even though it's a more complicated process than you'd think. You can't just plop them in the setting pudding. They're wet, and the juice pools. So I dry them on paper towels while I'm whisking up today's batch. The things we do for aesthetics.

     Speaking of whisking. The box says to beat the pudding for two minutes, so I take out my phone's stopwatch app and whisk it for precisely two minutes. Not a second more, or a second less. Which my wife finds hysterical.  I suppose the daring man would just wing it. Beat the stuff until it's firm. But I am not that man. Have you ever heard the term "literal idiot"? That's me.

     The only thing left is to play my favorite game, "Name that Etymology." I guessed that "pistachio" had to be Italian, which it is, but that's just the start. The word sails off into the past. It's one of those words that cuts through time almost untouched. In Greek, it's pistakion, in old Persian pistah. There's something comforting to the thought that you could show up in ancient Babylon, ask for some pistachios, and reasonably expect to get what you've asked for. And at this point, I'll take all the comfort I can get.

A new pope? But we already have one!

     "Congratulations!" said my cousin Harry, calling from Boston Thursday afternoon.
     I frowned, wracking my brains. What had I done worthy of congratulation? Had the baby been born? And nobody thought to tell me? Now the happy news was percolating through the extended family, reaching me through this circuitous route. "Did you tell your dad and mom?" "Nah, they'll find out eventually ..."
     "For what?" I asked.
     "The pope," he said.
     Ah yes! Bragging rights to the pope. Or "Da Pope!" in another instantly classic Sun-Times headline (with an assist from WBEZ). Or Pope Bob, as a reader dubbed him, born in Chicago, grew up in Dolton.
     Chicago can use the boost. It's been a while since we've had a one-name celebrity to crow over. Michael and Oprah are specks in the rearview mirror. Obama ... well ... still fond of the man and looking forward to that presidential center. Though right now he's still the guy who walked us to the cliff's edge and coughed into his fist as we toppled into the abyss.

     Still. Isn't using the pope as an occasion for pride somewhat contradictory? With all the whoops and fist bumps, I've yet to hear anybody say, "The pope's from Chicago; we'll have to double our efforts to live justly and love our fellow man." All pomp and no obligation — is there too much of that already?
     Honestly, while there was genuine pride, news of the Chicago pope was often played for laughs. Jokes about deep dish communion wafers and baseball. Pope Leo XIV is a White Sox fan. Well, they need something. Jesus did say, "Whoever humbles himself will be exalted," and 121 losses last season is humbling aplenty.
     Harebrained, a local graphics outfit that can turn out a great logo faster then I can tie my shoe, immediately created one of their spot-on mashups.
     Innocent joy only lasted a few hours. The city's understandable pride was quickly used to revive the old "Windy City" charge of unseemly boosterism.
     "But in a place where civic pride is both a virtue and a way of life, Chicagoans need little help believing their city is among God’s favorites," the Washington Post sniffed, as if they weren't the same publication that refused to publish a cartoon that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize because it suggested their owner fell short of his own lofty self-estimation by genuflecting before the orange enormity.
     I hate to be the bearer of bad news: But you put your lips on that guy's backside once, and it leaves a stain that will never wash off. Neville Chamberlain's entire life was an asterisk after waving that piece of paper and declaring "Peace in our time." Live with it.
     I'm reluctant to suggest it doesn't matter what the pope believes in. But we live in a leaderless moment — even President Donald Trump, who spins in the wind. As much as he pushes tariffs, I don't see the MAGA crowd yelling, "Yay tariffs! Double the cost of everything we buy! Shut down the global economic system!"

To continue reading, click here.

Split the difference

     Kitty and I went for a walk shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday, a fine cloudless day in May. We strolled to the corner of First and Walters. To the left, my neighbor Lee Goodman, in his homemade concentration camp uniform, and a small knot of protesters. To the right, the usual expanse of empty sidewalk. I had just about convinced myself to go rightward, avoid the crowd, but my gaze lingered a fraction too long to the left, and Lee's wife Nancy waved. I might be able to slip away from a protest, but I'm not one to cut my neighbors. I ambled over.
     Lee's new sign struck me as non-controversial in a sane world. "Northbrook stands with migrants." This being a nation of immigrants, all of us or our forebears, at one point or another, I'd say we have to.
     But alas, we do not live in that sane world. Having written on the subject Friday, and gotten an earful from readers who have lapped up the immigrants = criminals cant for years, their brains sodden with the stuff, taut like a water balloon, bulging with fallacy. To see them sneeringly feed it back, the logic being, if only they could deliver the news with sufficient vehemence, why then they would win the day. 

     On some I used my line that the fig leaf of concern for legality does not cover their shameful bigotry as well as they seem to think it does. It would help if they viewed a Venezuelan dishwasher with parking tickets and the multiple felon presidents through the same prism of love for law. But that takes time to express, and what's the point?

     Which is sort of my view toward street corner protests. I'm glad they're there, support them fully, but don't see the effect. I chatted briefly with Lee, who mused how long it would take our neighbors — some of whom are far more devoted to the idea of free speech for themselves than they are to free speech for others — will linger before throwing paint at his sign. I figure, nightfall the second day. 
     Prying myself away, I strolled up First Avenue, back toward home, and paused to press my face into the lovely lilac bush below. At first I thought, "These lilacs will make a fine post for tomorrow," planning to ignore Lee, whom I've featured here in his concentration camp uniform in the not-too-distant past. But then I realized the challenge we face is to balance keeping track of and protesting the Trump enormity, while still enjoying the good things in life that his metastasizing presidency has not yet found a way to ruin. I figure, split the difference: start with blue triangles, end with purple lilacs.