Survivor's plate

 

     The problem with vanity license plates is that, typically, they're more vain than clever. "CAR4MOM" or "VROOOM" or whatever. I can't recall seeing one and thinking, "'Yes! That's very cool."
     Which sums up my thinking when I saw this plate in the parking lot of a trailhead at Starved Rock State Park on Thursday. While I've never had a mammogram, the process has been described to me well enough to know exactly what "Smush" refers to, and in case there were any question, the plate has the pink ribbon of breast cancer prominently displayed.
     As I was admiring the plate, the owner arrived, and seemed nonplussed to find a stranger examining her car closely. That's the beauty of surviving an ordeal — you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
    Karen Aldworth, of Shorewood, laughed when I asked if I could take her photo and told her the name of the blog I intended to post it on.  She said yes but, being a thorough, considerate sort, I explained that once a thing goes online, you never know how people might react.

     "I don't care!" she exuded. That's the beauty of...well, you get the point. She explained the process behind coming up with the plate.
    "I thought,'breast cancer survivor,'" she said, of herself. "It's a mammogram plate. I wanted something to go along with a mammogram plate."
     "You immediately know what you mean," I said, citing the mark of good writing. 
    "You do!" she said. "Men and women both know what I mean." 

    And she was was gone, off into the woods, hiking briskly.
     

Boxed in

    My older son moved to a place without grocery stores, Well, there must be some somewhere, but none within walking distance, and he doesn't own a car.
     Which is not the problem you might think it is — okay, not the problem I might have thought it could be — because he gets all his groceries from Amazon. He orders them now, Whole Foods drops them off in an hour. It makes a lot of sense.
     To him. To me, well ... I knew Amazon was there, and knew it owned Whole Foods, but to see it in practice was ... a surprise.  I like going to the grocery store. Ride my bike to Sunset Foods, disconnect the front basket, wear it over my forearm, almost like a purse — almost like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." I feel part of something. Almost like I belong.
      My wife orders things from Amazon. "Need anything from Amazon?" she says. I thought hard, then said, tentatively: "You know those gel pens? We don't have any. Some gel pens might be nice. Blue."
     A day or two later, this box showed up. Gel pens! I'm not going to insult you by making the obvious observation, that the volume of the box is 50 times greater than the size of the pens. It would be inefficient to have boxes in more sizes than necessary, and small boxes could get more easily lost. Toss it in a box, deliver the box, recycle the box. Who cares? Not me. No siree.
     I only note these changes, I don't shake my fist. A postman was a member of the community. He checked on shut-ins, collected a cookie at Christmas. Northbrook has a bronze memorial to a beloved mail carrier. The Amazon driver, well, he's in and out, pausing only to snap a picture of the box on your stoop, to wash his hands of it. You could be hanging out the window with a knife in your back and ... well, I don't want to malign out of ignorance. I'm sure plenty of Amazon drivers have burst into burning homes to rescue a baby. At least I hope they have.
     Even that driver, he — or she — is an interregnum. In a few years — five, ten tops — the truck will drive itself, and some drone or little wheeled thing will spurt up your driveway, fling the box at your steps and retreat back to the truck for the next box.
     It really is a very nice pen. But good only for writing things. In a notebook. We all have our limitations. 

'A very sweet guy who had every reason not to be'

Bob Kazel

     Bob Kazel was a gifted writer, a devoted friend, a caring volunteer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 18, and for the next 44 years battled manic depression until he died on Sept. 17.
     "He was a fighter," said Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who turned his own mental illness and addiction into a platform to encourage others to speak out and fund treatment and research.
     Kazel was born in Chicago — his father, Sidney, an electrical engineer, died in a car accident when Bob was 14. His mother, Beverly, became his steadfast supporter. Kazel was editor of the newspaper at Von Steuben High School and set his sights on the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism.
     "He always wanted to be a journalist," said his older brother Mitch. "When he was under 10, he got a typewriter for his birthday. He immediately started putting out a one-page newsletter of what was going on at home, with headlines like, 'MOM TO MAKE SPAGHETTI.'"
     Kazel got into Northwestern. Then things began to go wrong.
     "I started feeling overwhelmed," he said in "Profiles in Mental Health Courage," a 2024 book Kennedy wrote with journalist Stephen Fried.
     Kazel ended his first semester in the psych ward at Evanston Hospital. He went on lithium and restarted the next year at Medill, where he shined.
     "Oh, my God, he was the best writer at The Daily Northwestern," said Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for his biography, "King: A Life." "We had a few Pulitzers come out of that group, but he was the best. Incredibly creative."
     Eig pointed to a story Kazel wrote after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Kazel rode the L back from a downtown Medill class and pondered the subdued CTA riders.
     "Television,” wrote Kazel, then 22, “a keeper of dreams that had guided them all their lives around the world’s realness, had betrayed their trust and shown them their own nightmares. A glimpse of chaos, of a baffling arbitrariness that they now saw clearly and would try to work out, by themselves.”
     For Kazel, mental illness reflected the same "baffling arbitrariness."
     "Bob took his meds, went to his psychiatrist, took good care of himself, and for periods he could live his life," Fried said. "Then his symptoms would break through."

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A number of readers wrote in to express condolences to me, and I should point out that while Bob was a devoted friend, he wasn't MY devoted friend. I never met him. I wish I had.

Bob Kazel at a 2008 birthday party at the Eig home. 

'Help me write'

     I read my email. Maybe that's old fashioned of me. I do so because a) I am old-fashioned; b) I'm also interested in what people have to say; b) some readers point out mistakes that I can then fix; c) others share interesting opinions, or situations I should be aware of.
     Then I answer my email, often. Because: a) it seems polite; b) sometimes, in crafting an answer, I coin phrases I like that can use later; c) it helps cement my bond with my audience, such as it is.
     Of late, artificial intelligence, as part of its general insertion of its enormous big money bazoo into our lives, has started offering email suggestions to me.
     For instance. Ken W. of Palatine writes:

     "Donald Trump has spent a lot of time lately calling all kinds of smart people 'stupid.' This is particularly rich coming from a guy who has an IQ of 72 and has the reading ability and temperament of the average 6th grader. He may want to be America’s Hitler, but happily he’s nowhere near smart enough despite his self assessment of being a 'stable genius.' He should have gotten the opinions of the other horses first."   

     While I considered a response, I hit "Reply" and my thought process was stalled by seeing a box filled with this hint, light gray, as if being whispered by some computer Cyrano de Bergerac:

     AI was putting words in my mouth, or trying to. And trite words at that — "a way with words" is a cliche, and not my voice. I tried to delete the suggestion, and instead it became regular print, ready for me to click on SEND. I defined and deleted it, then wrote my own answer:

Ken:

What's the truism about Trump? Every accusation is a confession. Thanks for writing.

NS

     My next step was to shut the damn AI email prompt thing off. I put the matter to AI, ironically enough, and got this instruction.

         Believe it or not, I made sense of that — went to the little gear icon, clicked it, and found my way to this.

     I shut the "Smart Reply" off and a few others for good measure, then returned to answering my email.  

     Not that AI gave up. When I go to reply, there is still two little glyphs — a tiny hypocycloid that seems as if it wandered off the old US Steel logo and a little pencil. Plus the plea, "Help me write," a phrase I've never uttered in my life.

     Now, there is no way I'm going to go with my gut and pronounce AI a bubble. I've seen too many dramatic social changes — heck, I remember pundits seriously explaining how restaurants will go out of business unless diners are allowed to smoke in them. Plus all those hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into it — they must know what they're doing, right? I mean, they can't be throwing their money away? Can they? That would be idiocy.
     Then again, put that way, maybe it is a bubble. There sure is a lot of idiocy going around.

     

Next, dyeing the river green will be cast as a terrorist act

 

     Like any small boy, I have a keen eye for both guns and boats. So, of course, I noticed the M240 machine gun mounted at the bow of one of the Coast Guard's Defender patrol boats cruising the Chicago River.
     This was back in the elysium of 2012, when it was a simple matter to invite myself aboard for a lake patrol, checking the fire extinguishers on pleasure boats and seeing just how fast the twin 825-horsepower Detroit Diesel engines could go, powering a pair of Rolls-Royce Waterjets — basically underwater jet engines — with nothing as dinky as propellers necessary.
     The Coast Guard public relations representative at the time was reluctant to tell me the boat's top speed — 40 knots, according to its own website — and one fun aspect of the resulting column was digging up details the Coast Guard flack refused to divulge, citing national security, that were nevertheless ballyhooed online. Small wonder why they never invited me back.
     Fun is the first casualty of authoritarian regimes — as we were reminded when President Donald Trump, through his puppet FCC chairman Brendan Carr, turned an ephemeral Jimmy Kimmel routine into a permanent, maybe important, chapter in American history.
     Not the brightest media strategy. I'm not sure how Trump squares his self-assigned greatness with a furious need to denounce every high school talent show snickering at him. It seems the mark of a deeply insecure individual.
     He should be used to it by now. Mocking would-be tyrants is a patriotic duty. Though aspirant strongmen, unwilling to trust the machinery of democracy to keep them in power for as long as they want, aka forever, try to squelch the rising laughter, often by pushing their power into places it doesn't belong.
     There was an unfunny chill to see U.S. Border Patrol boats cruising the Chicago River on Thursday — well, I didn't see them, myself, I was at the Newberry Library studying French maps of Chicago from 1825, researching a column for next month. But the Sun-Times got pictures.
     Four boats, packed with armed men, slowly cruising the river.
     It has to be funny, too, right? Social media must be awash with memes of brave aquatic centurians patrolling the mean waterways of Kill City, the masses of neon green kayaks and floating tiki bars peddled by celebrants working off their margaritas digitally erased.
     What could the Border Patrol possibly be doing here? Not a lot of immigrants without legal status arriving via the Chicago River — though it's amusing to imagine how that would work.

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Flashback 2011: Borne back ceaselessly into the past

    Every morning I check Facebook memories. It serves up vignettes of the boys at home, and columns I'd forgotten about, such in this enigmatic entry:

    Of course I had to know what headline I was talking about. I went into NewsBank, and found the column below, whose headline is taken from the last line of "The Great Gatsby" — "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
    The column is a reminder that no kindness goes unpunished. I'd thought to write a column celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Book Bin, my local bookstore, and tripped over the fact that the current owner was not the person who started it, an error on my part for sure, with the slight mitigation that she allowed herself to be interviewed on the topic and never said anything to make me think otherewise. Anyway, this is a lot of fun — notice my various descriptions of Northbrook — and I thought it might amuse you on a Sunday.

     Sue Warner has a gold charm bracelet, and on that bracelet is a charm that has a dollar bill tightly folded in a little box, and on that box is engraved "Book Bin 11-11-71." The date she and three other women opened the little book shop in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, though I’m tempted to start calling it "my many-chambered warren of secrets of Northbrook."
     I met Warner, a resident of the puzzle box of mystery we call Northbrook, after Sunday’s column on the 40th birthday of the Book Bin, juxtaposing its survival against the collapse of the Borders behemoth, also 40. I interviewed Janis Irvine, the store’s current owner but not — as I thickly assumed — its original owner.
     "I started the store," Warner said, claiming that Irvine, who bought the store later, is inclined to sometimes obscure that fact.
     "This is not the first time this has happened in print," she said. "I’ve lived in this town 44 years, there are lot of people who’ve lived in this town for years, and they all get madder than heck at her when she does this. She doesn’t need to do that. . . . People who were there for the original opening, it makes them furious, because she wasn’t even my first employee. If you want to know the truth, for a period of time I didn’t even go in there."
     I should point out that Irvine never claimed to have started the store — I asked what inspired her to enter the book business, but not directly whether she was the founder.
     Every story has two sides, and after I picked my jaw off the floor, I phoned Irvine.
     "Good God, the woman is never going to stop," Irvine said, after I told her why I was calling. "I started working there the next year. I never intended to lie to you or take on another year at the store I started at in 1972."
     Did I mention that the two women were business partners for 20 years? They were.
     The more I dug, the more worried I became. Irvine says she started working at the Book Bin in 1972. So is that true?
     "I was the first one hired in 1973, and worked there 17 years," said Sissie Erinberg, a resident of the hall of mirrors also known as Northbrook. "Janis came in after I was there."
     For the record, the store was unarguably begun by Warner, her old college roommate Judy Rummler, plus Joyce Eddington and Georgeann Butterfield. "We each put in $2,500, got a line of credit from the bank," said Warner.
     And how, I asked Warner — not wanting to repeat my original blunder — did the idea of starting the Book Bin first come to you?
     "If you want to know the truth, my first child was a year old and my husband asked me, ‘What are you going to do now?’ " said Warner. "The question rankled me."
     And that’s how the bookstore got going.
     Or was it?
     "Joyce Eddington was the one who got us together" said Rummler, who now lives in Minneapolis.
     "It was Sue Warner and I," said Georgeann Butterfield, who lives in Connecticut. "We pulled in the other two."
     At this point, rather than engage in full-blown battle over the origins of a humble book shop in the scorpion’s nest of lies known as Northbrook, seeing how I have to live here, at least for a few more years until my two boys are out of high school, and given that stopping by the Book Bin is one of the few remaining pleasures in my life that hasn’t been plucked away by grinning fate, I’m going to draw this matter to a close by declaring all parties innocent. Of course, Janis Irvine would want credit for a store, which, if she did not actually whelp, she certainly weaned, and of course, Warner et al would want their role as the birth mothers recognized.
     No, the fault is entirely mine, for assuming that the woman celebrating the store’s 40th was the same woman who started it, for dangling the apple of credit where I should not have dangled it. A savvier guy wouldn’t have done that. What’s important is that the store is here, now, celebrating its 40th with a party and a 40 percent off sale from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. And amazingly, Warner, Rummler, Erinberg and myself all plan to be at Irvine’s party.
      "I’ve had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but the most fun job I ever had was there," said Rummler. "It was a labor of love. The most important thing now is not to hurt the Book Bin. I’m sure it was a misunderstanding."
     "I loved it. I loved opening the boxes of books. I feel very loyal to it," said Erinberg. "She’s done a great job of keeping it open."
     "I’m extremely proud of it, that doesn’t take anything away from them; Janis and [her husband] Lex have done a wonderful job," said Warner. "But I also think the rest of us should be remembered for making it happen."
      And now you have been.

Flashback 2011: Enjoy a local bookstore while you can

Book Bin's old location on Church Street, 2016.

     "Moonstruck" is one of my favorite movies, despite a prominent role played by Nicholas Cage. It's so well-written, with many memorable lines that prove useful in regular life. "Your life is going down the toilet," alas, has been deployed more than once.
     And a useful edict that I considered just last week, while modulating my tone about the Charlie Kirk candlelight vigil — "Don't shit where you live." 
    With that in mind, I've never posted the pair of 2011 columns about my beloved local bookstore, "The Book Bin." Mainly because the second, which I'll post Sunday, caused the then owner to give me a stink eye whenever I walked in, making me feel even more unwelcome than I ordinarily do most places anyway.
     If you don't remember the 2011 columns, you can read this and try to imagine what sparked a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. You can wonder, but you won't hit on it because, to quote a truism not in "Moonstruck," you never see the bullet that hits you.

     Most books are published on Tuesdays, the day when what few bookstores remain put them out on sale, one of those quaint traditions of publishing about to vanish along with the stores themselves.

     Jackie Collins’ 27th novel, Goddess of Vengeance, was one of the books published last Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Dillon Perlow stopped by the Book Bin in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook to pick up the copy the store had tucked away for her.
     “A girl has to have a little light reading,” explained the Glenview woman. She also bought Linwood Barclay’s The Accident on the advice of Nancy Usiak, a Book Bin saleslady.
     As the two books were being rung up, the women talked about what they were reading.
     “I just finished Language of Flowers,” Perlow said.
     “I read Story of a Beautiful Girl,” Usiak replied. “I found it more impactful.”
     “I just loved that one,” Perlow agreed.
     An average day in the life of a small independent bookstore, one with a children’s section with toys in the back, a faux fireplace with comfortable chairs in the front, a store that has been in business for 40 years.
     Meanwhile, in the city, a better-known bookstore, Borders, was marking its 40th birthday, coincidentally, by going out of business. The last day of its last downtown Chicago location, on State Street, was Wednesday.
     “STORE CLOSING — EVERYTHING MUST GO — 90% OFF” read the stark red and yellow signs in the windows of Borders. Inside, the shelves were mostly stripped. The remaining books weren’t worth the match needed to burn them: Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal. Sydney Omarr’s Astrological Guide for You in 2010 and How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green.
     Bargain hunters milled around — there was always a crowd at Borders; it was, for those of us so inclined, the place to go, to stroll after dinner and, maybe, pick up a book.
     Obviously not an experience people valued enough, as consumers learned to prefer the undeniable Christmas morning joy of receiving another smiley face Amazon box.
     Borders was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., by brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Their chain steadily expanded until, at its peak, it had more than 500 stores.
      The Book Bin was founded in 1971 by Janis Irvine and her husband Lex.
     Irvine said someone approached her about opening a second store in the late 1970s, but she turned him down — with two stores, she reasoned, she’d always be in the back room, working, and wouldn’t be out front talking with customers about books, the part she loves.
     She has no joy seeing the giant crumble.
     “It really is not satisfying,” she said. “To see any bookstore close breaks my heart.”
     And Borders once was really something.
     “You had to take an examination [in literature] before you could become a salesperson at Borders,” she said. “They were terrific.”
     Large or small, each bookstore that closes, Irvine said, means one less place “where people can go in and exchange ideas and talk about books.”
     Perhaps the most incredible thing about the Book Bin is, though small, it is staffed by four saleswomen, plus a high school clerk.
     “We never sit around reading,” Irvine said, and indeed, as frequently as I stop by, the stock always seems to have changed — Wednesday the new Jackie Kennedy interview book was published, and three copies were already prominently displayed.
     Make no mistake. Books as tangible objects are doomed. In 2011, for the first time, sales of e-books surpassed sales of adult hardback books — Amazon delivers more e-books than paper books. That’ll never change.
     People like to save money, and to do so will ditch human interaction: first telephone operators, then gas station attendants, then bank tellers and now bookstore clerks.
     I try to focus on the advantages. As a guy who once lugged around bricks of Remembrance of Things Past, I appreciate the new technology. But oh those drawbacks: I never would have read Alfred Lansing’s gripping adventure Endurance if a young Adam Brent hadn’t pressed it upon me in his father’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue. Stuart Brent’s is long gone, as is Adam’s shop on Washington Street. Someday they’ll all be gone.
     But not yet. The Book Bin, for one, remains, at 1151 Church St., and on Thursday, it celebrates its 40th birthday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everything in the store during those hours will be an Amazon-like 40 percent off. There will also be wine and hors d’oeuvres — try getting someone to squirt that into a Kindle along with your e-book.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011