"Can you help us please?"

     I don't write about the poor as much as I should. Wrapped in my comfy middle class bubble, it's too easy to spend my time toddling off to operas, raising tomatoes and focusing on cool objects, and I usually don't think to gaze beyond my sphere at the suffering all around. Part is no doubt due to my personality—it's not a natural inclination for a self-centered, bookish guy. Though, in my defense, when the opportunity comes my way, I leap at it. 
    Last year, I ran into someone who works for the Night Ministry, and told him I've always wanted to write about their work with poor communities. Why it took that chance encounter, and I did just call them (or they call me, for that matter) says something about the accidental way a lot of stories come about. Anyway, I went out with their mobile care van, which led to this column about children being fed by the Night Ministry. While reporting the story, I heard that the Crib, their Halsted Street shelter is filled almost every night, and the surplus young people are given CTA cards and tossed out into the street, so I went back to write this column. 
      Last week I heard from the Night Ministry, with this story about a very sick woman and two concerned cops. I couldn't reach the cops -- police despise the media, and their whole besieged, wall-of-blue thing keeps them from acting like a public agency with a responsibility to discuss openly what they do. But even not talking to the officers involved, I decided I had enough of a story to put in the paper, as my Monday column. 

     You go to the police for help, not the other way around. They don’t come to you for aid, generally. But that was what two 14th District Chicago Police officers did last week.
     “They were very hesitant,” said Nancy Schreiber, a nurse with the Night Ministry, working at its medical clinic bus in Humboldt Park last Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
     “They came to the door of the bus and said, ‘Can you help us please?’ I’ve never been approached by the police to help them before. They said, ‘We have this woman and we don’t know what to do.’”
     Schreiber followed the officers to a bus shelter near California and Division.
     In her 12 years with the Night Ministry, the last line of assistance for Chicago’s impoverished, Schreiber has seen much that medical professionals rarely see: trenchfoot, frostbite, gangrene, untreated fractures, gashes that victims sutured themselves with clear tape. “These people are so marginalized, they hesitate to seek health care,” she said. “These people just suffer.”
     The woman the cops brought Schneider to was certainly suffering, lying on a bus stop bench, covered with huge open sores.
     "She looked 70," said Schreiber, who later found the woman is 53. "Probably 80 pounds soaking wet. She had these lesions all over."
     Schreiber immediately realized what she was seeing: MRSA - methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection common with the homeless.
     "I see it all the time," said Schreiber, who ran back to the bus, filled a shopping bag with bandages and ointment and tape. "I knew what she needed right now was to take care of those wounds." She also grabbed their intern Megan Libreros, 25, a student at UIC's Jane Addams College of Social Work, in her second week on the job. Her job was to talk to the woman. "She was really worked up and did not want to go to the hospital," said Libreros.
     The police officers offered to take the woman to Cook County hospital. "Which is very unusual," said Schreiber, who told her, 'You're in a great deal of pain. The only thing to help you would be IV antibiotics. You really need to go to a hospital."
     "I can't do that," the woman answered.
     She had been to county, she said, and while they treated her well, on the third day she went into the hall to look for a nurse, and they locked her in restraints. An ambulance was also out of the question.
     "If we call an ambulance, it'll take them to nearest hospital, which is Norwegian [American Hospital]," said Schreiber. "They are very punitive to homeless people. They don't give them treatment, push them out of emergency room and then bill them extraordinary amounts. We don't send anyone there anymore because they are not treated with any respect." (I called Norwegian and talked to their spokeswoman and she had no comment.)
      The woman was wearing what looked like pajamas, the thin material sticking to the wounds when the nurse tried to pull it back.
     "Every time, the wounds would open up," said Libreros. "She was screaming with pain," This was the point where some cops would have tipped their hats and gone about their business. But these guys stuck around.
     "They were really nice," Libreros said. "They really cared about her and tried to make sure she got the best care she needed. I've been doing this for a few years, I've had a lot of bad experiences working with the Chicago Police. But they were great."
     "What's wonderful is the involvement of the police," said Schreiber. "The humanity, overwhelmingly positive, above and beyond the call of duty. I called the station, trying to get their names. They haven't called back." That's typical. I called the 14th district a few times, too, plus news affairs, knowing they'd never respond, and they didn't.
     The cops on the scene, however, did what was necessary - maybe. "I believed that death was imminent, she was so toxic from these wounds," Schreiber said. "One would be stressful; she had them everywhere."
     Schreiber told the cops the woman was in no condition to decide. So they took her to St. Mary's - at least they said they were.
     "We called St. Mary's, and have no way of knowing if she got treatment or what happened after the police left with her," said Schreiber. "It was heartwarming, to see how these two gentlemen tried to help her."
     Libreros was able to learn a little about the woman, her name and history. She had a place to stay up until July. Then a Social Security check didn't arrive. A reminder that people on the street are just that.
     "They are people," Libreros said. "They are not different from any of us. They're either down on hard times or have mental illness. We're all really close to being in that place someday. No telling what in her life took a turn and went wrong. That could be me in 10 years, or you, or anybody else."

      

The Old Lie

   
     President Obama rose to power as an effective speaker. I haven't heard him give a bad speech yet, and last week's was no different. As I listened to him explain Tuesday why we need to make a limited air strike against Syria, why he could order it as president, but wants Congress's approval, as icing on the cake, it seemed to me the whole argument hinges on poison gas being an unacceptable weapon, as if it differs in some important and fundamental way from bullets and bombs and missiles. 
     Does it? And if it does, where did that distinction come from? I had a vague belief that it can be traced to World War I, but that's about all I knew, and I decided to look into the matter a bit. The result is in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times. 
     One element that didn't make its way into the column is this—one truth that echoes loudly from World War I, gas or no gas—is the insanity of war, the horrendous human cost for muddled and minor political motives. World War I is not the war to invoke when proposing ill-conceived military jaunts. Claiming they will be quick and easy only makes it worse. They're always supposed to be quick and easy, at the start. When the war to end all wars began in August, 1914, everybody thought it would be over by Christmas, and young men raced to enlist, lest they miss the fun. When President Obama invokes gas, he unknowingly invokes Wilfred Owen's haunting poem "Dolce et Decorum Est," which I've linked to below. When you look at what World War I was like, it's amazing that anybody ever fought another war.  But that's people for you. They forget. Even smart people like Barack Obama forget. Two bloody and dubious Middle East wars barely come to a close, and we're already lurching toward our next one. Saying it will be quick and easy. As always.

     What’s so bad about poison gas?
     Bad enough that the United States could sit on its hands, uttering a few feeble protests, while 100,000 Syrians were killed through conventional means. But 1,300 civilians were murdered Aug. 21 in a poison gas attack, and that spurred us to action, or to near action.
     Where’s this distinction coming from?
     It’s a century-old revulsion. People associate poison gas with the horrors of World War I, but its use in warfare was already illegal according to international law — and already produced by most major powers anyway — in the late 19th century.
     What World War I did was loosen qualms against using poison gas. The outbreak of war in 1914 saw the last gasp of military chivalry: there really was a spontaneous Christmas truce in Flanders in 1914, with soldiers meeting in No Man’s Land to shake hands, sing carols and exchange gifts. Using poison gas was seen as “cowardly.”
     But by spring 1915, the wholesale trench warfare slaughter made such notions laughable. The First Battle of Ypres cost 100,000 lives. By the second clash outside the flattened Belgian city, qualms against gas were set aside. On April 22, 1915, the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine gas from 5,700 cylinders across a five-mile line into a wind blowing toward French Moroccan troops, who saw the green cloud coming, then were suffocating, vomiting blood, burying their faces in the dirt seeking relief.
     Most of the French front line died or fled in panic, opening a four-mile gap in Allied defenses which the Germans, understandably reluctant to charge into their own gas - they had gas masks but didn't trust them - and lacking reserves, did not take advantage of. Raw Canadian troops, outnumbered but improvising respirators from handkerchiefs soaked in urine, rushed to fill the breech and held their line, a feat of bravery that, at the time, was deemed glorious and predicted to be "the theme of song and story as long as the world endures" but, of course, wasn't.
     So why did poison gas seem so awful in a war that saw the first general use of machine guns and armored tanks and aerial bombing and flame throwers? Gas was silent. It could linger on battlefields for days. Heavier than air, it crept into basements and trenches, the very places where soldiers fled expecting a degree of safety. It killed men in "horrid and unendurably painful ways," often blinding them. Gas masks didn't always work. The Germans later introduced mustard gas, which didn't suffocate, but burned, invisible, and soldiers could be exposed and not even know it for days (that's why WWI soldiers always look so overdressed, in leggings and wraps; the practice was to cover every inch of exposed skin).
     Plus, it hadn't been used. "The novelty of poison gas," wrote Michael S. Neiberg. "Its unnatural greenish and yellow colorations, and its use in contravention of international law all lent gas an air of barbarity and savagery that other weapons never had."
     To top it off, while all nations had it, gas had been first used effectively by the Germans, one of the "heinous devices created by these demons of depravity," to quote W.C. King's post-war book "Germany's Crime Against Humanity." The British called mustard gas "H.S.," for "hun stuff."
     So poison gas was bad because our enemy used it - that's what history remembers, a bit of lingering propaganda. Though the U.S. military, loath to lose any weapon, tried to rehabilitate poison gas after the war.
     "War is abhorrent to the individual, yet he accepts blowing men to pieces with high explosive, mowing men down with machine guns, and even sinking a battleship in mid-ocean with its thousand or fifteen hundred men being carried to certain death," Earl J. Atkisson, head of the U.S. 1st Gas Regiment, wrote in 1925. "However, to burn the skin of a man outrages all his civilized instincts."
     The bottom line is that any weapon that depends on the wind is of limited strategic use. Thus it is gas' undependability, more than anything else, that places it in a special category of disapproval. If it worked better, we'd find it in our hearts to use it. Land mines are devastating against civilians, too, in a sense worse than gas, since they remain a threat for years after being deployed. The world is nearly united against land mines, but the U.S. feels it needs mines to hem in the North Koreans, so we refuse to join all land mine bans. Morality has its limits.
     Gas is bad because all weapons of war are bad. That President Barack Obama would single it out in this fashion is more a quirk of history than any absolute ethical point. Odd that we would risk war over some century-old propaganda. Then again, it's been done before.

Wilfred Owen, Britain's great martyr poet of World War I, wrote a haunting poem about a gas attack, Dolce et Decorum Est. For those whose Latin is a little rusty, "dolce et decorum est, pro patria mori" means "sweet and proper it is, to die for one's country."

Stuff I Love #6 -- Gransfors Bruks Scandinavian Forest Axe

     One pitfall facing the aging middle-aged suburban male is a phenomenon I think of as "tool porn" — an obsession over tools, focusing on the best and most expensive, detached completely from the requirements of the job they are supposed to do.  
      In general I avoid this, by necessity, because the best tends to cost a lot of money, and I am on a perpetual budget. Good enough is usually plenty. I'm happy just to get my hands on the right size screwdriver; it doesn't have to come from France. Though occasionally I am drawn in to the allure of some glittering instrument. Once, for instance, it came time for me to buy a hammer, and I splurged and bought an Estwing hammer, not because of its cool all-steel construction, or comfortable blue handle, but because as a fossil-hunting youth, I had an Estwing rock hammer, and felt nostalgic attachment toward the brand. I wanted it. 
     Of course I was punished. Those who give in to the tool porn urge usually are. In line at the Home Depot, waiting to purchase my beloved Estwing hammer, the lady behind me leaned forward, draped her big bazoo over my shoulder, and asked, "How much does that cost?" 
     "Umm," I said, taken aback. "$19.99." 
     She snorted.
     "What does it do for that—drive the nails in itself?"
     I did not point out to her that the difference between the Estwing and the cheapest conceivable hammer, at, say, five bucks, is a whopping $15 which, amortized over the 30 years I would be swinging that hammer, was effectively nothing—a penny a week—compared to the joy of ownership I would derive. Or would have derived, had the pleasure not been permanently mitigated, a little, by the echo of that woman's derisive cackle. Thanks lady,
     I tell that story to drive home how I was predisposed against ever buying a Gransfors Bruks axe.  I had never seen one, or even heard of the company, way the heck over in Sweden. Unlike the Estwing, I had no emotional attachment to the brand. But I was helping a neighbor chop up a tree that fell in a storm, using whatever crude mass-produced axe I had lying around. "Wait a sec," he said, running into the house, returning. "Here," he said, holding a sleek axe lightly atop his open, upward turned palms. "Try this."
      Cutting the tree apart with it was like hacking apart a stick of butter with a red-hot meat cleaver. The thing just felt good in my hands. Hand-forged in Sweden by a Swedish blacksmith. A handle of hickory, rubbed with oil and beeswax. 
        It also cost money, I learned from research, $130, or about five times the price of a decent axe that would do the job well enough and last for the rest of my life.

        This was, oh, 2007. I thought about that axe for the next five years. I remember being in a knife shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 2009, noticing they carry the axes, asking the clerk to see one, feeling its heft, wondering whether it should be my souvenir of our great trip out West, considering the c-note and a third, and handing it back with a sigh. 
      Years passed. You can only be a bystander at life's feast, as James Joyce says, gnawing on your own rectitude, for so long. Finally, a year ago Father's Day, I gave in, and told my wife that the time had come to deploy the axe, as my Father's Day present. I didn't have to say any more. My wife, God bless her, leaped to her assigned task. It's a lot for an axe, but not so much for an indulgent gift. Give the Swedes credit, the axe comes with several books and pamphlets that tell me everything from the address of the Swedish Axe Throwing Society (730 30 Kolsva) to the name and photo of the actual  blacksmith who forged my particular axe (Kjell-Ake Sjolund) to how to hew the logs for a log house (don't ask; it's complicated). 
     The axe does the job. You can fell trees, you can limb them. Hold the axe up high, by the throat, and you can strip small branches from a tree faster than anything. I'm blessed with a tangled woodsy property at one edge of my yard, and I am constantly on the prowl for buckthorn and other garbage trees to take out. The axe also looks great. Every year, when I go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit a pal, I bring it with me, and the other guys find reasons to use what my buddy Rick has nicknamed "The Swede." Chopping with it is pleasure, and exercise. By the time someone with a chainsaw has finished priming and starting and adjusting it, I can cut through a tree with my axe. I've looked at cheap axes at the store - they just don't come close. Heavy, crude, unbalanced implements. It's like comparing a surgeon's scalpel with an old butter knife. 
      Frankly, you don't even have to use it. There is a joy to owning a really good tool. Just having it. You should own something that's the best there is. My house isn't the best house on the block, and my car isn't the best car. But my axe, well, is the best axe, the very best — well, mine and my next-door neighbor's, who has the exact same model, the Gransfors Bruks Scandinavian Forest Axe. He never questioned why I bought one. Owning one himself, he already knew. 

Stuff I Love #5: Zippo lighter

      Few machines are perfect, in that any attempt at improvement would only diminish them. A spoon comes to mind. Oh, you can alter the size for the task at hand—a teaspoon for coffee, a tablespoon for soup, a serving spoon to ladle out creamed corn. But the basic design -- an oval bowl attached to a stalk -- cannot be improved upon.  
     Ditto for a Zippo lighter, the perfect fire machine. Even better than a spoon, since varieties of size are not necessary. Just one rectangular metal block, 1 3/8 inch wide by 2 1/8 inches tall, slightly rounded at the top. I carry one and I don't even smoke -- it's a joy just to hold, to feel those dimensions in the palm of your hand. To be honest, I'd value a chunk of metal that size, just as a talisman. Something solid to grasp. The fact that a Zippo also lights stuff is a lagniappe, an added bonus.
     And light things it does. The top opens with a snap.  Run your thumb against a toothed wheel, striking sparks against a flint, setting fire to a cotton wick that sits in the center of a chimney vented by 16 holes.  The chimney keeps the wind from blowing out the flame. To extinguish the fire, just close the top with a ca-thunk, like a luxury car door slamming.
     They're inexpensive. When George Blaisedell sold the first one -- the name "Zippo" taken from "zipper" -- in 1933, it cost $1.95. You can buy one almost exactly like it now for $12. 
      Changelessness is part of the appeal. The brass Zippo lighter I've been carrying around forever is almost precisely the device outlined in Blaisedell's patent application of March 3, 1936. A Zippo is like baseball. Okay, like baseball, Zippo has played around with change, introducing various thinner models, trying to improve upon perfection and catch the fickle whims of shifting public taste. But those are like the Designated Hitter Rule -- distractions from the pure form of the  original. The original remains the best.
    The Zippo has style.  When James Bond gives the FBI his accoutrement wish list in Live and Let Die, he asks for "a Swank tie-clip in the shape of a whip, an alligator skin bill-fold from Mark Cross, a plain Zippo lighter." Frank Sinatra is buried with his Zippo, the better to light his pack of Camels in the afterworld. You can buy a solid gold Zippo (in 18K, $14,786.28, complete with cherry wood display case) though I would not recommend it. One of the joys of a Zippo is, if you lose yours—and I have—you're out 12 bucks, and you go get another. No biggie.
     It's sturdy. The company could have economized. Made it out of plastic, like everything else. The Zippo is over-engineered. There's no need for this case that would stop a bullet and has. But then they might have to rethink their lifetime warranty, expressed in seven words: "It works or we'll fix it free." You could probably break a Zippo, but you'd need a hammer.   
       I think that's the heart of why I love my Zippo. The company didn't cheap out, didn't compromise. You can look at so many products just ruined by economizing—Cracker Jack comes to mind. Once upon a time, they gave you a real Toy Surprise Inside. Now it's some worthless paper crap, a sticker, nothing. Worried about choking death liability, no doubt. Even a 7-year-old feels cheated. 
       Not with Zippo, probably because it's still family owned -- by Blaisedell's grandson, in fact. They sell about 18 million lighters a year, half a billion so far.
      It's hard to imagine who, with the option of a Zippo, would use a disposible butane lighter instead. Drug addicts I suppose. Teenagers who don't know any better. People to whom aesthetics mean nothing.  The same people who prefer fast food to real food. 
     With a Zippo, you're ready for anything. I wouldn't hike without one—if I get lost, and have to spend a cold night in a national park, my campfire is going to be lit by a Zippo. It'll never happen, but having the Zippo gives me confidence, security, reassurance. A Zippo is practically a piece of military equipment. Soldiers love them. "The most coveted thing in the Army," Ernie Pyle wrote during World War II. In Vietnam, troops would engrave and decorate their Zippos as expressions of their inner selves. 
    Nor is the Zippo good just for lighting things. The lighter fluid inside is very much like dry cleaning liquid, and I've opened it up and used the cotton inside to remove spots from clothes, in a pinch. I've used the little bit of extra space in the top to store tiny items. With a Zippo, you're always ready to tuck a loose diamond in your pocket and not worry about losing it. 
     As much as I've used its flame, I've used my Zippo to burn off nervous energy -- snap the top open, clunk the top closed, snap open, clunk closed. Repeat that a few times, and suddenly the fugitive thought you are seeking arrives.
     Finally—and this is least important, but still real—Zippos are the most cool you can buy for 12 bucks. You pull out a Zippo, people ooo and ahh. They want to see it, hold it, touch it. And who can blame them?
   

  

Stuff I Love #4: Big Toe Uglydoll

     About five years ago, the boys and I visited Evanston, and you really can't visit Evanston properly unless you stop by Comix Revolution, the hip comic book store—and cool book shop, and trendy toy store—on Davis Street. 
     So we're visiting Comix Revolution, and the boys are selecting their comics, and my attention is drawn by a rack of Uglydolls, these homely stuffed creatures, horned and bug-eyed and snaggle-toothed, in shades of rust red and powder blue and lime green, created in 2002 by a young couple, David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim. The two had met at the Parsons School for Design, become friends, then Kim's parents pressed her to return home to South Korea in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. They exchanged letters, of course, and in one Horvath doodled a little cartoonish figure. Kim, a designer. liked the character, and sewed it into an actual plush plaything, then sent it to him. Horvath showed his girlfriend's creation to a friend who owned the Giant Robot novelty store in Los Angeles. He asked for 20, which Kim dutifully hand made. Thus a hugely successful toy company was born. The creatures have big flat faces and thousand-yard stares, their ancient gaze reminiscent of Babylonian

Lewis chessmen

idols and Lewis chessmen, at least to me. They're also made of a fabric that somehow manages to look both new and worn at the same time. There is a folk art, hand-stitched quality to them—no two are exactly the same. They are placid, encouraging, serene.
     Particularly this one fellow, named "Big Toe," though he doesn't have any toes at all.  I plucked him off the rack and regarded him, eye to eye, smiling. Just then, my older boy, about 12 at the time, drifted by and noticed. "Oh, so you like that one, eh dad?" he taunted. "Why don't you buy him, huh? Why don't you buy him for yourself?"
     "I think I will," I said, calling his bluff, savoring my son's instant expression change from sneer to open-mouthed surprise.  I took my purchase to the cash register, the boy following me, unbelieving. "I'll take this little guy," I said. Ten bucks—not bad.
     "Do you want a bag?" the clerk asked.
     "No," I announced, with a quick backwards glance. "I think I'll carry him with me." And I tucked him under my arm, his broad face peeking out at heart level, and we exited onto Davis Street together, one grinning, victorious dad, head high, stepping lively, almost marching, followed by two cringing lads, searching the faces of passersby for reaction, trying to fold themselves into little inconspicuous balls.
     A joke like that is too delicious to just let drop. At home, I placed Big Toe atop a pillow on my bed, to the amusement of my wife, at first.
      "My husband sleeps with a doll," she marveled.
      "Not a doll," I corrected her. "An action figure. A Secret Agent Midnight Ninja Big Toe." The full-sized Big Toe is actually blue, but this guy is from a line of smaller Uglydolls, 8 inches tall. He's deep black, with an oval dark orange nose. The nose is key, somehow, though I can't explain why.
      The boys took to stealing Big Toe, spiriting him away by force or guile. I of course had to rescue him, and there would be epic battles, chases, wrestling matches, keep-aways, intrigues. Years passed.    
     In a burst of inspiration, I bought a second Big Toe—dubbed "Faux Toe"—that the boys didn't know about.  He started as a stunt double—I was genuinely worried about the original Toe being manhandled to pieces, after having borne so much in the line of duty. I respected him too much to allow that to happen. Two would last longer.
      But he also became a kind of  decoy. This second Toe allowed the first Big Toe, whom I of course called "True Toe," to vanish in one spot, and then re-appear somewhere else, in sleights of hands that confounded the boys. It was a great moment in the dad/boys tug-o-war when the older boy finally realized there were two, my reluctance to have the deception finally revealed overshadowed by pride of accomplishment.
       More Toes were purchased. One to mark our visit to F.A.O Schwarz in New York City. My wife actually bought me another for Valentine's Day. Yet another came aboard after a visit to Comix Revolution when I spied a Toe that just, well, he called out to me. I couldn't leave him. He was very puffy.  To be honest, it took an act of will to stop at five, a gathering I refer to as "The Full Congress": True Toe, Faux Toe, New Toe, Skew Toe (he looks a bit to the left) and Tip Toe, who has an ear pointing up. 
     By now, with the passage of years, the boys have moved beyond such things. And me? Well, I'm working on it. Okay, I'm not working on it. I've surrendered to it. I consider them half Legion of Superheroes, half domestic staff, on the job, radiating a certain good-natured tranquility, and a diligence, keeping an eye on things. They're very stolid and uncomplaining, and I value that.
     "Thank you for your service," I'll say, passing one standing guard atop a pillow. "You're doing yeoman's work, Mr. Toe." Having five out at a time would be cluttered—they tend to topple over—so usually one is on duty, while the others wait in reserve. "Okay Mr. Toe," I'll say,  "let's get you to a secure location, right away." And he'll be swapped out for fresh reinforcements.
     Yes, I know. Sometimes the whole thing risks veering into the deeply strange, assuming it is not there already. Once I covertly replaced a photo of the older boy, in a double frame on my night table alongside a picture of his brother, with a photo of Mr. Toe, then waited patiently for the boy to notice. He did, eventually, to great effect. Perhaps the highlight of my fatherhood experience.
     Occasionally I have to remind my wife that it's all a joke.  A grown man, particularly one my age, not to mention my deep cynicism and highly-polished intellect, would never really love these things, never really give them honorifics—Mr. Toe, Dr. Toe, Prof. Toe, Senator Toe, Field Marshal Toe. That would be silly, ridiculous even. Yes, all a joke, a long-running deception, a comedy routine that I imagine might risk getting old, someday. But not yet. It still retains its freshness and splendor and high hilarity, at least for me. And my wife, God bless her, plays along, usually. We'll both be reading in bed, focusing on our books.
     "A doll!" she'll exclaim, very precisely, almost tartly, turning a page. She sounds almost annoyed, which of course is impossible. "A dollie."
     "Action..." I'll correct her, feigning annoyance myself, drawing out the word through clenched teeth, "figure."    

 
     

Stuff I love #3: Tire swing

     When we moved to Northbrook in 2000, the boys were 3 and 4, and the big old sugar maple in the front yard called out for a tire swing. I'm not sure why. It wasn't as if I had a tire swing as a kid. Heck, I can't recall ever swinging on one.  Growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, our brand new single story ranch house didn't have a tree that could support a tire swing had we wanted one. A puny linden in the front yard, the delicate V of a young birch at the side.  Nothing like this enormous sugar maple filling the front yard, dwarfing the house, its branches, like extended palms, quietly murmuring, "Gimme the swing." 
       I had never attempted a tire swing before, but I knew a tire is required. Not a new tire of course—that would be stupid—but an old tire. Where does one get old tires? A service station, of course. They take old tires off, so must have them lying around. 

     We stopped at a gas station in the city. There was a stack of old tires by the service bays. Trying to exude an air of competence, I went up to a guy in a blue mechanic's uniform. 

    "Hello there," I said. "Please tell me, my good fellow, how much money would you require to part with a used tire?" I might not have used those exact words, but my tone was the same. I'm sure that's what the grease monkey heard. He gave me a long, appraising look.

     "Well," he said, "considering that I pay $1 a tire to have them hauled away, I'd say you can take as many as you like."

      Slightly surprised, I selected an appealing looking whitewall, purchased a hearty length of rope later at the hardware store, and hung the tire.  For many years, the boys span and swung on that tire. It was the epicenter of delight. Every so often I'll hook my foot inside, step up, grab the rope and go for a ride myself. 

      But beyond that ... and this only struck me recently ... I've never seen a house in the Northwest suburbs with a tire swing in the front yard. Rather amazing, now that I think of it. Maybe a tire swing is considered low rent. A few bucks—the price of a rope—and a little effort to snag a free tire. The swing doesn't exude wealth or status. Although I would argue that there is a wealth of feeling, of casual warmth and easy living behind it. 
    To my neighbors' credit, they never complained, at least not to me, and my hunch is, not to anybody. Because they wouldn't hide a thing like that, especially now. Someone would blurt out, "So, the boys almost off to college, guess it's time to cut down that old swing, huh?" Nobody has said that yet, and I'm not expecting them to. My sense is they like the swing. There is something very welcoming, something low key and unpretentious about a tire swing. The boys haven't swung in it for years, and kids don't come over so much anymore. But we're keeping it up, because, well, it wouldn't be home without it. 

Stuff I Love #2: IBM Electric Clock

      It was a focal point in the school rooms of my youth. Spare and perfect and beautiful, from its sans-serif numbers, to the little black hash marks denoting the minutes, to that red second hand, which somehow pulled it all together. This was the top-of-the-line electric wall clock for decades, and all other brands were something less. Which leads us to the iconic "IBM," the name attached, not to some complex computer mainframe, but a simple electric motor pushing hands around a face, the most basic analog display. 
     Actually, not so simple—not just an individual clock plugged into a wall, but part of a complex master/slave timekeeping system where the individual clocks were controlled by a central timepiece, a coordination particularly essential in schools, where you couldn't have dozens of different classrooms beginning and ending at dozens of slightly differing times, all based on the varying time kept in each room. 
     If it seems odd to have an IBM clock, and it does, that's because we're swayed by recent history, "recent" meaning over the past 60 years. The business was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, changing its name to the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924. Long before IBM dreamed of digital computers, it was selling factory timecard devices and clock systems, along with commercial scales, tabulators, plus meat and cheese slicers. 
      This particular clock was manufactured by the IBM Time Equipment Division, and was shipped, according to its serial number, in January, 1957, to the grey trapezoidal barge of the Chicago Sun-Times Building at 401 N. Wabash, which was about to open. It did its job without fail for 47 years. Then just before the building was torn down, in 2004, I had the foresight to rescue this clock from the fourth floor lunchroom. I had looked at it for 17 years, decided that we had a bond, and nobody else seemed to want it anyway.
     If you just have to have one, with no condemned newspaper building at hand to plunder, Schoolhouse Electric created a reproduction that you can buy for $235. Though it runs on a single C battery, which seems a flaw -- mine plugs into the wall, and I imagine that changing that battery would become a chore. You can buy the originals on eBay, probably for less, depending on the condition.  Some look pretty beat up. 
     Mine is fairly pristine.   It keeps nearly-perfect time. I have it hanging at eye level, just beyond my computer—which of course also would tell me the time,with utterly accurate atomic clock precision. But it just isn't the same. The IBM clock has a certain seriousness to it. This is a NORAD clock, the clock you would expect at the command center deep within Cheyenne Mountain, many of them in a row, set to various times around the globe: New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo. A Cold War clock. Yet, alongside its dignity, and its manifestation of the relentlessness and importance of time, the IBM clock is not without an element of joy, the release it promised long ago to all those youthful faces that looked up at it during tough long division classes. The escape that's coming, if only you do your work and wait. Now, of course, older, we'd hold it back more than we'd urge it forward, though we can do neither. Tempus fugit, as the Romans said. No stopping that. So we might as well watch time flee in as pure and aesthetic a form as possible.