Uber is for the weak

Young people aboard the LaGuardia Link.

  

      "We're the oldest people on this bus by 30 years," I said, then gave a second look around and revised. "Maybe by 40 years."

     It was true. Everyone else on the LaGuardia Link Q70 seemed in their mid-20s. A time when money tends to be tight.
     Money isn't tight for me; at least we can afford ride shares and taxis. But I can also do math. And spending $111 on an Uber from LaGuardia to Jersey City, a trip that would take about an hour with traffic, didn't make sense. Not when you can make the same trip for $7.75 — the free shuttle from the airport to 75th Street, the $2.50 subway down to the World Trade Center, and then five bucks or so — I didn't even take notice if the exact price — for the PATH train under the Hudson to Exchange Place.
      Sure, it took closer to two hours, with the pause at the Oculus Starbucks so my wife could grab a revivifying cappuccino. But we weren't in a rush.
      I've enjoy taking public transportation. Great way to become familiar with a place. I spent weeks in cities from Tokyo to Paris and never gotten in a cab or, more recently, called an Uber. (Not that I'm condemning the practice; I take Uber too, when necessary. The headline is a glib brag, not a blanket condemnation you need to get agitated about). 

      Sometimes public transportation is a challenge —  last year I was offended that there was no direct public transportation route from Boston to Boxborough, so cobbled a complex public transit odyssey together. It was almost an adventure. Even when publications are paying. I don't have many rules when traveling, but I seldom take a cab when a bus works, or a plane when there's a train going the same place. 

     I remember going to cover the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I checked into my motel — nothing fancy here at the old Sun-Times — and then got in the queue for the bus, smiling quietly to myself, thinking about a colleague who ran up nearly a grand in taxi bills, supposedly, in London and almost lost his job over it. 

     "You'll just have to find another reason to fire me," I thought, paying my fare. Plus there was a captive audience of talkative Clevelanders waiting for me there.

    When there is no public transportation, there is always walking. We had a magnificent lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. When we finished, we considered calling an Uber. It was hot, and a half hour walk back to where we were staying. We walked.

Nothing distracts like a new baby

     My wife asked if I wanted to cover the mirrors. A Jewish tradition in a house of mourning. At first I said no. Many pressing practical concerns had been raised by my mother suddenly dying that morning, but her soul becoming trapped in a mirror wasn't among them.
      Then I immediately changed my mind and agreed. Rituals comfort. The tradition had been retrofitted for modern times, in that nimble, adaptive way religion employs, scrambling to stay both timeless and relevant. Now covering mirrors is supposed to discourage vanity among the bereaved. I'm all for that. We could all use less vanity. Imagine where our once-proud nation would today be if fewer people were consumed by unchecked self-regard.
      "Suddenly" is the wrong word. My mother had actually been steadily dying for years — ailment upon indignity upon deterioration. Every time I'd visit, I'd make sure to kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her because I really wasn't sure if I'd see her again. The last time, a week earlier,, I'd gone to show her a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter.
      My mother, increasingly indifferent for the past few months, perked up, and even phoned her sisters, whom she'd uncharacteristically ignored, to share the happy news. We agreed that this was the most beautiful and perfect baby in the history of babies, and as soon as the tot could travel — probably at Thanksgiving — she would be personally presented for approval. Though I had my doubts of that ever happening, and stood in the doorway a long moment, just gazing at my mother, until I realized she was glaring back at me with a "what-are-you-looking-at-bub?" expression, and turned away.
      The next time I saw her she was dead, in bay 48 of the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital. Not a moment I'd prepared for. I don't believe I actually turned to my wife and implored, "Do something!" But I certainly thought it. My mother sang as a young girl — on the radio, on television — and sang to us all our lives. Last month was the first time she didn't call on my birthday and sing "Happy Birthday to You," In those last few moments together, I sang a couple brief lullabies she'd sung to us: "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," an odd Scottish dirge she's somehow turned into a bedtime song, speaking of retrofitting. But apt in its sense of loss and longing. "Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me."
      We went directly from the hospital to Golden Haven in Addison, where our parents lived. I told my father that his wife of 69 years had died. "How old was she?" he replied. I said 88, He nodded and observed that 88 is a good age, then let the matter drop. If he brings up the subject again, I plan to say that she went to the hospital, which is true, and leave off the rest. Who wants to re-discover, even vaguely, that his wife has died, over and over, every day, if not every hour?
      Jews get our own into the ground fast. My mother died on a Saturday, and was buried the following Wednesday. I'm not sure how we picked Shalom Memorial Park -- that was my brother -- but I admired how smoothly the whole process was handled. My mother had a keen eye for the mistakes of others, a trait I've inherited in full. But the only wrong aspect to the process in my view was there are no headstones jutting out of the ground — the Arlington Heights cemetery is a memorial garden, all bronze plaques, flush with the grass. When we drove through the place, I was uncomfortable with that absence, and considered insisting we find somewhere else, where she could have a granite tombstone.. But I decided to go with the flow, speaking of suppressing vanity, and not insist upon my own preference. Maybe covering those mirrors had an effect after all.

      The paper told me to take as much time off as I liked, and most of a week was consumed with planning the funeral and then holding it, removing her effects out of her apartment and donating them to charity.
     But in one of those examples of lucky timing that would look trite in fiction but life doesn't blush to serve up, 48 hours after we buried my mother, my wife and I flew to New York City to meet my new granddaughter, and help her parents pack up their apartment and move to a different city. Because merely having a baby isn't difficult enough.

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Can you pick the near Vermeer?

 

So is this the close-but-no-cigar Vermeer?

    Odd. I'm a certified art museum buff. We're members of the great Art Institute of Chicago and visit regularly, seldom missing a new exhibit. I love nudging Chicagoans toward Pilsen's National Museum of Mexican Art — few seem to go otherwise. I've even been to the quirky little Intuit Art Museum , with its tableau of the apartment of the deeply strange outsider artist Henry Darger. Though not since they expanded into Howard Tullman's old apartment. Going back to check out the new arrangement is high on my agenda.

     When visiting just about any city, hitting the local art museum is always a top priority, though after touring the museums in most smaller cities my main takeaway is near pity. The Art Institute they're not. 

     Still, most museums have at least one work worth seeing — Dallas's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, for instance, has Grant Wood's ever-more-significant "Parson Weems Fable." 

     Sometimes I fall down on the job. It hurt me to be in New York City recently and not hurry to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent show. But time was limited, and duty called.
    Generally, I collect museums the way other guys collect major league ballparks. The Prado. The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, plus the Van Gogh Museum. The British Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I'm proud to have gone to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before its famous 1990 art heist. 
     But the National Gallery of Art in Washington just wasn't on my radar. Maybe, given a spare few hours in the nation's capital, I always rush to the National Portrait Gallery, with its hall of presidents, or the American History Museum. Even the little round Hirshhorn. 

Or maybe this one? 

     

     On the 4th of July, I was headed to the Air & Space Museum— haven't seen that for years — but it was all sold out (tickets are free, but you need one). So we wandered over to the National Gallery, which turns out to have an enormous, deep collection — the only Leonardo da Vinci in the Western hemisphere (her room packed with tourists taking selfies of themselves, in some daft after echo of the mobs around the Mona Lisa). 
     An astounding trove of French impressionists, including Monet after Monet. My wife confessed to not being a fan of his near homophone, Manet, but by the time we were done she was won over by works such as "The Dead Toreador." 
     Rare paintings and studies by Georges Seurat, who created the Art Institute's masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (rare because he died at 31) 

Or this one?

     The museum has an excellent Dutch collection, with a number of fine Rembrandts. It also has three of the world's 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. As a fan of his quiet scenes of Dutch domestic life, I headed over to see them. 

     The National Gallery used to have four Vermeers. But in 2022 the museum took advantage of being closed due to COVID to put its Vermeers under sophisticated scanners, and decided one of them wasn't done by the master himself — the brushstrokes are wrong, apparently — but by someone in his studio.
     Knowing this, it seemed clearly inferior. But that opinion might have been skewed by knowing it wasn't from the master's hand. Which inspires me to quiz EGD readers. Take a look at these four paintings. Can you tell which three are real, supposedly, and which four is not quite up to Vermeer standards? The New York Times spills the beans here.

     I'm only touching upon the glories of the National Gallery of Art. In three hours we saw maybe half of it.

    I've been to the Rodin museums in Paris and Philadelphia, but was still impressed by their collection of his busts and sculptures (this time I managed to resist pointing out. yet again, that German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was Rodin's secretary. Typically my resolve fails me — as it did when I found myself mentioning, for the umpteeth time, that Rodin's Thinker is supposed to be an incredibly buff Dante, conjuring up his Inferno). 

    If you go before Nov. 2, check out the ground floor exhibit "Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World," a fascinating deep dive into 16th and 17th century depictions of insects and other small creatures. 

    Oh, and in addition to being a museum fan, I'm also a foodie, and lunch at the National Gallery was first rate — a chicken and orange salad for me for $18, a curry chicken salad for my wife. It's tiring work slogging through gallery after gallery, and nothing braces you for the effort than a plate of high grade chow. 

High-level training

 

     My attention was drawn to three jets of water shooting out high atop a building being constructed on Hudson Street in Jersey City. At first I thought the water had to be due to some kind of construction mishap. A burst pipe maybe. That might account for one jet. But three? 

     "They must be testing the standpipes," I said to my wife, referring to the vertical water pipes installed in all buildings taller than four stories, designed to be used by firefighters. 

     But I'm not a big fan of guesswork, not when an explanation can be found. We strolled in that direction, figuring enlightenment might be found there, and it was, in the form of a firefighter looking up at jetting water.
     I addressed my question to him, and he said that firefighters do not often get the chance to train 50 floors up in a high rise. They were being permitted to use the raw space to practice their hose work. That made sense. Firefighters sometimes make use of high rises that are about to be torn down, or have special training towers to simulate the layout of skyscrapers. Such simulations are important -- high rise fires are particularly dangerous, with the usual hazards of fighting a fire magnified by  additional mechanical and electrical systems, not to forget the difficulty of hauling gear up a few dozen flights of stairs. 
      We moved on down the street -- the water was shooting out so high up, maybe 500 feet above the pavement -- that by the time it reached street level, it was no more than a fine mist, quite pleasant on such a hot day. 

He's baaaaaaaack!

                            

    John James Audubon's Washington Sea Eagle is a magnificent bird. But there is a problem with it.
    It might not be real.
    While America's master of depicting birds is not known for just making them up, the fact is that this glorious specimen has never been found in nature. So either it went extinct after Audubon captured its golden glory, or he just got the bird wrong -- it isn't as if he could take reference photographs. 
     Making the Washington Sea Eagle the bird of the moment. As a stand in for our beleaguered nation. Glorious yes. But is it real? Or just a pretty picture? Did our land of freedom and liberty ever really exist? Or is it just a flattering story we've convinced ourselves is true?

     Glory seems in short supply, as congressmen cave and the thin veneer of values that many at least gave lip service to is utterly abandoned. Economic responsibility? Gone. Concern for the struggling? Gone. Half the nation watches in horror through latticed fingers as Donald Trump codifies and strengthens his hold on power and entrenches his administration policy of cruelty and abuse. While the other half either cheers or yawns,  cycling through Instagram, bored with it all.
     I'm ... what? Tired. Distracted. A little bored, to be honest, because the story lately never changes. The bad guys win. Still keeping track, sort of, despite a personal life that has suddenly become very, very busy. 
     Honestly, I've enjoyed the break. I could get used to this. In fact, I have a fine obituary ready to go for Old Obit Week #5.
     But ... well ... am I the only one who thinks Old Obit Week is feeling a little ... old? Stale. I like to give you your money's worth (which is a joke, ha ha, because you don't pay anything. Get it?)

     While I'm still officially on vacation, from the paper, helping my son relocate his new family, extending my week off to bury my mother to a second week off to welcome my granddaughter — talk about a shift in tone — an email from a reader served as a firebell in the night, a call to duty, such as it is.
     "Hi Neil," JS begins.

      "I am of German heritage. I have friends that are German immigrants. I have always struggled with how the German citizens of the 1930-40 era could capitulate to the horror of the Holocaust. Today, after the passing of the big bad bill, I understand how good people will look away. It's very sad and i need you to write about it. Help me make this ok or help me make it better.Please write something to help me. Help all of your readers.Thx. Your readers love you."

     And I love you guys, too. Truly. I'd feel stupid writing this for nobody. 

     My first thought was that I could never make this okay and wouldn't want to try. How could it be okay? This confederation of cowards kneecapping the poor while lavishing resources on our aborning police states. This is the exact opposite of okay. It's horrible. My general optimism sags under the weight of events. With far worse certain to come.
     One thing that made taking time off easier is there is nothing useful to say that I haven't been saying for years. This is a process, turning our flawed republic into a totalitarian state and then, maybe, turning away from that doom. We punched the ticket, we need to take the trip, to go through it, unfortunately. This is the part where we endure. It isn't pleasant. Bad things are supposed to feel bad. If you think this is terrible, wait. It gets worse.

     There is good news: this epoch will end someday. But until it does, all that decent Americans can do is pay attention and manifest ourselves in whatever small ways we can. I can't pretend this blog post or my Sun-Times column have any influence whatsoever. But they can buck up readers like JS, and that is not without value.
     I wrote her back, saying, essentially, now is a time for courage and forbearance, which are free, and no one can deny you. I am a fan of an organization that puts much stock in the concept of hitting rock bottom — that you have to reach some unacceptable nadir before improvement is possible. For a while, I hoped the insurrection of Jan. 6,2021, had to be that bottom. But I was wrong. Obviously we have further to slide. The future of America includes concentration camps.
Shit, the present of America includes concentration camps.
     If being in a state of constant anxiety would shorten the Trump's era by 15 minutes, I would do that. But the entire collection of voices thundering against him have done exactly diddly squat. He's stronger than ever. Yet I remain strangely optimistic. Maybe it's some kind of psychotic disconnect and denial. Maybe I'm relieved I'm not in a camp, yet. But I do retain a bedrock faith in this country that cannot be shaken . The good guys win, eventually. This country defeated King George III, the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor cannot prevail forever. We will defeat this monster. Just not anytime soon.

Old obit week #4: Bill Sennet, 70, `bright star in the neighborhood'

     Not everybody I wrote an obit about was famous. Some of my favorites were about exceptional-though-unheralded — I almost said "ordinary" — people who make life worth living. I wondered if it was too much of a burden to impose old obituaries on the EGD audience, but "He understood the joy of every day" makes the entire endeavor worthwhile, to me if no one else.

     Bill Sennet was a great neighbor.
     "He was Chicago all the way: Lane High School, Korean War, worked with his hands," said Paul McCloskey, whose yard abutted Mr. Sennet's in their Lakewood; Balmoral neighborhood. "His hardware shop in his basement was better than Ace. If you needed a tool, you didn't go to the store. You went to Bill. He not only had it, he said, `Here's how you use it.' You broke out a can of beer and sat there while he did it, then said, `Gee, thanks Bill,' and he said, `Let me know if you need any more help.' "
     Mr. Sennet, 70, died Dec. 19 at home.
     Born in Chicago — his dad worked in the Post Office — Mr. Sennet worked for 40 years in the insurance industry, as a safety engineer. But he had heart trouble_he had two bypasses_and retired about 1990.
     His friends remember him as one of those rare, wonderful people who brings a community together.
     "He was like the glue that bound everyone — the young and old and middle-aged — on the block," said another neighbor, Roger Flaherty, an assistant metro editor at the Sun-Times. "He loved to talk with other neighbors — new ones and old — about politics, neighborhood issues, how to fix things around the house, the best way to get rid of weeds and rodents, how to make a catapult. He was endlessly curious about the world around him."
     Mr. Sennet attended Wright College for two years, and was in the Army in the Korean War.
     He served on the local school council at Peirce Elementary, and volunteered, particularly with the art program.
     "He was really the most cordial, giving and warm person, always willing to support the school and very interested in art," said Peirce principal Janice M. Rosales. "Most recently, he was working with the artist-in-residence; he was working on a mosaic project just last week."
     "He understood the joy of every day," said Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th). "Where some people don't seem to understand the miracles that surround us all, he understood those miracles and he was able to communicate the meaning, to children in particular. I worked with him for many years on children's art events. It wasn't the doing of art; it was discovering and believing you could try and achieve something. I miss him so much."
     "He had a lot of interests," said McCloskey. "He loved a good martini, good music, loved to go to the Art Institute, loved working with his hands, loved doing financial things, loved working on his house."
     Mr. Sennet periodically adopted dogs from the city shelter. The latest, Zoe, was prowling his house a day after his death, searching for his missing friend. It was a feeling shared by everyone who knew him.
     "It is such a loss, not just for the family, but for the school and the whole community," said Rosales. "One of the neighbors mentioned to me: `He was a bright star in the neighborhood and well liked.' Everyone will miss him."
     Survivors include his wife, Josephine, daughter Karen and son Erik and a sister, Doris Potter.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 2000

Old obit week #3: TV sportscaster Tim Weigel dies

     The approach for this obit came about because Tim Weigel was my friend too -- we bonded over our mutual love of cigars, smoked together at the Billy Goat, back when men could do that sort of thing. I remember arriving for dinner at Tim's house in Evanston for the first time, his address written on a piece of paper. I gazed stupidly at a baronial mansion on the lakefront and thought, "That can't be the home of the guy in the loud jackets reading sports on TV." Then showed the address to a neighbor. It was. For some reason I neglected to mention that he was Gene Siskel's roommate at Yale and they both succumbed to the same rare brain illness. Maybe I didn't know at the time. 

     Tim Weigel was your friend.
     Even those who only knew him from their TV sets, from his candy-colored jackets and his upbeat, affable, "Hey-it's-just-sports" delivery, felt a special bond with Mr. Weigel that made him among the most popular television personalities in the Chicago area.
     He died Sunday at home in Evanston, almost one year since vision problems sent him to a doctor and an MRI revealed a tumor on his brain.
     Mr. Weigel, 56, was sports director of WBBM-Channel 2 for the last six years before illness forced him to step back, though not before bravely facing the cameras in a toupee he was the first to make light of.

      Previously, he was at WLS-Channel 7, where he spent the bulk of his career — from 1977 to 1994. He was so popular that, for several years in the early 1980s, he moved out of sports and anchored the 10 o'clock news.
     A fluid, graceful writer, Mr. Weigel also crafted a sports column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1994 to 1996.
     Born on a Gurnee farm, Mr. Weigel attended Lake Forest High School and Yale University, where he studied history, played keyboard for a rock band, Cleopatra and the Seizures, and was a member of the football team.
     He received his bachelor's degree in history in 1968, taught third grade for two years and earned his master's degree in film from Northwestern University.
     A promised newspaper job in Connecticut failed to materialize, and he became a waiter. His big break into journalism came when he served a meal to Yale President Kingman Brewster, who felt waiting tables "was an embarrassment to Yale," Mr. Weigel said. Brewster got Mr. Weigel an interview with the New Haven Register, which turned into his first newspaper job.
     Mr. Weigel began covering college football in 1971 for the Chicago Daily News, winning awards and quickly moving up to cover the Bulls and the Bears.
     "I've never been around anyone whose sense of humor was so infectious," said the man who hired him, Daily News sports editor Ray Sons.
     Mr. Weigel's work was grounded in solid knowledge and fueled by a competitive streak, yet colleagues said he remained a fun-loving, loyal friend.
     "It was impossible not to like Tim, even when we were on opposite sides of a story," said former Bears coach Mike Ditka.
     Mr. Weigel "was one of the toughest competitors I've ever known, and he had the tenderest heart — he loved opera," said Channel 2 news anchor Mary Ann Childers. "Woe be it to the news manager who had to call Tim and tell him there was a breaking sports story on the night he had his opera tickets."
     He entered broadcasting when WMAQ radio hired him for sports commentary. He moved to television after hearing about an opening at WMAQ-Channel 5.
     Mr. Weigel was given the job on a trial basis. Soon after, he was given the No. 1 sports anchor job.
     "It was a total fluke. I can't imagine that would happen today," he said. ". . . In a cool medium, I was fairly hot — different. It jolted people for a while."
     "He was one of the first journalists to approach sports in a way that was both passionate yet professional," said his daughter Jenniffer Weigel.
     Mr. Weigel was fired when the station was taken over by a management team from New York City. Channel 7 quickly hired him, where he created a name for himself with his "Weigel Wieners," a much-copied segment of sports gaffes and oddities.
     He sported a backward beret when he lost his hair because of chemotherapy, which led to some disapproval from viewers who apparently didn't know he was ill, said his wife, Vicki Truax. They asked, " `Who did he think he was, going on the air looking like a gang member?' " she said.
     Despite his ordeal, Mr. Weigel patiently wrote to the viewers that "he had lost the hair on the back of his head and needed to cover it," his wife said.
     Family and friends recalled his hearty laugh. When he attended the opening of Broadway-bound "The Producers" in Chicago, Mr. Weigel laughed so hard that actress Sarah Jessica Parker — wife of the musical's star, Matthew Broderick — "kept turning around, and at the end she said, `I'm so glad you liked it,' " said Jenniffer Weigel.
     Toward the end of his life he could no longer play piano, read or drive, yet he remained positive. When his daughter expressed her sadness, Mr. Weigel told her, " `No, it's OK_because I'm still able to love.' "
     He was married three times, first in 1966 to Kathy Worthington, and to Carol Bishop in 1979. In 1992, he wed Vicki Truax.
     In addition to his wife and daughter, Jenniffer, survivors include his son, Rafer; daughter, Teddi; father, John; brother, Tony, and sister, Deni.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 18, 2001