Home

     "Home," Robert Frost once wrote, "is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
     From his heartbreaking "The Death of the Hired Man," a short story, really, a farm couple sitting on the front porch, talking about Silas, the ne'er-do-well who works for them, sometimes. A refutation to all those who dismiss Frost as a greeting card poet of snowy evenings and yellow woods. (Along with "Out, Out—" a poem about a boy who feeds his hand into a buzz saw — though the saw practically grabs it, after the boy is called to supper, "As if to prove saws knew what supper meant/Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—")
     Dire things — and poems I've addressed before — at cross purpose with my holiday mood. There are of course happier interpretations of "home." It is the place where you walk in, drop your bags, and — even after an absence of seven months and the arrival of big changes — still immediately stick your head into the refrigerator to see what there is good to eat. Even with a freshly baked cranberry bread waiting on the counter. A ritual of familiarity, and comfort. Things change. But at home — another definition — the grinding gears of time are thwarted, for now. The familiar brands in the refrigerator. The old crib you slept in, a gorgeous rich blue, bought in the city at Lazar's, now magically returned from its sojourn with other relatives. Set up in your old bedroom, under the chess trophies, fitted with fresh sheets, ready for a new generation, home also being the place where you grow up.

"My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd...."

     Say it along with me:

     "My name is Elmer J. Fudd. I am a millionaire. I own a mansion, and a yacht."

     If you are of a certain age, you easily remember those lines from "Hare Brush," the  Merry Melodies cartoon where our bald-headed, shotgun-wielding nincompoop is morphed into a corporate CEO (not that the two conditions are mutually exclusive; remember Dick Cheney) who thinks he's a rabbit. A psychiatrist becomes involved, and a dazed Bugs Bunny ends up repeating those declarations over and over. It's the rare, perhaps unique Bugs cartoon where Elmer is victorious at the end.

     Words ground into us on countless Saturday mornings, sprawled in feet pajamas before our black and white television sets.

     It's an odd brain worm to have, in these times when inflation has made nearly meaningless the coveted 19th century benchmark of "millionaire" — 8 percent of the country are millionaires — while the truly wealthy continually shame themselves by their grasping for even more power and their displays of oblivious self-regard. But these are odd times.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd..."

     With that line tickling my ear, I regularly check my 401(k). I used to ignore it for weeks at a time. Now I look every day, sometimes more than once a day, rooting it on toward the empyrean.

      Not without a few speed bumps. A week ago Monday, the words echoing in my head, I logged on, or tried to.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd ... I am ... a millionaire..."

     Instead of the latest update, I got this message:

   
     What the heck is Cloudflare? No idea? And when had I blocked it? I didn't recall. I asked AI what I should do to unblock Cloudflare, and it told me to start wiping out caches and eliminating cookies. I'd just done that, a few weeks earlier, trying to correct some other unwelcome situation, and it's a pain in the ass. You have to sign into stuff all over again.

     Instead I deployed one of my special magic strategies that often work with computers and everything else. I waited. And was rewarded by catching a news report on the radio that mentioned Cloudflare, some huge server system the specifics of which elude me, was down, sending ripples. It wasn't just me. Which is always a comfort. Indeed, as I went about getting my column ready, fact-checking and such, I got several of these messages:

     Now that, if I may, is a useful graphic, in that it tells me what is working —me —what is not working —them — and what I should do: wait. Which I knew to do anyway. Kudos to whoever came up with that one. A human, certainly. 
     Eventually I got into my 401(k), and had my traditional morning lick-lipping glance at the room of pillows I plan to flop into midway through 2027. Tuesday we crossed the Rubicon.  And Elmer's voice whispered once again, tauntingly, in my ear.

Flashback 2000: Building model ships is a lost art

     The boys will be home, tonight, if the travel gods smile upon them. First time in, well, quite a while. Plus two daughters-in-law and a grandbaby. Quite the full house. Which I take as a compliment —nobody forces them back. They arrive of their own free will. I think having had a pleasant childhood helped, evidence to the contrary, such as this 25-year-old column, notwithstanding. 

     I am building a model ship. This will come as a shock to my friends, who know me as one of those relentless grinds who work and work and work and, as a break, gets together with co-workers to talk about work.
     I don't know where the ship came from. A Lindberg 1/64-scale model of a U.S. Navy Torpedo Patrol Boat, still in its shrink wrap. With the commotion of packing for our move, it must have been dislodged from whatever shelf or box where it has hidden for years. The copyright on the model box is 1976.

     My oldest son noticed the thrilling painting on the box of the PT boat bursting through a wave as its machine gunner trades bursts with a Japanese fighter.
     "What's this?" he said. I told him. "Can we build it?" he asked.
     As a young man I was terrible at models. I haven't the patience. The glue got everywhere. I didn't read the instructions right.
     But the prime directive I try to follow when struggling through dadhood is this: Don't say no unless you have to. As unappealing as the idea of assembling this craft was, as hectic as things are, as certain as I am that the boys will destroy the model the instant it is complete, if not before, the fact is, we could do it. I said yes.
     We spread out newspaper on the dining room table. I opened the wrap on the box. I lifted the lid. I looked inside.
     Ayiiieeee! A million tiny pieces. I considered slamming the top back down, leaping up with a "Whoops boys, no boat inside" and rushing it to the trash. But I saw the expectant look on their faces. I grimly began sifting through tree after tree of plastic parts.
     Instruction one began: "Place motor 55 onto mount 56 then flatten pins with pliers as shown in sketch. Next cement and press pulley halves 12 onto motor shaft and propeller shafts 46 as shown in photo. . ."
     A few years ago, I was at the New York Toy Fair and, filled with nostalgic memories of model planes and boats, I slid over to the Revell-Monogram showroom, where I learned that models such as this one, boxes of parts that have to be meticulously glued together over hours and hours, have gone the way of the realistic toy gun. Kids no longer have the time for them. Revell-Monogram's new line of "Snap-Tite" models could be put together in about 60 seconds, without glue or paint.
     Model-building, as a child's pastime, is a fading art.
     "We get a few kids," said Gus Kaufman, co-owner of the Ship's Chandler, a Mount Prospect store devoted to model ships. "But mostly it's the older generation."
     He said when he started, in the 1970s, models were popular among the young. Then they discovered computers.
     "When it comes to using their hands now it seems they're all thumbs," he said. "Nobody wants to take the time to build something. That takes too much effort. They've got to think."
     Do they ever. Some of these instructions are as cryptic as Mayan hieroglyphics.
     Progress is maddeningly slow. Every blower, every cleat has to be glued onto the deck. The cleats are 1/4-inch long. I try to involve the boys — it's their job to pry the pieces off their trees, to dab the glue on, to hold the piece so it sets, to scramble to the floor to find the tiny hatch cover that daddy drops.
     We've been building it for a week now, and I've spent long, agonizing minutes, squinting at some oddly phrased directive, the boys gazing at me with sagging admiration.
     But they keep gazing. And I do not give up the ship. Each day, it slowly progresses. Which is the entire point of these things. A 1/64 scale model of a PT boat will not help either them or me, in and of itself. The memory of having built one, however, the dogged determination and patience needed to not do a botch job, is priceless.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 11, 2000

Dolton mom forced to give birth at the side of the road, symptom of broken health care system

Alena Ariel Wells

     Both my boys were born in Evanston. Which at the time seemed wrong, since we lived in the city.
     "Why Evanston?" I asked my wife. I worried it would dog them, a nagging footnote. They wouldn't be "born in Chicago" but "born in Evanston." Not quite the same ring to it, right?
     Plus: Evanston Hospital was half an hour away. Northwestern Memorial, less than 10 minutes down DuSable Lake Shore Drive from our place at Pine Grove and Oakdale.
     "My OB/GYN is at Evanston Hospital," she said, with finality.
     End of conversation. Go where the best care is. Evanston gave us the red carpet treatment — when we showed up at the emergency room, nurses came running. Then again, my wife made her entrance in an unusual fashion. Or as I explained afterward: "If you want to get immediate help at an emergency room, crawl in on your hands and knees. It focuses their attention wonderfully."
     Unless it doesn't. Such as with Mercedes Wells, the Dolton woman who was met with "blank stares" and turned away from Franciscan Health Crown Point even though she was in active labor.
     "I felt like they were treating me like an animal," Wells later said.
     She gave birth eight minutes after Franciscan put her on the curb. In the cab of a pickup truck. On the side of the road.
     As awful as that story is, it's only the tip of the iceberg of the racial disparity in health care in this country. It isn't a few bad apples in Crown Point, but, in the words of one study backed by two federal agencies: "Systematic discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotype."
     This translates into years of life lost — WBEZ and the Sun-Times are running a series about it. The girl that Mercedes Wells gave birth to can expect to live, on average, three fewer years than had she been white. If the baby were a boy, the gap would be five years.
     There are numerous economic and social factors at work, but plain racism is a major aspect.
     The bottom-line truth — and this doesn't get said enough, so I'm going to just say it — cuts across medicine, law enforcement, employment, the whole of American society: Too many whites, encountering a Black person, see the "Black" part immediately, but the "person" part, poorly if at all.
     Everyone suffers. The only explanation that makes sense as to why the United States, alone among industrial countries, doesn't have a system of national health care, is because white citizens are in horror at the idea of Black people receiving benefits, even if it means they are also uninsured — a reminder that racism is self-destructive and blows back, the way that Southern towns, ordered to integrate their swimming pools in the 1960s, filled them in with dirt instead, so nobody could swim in the hot summer.
     Good manages to come out of the bad. There is a classic Chicago story also involving a woman being turned away from a hospital, one I hope you'll forgive me for relating.
     The woman was Nettie Dorsey, who had already paid for delivery services at Provident Hospital, the "Black medical mecca" near her home on the South Side. But the day in 1932 she arrived, in labor, there was no room for her. Provident had 75 beds for 200,000 Black Chicagoans. (That number seemed low, until I checked. Today, Provident has 45 staffed in-patient beds.)
     Dorsey went home to deliver her baby. Both died. Her husband, Thomas Dorsey, a noted composer of blues and gospel songs, was devastated and first thought he'd give up music. "God had been unfair; I felt that God had dealt me an injustice," he said. "I didn't want to serve Him anymore or write gospel songs."
     That bleak mood lasted a few days, until Dorsey sat down at a piano, put his hands on the keys and poured out his anguish in a new type of gospel blues song, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." The song was an instant classic —it was Martin Luther King's favorite song. Mahalia Jackson sang it at his funeral. Beyonce recorded it.
     Good has come out of Mercedes Wells' experience, too, and I don't mean the doctor and nurse who turned her away have been fired. Think hard — what is the wonderful thing that came from this whole episode? Many news stories didn't mention it at all. Any idea?
     The arrival of Alena Ariel Wells, weighing exactly 6 pounds, on Nov. 16 at 6:28 a.m., delivered without medical expertise but into the loving hands of her father, Leon. The baby is "doing well" according to her mother. The world she was born into, alas, not doing so good. But maybe Alena Wells will be one of the people who try to fix it.

Leon, Mercedes and Alena Wells.

Flashback 2010: Happiness is . . . an empty voicemailbox

     Nobody calls — well, scams, and automatic pharmacy reminders. That's about it. Rarely a real person. Emails too are mostly pellets from some ineffectual blunderbuss blast of scattershot PR pleas. Still, in the morning, as I scroll down in the vain effort to detect something significant, I define and delete them. Out of habit, I suppose, from the day when computer memory was limited and could fill up. A practice that was already out-of-date when this ran, 15 years ago. Back then, the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings.

OPENING SHOT 

    With swollen, foaming rivers of information roaring across the Internet, we flatter ourselves that the netting of relevant data is a recent skill — as if the primeval forest didn't also offer an overload of information to every prowling hunter, for whom reading the sky, culling facts from the flutter of leaves, from the sound of snapping twigs, were essential abilities, certainly more significant than our talent at finding good local restaurants online.
     We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information — we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
     A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion — or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.

BERRY PAINT TO BUNCHED ELECTRONS

     My mother phoned. "Do you know your voicemail at work is full?" she asked. "No ma," I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there.
     So I phoned my office.
     "Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
     I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
     First the two new messages — the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years (for a taste, click the video at the end of the column). He marks his messages "urgent" — the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."

     Sometimes I listen to the first few syllables. "Mister Steinberg, you LIBERALS make me pu . . ."
     Delete. God bless voicemail.
     "Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
     Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
     A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
     Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
     A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
     The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
     There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
     Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
     "The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
     One was me, a nasal voice — cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen — caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick — if I say so myself — to have in your bag.
     A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
     Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
     Or will they?
     We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
     At least I think that's true. Better check.
     "There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
     "It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
     Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
     "Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
     While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
     "We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
      We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
     "You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

From Alicia Brandt:
     The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2010

A cautionary tale

"Praying hands,"  by  Albrecht Dürer (Albertina Museum, Vienna).

      

     Readers write to me all the time, sometimes sharing various personal developments. Like this on received Friday afternoon:

      Newspaper readers do tend to be an older crowd. I was sympathetic, and immediately replied:

   And this is the part that makes me cringe. Figuring, "No time like the present," I clapped my palms together, turned my eyes upward in the general vicinity of heaven, supposedly, and said, out loud, in the presence of my wife: "Please God, deliver a swift and full recovery to Jim Murray."

     The shame is not from the invocation of a deity I don't believe in, but in something revealed the next email.

     "Do you often shop online?" OMFG. A scam! I had fallen for a fuckin' scam. True, my only loss was dignity. But I had prayed for this piece of shit, in his miserable overseas scamster boiler room. I decided to string him along.

    That brought an instant reply.

     People fall for this shit? I mean, talk about a muddy narrative. I tried to string him along.

     But he must have sensed he was nailed —they do this all day long —and moved on to bigger dupes than me. And while I did not lose anything material, there was still an odd, visceral sort of violation. I'd dropped my guard. I had prayed for this guy.   

     No shame there. Still, we human beings, who take things on face value, or try to, are at a disadvantage in this online world. And it's only going to get worse.

Atop blog: "A Dip in the Lake," by John Cage (Museum of Contemporary Art)

Landscapers hit hard by ICE blitz, '...accused of the crime of working'

Barbara Kruger, The Art Institute

     Rey was just doing his job — cleaning up a yard in Rogers Park one morning at the end of October — when a Black Jeep Wagoneer slowed down, a group of masked men jumped out, slapped on handcuffs and dragged him into the vehicle, then drove off, taunting him as they did.
     News spread quickly.
     "I was heading downtown with my husband," said his boss, Kristen Hulne, owner of Patch Landscaping, with her husband Patrick, a newly-retired Chicago firefighter. "We get a call from a guy in the office: 'ICE just picked up Rey.' My other employee ran away and hid. The customer called and said, 'I'm sorry this happened; I took all your equipment off your truck and locked it away in the yard, safe.'"
     It's hard enough to operate a small business. Never mind a landscaping business in a city as weather-scoured as Chicago. The federal government's war on immigrants these past few months made that task even harder for landscapers here, a "cat and mouse game" Hulne calls it, trying to both rake leaves and avoid capture.
     "It's such an incredible burden on this industry," said Marisa Gora, owner of Kemora Landscapes, adding that ICE withdrawing recently is of limited comfort. "We don't know if they're going to come back in the spring."
     "As landscaping contractors, we're a targeted community," said Lisa Willis, owner of MINDSpace, "Our industry associations really haven't spoken up about it. It was really disappointing."
     The executive director of Landscape Illinois declined comment beyond, "we need to keep a low profile to protect as many of our workers as possible from additional enforcement."
     A worry everyone I spoke with raised — if I exercise my right as an American citizen, will our increasingly-vindictive government come after me or my business? It's like living in Russia.
     When a worker was abducted, everything else stops —for Hulne, it took time to locate the terrified worker who fled. The abandoned truck and equipment had to be collected. An increasingly Kafkaesque police state confronted.
     "We got a lawyer that day," Hulne said. "Before I could turn around, Rey's wife was in my office crying. Fifteen minutes after that I had a call from our alderman —'Oh my God I just heard what happened....' There was this immediate mobilization of the neighborhood. It was incredible."

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