Misericordia: One size doesn't fit all

Sister Rosemary Connelly

     "Above all gentlemen," Talleyrand once said, "no zeal."  He didn't mean no zeal for good causes, or no zeal to help others, but rather no Procrustean determination to treat different situations the same way, or to cling to rigid dogma and ignore particulars. I've been writing about Misericordia for years, ever since I was the paper's charities, foundations and private social services reporter. If it had a dark side, I would know about it. Being politically-connected, I suppose, to the degree that having powerful friends is a sin. 
      So I'm continually shocked to find that this compassionate and competent  home for hundreds of people with disabilities is scorned by some because it's a large institution, period, end of story, since the current trend in housing people with physical and mental challenges is to have smaller residences. It isn't right, to blame Misericordia for the faults of others, or for the faults of large institutions in the past, while ignoring what is good about the place. There is a scandal involving Misericordia, I like to say, and the scandal is there's only one. 
      Or maybe I'm just swayed by the persuasive charm of Sister Rosemary. For the first time in the nearly five months since I've begun this blog, I balked at telling someone its name. I started to, at lunch. Had my mouth open to say the words. But I looked at her and just couldn't do it. Could you? 

      Sister Rosemary Connelly is worried.

      “There are advocates out there, some paid by the government, who really feel that anything big is bad, and there’s no exceptions,” she tells me.

      We’re having lunch at the Greenhouse Inn, one of the more extraordinary restaurants in Chicago, staffed almost entirely by residents of Misericordia, a Catholic home for people with developmental disabilities, particularly Down Syndrome.

      The issue is an old one. Abuses at large institutions warehousing the disabled were a scandal, particularly in Illinois, and in some places still are. The state is pushing to move people out of institutions into small, independent living residences.

     Sister Rosemary feels unfairly maligned.
     "If you're big, you're bad," she says, summarizing critics' thinking. "They're very angry at us because we weaken their story, because we're good. They really would love to get rid of Misericordia."
     She has been in the this business since 1969. She has seen how someone can be active one year and helpless the next.
     "What are we going to do when these people become so disabled? Where are they going to go?" she said. "Dump them in inappropriate nursing homes, and that will be one of the scandals of our time. But right now there's only one way to serve the people, according to a few of these advocates."
     At first I think Sister Rosemary is exaggerating. People without disabilities choose a spectrum of living arrangements - dorm, commune, hut on a remote island - why should it be any different for those facing handicaps? Saying people must live independently is as rigid, and potentially dangerous, as saying they must live in an institutions. "Each according to his own need," as the communists say.
     Surely, she's too focused on her respected institution, which has its own independent houses on campus and is building more. Who, exactly, I ask, are you worried about?
     "Certain very powerful groups, like Arc, they have no room for Misericordia," she says. "And they heavily influence bureaucrats in the federal and state government."
      For all its wealthy patrons, Misericordia relies on government funding, which can be tardy. "2012 was a terrible year for [the state] paying their bills," says Sister Rosemary. "They owed us $27 million."
     The money's flowing again, but this worry remains. I phone the Arc of Illinois, an advocacy group. Executive Director Tony Paulauski doesn't want to speak of Misericordia. "I don't think it's newsworthy," he says. "What's newsworthy is rebalancing. This is a nonissue."
     Gosh Tony, thanks, but how about you don't tell me my business and I won't tell you yours? I have an 82-year-old nun who is worried that when she isn't here, pulling strings, people like you will tear down what she has spent her life building. Humor me.
     "It's a nursing-home model, Neil," he says. "We have better models now. I'm spending all my time on the state closing antiquated state institutions. That's the real story."
     So she's right to worry? "I don't want to tick her off," he says. "I don't want to tick her legislators off. I don't want to detract from what's really important."
     Shutting down big institutions like Misericordia and moving their residents out?
     "Yeah," he said. "What we want to see is people controlling their own homes, choosing what they want to eat for dinner, doing what you and I take for granted."
     I'm all for that too. But when you tour Misericordia, and see people who are locked into their bodies, eyes clamped shut, hands curled and frozen, the idea that they have to be removed from this setting and placed somewhere else to serve some greater activist ideology is what we laymen call "nuts."
     "It's all an overreaction to the past," says Sister Rosemary. "Where big was bad. Today big can be bad, it can be good. Small can be bad. The question is, how much supervision is going into these houses."
     She still remembers what happened last time there was a drive against institutions.
     "A man came in from Boston and said orphanages are bad, close them all, stop the funding," she says. "When I see middle-age people on the street, I wonder, are those the success stories of the 1970s? That they placed them in inadequate places, but they got them out of orphanages?"
     Misericordia isn't going anywhere, for now - with 600 residents, it has a 500-person waiting list. The families of those residents, and those who hope to be residents, obviously see its value. It's a shame that those who should know better refuse to see it as well. I'd like to tell you that you're wrong to worry, Sister. But you're not wrong.

"He's perfect."

     My editor asked me to tell a love story about a same-sex couple who would now be getting married, in the wake of the Illinois legislature legalizing gay marriage, and I was fortunate to find Tzu-Kai Lo and Alain Villeneuve—behold the power of Facebook. 
    There is one bit of background I should mention. As I started to report the story, and the details of their romance, I had a moment of ... I'm not sure what. Difficulty. Despite my 20 years writing about this subject, and despite supporting equal civil rights for gays and lesbians, I had never really focused on one couple before, never chronicled a narrative like this one. To my surprise, there was a renegade qualm, apparently, somewhere in the back of my mind that can be roughly translated as, "It's two guys." I paused, perceived it, contemplated it, then overcame it—shook it off, basically—realizing, once again, that each of us has vestigial prejudices lingering somewhere in the vast cosmos of his or her brain, and everyone has to be vigilant in order to treat others with the fairness and compassion that we all expect and we all deserve. 

Alain Villeneuve, left, with Tzu-Kai Lo (and Oscar)

     Tzu-Kai Lo was studying for his Masters in Law at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 2001.

     If you think studying law is difficult, try studying law when your command of the English language is shaky. Lo, born in Taiwan, had been in the U.S. for just two years.

     And the class wasn’t just law but patent law. That is like regular law, only duller.

     In his class was another international student, Alain Villeneuve, a French speaker from Montreal whose English was excellent and constantly being heard in class.

    One evening, Lo was studying, or trying to, bewildered at what he was attempting to understand.     

     Desperate, he thought the Canadian student might help him.

     “He talked a lot in class, always talking,” Lo said. “You cannot stop him. I figured I would ask him for help.”

     And OK, to be honest, Lo thought the chatty classmate was hot.
     "I can't say there is not some interest," he said.
     But there was a problem. They had met, but Lo didn't know his name.
     "I was never really properly introduced to him," he said.
     So Lo went to the University of Illinois' website portal and started looking at the 600 faces on the profiles of his fellow students, beginning with "A."
     And looked.
     And looked.
     Villeneuve starts with a "V," remember. The search took an hour.
     But what is a love story without obstacles?
     Villeneuve got a momentous phone call.
     "This guy with a big accent asked me to help him with homework," said Villeneuve, a man with a checkered past.
     "I'm a weird guy," he said. "I was once married to a woman, for 10 years. A French woman."
     He had known he was gay since he was 12 (his mother said she knew since he was 6). But he had never had a boyfriend. When he married, Villeneuve was a 21-year-old engineer.
     "When I met this woman, she was very French, and I said, 'OK, I'll run with this,'" Villeneuve remembered. "She was like a best friend."
     But at some point, best friends aren't enough. He divorced her, left France, gave up engineering, started life again.
     "I came back to the U.S., went to law school," he said. Then one day the phone rang. A guy from patent law class.
     "He wanted more than my knowledge of patent law," Villeneuve said. "My heart started racing. I never felt that."
     For Lo, though their meeting was "destiny," love took a little longer. He was impressed with how Villeneuve helped him study—crafting charts, prodding him to work harder with gifts, helping him clear the linguistic hurdles.
     "It was a difficult and frustrating time for me," Lo said. "He was very, very patient. That's when I said, 'He pretty much is standing by my side.' "
     The two moved in together.
     "For quite some time I didn't tell my family about our relationship," Lo said. "They knew something was going on, but it was a don't ask/don't tell situation. I officially came out to my sisters three years ago. They were shocked, but they were happy because it was a person they knew."
     The two men—Villeneuve is 46, Lo a decade younger—live in a high-rise near Navy Pier with their West Highland White Terriers, Austin and Oscar, as well as a tight-knit group of friends who admire them.
     "They're great. Completely in love," said Paul Coyle, a partner at Villeneuve's firm, Vedder Price.
     "They're a great example of why marriage is a civil right. They're no different than any other couple in terms of being committed to each other."
     They knew they were for each other before marriage was a distant possibility.
     "In our case, it's life partners. I'm old-fashioned," Villeneuve said. "I believe in marriage, in being faithful and truthful, and being exclusive with someone."
     The idea of marriage crept up obliquely.
     Villeneuve gave Lo a lovely ring. Then another. "The first one wasn't good enough," Villeneuve said.
     Usually a proposal leads to a ring; here it was the other way around.
     "It wasn't really about proposing, it was about my Christmas gift," Lo said. "He is French Canadian—Christmas is a very important holiday for them. Because of our two dogs, I don't like to board them. So I always have him travel to Montreal by himself. He felt guilty, leaving me alone on Christmas, even though I don't particularly care at all. He got me a ring from Graff. A very, very substantial ring. It was a very beautiful ring. He said, 'This is your engagement ring.' In that sense it was a proposal, though not in a very formal setting."
     Lo wears three rings—platinum bands—one tastefully circled with diamonds. Villeneuve wears a pinkie ring that belonged to Lo's father, a Taiwanese government official.
     Meanwhile, the move toward legalized same-sex marriage continued unfolding.
     "We're both lawyers. We've been following this very closely," Villeneuve said.
     They had been tempted to form a civil union. Same-sex marriage is illegal in Taiwan, though the legislature is moving to change that. It's been legal in Canada since 2005, and Villeneuve's family is there.
     "I think it's a sign of respect [to be allowed to be married]," Villeneuve said. "We're not going to do this until we have equal rights."
     Then Illinois law changed Tuesday.
     "We saw the news," Lo said. "I'd been following the bill online all day and listened to part of the live debate. I texted him, and he was, 'OK, great, let's get married.' "
     "We just kind of waited it out," Villeneuve said. "It's recognition from the straight majority in the state that the fighting's over. A sign of recognition. We've been together for 12 years; we want to be together for 30 years. We need marriage."
     Nobody wants to be proposed to in a text, however.
     "It wasn't him getting down on one knee," Lo said. "I wrote back, 'Hold on a second, you've got to propose again, make sure this time it's more formal.' "
     That's coming, along with a big wedding, and, maybe, kids conceived via surrogate.
     "We want to get married in the state of Illinois," Villeneuve said. "It wasn't making sense for us to be traveling off to get married in a different state."
     And why does Villeneuve want to marry Lo?
     "Why? Kai's Kai. He's perfect. I love him," Villeneuve said. "He's a young prince. He's gorgeous. He's brilliant. He could have been a model if he was a little taller. The full package, just the full package. He's like a tiger mom, very demanding on himself and others."
     And why does Lo want to marry Villeneuve? He spoke about his grandmother, how they were very close, and he dreamt of her a lot after she died in 1998.
     "When we started living together, I dreamt of her less and less. She used to be my guardian angel," he said to Villeneuve, starting to cry. "Maybe she isn't anymore, because I have you. So maybe I have a new guardian angel."
     A June wedding?
     "I think so," Lo said. "The plan is to get married in June. We don't have a date yet."
     "I've been through this before," Villeneuve said. "We need a venue."
     "I know where the venue is," said Lo. "The Park Hyatt."
     So now, like countless other couples, Alain Villeneuve and Tzu-Kai Lo work out the logistics of their wedding, prompted by the classic nuptial concern that if they don't act fast, wherever they go they'll find, as Villeneuve put it, "another 5,000 couples waiting in line."
     June should be a very, very busy month for weddings in Illinois.
     And what is a love story without obstacles?

Happy Saturday

    So I'm walking through the newsroom one day last week, and I see, on a low metal shelf, where people dump stuff they don't want—books, snacks, promotional freebies—someone has left this cool little yellow football.
     I snatch it up, thinking, "Wow, lucky me. A little yellow football."
      And my heart was filled with joy, so much that I immediately displayed my prize to an editor nearby, and said something like, "Since I'm sometimes accused of being a pointy-headed intellectual, I'm going to share with you the exact thought that just went through my mind when I snagged this: 'Wow, lucky me.  A little yellow football.' It takes so little to make me happy."
     She looked at me strangely.       
    Okay, it's Saturday. Stupid stuff should get a pass on Saturday, a day that still retains the whiff of childhood about it. Probably because, when you're young, there is no school on Saturday, and when you grow up, no work either, so the liberating lightness of leisure enfolds the day, or should, or can.
     Said the man who invariably works on Saturday.

     Still. There's more. I take my little football—about the size of a small lemon—and go into my office, and immediately begin bouncing it high against the set of the New Catholic Encyclopedia I have atop a row of cabinets over my desk, near the ceiling. I hope this doesn't strike some readers as anti-Catholic hate -- they can be very sensitive, and focus on the oddest things. I wasn't venting rage against the New Catholic Encyclopedia, wasn't pelting it with this yellow prolate spheroid. 
     It was more of a habit. A while back, a journalism class from Brigham Young University in Idaho came to visit me, and brought a foam potato, as a sort of present. A life-size potato with "BYU" on it. At first I'd just squeeze the thing, occasionally. Then toss it up and catch it. Then bounce it off the cabinet. Then the New Catholic Encyclopedia—again, not violently, not in an anti-papist rage. Just for the exercise, for the distraction. (Jeez, you'd think I'd get credit for having the New Catholic Encyclopedia around, all 17 volumes. It didn't just show up there by itself. And yes, I do use it, when necessity arises). 
     Anyway, I'd toss the foam potato up, it would bounce around the encyclopedia, then drop down, taking unexpected trajectories, and I would catch it, or not catch it, it sometimes took strange bounces that required some skill to snag, it being potato-shaped and not round. The brief game was a welcome break from writing this stuff all the time. But one day, well, I tossed the potato too far, and it became trapped behind the New Catholic Encyclopedia.  It never bounced down. It's there now. 
     I suppose I could get up on the step stool I inherited when the paper shut its library (the same period when I shanghaied the New Catholic Encyclopedia) and retrieve it, but that would involve effort, and I just went without the simple childish pleasure of tossing a foam rubber tuber at a massive set of religious reference works and then catching it again. 
     Which will give you the background of why I was so happy to have the little football, beyond its littleness and yellowness and squishiness. I've been tossing it with more care.
     Anyway, it's Saturday. I think I'll stop writing, so you can stop reading, and we can both go do something fun, though this is my idea of fun, which I suppose is sorta sad.... 
      I should point out, in parting, that it never crossed my mind to wonder, until now, about whatever the little football is promoting. A TV show of some sort.  You wonder why they go to the trouble. 

Will Eggers' "Circle" be unbroken?

     Thursday I was coming back from lunch, and saw a big metal box high atop a pole, containing three cameras. A brutish looking contraption and, for good measure, a police officer happened to be standing across the street. I felt a chill. "Maybe I have this wrong," I thought, regarding the column that follows. "Maybe we will be trapped by all these technologies." Maybe it's foolish optimism, but I don't believe it, an opinion that sprouted long ago, when I read "1984" as a teen, and thought that such a society would require so many watchers, there wouldn't be any people left to watch. Not that we won't change, we will. But we don't need anyone to compel us; we distort ourselves. What happens is, we abandon much willingly—no one forces us to carry iphones and check them constantly, we just do that because we like it. But should technology intrude "too much," whatever we deem that to be, we immediately pull back, and assert ourselves. That at least is my hope.

Franklin Street pocket park, 11/06/13

     Two weeks ago Sunday, The New York Times ran a full-page ad for the Shinola Runwell, a watch assembled in Detroit of parts made in Switzerland. An attractive watch. But if I’ve learned one thing about watches, it is that any watch that appeals to me, even a little, costs a fortune.

     “Probably $3,000,” I muttered to my wife. “If not $30,000.”

      My own watch, a smart Kenneth Cole, cost $29.95 in 1999 at Filene’s Basement on Broadway and has kept perfect Metra train time since. But lately it has had a few hiccups, and part of me is rooting for it to die, just so I can finally get a new one, and if doing so tosses some business in suffering Detroit’s direction, all the better. A watch made in Detroit; how much could it cost?

Shinola Runwell

      Curious, I plugged “Shinola Runwell” into Google, explored the options - the green-faced model is handsome - noted the price, $550. Not the fortune I imagined, but not cheap either for a watch named after a defunct brand of shoe polish that the clueless were said not to know from, er, a substance that looks like shoe polish but isn't.
     I decide that I don't want to help Detroit that much. Besides, my watch still works.
     Every day since, Facebook has dangled a Shinola watch in my face, with a small ad. There was something mildly creepy about it; Google has been spilling the beans to Facebook, tattling about my searches, rather like two friends in different realms of your life getting together, without you. "Remarketing" is the official term.
     Shinola's ad hung in the back of my mind as I read Dave Eggers' new novel, "The Circle," a cautionary tale of an enormous tech company — think Google — married to Apple, at the brink of taking over the world at some time in the near future.
    What I admired about the book is how easily the visionary founders' desire to end privacy reads as perfect sense. Eggers-raised in Lake Forest, schooled at U of I- doesn't make them villains, but sympathetic geniuses. Being monitored all the time by their omnipresent hi-def cameras, "we would finally be compelled to be our best selves," says Eamon Bailey, one of the three "Wise Men" systematically shining the glare of technology in every corner of life. " And I think people would be relieved. There would be this phenomenal global sigh of relief. Finally, finally we can be good. In a world where bad choices are no longer an option."
     Who could argue? The tendency for dystopian novels is to follow the rebel; Eggers instead makes his hero Mae Holland, an up-and-coming "newbie" learning the ropes of the gleaming California campus. As if "Hunger Games" didn't focus on Katniss Everdeen but on a PR gal for the Capitol.
     The parallels with George Orwell's " 1984" are clear, particularly when they start spouting slogans like "Privacy is theft."
     "The Circle" makes you think about technology and is a well-written cautionary tale, though also a reminder that predictions of the future are a far more accurate gauge of general anxieties at any given moment than they are predictors of anything to come. For all its fame, " 1984" was lousy augury — the next half century was marked, not by increasing repression, but spreading global freedom. IBM and Ma Bell were bogeymen in 1960s futurist fiction. Look at them now.
     For all our concern over the surveillance state, you'll notice that what technology has done most significantly is trumpet government secrets that normally would have never been whispered. The big flaw of " The Circle" is its insular world where employees shrug and permit an endless series of escalating intrusions into their lives — Mae is as real as the hero in a Chinese state opera, meeting each demand for increased productivity with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
     Could facial recognition and GPS and drones all unite into some grand web of repression? Sure, but it would be hard-pressed to top the old Soviet-style informant and jackboot repression. Teens are already bored with Facebook, and it's easy to see why. There's only so much Farmville you can play. We like technology, but we insist on it being our choice, or seeming to. You can trace an arc of increasing personal liberty for the past 300 years. A new chip isn't going to change that. We build anarchy into our systems - the speed limit may be 55, but auto speedometers still go up to 160.
     After two weeks of noting the Shinola Runwell ad on Facebook, I looked closely at it and saw a "Hide this Ad" option. I clicked and was asked why, my choices being "Uninteresting, misleading, sexually explicit, against my views, offensive, repetitive" — bingo, "repetitive." It disappeared, replaced immediately by a new ad.

Game theory

     Maybe because I get a steady trickle of aggrieved emails from religious sorts, flabbergasted by this new world of ours, but I found myself thinking about games Wednesday. You know, games—Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Trouble, Clue, Life—played with tokens and dice, folding boards and decks of cards. 

     Games have rules. You know, rules. Pass Go, collect $200. Seven tiles in your rack, no more, no less. The queen goes on her color. 

     You have to play by the rules. Oh, with some games, you can alter the rules, a little, if everybody agrees beforehand. In our house, the fines in Monopoly go into the middle, a payday when you land on the otherwise dull Free Parking space. A common house rule. If you have the letter that a blank is played to represent in Scrabble, you can swap it for that blank on your turn. Thus blanks are recycled, and the games are higher scoring. 

     But you can't break the rules, you can't make up new ones as you go along, or cheat. There was never much of that in our household anyway—we respect games— though occasionally, when very young, a boy would toss the board over in a huff or stalk off, unhappy with a certain turn of events. I remember being aghast, just horrified. What about the game? Quitters lost all respect.

      The metaphor of games, and their importance, is the best way I can understand those who are deeply bothered by same-sex marriage. Because at first glance it's ludicrous to be upset by this. Why care that people you don't know are forming unions that don't affect you? Not in any real sense. It doesn't raise your taxes, or pollute our air. And it's already happening. Where's the harm?

       Yet the anger, the outrage, the sputtering indignation. It reminds me of myself finding a game spoiled. And that I think the idea of games, of their importance, can help us understand what is happening here. Forget religion, or bigotry, or morals, or the other buzz words thrown around. Those are symbols, tokens, cards. Faith could lead you to embrace same-sex marriage as easily as forbid it, morals to respect other people rather than condemn them for some bedroom practice. What is at issue here is a certain game, a set of rules, an understanding of how things are supposed to be. The way American life as it has been played, up to now. The way they grew up playing it. It's always been played this way. The rules are on the box lid, put there by God, no less. The game is fun and beloved, the time passes and nobody challenged it. Nobody would dare, introduce a third die into Monopoly, a few countries on the Moon in Risk. The right to gaze into the bag before picking letters in Scrabble. And yet here are these people, these newcomers to the game, wanting to do this new thing that is just completely contrary to how we've always done things. Changing the rules after play has commenced.

       I sympathize with the purists, I do. In the framework of the game, it all makes sense. It hurt to scrap the game. I remember clearly. Our oldest, the last time we played Monopoly, a few years back, bought one property of every color and refused to trade. So nobody could get houses and nobody could win. "It's a real estate trading game!" I said, hotly. But no, he enjoyed messing it up. Big smile. We played for a while, but the game was a stasis. It was suddenly pointless, stupid, endlessly circling the board, and play petered away in animosity. I was truly mad at him, spoiling our Monopoly game for reasons that struck me as perverse. How much more angry then are people who see their whole idea of how life should be played, of what the rules are, rules they grew up with, spoiled by this group of people they consider perverse already, just for existing?  No wonder they're mad. 

      I'm not apologizing for the vocal opposition. I'm trying to understand them, to grasp why they cling to this irrationality. And why bother trying to understand them? They lost, forget 'em. Why grant them the respect they deny others? For that very reason. Because they expend so little energy trying to understand my view, or the view of gays and lesbians who now have won these civil rights. It's an effort I wish they'd make. The golden rule says, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." I would have them try to understand a bit harder, to take a little of the energy they use defending themselves, clinging to the fading status quo, and attacking the change and instead try to grasp what's going on here. And perhaps find the sympathy waiting there. But since they don't, I will, if only to show them how it's done, if only for the satisfaction of understanding a little better myself. It's cool to figure out what's happening. I wish more people could see that. When you realize that gay marriage is like introducing apartment buildings into Monopoly, like scribbling a third level of rents under those for the houses and hotels, you get a glimpse of how strange this all must be for some people. No wonder they're indignant. 

HIstory will just shake its head

     It's overdue. It's important. But in the way that each step in the journey of 1,000 miles is important. I'm glad the Illinois House and Senate approved same-sex marriage Tuesday. But we also need to moderate our self-congratulation and crowing about history being made by realizing what we're doing is extending basic human rights to a group of people long and cruelly denied them. History won't see this as a joyous victory so much as an inexplicable slog that took too long. We tend to forget history — when did women get the vote in Illinois? 1920? Wrong. April, 1914, as the states gradually did what the federal government was reluctant to do (sound familiar?) How can we claim we are making history now when we don't even know the history we've already made? Nor is the struggle over....
     Okay, I'll stop. I know I'm splitting hairs—a lot of people worked very hard to bring this day about: congratulations, and thanks.

     Don’t be fooled. Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2013, will not go down in history, at least not in the kind of popular history that regular people readily remember.

     Yes, the Illinois General Assembly finally approved same-sex marriage, as well as an amendment that puts the law into effect in June — a fine season for weddings.  The state Senate immediately gave its consent Gov. Pat Quinn is certain to sign the law, if he hasn’t already.

     A welcome, overdue and, with the protests and last-minute ear-twisting needed to gather the votes, dramatic development.

     But historic?  No. Because the idea that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry and share the kind of regular civil rights that straight citizens have always enjoyed will someday be seen as such an accepted part of life, such a no-brainer, the fact that it was once otherwise is what will puzzle and astound our descendants.
     This isn't the first irrational bias set aside. They tend to be tucked away, as if society were embarrassed. Nobody remembers the year, never mind the day they started letting women work as postal carriers. (Any idea? Guess. With many men away during World War I and labor unrest at home, the post office in 1917 allowed women to deliver mail despite doubts "whether women could stand the strain for any length of time without seriously impairing their health.")
     That's how progress is made. Pioneers push for change, the old verities are waved as excuses. But they buckle, circumstances shift and the truth prevails, eventually.
     As with female postal carriers, people won't even remember the year gay marriage got the legislative OK in Springfield. This isn't like 1920, when a sweeping change in the Constitution gave women across the United States the legal right to vote. Gays are winning their rights piecemeal. Illinois is the 15th state, plus Washington, D.C., to approve same-sex marriage; not the first, not the last. But in the first half — not exactly a reason for state pride, but better than some.
     Which is fitting, in a way, for a movement without any identifiable central leader: no Gandhi, no Martin Luther King. Just millions of anonymous people who 30 years ago refused to die of a mysterious ailment that their government didn't care about — AIDS — so they took a truth that was once a shameful secret and made it public. They told their families, friends; they marched in the streets and refused to be ashamed. It is the Gay Pride Parade for a good reason.
     This is not to say that this day won't echo in individual lives. Just as wedding anniversaries are personal (not public) celebrations, so countless Illinois gay couples — and their children — will remember when the Land of Lincoln decided to join the 21st century and recognized these couples for what they are.
     That's something that can't be stated too plainly: There is a bedrock of fact here. Gay people do not make worse spouses or worse parents. You could argue they must make better parents, since every kid they adopt is from a straight couple, somewhere, who can't or won't care for them. If gay couples had a similar record of failure when it came to parenthood, they'd never have reached this point. But they don't.
     A word should be said to those who recoil in horror at all this, who hold up their well-thumbed Bibles, the several passages addressing homosexuality highlighted. To you, this is oppression, the dashing of your religious rights. Don't be silly. Religion might have helped mold the law originally, but as the law adapted to an increasingly democratic, increasingly free, increasingly humane time, it diverted from religion. Long ago. If you stone your daughter for speaking disrespectfully, the Bible will not excuse you. If you try to sacrifice an ox in your driveway, quoting Scripture won't help. You lost this argument; it's tiresome now. Sorry you haven't gotten the message, but it isn't all about you. Time to move on already.
     So, not historic. But significant. Put an asterisk by Nov. 5, 2013. An overcast day in Illinois, made suddenly sunny by our skittish state legislators, who after a misfire last spring finally did the right thing.
     If you're glad, congratulations. And if you think the world is crumbling, take comfort that you are completely wrong, and flatter yourself with the tantalizing possibility that you might someday realize it. Look around. The world is not ending. Some regular folks will be getting married. Normal people who love each other will be openly pledging their troth in Illinois, too. Just like 14 other states and Washington, D.C. Just like countries around the world. Your great-grandchildren will be amazed that it wasn't always thus.
     

Grounding the Butter and Salt Flight

   When Spiaggia opened on Michigan Avenue in 1984, my wife and I of course were younger, still of an age where trying out new restaurants seemed a sort of civic responsibility, a duty to contemporary culture. 
   Being young, we were also on a budget, so went to Cafe Spiaggia, the 2nd tier, farm team eatery attached to Spiaggia, for those who only wanted to spend a lot of money on dinner, as opposed to an obscene amount of money. What I remember from that long-ago meal was a big white plate -- big plates were hot then -- with an arrangement of tiny triangular raviolis circling the rim. 
    The other thing I remember is that we went directly from Cafe Spiaggi to the Dunkin' Donuts on Rush Street, because we were hungry. 
    One of the joys of aging is the realization that it's okay to avoid trendy restaurants -- all those new chefs who serve spoonfuls of foam and eye cups of distilled essence, who waft scents in your face while flicking morsels of food at you. You pay a lot for a little; I imagine it helps to be drunk, and since I don't drink, that's another reason such places are easily avoided. 
     But sometimes I'm not the one in charge of dinner, I'm meeting other people, and they have their own ideas about where to go. Being polite, and deferring, I get dragged to new places that way. One drawback of being polite, an over-rated virtue.
     Saturday night, for instance. I was meeting two college friends in Evanston. When I am in Evanston I always go to the same restaurant, Dixie Kitchen, and get the same thing, blackened catfish with red beans and rice. It's always excellent, and ordering anything else would be diminishment. When my friends asked me where we should meet, I said, "Dixie Kitchen." 
     That didn't fly, for some reason. Maybe not trendy enough. I didn't ask. Polite. They suggested The Cellar at the Stained Glass. The name itself worried me. Something pretentious about those two "The's." "The Lord of the Manor House." The Stained Glass is a contemporary restaurant; the Cellar, a satellite beer bar appended to it that serves small plates of food. Same owner, same kitchen. Kinda like Spiaggia and its ancillary Cafe Spiaggia.
      I arrived early to the Cellar at the Stained Glass, was allowed to wait at the Bar in the Cellar at the Stained Glass, and looked at the Menu for the Bar in the Cellar at the Stained Glass.  One item leapt out: the "Butter and Salt Flight," which was described as: "Parmigiano reggiano butter with fleur de sel; goats milk butter with Himalayan pink salt; truffle butter with truffle sea salt. Warm French bread." 
      All for only $6.50. 
      Strip away the superfluous adjectives, and what they have contrived to do is charge for the bread basket by trotting out some fancy butter and salt. Six bucks fifty cents for a loaf of bread would obviously be larceny, even at a trendy spot. A kind of genius really—social mores dictate you can't charge for the bread; that would be like charging for a napkin. So charge for the butter and salt. And why not? They charge for fancy water now. Sea salt and mountain salt and what have you is supposed to be in the same vein, though it doesn't appeal to me, and I can't imagine how it appeals to anybody. Still, I wanted to take that test flight, for professional purposes.
      "We have to order it," I told my table mates, wearing my journalism hat. A marvel should be fully experienced. But my friends, alas, were wearing their order-something-good-for-dinner hats, and turned up their noses at the suggestion. If I insisted, it would involve pushing their wishes aside for my own interests, so I let it go. Hobbled by good manners.
      So maybe the Butter and Salt Flight is the most profound gustatory experience you can have in Evanston for $6.50. I can't damn it in full cry without having tried it, which is frustrating. Or maybe it is another new age scam, designed to use the crowbar of pretense to separate the status-conscious diner from his or her hard-earned cash. 
     I'd like to say that, in pursuit of truth, I'll go back there next time I'm in Evanston, soar with the Butter and Salt Flight, then deliver a full report. But over at Dixie Kitchen, they give you a basket of pancakes with your meal. The pancakes come nestled in wax paper, served with regular butter. The salt is on the table—basic NaCl white salt. But it costs nothing, is not called "A Flight of Pancakes," which I never realized was a blessing, but I do now. They taste just fine. All things being equal, I think I'll go back there next time for my catfish and let the Salt and Butter Flight remain a mystery. Some things are better left unknown.