Thursday, December 5, 2013

Ignore the pea pods


     Work is always there. It waits for us, or sometimes doesn't wait. Sometimes it stalks us.
     Lately it has been, not just stalking, but smacking the back of my calves with a stick whenever I've paused for breath. Not just the column four days a week, with additional days tossed in here and there as need be. That's a given, like getting dressed in the morning. Nor the book, which is actually done, but has entered into a tricky legal phase, securing literary permissions, which is even more arduous than writing it was. This daily blog, of course, but that's like the column, just part of the fabric of the day. Nobody objects to breathing, to brushing their teeth in the morning. You have to do it, so you do it.
     That's the baseline work. Then other tasks are added,, it begins to pile up, and the extra load tends to make the old camel's back sag a little. In New York, Audible is recording an audio book of my memoir "Drunkard"—beginning today, in fact —and I had to work with the actor doing the recording, checking pronunciations and such. Plus —idiot that I am—I started sending him re-writes of sections that got changed in the book, parts that I hated being changed, including a new ending. So there I am, in the basement, dragging old manuscripts out of boxes. A normal person would have let it go, but as I always tell new writers, if you don't care about your writing then nobody else will either. Then add this -- better not say exactly, so as to not jinx it —big honking profile for a big honking magazine I've been writing for the past month, a story that just gets bigger and more honking as I try to make it smaller and smoother. The magazine says, "Great work, do this and that and this and that." By now, I just wish somebody would take the damn thing away from me, which probably means it'll go through another few re-writes. Then I had promised a pal in Paris that I would write a post to run on her blog next week while she's away in Sri Lanka, so I put together something on Com-Ed faux buildings hiding electrical substations. And....
     This isn't complaining. At least I hope it isn't complaining, or bragging, at least not complaining or bragging too much. I like to work. This is what I built up my whole life to do, and I'm grateful and happy to be doing it, albeit a tad on the giddy, punchy, exhausted side for the past few days. When people ask me how I get so much done, I fix them with a steady gaze and say in a flat tone, "I don't watch television. I don't play golf. I don't have friends in the usual sense of the term. All I do is write." It is a joke, sort of, and they laugh, which they're supposed to, but as with any joke, there's a vein of truth running through it. Not regarding the friends—I have many good, old friends, so don't please, don't get your noses out of joint and stomp off, sulking for years, the way my friends sometimes do. No slight intended. Love you guys, the ones who are left, I mean. But they do tend to live in distant cities, which is probably how I've kept them as friends, and those who don't, well, they aren't bursting into the room like characters in a TV show to tell a few jokes and move the action along. Which is just as well, because I've got all this work to do.
     One thing I've noticed about work, and this might be particularly true in writing, but I'm sure it applies to all professions, is that it's self-limiting. If you do it too much your quality breaks down. I hope my quality hasn't broken down too much. Though I woke up this morning and my head felt like an empty shoe box held on to my shoulders with Scotch tape. I waited for it to pass and it did, thank God, and I was able to get a good grip on the stone and roll it a little up the mossy, steep hill. But it also was a message to take a breath. Not here of course. These posts are fun. But time for a break from the other stuff—thank God my younger boy and I are going to Colorado to visit my folks at the end of the month, and even ski a bit. Can't wait. You need to know when to ignore the pea pods for a while, as this woman at the China Town Restaurant on Dempster in Morton Grove was doing on Friday. When I took the photo, drawn by the big pile of green pods, I assumed she was doing the books—my fault for stereotyping—but if you look closely, she's isn't doing work, she's playing some kind of video game. 



Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Block 37 — still cursed, but now serving snacks

     In the pantheon of urban development nightmares, there is really only one city block that can be described as famous or, more precisely, infamous: Block 37.
     Notorious as “cursed” and “a boondoggle,” the area bounded by Randolph, Washington, Dearborn and State sat mostly empty for 20 years, poorly masked by various half-efforts to hide its yawning vacancy in the heart of the Loop: an ice skating rink; an arts and crafts festival.
     In 1996, a book was published about the doomed efforts to make something take hold there. Ross Miller’s, “Here’s the Deal,” deemed it a “fiasco,” cataloging years of lawsuits and protests over the “gold-plated hole in the ground.”
     Finally, in 2009, a four-story mall opened.
    Then the trouble really began: bankruptcy; more lawsuits; 70 percent vacancy.
     It says something about the outer Neptune orbital ring of Chicago consciousness the north half of the block occupies — CBS Studios is on the southern part, lifting the curse there — when the idea of actually stepping into an establishment on Block 37 never crossed my mind until Monday, after I noticed the Doughnut Vault’s distinctive cornflower-blue 1957 van parked on the sidewalk directly under the Dearborn entrance to what is boldly (or foolishly) called “Block Thirty Seven Shops on State.” 
     If Block 37 exerts a repulsive force on profits and customers, the Doughnut Vault is the opposite, exerting a magnetic, indeed, mesmeric, power. I bought a doughnut even though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want one.
     I was chatting with Derek, the guy in the van, when a frantic publicist, seeing my notebook, waylaid me, insisting on personally escorting me that instant into Block 37. It all happened so quickly, it was a little discombobulating, as if a hatch opened in the Bean and a gnome yanked me inside. I would have preferred a bit of ceremony, the way buses entering Jerusalem will pause to let the occupants weep and sing and pray.
     The mall has been open four years, but the second floor has the raw feel of a space opening next month. There is one store.
     Otherwise, a corner of the vacant second floor has been taken over by Nosh, the pop-up food fair that has been appearing at farmers markets like the Green City Market in Lincoln Park and in Logan Square.
     "It's a little slow," admitted Aaron Wolfson, owner of Chicago's Dog House, shooting for a Hot Doug's vibe with exotic franks. I tried the $8 smoked alligator sausage with caramelized onions and sweet chili sauce. Mmm. Another high point was Lindy's Chili, which you normally have to haul yourself to the South Side to experience.
     "We've been doing it a long, long time, so we've got it down," said Rich Wierenga, who owns "the best two" of Lindy's seven Chicago-area outlets, and who showed the proper South Sider's contempt for those north of Roosevelt Road. "It's interesting," he said, of selling chili in the Northlands. "We get a lot of requests for vegetarian chili." By "interesting" he means, I assume, "disgusting in a way that instills me with amusement and contempt" since Lindy's, open since 1924, does not sell vegetarian chili and never will.
     The various restaurants, caterers and full-time pop-up food purveyors won't all be there every day; they rotate. For instance, the Doughnut Vault van is not coming back. So there probably isn't much point to reviewing each of the various booths. Karl's Craft Soup ladled out an interesting smoked-pumpkin bisque, apologizing for failing to master the expected heating technology - one assumes they're fixing that. Gayle Voss has an interesting backstory. She represents Prairie Pure Cheese at farmers markets and found herself next to a Bennison's Bakery booth selling bread. Nearby, fresh butter, and thus was Gayle Grilled Cheese born.
     If you do go, after eating your fill, make sure you wander up to the third floor to gaze respectfully on the expanse of closed stores, noting the brave, sad mural showing the busy, successful food court that isn't there.
     Visit soon. First, Nosh (open 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.) disappears Dec. 13. Second, there is no reason to assume the block's woes are over. One expects a sulfurous hell mouth to open up next, sucking the building down, or a meteor to hit, or some other kind of strange, nowhere-else-but-here calamity. Nothing should be surprising at this point.
     What Block 37 needs is not pop-up food, but an exorcism. Get Bishop Paprocki up here from Springfield. If he can cast out the demon of tolerating gay people, then a simple city block that somehow ran afoul of the Great Karmic Wheel and became accursed by fate should be a snap.





Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Critical Cycles

    
    
    Somewhere along the line the idea of style and expense became fused in the public mind. Or maybe it's just me. I noticed this bike Monday, locked on Randolph Street, because of its clean lines and unusual orange rims and hand grips. Then the name on the frame,"Critical," leapt out, one of those moments when life seems to become a Greek chorus directing some kind of sly remark at you. "Critical? Why yes I am. What of it?"
     I assumed the bike had to be a costly couture bike, made of titanium perhaps, designed to be shown off more than ridden. Wrong. Critical Cycles, "America's on-line Urban Bike Shop," based in California, slogan "Happiness on Two Wheels." This bike, their Fixed Gear Single Speed Fixie Urban Road Bike: $219, with free shipping. Made in China, natch.
    I can't vouch for the bike itself. Some glowing reviews online, some dismissive ones, claiming that it gets beaten up too easily. But the machine sure looks nice. Doesn't it? One reason the front wheel is so clean is that it doesn't have any front brakes -- "fixed gear," if you are unfamiliar with the term, as I was, means that there is no mechanism that allows the pedals to remain stationary while the wheels turn. This saves weight, and means that you can also slow the bike down using the pedals, thus less need for front brake stopping power (some riders dispense with the rear brake too, though the company discourages this). Fixed gear riding also "gives you a feeling of oneness with your bike," the company claims, "similar to driving a stick shift."
     And "Critical Cycles"? You have to admire the name. Maybe from a closet electronics geek, "critical cycle delay" being a problem in integrated circuit design. Although, to me, it sounds like a term that describes how a particular writer or artist falls in and out of favor as time lopes along. "Strindberg passed through several critical cycles before reaching his current popularity." Now that I think of it, the company name has to be a stab at borrowing a bit of the cool from the "Critical Mass" bike rides that draw hordes of bicyclists to reclaim city streets by weight of numbers. Though between the Divvy bikes and the dedicated bike lanes downtown, it seems that bicycles have achieved a critical mass in the heart of Chicago already, with no packs of riders necessary. 
     A pretty bike, this, though I'm hanging onto my black Schwinn Cruiser, with its balloon whitewall tires, coaster brake and fat ass saddle.  So uncool, it achieves a kind of transcendent coolness all its own, in my own eyes if nobody else's. Of course that's nothing unusual: most coolness is both self-assigned and illusory.

   

Monday, December 2, 2013

Push back against the Chinese, but not too hard


Photo by Ross Steinberg

     Given how important China is to our economy, and what a pivotal role it will play in the global future, it's alarming how little Americans know about the most populous nation on earth. I would bet that not one in 100 could name its new premiere (Li Keqiang, and no, I didn't know either) and few grasp either the hostility that many Chinese feel toward the United States, or understand where their animosity came from. 

     Man-in-the-street interviews are usually the lowest rung of journalistic tedium. Tapping regular folk on the shoulder, collecting their unexceptional opinions about passing issues — “Why yes, it is cold.” “No, I prefer the fat Elvis stamp.”
     But one particular temperature-taking sticks in my mind and haunts me, more than a dozen years after I read them: the man-in-the-street chats with Chinese citizens after an American surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter plane collided April 1, 2001.
     The U.S. plane, an EP-3E Aries II, was a prop-driven mule — it looks like a passenger plane from the 1950s — plodding along at 207 mph when a Chinese J-8 fighter began buzzing it. The jet clipped one of the EP-3E’s four propellers. The Chinese jet broke in half and crashed; the U.S. spy plane was able to land on the Chinese island of Hainan.
     If anyone should have been indignant, it was the Americans. Our plane was operating in inter
national waters. The Chinese pilot caused the accident. But interviews with the Chinese revealed seething belligerence.
     "The United States thinks it can do anything it wants to us," a delivery man surnamed Wu told The New York Times. "Saying you're sorry isn't good enough. Americans need to know we aren't afraid of their bullying." They were hopping mad.
     As the two governments maneuvered to end the crisis — the crew of 24 ended up being held 11 days — the Chinese government seemed as worried about placating the intense nationalism of its public as they were about the Americans. A swath of the Chinese citizens viewed the incident, in which their pilot was killed, as the latest in a series of national humiliations going back to the Opium Wars that had to be avenged.
     "The battle is not over," Chinese officials reassured their public, which felt the U.S. was being let off the hook for its aggression.
     The episode gave me a sinking feeling that China won't be content forever churning out khaki pants and raking in our money. Once China's on top of the world, they're going to want to do something with it. Nobody ever bought a bike they didn't ride.
     The Hainan incident was eclipsed five months later by 9/11, an event greeted with glee in some quarters of China. But that feeling of aggrievement has not gone away, as evidenced by the latest Sino-U.S. faceoff.
     The issue is a block of airspace in the East China Sea, which the Chinese two weeks ago announced is now an "Air Defense Identification Zone" that could not be entered by aircraft from other countries without receiving their permission first.
     On Friday, a pair of American surveillance planes, accompanied by 10 Japanese aircraft, flew into the zone to see what would happen. What happened is the Chinese scrambled their fighter jets, and suddenly the world feels like a more dangerous place.
     The specifics are trivial; two uninhabited flyspeck islands that Japan controls but the Chinese say rightfully belong to them.
     Still, this is a high-stakes balancing act. If we back down and let China make whatever claims it wants, then we are living in China's world, and we will not like that world. If we press them too hard, however, we'll be fighting with China, and that would be bad.
     When dealing with China, time is our friend. Capitalist democracy is self-administering, and we've seen China soften, just last month announcing it was dropping its one-child policy and forced labor camps for political prisoners. That's still far from becoming Evanston writ large, true, but the longer we don't slide into World War III with them, the more remote that possibility becomes. Ten years ago we worried about war between China and Taiwan. Now China and Taiwan seem happily on the road to getting married.
     The Obama administration urged U.S. airlines to respect China's no-fly zone, even as U.S. military planes defy it. That makes sense. This situation won't be helped by a Boeing 767 with 300 people aboard being shot down by some trigger-happy Chinese top gun, a new Lusitania to drive Americans into the same kind of bellicose frenzy that some Chinese people seem already in.
     The Japanese, on the other hand, ordered their commercial carriers to continue to fly through the disputed space without offering notice, so as not to give the Chinese claims legitimacy. That makes sense, too. Yielding to aggression leads to more aggression.
     The American domestic situation has been so messed up, between political gridlock, government shutdown, economic morass, health care rollout fiasco and on and on, that we didn't worry much about the rest of the world. Now that seems like another luxury we can no longer afford. Hello China.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Holiday weekend worst time to fly, except for all the others.


     Everyone in the media is scrambling to fill the endless expanse of the Internet while still maintaining professional standards — I don't know if we've gotten worse at it, or I'm just noticing more surprising lapses, such as this ham-handed post from the Daily Beast. On one hand, error is intrinsic to writing, and the fault you find in others today could be found in you tomorrow. On the other, we can't just let any blunder slip by unnoticed, escaping under the "There But For the Grace of God Go I..." clause.

     So I’m up at 5 a.m., too early to start working. Might as well browse online. As a change of pace, I slide over to the Daily Beast, the online remnant of Newsweek. Naming the site for the London tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Scoop” surely seemed more clever when they first thought it up than now, when some slice of America must avoid it, assuming, with that name, it must be the house organ for Satan.
     I’m rewarded with “20 WORST AIRPORTS FOR THANKSGIVING TRAVEL.” A list! We readers love lists! It can be “15 Most Useless Facts to Waste Your Time Reading” and we’re there. Oh, No. 6, “Lists Like This One.” Yes indeed, spot on!
     Of course I want to know how Chicago fares after the Daily Beast analyzed its "reams of statistics" in order to name the worst airports to pass through, based on arrival and departure delays, both during the year and for Thanksgiving weekend.
     No. 1 was San Francisco (whew!), where a quarter of arrivals and departures are delayed on an average day, rising to 29 percent of departures delayed on Thanksgiving.
     I figured Chicago would be up there, and Midway is No. 2, though if you look closely, you see something odd: 20.2 percent of Midway arrivals and 30.7 percent of departures are delayed on average. But Thanksgiving 2012 stats show 18 percent of arrivals and departures are late. So it's better to fly at Thanksgiving than most times, which sort of undermines the whole point of the post.
     Newark, N.J., is third, with numbers that again suggest it's far easier to fly at Thanksgiving (27.6 percent arrivals delayed during the year versus 15 percent at the holiday; 25.3 percent departures delayed year-round; Thanksgiving drops to 14 percent).
     Nothing in the slide show—photos of waiting, frustrated travelers at various airports — addresses this incongruity. Do they read their own posts? O'Hare, at fourth, is the same: delayed departures during Thanksgiving are almost half average year-round delays, 14 versus 27.2 percent.
     Airport after airport, they're all like that. The headline should have been: "THANKSGIVING IS BEST TIME TO FLY." It's hard to say whether they just started with a concept — list the busiest, most-delayed airports at Thanksgiving — then didn't notice that the stats tell an even more incredible story: It's better to travel over the holidays, probably because travelers are scared off.
     I consider this more evidence we've grown so accustomed to complaining about air travel that it's become a reflex; we don't even think about what we're complaining about anymore. Jets are a modern marvel, and I wish travelers would stop bitching. You never see articles about people who live in refugee camps complaining about living under a tarp and lining up for potable water. They cope with it. But the media offers pampered airborne business folk and vacationers shaking their fists at their hard lot.
     Stop whining. Get to the airport two hours early and flying is usually a breeze. Expect to wait. Bring a book. Smile at the big, shuffling line for a security check that does nothing at all; it's almost like a religious ritual we do in honor of 9/11 ( that would be interesting. Instead of patting you down, the TSA should anoint your head with oil).
     Whatever happens, roll with it. I flew to Colorado with my older son in February to visit my folks. We didn't depart until 12 hours after our flight was scheduled to leave. It was still fun. The evening flight was overbooked, and they kept requesting volunteers to be bumped to the morning, something I'd never consider — inconvenient! But my son wondered, "Why not?" It helped that my mom had been carping about us arriving too late at night, and I realized being bumped would a) get us there the next morning, voiding mom's concern; b) reduce the invariable "Long's Day Journey into Night" span of the visit and c) put a pair of $400 vouchers in our pockets. Next thing I knew we were on a bus, bound for a nearby Holiday Inn. It was an adventure. Next morning, we used our meal vouchers to feast on a lavish Wolfgang Puck breakfast.
     We're going back to the airport to use those vouchers this Christmas Eve. If I have a 500-pound man in the seat in front of me and a pair of toddler twins with ear infections wailing in back, on a plane that is three hours late taking off, I will not feel ill-used. I'll have a good book, and if the plane lands wheels first, I'll consider myself lucky.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Are the Bulls really going to quit now?


A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late Renaissance scholar, Yale president, and commissioner of major league baseball, was correct when he said that the sport was "designed to break your heart." Unlike baseball, in basketball, the heartbreak is more of an accident, an afterthought, a by-product. Maybe because basketball is too fast-paced, or too recently popular, to evoke the deep soul-sickness that baseball can. But it comes close. Even if basketball can't break your heart, it sure can put a few deep cracks in it.

     Life is a long line at a snack shop. You finally get to the front, order your Coke and they hand you a pretzel. Enjoy your pretzel. Life is buying a ticket to Las Vegas and being flown to Dubuque. Change of plans. Explore Dubuque.
     Sports is not life, of course, but a concentrated simulacra of life: thrill, hope, triumph and, yes, disappointment, all packed into one maddening, chaotic, endless enterprise.
     I ignored sports most of my life because I was no good at them, and my father didn’t know a baseball from a basement. But occasionally my interest was sparked. In the 1970s, the Indians. In the 1990s, the Bulls. My wife loved ’em, the city loved ’em, and I tried to love ’em too, though Michael Jordan, excellent as he was, flubbed the hero test for me by being a jerk. He seemed mean, up close, taunting his teammates. Maybe to glory, yes. But nobody wanted to be Scottie Pippen.
     Frankly, I like the current crop of Bulls far better. Derrick Rose is not a jerk. The MVP with the extra gear to the basket. With a quirky supporting crew. Passionate Joakim Noah, scowling Carlos Boozer. And the rest: Gibson. Hinrich. Deng. Not to forget my kid's hero, Jimmy Butler, whom he was cheering from the start for reasons I plumbed but never fathomed. He loves Jimmy Butler because Jimmy is the best.
     We went to a preseason game, yelled our hearts out, then settled in for something new to me: a season where I knew the team, knew the players, knew what was going on.
     Then Rose blew out his knee. Again.
     My first reaction was selfish. Oh, great, I finally surrender to this stuff, reach a point where my question at breakfast is, "Are they playing tonight?" Where tipoff finds me on the sofa, ready to savor the action. Little Neil, a sports fan at last. Now this.
     That lasted 10 seconds. Then I thought of Rose, not the player, but the person. The poor man. How awful this must be. How hard he worked this past year, getting healthy, absorbing the tsk-tsks of the entire city. He's back, not even a dozen games.
     "He looks fragile," I kept saying, watching Rose play. Turns out I was right; the one time I would have preferred being wrong.
     My 16-year-old, whose grasp of sports is more "Moneyball" than athletics, explained why the team will now be broken up so that the Bulls can lose and get better draft picks.
     Can that be true? I'm naive, yes. But that can't be the plan. It feels like surrender. "A seasonlong wake" as my colleague put it. Why can't the team that's left rise to the occasion? Why can't Jimmy Butler become the star my kid thinks he is? They almost did it last year. What are fans supposed to do while waiting for the draft? Watch a lousy scrub team lose? That doesn't sound fun.
     And what's Rose supposed to do now? An outsider would say he's already won, beat the odds, grabbed the brass ring. If he doesn't squander his money, he can own car dealerships and have a happy life.
     Or can he? The road back is even more fraught. Not only is there the pain and struggle of recovery, but once he gets into shape there will always be fear, every time he puts his foot down, it could happen again. It's already happened twice. Einmal ist keinmal, as the Germans say, und zweimal ist immer. "Once is never and twice is always."
     Those are the stakes. Still, I don't see a choice. Rose, like each of us, can't dictate outcomes, only effort. Fall down, get up, maybe shake your fist at the sky and start again. "It's called trying," I tell my boys.
     Last season, without Rose, was still fun to watch. I would rather see Noah and Butler and Boozer flail against better teams and lose than have them shipped to other teams and watch some temporary cast of new nobodies — The Chicago Generals — rack up the losses we need to maybe, maybe, draft a star player. Who'd enjoy that?
     The team can't wait, cargo-cult like, scanning the skies for Rose to return, or for a new draft-pick hero. It has to play hard now.
     My apologies for caring. It is a change, I know, and against character. I've never met Derrick Rose, but he seems a fine young man dealt a bad hand. There are a lot of those. I am confident he will play that hand, best he can. You don't have to win a championship to be a hero. Sometimes your big play occurs when you blow out your knee, again, and are counted out. I do not expect him to quit. He has his job to do, the Bulls have their job to do, and fans have a job, too. "I will be conquered," the great Samuel Johnson, no stranger to adversity, said. "I will not capitulate." That sounds like a game plan. Disappointment comes, adversity arises, yet you somehow overcome. Is that not what sports, and life, is all about?



Friday, November 29, 2013

Happy Chattanooga!

 
     Three blog posts in a row on Thanksgiving, and not a murmur about Hanukkah, which began Wednesday night. "What's the matter?" the reader might ask, "ashamed?" No, indifferent. Hanukkah is a minor holiday for children that got blown out of proportion ... well, I have an old chestnut that explains it. This piece is noteworthy for where it first appeared—on America Online in 1996. Once upon a time, when the Internet was new and dial-up, if you clicked on the AOL logo, it would give you a surprise, a cartoon, or an essay. The editor of the AOL surprise feature was John Scalzi, who went on to a successful career as a science fiction novelist. I wrote the very first one, in fact, and a number to come, including this one. It hasn't been seen since. Its title is an allusion to the strangled way some mangle the pronunciation of what is also spelled "Chanukah" and I was dumbfounded to get emails from people in Tennessee, confused and angry because they suspected their city was being mocked by a Jew. The first glimmer that when you write online, you also write for readers beyond your intended audience. But they remind you.

     Imagine you move to Mars.
     The Martians are a pleasant lot. Not too different than you, really. They have holidays, just like back on earth. The biggest Martian holiday is called the Grand Galloon; it comes at the end of April, around the time Arbor Day takes place in the United States.
     We won't go into the details of the Grand Galloon—let's just say it has to do with the Martians' deepest religious beliefs. They make such a fuss about it that Martian society addresses little else in the weeks before the Grand Galloon and everyday life grinds to a halt when the great day finally arrives.
     Of course the Martians are curious about you, who have no Grand Galloon. Poor you. How do you live?
     Lest they dwell on this misfortune, the Martian ask about Arbor Day, which takes place at approximately the same time. Tell us about Arbor Day, they say. It's sort of your Grand Galloon, isn't it?
     Well, no, you answer. Arbor Day is not Galloonish at all. It's about planting trees. No big deal.
     The Martians ignore this explanation. At school, they pause from their Galloonery and demand that you stay a few words about trees. You try to point out that Arbor Day isn't that meaningful to you. The Martians smile and give you saplings.
     That's Hanukkah. A tiny Jewish festival. I can think of half a dozen more important dates on the Jewish calendar. Hanukkah marks a Jewish uprising against the Greeks in 168 BCE.* Jews decided to commemorate the event by lighting candles and eating potato pancakes.
     And that's it. Except that Hanukkah occurs in the vague proximity of Christmas—the two holidays are a measly 19 days apart this year. So Hanukkah, or Chanukah, as some spell it, in a futile attempt to capture that garbled Hebrew sound that is neither "H" nor "ch" but a little of both, gets conflated into something it isn't; a rival to Christmas.
     When in fact it really is the Jewish Arbor Day (not literally. There is a Jewish Arbor Day—Tu B'shvat, that never gets talked about since it doesn't arrive around Christmastime, even though it is as significant a holiday as Hanukkah, if not more so).
     There are problems with making Hanukkah into Christmas' Semitic twin. First, Hanukkah doesn't have enough stuff. No good songs, to start. Christmas carols are beautiful—"Oh Holy Night" and "Silver Bells" and "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire." I can get choked up just listening to "Little Drummer Boy" and I've never celebrated Christmas in my life.  
     There is no good Hanukkah literature. Christmas has Dickens and the Waltons and "It's a Wonderful Life."
     And Hanukkah? Hanukkah has a song about dreidls, those little tops associated with the holiday. ("I have a little dreidl/I made it out of clay/And when it's dry and ready/Dreidl I will play...") It's a dumb, grating song with only one note in it, and there's no more horrifying, humiliating experience a Jewish child can have than, 50 minutes into a music class filled with the lovely tunes of Bach and Irving Berlin, to have some solicitous music teacher clap her hands together and say, "Okay, now we're going to sing a Hanukkah song," while gazing at the one Jewish child, who is trying to dig a hole in the floor and hide.
     Hanukkah literature consists of a few grim Eastern European tales and Jospehus, the traitorous ancient Jewish historian, recounting his self-serving version of the uprising that he managed to both lead and betray.
     Getting back to dreidls. Dreidls are a strange addition, anyway. They're a gambling game that somehow got grafted onto the holiday and, in an attempt to have something to toss at Christmas, got puffed up into an icon as well. It's as odd as if Easter were associated not only with bunnies and eggs, but with roulette wheels, or pairs of dice.
     This is not to pooh-pooh Hanukkah. Taken on its own merits, Hanukkah has some wonderful qualities, the first and foremost being latkes, those potato pancakes fried and eaten with applesauce or sour cream or, in my case, both.
     Latkes are one of the great philosophical creations of mankind—hot sand salty and starchy and just delicious.
     If given the choice between the Maccabee story and latkes, where I would decided which would be preserved for future generations and which consigned to oblivion, I'd pick latkes in a heartbeat.
    Who knows? Maybe the latkes came first. But Jewish kids were too embarrassed to say that we had an eight-day celebration of potato pancakes. thanking God for them and crowing that we, as a people, had brought them into the world.
     So we tagged the story of the Maccabees and the miracles onto it, and added a menorah ad a dreidl and a few other trapping to obfuscate its real purpose. I wouldn't be surprised. History can be quite cunning that way.


* In the original, I had the uprising a) occur in 70 AD, b) be against the Romans and c) fail, three jaw-dropping errors whose origin I can only speculate (we had a new baby at home, the festival is indeed as minor as I say, so much that even guys like me, fairly well-schooled in my religion, have a loose grasp on the particulars). Not wanting to propagate error, I fixed it in the text, but figured I should own up to the gaffe here.