Setting the scope on a Jackal bow

    What is an authentic person? And why does someone who lives in the woods, drives a rusty blue Chevy pickup truck with various pro gun decals, a half dozen empty beer cans rattling around in the back and a "NO WOLVES" bumper sticker, someone who works as a jack-of-all-trades, seem more real than, oh for instance, someone who lives in the suburbs, drives a silver Honda Odyssey van, and writes stories for a living?
    Friday I stopped by the house of Moonshine Mike Guzek in Ontonagon, Michigan—he works as the handyman for my pal Rick, and in general has the lay of the land here. We had the pleasure of sitting in his garage/woodshop, talking about stuff. I don't talk about "stuff" much, especially the stuff Moonshine Mike, 73, talks about — bow hunting, wood chopping (that's his winter's worth of maple firewood above, stacked by his girlfriend Susan who, alas, I did not meet), women, chainsaws, the unexpected connection between the two (later in the day, trying to start a chainsaw that took a long time to get going, he'd say, "I knew a girl like that") property sales, and various other UP topics.  He told me a story about hunting a deer with a buddy's crossbow in snow (much better to hunt them in the winter, when you don't have to worry about refrigerating the results), shooting it through the heart, a shot that — he later learned, dressing the deer — cracked the fifth rib, cut through the deer's heart, then through the fifth rib on the other side, and out. I wish I could replicate his description of the blood in against the snow, but I would not do him justice.
     Mike was quite excited about his new Barnett Jackal crossbow—a bad shoulder makes drawing a composite bow tough— and let me test it out while we calibrated the scope. You pull the bowstring back using a rope with two handles on it, and while it took all my strength, I could just do it. Firing was easy after that, and I got quite good at it. I don't know if I could shoot a deer—probably not—but a big yellow foam cube target is another matter. The arrows travel at over 300 feet per second, and after pulling back the string, the hardest part was pulling the "Headhunter" brand arrows out of the target.
     Mike is a craftsman—he built the cabins on my buddy's place here, and is a reminder that artistry comes in a variety of forms, and that skill and refinement is not always obvious. Maybe that is why he seems more real—because the ability to butcher a moose seems more of a genuine life skill than the ability to, oh, polish a sentence.  There was also an unapologetic quality to him. His pickup had a sticker that showed a wolf, howling at the moon, in a rifle crosshairs, that said: "HUNT HARD, SHOOT STRAIGHT, KILL CLEAN, APOLOGIZE TO NO ONE." That seems like a life philosophy, and as a person who is always explaining, nearly apologizing, I told myself: don't do that so much.
     Our skills sets do not overlap, but I still appreciated his wisdom, and though he was initially puzzled, by my repeatedly turning down a beer (later, when we cut down some trees that were threatening a barn, he saw me and said, "Where's your beer?!" with alarm, as if I couldn't breathe without it, and only then remembered. I of course apologized—old habits die hard—and he said, "No, it's a good thing.") I even suspect he enjoyed talking with me, or at least appreciated my help setting the Jackal's scope, three green dots which skewed up and to the right, at first, but seemed dead on and true by the time we were done with it.

   

Gone to the UP

     "So how does any man keep straight with himself," Nelson Algren asks, in The Man with the Golden Arm, " if he has no one with whom to be straight?" Once a year, I go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to a small town on the shores of Lake Superior called Ontonagon, where I hang out with my colleague, the great sports columnist Rick Telander, and an assorted motley of his pals. We are straight with each other, and talk philosophy, believe it or not, and life, and swim in the very cold water, and look at the stars, and eat very well, and smoke cigars, and have an awful lot of fun. I'm there right now. So this will be by necessity brief. 

     When Rick first asked me to go, to spend a long weekend with a bunch of guys—an ex-football player, a TV sports reporter, a couple of former Army Rangers— I almost said no. It sounded like a blow-out, and I've given up that kind of thing. Besides, would I really fit in with that group? But he said trust me, it'll be fine, and I decided to set aside my reservations, believe him and go, because I knew what would happen if I stayed home, and I always try to err on the side of trying something new. And it was fine. More than fine. Great. I'm so glad I did; I made new friends, had many interesting conversations, and saw a part of America that is pristine and proud and very, very beautiful. You can't join us, but you can try new things, even if means an eight hour drive due north to find out if you made the right call or not. Because you never know. Something worthwhile can be waiting. 

There are no New Years, only new days

     The seasons cycle, winter to spring to summer to fall, without a beginning or an end. So we humans, who very definitely begin and end, like to pretend that years end too, just like us, to chop them up, insert pauses, like rests in music, to allow us to catch our breath, gather our energies, and start playing again, renewed.
     Thus Jews pause Thursday to welcome in 5774, a year many would be hard pressed to specify at any other season. And three months and three weeks later, the rest of the world -- and most Jews too -- welcome in the standard new year, this time 2014.  The first, ushered in with apples and honey, the second with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and frantic, bad television programs.
      And what do we wish for, at these special times, during these self-imposed changes in the calendar? The Jews seem interested in praising God—I just came from evening services. Much praising of God. One hopes He's pleased. And the secular New Year involves pledges to improve ourselves, to lose weight, start exercising, be better people, that people we haven't been the past year, and probably won't be the next year, or ever. Still, we try.
      Strange ventures, both. And nothing you can't do all through the year, if you so desire—both the praising and the resolving. Always a good idea, thanks and effort. Which makes one wonder, not why we do it so much now, but why so little the rest of the year? Why do we need the artificial change from one digit to the next, to prompt us to piety, to prod us to be self-improvement, to realize that we are not as appreciative of all that we have, not as much as we should be, or that we are not trying to be the people we'd like ourselves to be. So maybe the lesson of the New Year is to try to make every day a little more like it. To try not to concentrate so much of our hopes on a decimal change, and instead realize that while there is really no such thing as a New Year—it's just the Same Old Year dressed up in our imaginings—there is very definitely a new day, a multitude of new days. Arriving, in fact, every single day—odd how that works out— and each can be as important as we care to make it. So Happy New Year, Happy New Day.
   

The best time to plant a tree

     A Russian proverb says that, during a man's life, he should: have a son, write a book and plant a tree. And had you asked me, when I first heard the proverb, before I had done any of those things, to arrange these life goals in order of difficulty, from easiest to hardest, I would have instantly replied, 1) tree; 2) son; 3) book. 
      But now that I've raised two sons, published seven books and planted, well, a good number of trees, I can tell you that while books take a long time and require much steady plodding—ditto for raising sons—both tasks, though difficult, collaborative, long term efforts, are achievable through persistence and enterprise. 
       This tree-planting business, however, is really tough.  
       You have to know what you're doing with trees, and while I've only been planting them for 13 years, since I've moved to the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, let's say my success-to-failure ratio is not good, far worse than with books or, thank God, sons. 
       There is an awful randomness to planting trees. It is, frankly, a crapshoot.  I planted two apple trees, one next to the other, tended them the same, I thought. One lived and thrived and is giving us bushels of apples. The other died almost immediately. Ditto for a pair of accolade elms—one took, one didn't. Three cherry trees planted, three cherry trees withered—wet soil, I finally decided—as did a pin oak  I had great hopes for. The pin oak had been a sturdy sapling, tall as I am. Kindling in three months. But a white pine, planted as a slender knee-high seedling not far from where the pin oak would have been, is going gangbusters. Some trees I coddle and they die, and others get abused and live; a red bud that I moved a few years after planting, which is hard on trees, survived the shock and is doing great.
     Of course, "doing great" is relative. The most successful tree I've planted, a dozen years ago to replace a tree blown apart by lightning, is a cimmaron ash. It's growing a yard a year, now taller than the house itself, lovely full, symmetrical, oval shaped crown, and, of course, almost certainly doomed, thanks to the emerald ash borer, which hasn't gotten to yet, perhaps because I've spent much more money on anti-ash borer treatments than I spent on the tree itself,, like holy oil religiously poured around the tree's base, uttering incantations. 
     Or perhaps it's dumb luck. I truly wish the borers would get me, first, drill directly into my heart, because it'll kill me anyway if that Chinese pestilence takes my tree down. Just bad luck. Of all the trees I had to plant, I had to plant an ash. Which is why I am interested in a Chicago Botanic Garden study of which trees will best survive the coming global warming catastrophe. Bad enough to grow old. Worse to grow old in a climate gone mad. Worse still to grow old in a climate gone mad and see all the trees you planted as a youth die. (You can learn about a Chicago Botanic Garden study by clicking here. If you read it, bear in mind that the last tree I planted was a ginkgo biloba. So sometimes I catch a break).
     Why care about trees? (Or books, or sons, for that matter?) I don't think it should be due to any Slavic yearnings toward immortality. That's what those three proverbial Slavic bucket list boxes to check off are all about — sons, books, trees — all propagating your name, leaving your mark, a notch on eternity. But even the oldest trees die, eventually. I have a 150-year-old sugar maple in the front yard that is as close to senile as a tree can be. Any day now I expect it to crack in two. Books as well, have their moment and are swept away, and better not to even think about sons. The truth is, permanence is not found in the oldest tree, just a drawn out moment, a protracted fleetingness. The faint scratch marks of books, trees and, yes, sons, will be effaced quite soon after you're not around, if you're lucky.   
     Far better to forget about eternity and concentrate on now. Value things for their own sake—the books for their ideas and writing, the sons for their personalities, the trees for their beauty, all passing, but all still here at the moment, which is the important thing. Better to abandon the Russian proverb and make up our own Buddhist proverb. "In a man's life, he should overcome vain hopes of permanence." That sounds like a better plan, so long as it doesn't keep you from planting trees too, perhaps bearing in mind the equally apt Chinese proverb: the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time to plant a tree is today. 

Calvin Klein's plywood house

     In the newspaper biz there is an expression, "burying the lede," which means to put the most important part of the story, which typically should be close to the beginning, deep in the body of the article. If I come home from work, say hello to the wife, putter around a bit, then suddenly remember some bit of exciting news, I might say, "Whoops honey—I buried the lede."
     Sometimes burying the lede is done intentionally, to provide a bit of flair at the end—"a kicker," to use another journalistic term.  And sometimes, I believe, the writer just doesn't seem to realize how incredible a certain fact is, and it ends up stranded in the middle of the story.
     This was the case in the New York Times article "The House That Calvin Built," splashed across the top two-thirds of the front page of the SundayStyles section this past Sunday, with a huge photo of the $75 million house that fashion designer Calvin Klein is buliding in Southhampton, New York. It is your general Rich-Man-Builds-House story, chronicling the five years the project has taken, the reaction of neighbors.
    A neighbor I spoke with who started the lengthy story bailed out before getting to the amazing part. I stuck with it for the same reason anybody reads these stories, to feel a shimmer of the warmth of the super wealthy. And there were delights that kept you reading. The Klein spokesman's fussy refusal to comment on the matter: "At this time, Calvin really doesn't want to participate in any editorial on the house." At first I thought the spokesman didn't grasp the difference between an editorial on the editorial pages and a puff piece in the style section. But, upon consideration, I realized his reply just reflected fashionspeak for the words that go around photos. It's all "editorial" to them, and he might have a point there.
     The wonder didn't occur—and I guess I'm burying the lede myself here, though I consider it providing context—until the 30th paragraph, when author Jacob Bernstein, following a description of the former mansion on the site being chopped up and carted away, serves up this stunner:

     After that, a life-size mock-up of the two story house was built of plywood on the property. That project was so substantial that it required a building permit from the Village of Southampton and wound up costing approximately $350,000, according to two sources close to Mr. Klein. So that Mr. Klein could get an even better idea of what it was to be like, the furniture he had in mind was created of foamcore.

    Have you ever heard of such a practice in your life? Have you ever imagined it? Of course not. I truly believe, if you locked F. Scott Fitzgerald, Barbara Cartland and P.G. Wodehouse in a room and charged them with dreaming up the most indulgent follies of the rich they could imagine,  they would never come up with that image—the plywood sample house — not in a hundred years. The faux tester house, with its foam furniture, built so Calvin Klein can wander through and make sure that everything is Just So before the real house gets built.
      That's a big drawback of being rich, I believe—I'm guessing here, but I feel fairly confident. Wealth gives you the illusion that you can have everything Just So, everything to your liking, all the time, and allows you to go to ridiculous lengths to try to get it. Not to take anything away from Calvin Klein. As a young man, I owned one of his bomber jackets and was immensely proud to have it. And now, his boxers and undershirts—just the best. Wouldn't wear another brand; nothing else will do. So he earned his money, and if he feels compelled to spend it in such a patently crazy, controlling and almost sad fashion, well, there you go. If I read of the plywood dry run house in a Christopher Buckley novel I'd smile, shake my head and think that Buckley had gone a bit over-the-top, and strayed into overbroad parody. That it is instead a factual occurrence is a matter of wonder, and deserves the widest possible dissemination.

To read the entire New York Times piece on Calvin Klein's house, click here.




   

Labor Day, 2013

     Work is hard. You can't find a profession so well paid and fun that it is without its difficult elements, whether jetting to Paris to pose for fashion photos, tasting beer at a brewery, or watching movies for a living. Or as the great James Thurber put it: "Even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on."
      Work is also a joy. The flip side of the difficulty is that no task, however menial, repetitious and humble is without its pleasures—I don't think a person could stay at a job they completely hated. That is the realm of slaves and prisoners.  I've done my share of menial work, early on—loading boxes in a warehouse, baking biscuits in a restaurant, putting numbered tags on machinery at a large laboratory, and each had its particular joys. The worker-bee-in-the-hive satisfaction of moving through the warehouse bringing the right box to the right bin, the perfect ranks of raw biscuits, like fat beige soldiers, lined up on trays, slid into the oven and off to war. Reaching down for the drill on my belt to affix one more of the 11,000 tags I was charged with applying, like a gunfighter on the draw, or so I imagined.
     Perhaps I'm imagining too much—maybe work is an ordeal for many, a necessary grind, the price of living. Maybe lots of people despise working. Though I don't see that. I've talked to countless employees in factories around Chicago, and am always impressed by how glad they are to have their jobs, their sense of dignity, their frequent satisfaction and pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves, and in doing their jobs well.
     Labor Day is about more than work, of course, about more than jobs, which sag in Illinois, our unemployment rate well above the national average. It is about the organizations that working men and women had to build to drag themselves up away from the most basic and miserable existence. Unions are on hard times now, almost a dirty word, thanks in part to their own corruption, thanks in larger part to a Big Lie concocted and used against them, slurs that focus only on their shortcomings. The Reagan era calumny that owners all deserve whatever they can grab, no matter how they get it, while workers are lucky to be given whatever crumbs fall to them for their labors.
     People forget—and Labor Day is the perfect time to remind them, perhaps the most important government holiday of them all, because its reason for being truly does slip from mind—about all that organized labor has wrought over the years.
     An eight hour day. An end to child labor. Safe working conditions. Sick pay. Paid vacations. Maternity leave. All in their time controversial, all in their time a chance for business owners to harrumph and scoff and predict that treating their workers decently will drive them out of business. It didn't.
     It's the unions that risk going out of business. They continue on, albeit in weakened form, trying to protect workers from the whims of their employers. I've been a member of a union for 26 years, the Chicago Newspaper Guild unit of the Communications Workers of America. In that time, I've seen its power shrivel, the guild at the Sun-Times dealt a severe, perhaps mortal blow in 2009, when it gave up seniority, defunded its pension system, and took a 15 percent across the board pay-cut so the Sun-Times could be purchased. The sacrifice was made to keep the paper from going out of business, and it worked. The paper continued, while the union kept getting squeezed into a smaller and smaller box. Now we approach a system where the Arianna Huffingtons of the world make millions while shepherding a flock of free labor sheep. How long is that supposed to go on?
     We slide gradually back to the system of 100 years ago, where workers fend for themselves, grateful for whatever employers decide to give them and—surprise surprise—employers give them as little as possible. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has 3/4 of the buying value it did 45 years ago. In 1968 the minimum wage was $1.60, or $10.70 in 2013 dollars.
     Yes, realities have changed, the two great gears grinding American jobs are technology and internationalization. There are few industries that computers haven't revolutionized—read cost workers their jobs—from banking to law, manufacturing to music, and of course, my own industry, journalism. We don't need people to answer phones, pump gas, write stories.
     And competition from abroad grows stronger every year—the phone bank jobs that used to be down the street are now in Mumbai.
     You can't fight technology. Technology wins. If history teaches us anything, it is the Luddites attacking the looms are wrong and doomed. But workers can still use technology to their benefit, accept their losses, reassemble, and come out stronger, the piecework weavers becoming the United Garment Workers.
     Those trends can't be fought, they must be coped with. It helps if workers don't lay down, don't accept the notion that they don't deserve the fruits of their efforts. It helps to remember the joy of work, to try to adapt and to attempt new things, even if it means, oh, writing a free blog for a while, to see where it goes.  
     These economic trends run in cycles, the economy strays in one direction until people here can't stand it any more and agitate for change, then it slowly swings back in another direction. The American middle class lopes along, suffering indignity after indignity, while their bosses grow richer and more distant and politics becomes more petty and paralyzed.
     I have no idea what's ahead for labor in America–nobody does. But I do know there is a proud tradition of union organization, that it had a central role in providing us with the decent society we enjoy and are trying to hold onto, and that organization will be crucial if America is to remain a place where regular people can work and be rewarded. Working men and women are all too aware of how steadily the hard won victories of the past are being lost. We have to do what we can to remain strong, keep our spirits up, and remember both where we came from and where we want to go.

"Oh please Brer Congress, don't tie my hands in Syria..."

 
     "Credible," in my dictionary, is defined as "believable, worthy of belief or support." And for a while last week it seemed America would go to war against Syria, at least briefly, in order for President Barack Obama to maintain his credibility. We were going to battle because he had said we would.
    "To do nothing in the face of images of children killed by poison gas," David Sanger wrote in the New York Times, "would cripple his credibility in the last three years of his presidency."
     Can't have that. Though in Sanger's argument the deaths seem secondary to the robust presidency. And raises the question of exactly who we're trying to maintain our credibility for—it's the Iranians, right? Though they aren't either supporting or believing us as it is, and few seem to really imagine that an air strike or two will make them start. Maybe we're trying to uphold our believability in our own eyes, to convince ourselves that we really are still a trustworthy people who do what we say we're going to do. I would have thought the ship had sailed on that one. We say we're going to fix the budget. Every year.
    This situation came about because President Obama said, over a year ago, that if "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" were "moving around or being utilized" in the Syrian civil war, why, that would be "a red line for us" and he'd have to do something. Not exactly a binding contract. And we probably should be grateful he didn't hide behind a Clintonian professorial parsing of just what "a whole bunch" constitutes.
    A whole bunch of chemical weapons, more or less, rained down upon a rebel-held section of Damascus Aug. 21, killing some 1,400 people, 400 of them children, fired—we're absolutely, positively sure, almost—by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Why that bothers us a lot while the 100,000 Syrians who have already been killed in the conflict by conventional means bothers us hardly at all—a bit of finger wagging, some empty talk, as if reading off a script, and we're done—is a question for historians, or psychiatrists, because on its surface, it's kind of crazy. Chemical weapons are horrible. But so are bullets and bombs and rockets. You're dead or maimed either way.
    But chemical weapons are a step too far, long-held tradition dictates, so something has to be done, by us, by default, because we're the world's policeman, apparently, despite all our bad experiences trying to fill that role. The president seemed poised to do something—in the standard limited, undefined, wham bam thank you ma'am death-from-above way he summed up as "no boots on the ground."  My theory is that he was eager to call in a few air strikes, not because doing so would be an important, meaningful action, but the opposite: any passing military strike a tiny, symbolic insignificant act, the sort of thing we've become so good at. The Americans, arriving on the scene late to blow something up. The kind of ass-covering half measure we like to take, telling ourselves something dynamic is being done, just as we said it would be. Our promises are being kept! 
      "I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets," Obama announced. Which sounded determined, until you remembered that he had also said he was determined to close Gitmo. Things change.
      If Obama expected a cheer to go up and the boys to kiss their sweethearts, then toss their hats into the air and rally behind him, he was mistaken. Instead, Obama was Daffy Duck in the immensity of the Hollywood Bowl, down on one knee, arms spread a la Al Jolson, staring blindly into the footlights, listening to the silence punctuated by crickets. At that moment, the British Parliament let out a low muted trumpet of "wa-wa-waaaaaa" stage right, taking a pass on the whole lark, despite Prime Minister David Cameron having been the head cheerleader for military action. "Sorry mates, maybe next time." Then the American people, emboldened and perhaps embarrassed by seeing democracy in action across the pond, decided to try it here, and started whining, like tired children dragged through one too many museum of horrors. "Aww, do we hafta?"
     I figured at this point, the Obama administration would quickly fire off a few Tomahawk missiles, accomplishing, by universal acclamation, nothing. Then, clutching this bold military action to his naked ineptitude like a strategically-placed gym towel—"See? I did what I said I'd do. I'm credible, totally credible. Bye!"—declared success, wave off questions and scoot dripping with sweat and shame back into the Oval Office, to not be seen again until it came time to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey.
     Instead the president did something unexpected. Like the dad who, threatening to turn the car around and go back home if the kids don't behave, shocks everybody by doing exactly that, Obama said, in essence, "Fine. Have it your way," and tossed the smoldering potato to Congress. "Here, you guys decide then." Which is the equivalent of deciding to do nothing, because Congress, unable to do almost anything of importance, unable to manage the nation's helium supply, certainly won't authorize the doing of anything at all in Syria, particularly if Republicans think Obama wants them to which, in his secret heart, if he's as smart as he's supposed to be, he most certainly doesn't. (If he was truly devious, he'd have planned this all along, as a Brer Rabbit ploy. "Oh please Brer Congress, authorize my  wrist -slap for Syria, and whatever you do, please, PLEASE don't tie my hands so I can't drop-kick our military into the middle of some hall-of-mirrors Middle Eastern bloodbath....")
     Besides, Congress won't return from summer break for more than a week, and by then the moment of American military madness will have, hopefully, passed.
     So five points taken from Obama for public dithering. And five points added for finding a creative escape—or, more likely, as befitting the luckiest man in American politics, blundering upon a solution. Either way, he squirmed out of the locked box he had sealed himself into and stood on Saturday, Houdini-like, hands raised above his head in triumph, fingers spread, the open manacles at his feet, while the audience gaped, too amazed to clap.
     Although, in my biased view, his Syrian performance still represents a kind of credibility. Because there is the credibility of doing what you say you're doing to do, no matter how dumb an idea it might have been from the start. And then there is the credibility, perhaps even a higher credibility, of instead being as nimble as you are supposed to be, and dodging the disaster you promised to swan dive into. It's such a neat escape, you can almost overlook that the slaughter in Syria continues, unabated.