The Christmas Truce

     This is a season of warm holiday fiction, from Dicken's A Christmas Carol to "It's a Wonderful Life." Something about the holidays makes us yearn for tales of grace and transcendence, breakthrough and redemption, and since it so seldom happens in real life, we have to make it up.
     But sometimes it does happen in real life.
     Most heartwarming Christmas stories are too good to be true, but get repeated because they feed that part of human nature desperately wishing they were true.
    But some stores are both good and true, despite being wonderful. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is one of those.
    It was 99 years ago tonight, in the world's first war -- they called it "The Great War" while it was going on, not knowing it would lead directly to a second. It had started in August, and by Dec. 24, 1914, a million men had already died. The German and British armies faced each other across the Western Front. After night fell, the Germans set up Christmas trees and candles atop their trenches; the Allied soldiers could hear them singing.
    "It was a beautiful moonlit night," remembered Pvt. Albert Moren of the Second Queens Regiment, who was stationed near the village of La Chapelle d'Armentieres in Northern France. "Frost on the ground, white almost everywhere. About seven or eight in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights —I don't know what they were. And then they sang 'Silent Night' -- 'Stille Nacht.' I shall never forget it, it was one of the highlights of my life. I thought, 'what a beautiful tune.'"
    Then a few soldiers climbed out of their trenches, met in No-Man's-Land, shook hands, tentatively at first. More followed. They exchanged tobacco and souvenirs, bowed their heads in prayer, played games of soccer. Not everyone was pleased with this of course. "Such things should not happen in wartime," Cpl. Adolf Hitler chastised his comrades in the 16th Barvarian Corps. "Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?" *
    It hadn't come out of nowhere -- the trenches were 50 yards apart. Groups of soldiers had previously conversed, played music for each other. And the idea had been floated by Pope Benedict XV, who suggested a break in the fighting for Christmas.
    That's what Christmas is supposed to do -- inspire us to pause from the daily battle, to reach for the life and beauty that is waiting there, whether in music and peace, or faith and festivity. 
    Christmas is the only religious holiday that is observed by the United States federal government. Mail stops, offices and businesses close, even FedEx doesn't deliver. An economy that prides itself on selling you stuff whenever you want to buy it -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week online, and close to that in the steel-and-flesh world, pauses to take a breath. It's a good idea even if you hold the faith lightly, if at all. 
     On Dec. 24, the day starts out normally, often with work and the office, stores and shopping. Then as the day progresses things ... just ... slow ... down. The world seems to empty out. People exchange their wishes in offices that are half empty anyway, make a last, half-hearted stab at reaching people who left work hours ago, then go home themselves. Then things really quiet down, and in that hush, you can hear what normally gets drowned out, you can see the human spirit that gets lost in the cannonade of daily life. You can reach toward something beyond yourself.
     The Christmas Truce ended Dec. 26, the war started up again, and lasted nearly four more years, taking millions more lives. It was an extraordinary occurrence, and makes you wonder: if the Germans and the British could do it, then, why can't we now? What did Tommy and Fritz know in 1914 that Democrats and Republicans can't figure out today? Why the peace that can come on Christmas, then and now, can't last throughout the year is a worthy thought to ponder as we savor the warmth and plenty of our homes, our families and our precious lives.
     

* From "The truce of Christmas, 1914," by Thomas  Vinciguerra; New York Times. Dec. 25, 2005

If you're given tickets to Nineveh this Christmas, just go

     It's been a strange holiday season, and this, I decided afterward, is

sort of a strange column. It definitely scratched an itch I had when I wrote it. I don't know if it's going to make anyone else feel better, probably just puzzle people. But it made me feel better, and sometimes that's enough.

     The snow was light and fluffy, and no sooner did I think, It’s going to be a white Christmas for once, then it began to rain, a cold, in-your-face sort of rain, beginning to wash the snow away, melting pristine mounds of smooth white into shrunken, spiky reefs of grime and garbage.

     Merry Christmas. Maybe next year.

     Christmas. A jewel with many facets: celebration, family, faith, community, lights, food, booze. And to each facet, a flip side: sorrow, rancor, doubt, loneliness, darkness, excess. They teeter-totter back and forth. Sometimes the good is up, sometimes it’s down. Here’s hoping, this Christmas, that your balance tips the right way — not a random process, I might add. Whoever you are, however tightly fate has got you, you still have a say in your holiday. Reach for the good side of Christmas, grab and raise it up.

     Merry Christmas. I saw a guy walking up Orleans with a button that read, “It’s okay to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ’’ I almost tapped him on the shoulder and snarled, “Well then why not just say it, if it’s OK, instead of making such a big deal out of it?” By the time Fox News is done with “Merry Christmas” the phrase will have the sting of “sieg heil.”  Be self-absorbed and joyless the rest of the year; if you want to celebrate your holiday, celebrate it. To apologize is to suggest that anybody expects apology. Nobody does. We just live here too, if that's OK with you and even if not. Display the respect you expect.
     Merry Christmas. A time when you give things, and get things, and that can be tough, because, as anyone who has ever opened a gift knows, you don't always get what you hoped for. "Always?" Try "often."
     Sometimes you do, with cries of delight, "Oh mom, that's just what I want."
     And sometimes you just cry, holding up the lumpy cable knit sweater. "Aww gee."
     You don't need me to tell you which group is better to be in.
     Although . . .
     Sometimes not getting what you want leads to what I call "Nineveh moments." If you remember your Bible, the Lord tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach. But Jonah doesn't want that. Who can blame him? He wants to go anywhere else. So he flees. But you can't always flee fate, try though you might. Some presents you can't return.
     Some you have to live with. Some you learn to like. Satisfaction runs smooth, from hope to reality, like an icy toboggan slide. One moment you're on top, excited, then whoosh, you're there, just what you wanted.
     Disappointment jars but can be a gift, too, because it forces you to re-examine your desires. Now what? People remember the whale in the story of Jonah; they forget that, once Jonah finally gets to Nineveh, it all works out. So if this Christmas isn't unfolding the way you'd like, if the gifts aren't what you expected, maybe rather than complaining, you should just go to Nineveh. Go, see.
     Merry Christmas. Sometimes it seems that the focus is too much on the getting, and not enough on the wanting. Because both are adjustable. Here the Buddhists have it right. Don't try to be satisfied by making sure you always get exactly what you want. Disappointment awaits you there, because there is always another hill. You get This, and even while unwrapping it, you notice That, on the horizon. And off you go. Better to be satisfied by wanting what you get, even the times when it is very different than what you thought Santa was bringing.
     Merry Christmas. I'm off until after New Year's—if I don't say it, readers assume I've been fired. Nope, just home to Colorado to visit my parents, who are doing fine but like to set eyes upon their boy from time to time.
     That's a gift. As are my own boys, and my wife and our dog. You can focus on what you don't have, or on what you've got, and most people, if they do, realize they've got a lot.
     Merry Christmas. The rain tapered off and the snow returned. It looks like it will be a white Christmas after all. A reminder that, if you're patient, sometimes, when it seems like the world isn't going your way, it really is, you just don't know it yet. People pause this time of year and take stock, asking, "Is this the Christmas I deserve?" Whether you are celebrating in Cook County Jail or in a mansion in Kenilworth, the happiness or the sadness is still all in your head, and you have valid reasons to listen to either. Take my advice: Choose to be happy. Go to Nineveh.
     If you don't get what you want, you can shake your fist at the world and point tearily at the others, who got what they wanted. Or you can look at what you did get—a rather nice sweater, actually—and decide that maybe this is what you want after all. It might as well be, because it's what you've got. Merry Christmas. See you in 2014.

Ours to fiddle with

     The problem with the fixations of obsessives is that they become tedious to the unobsessed. 
     But inside every idiotic flap, there is an interesting cultural discussion, crying to be let out.
     So before we let the Fox News "Santa-is-white" kerfuffle, which I waded into last week, fade into the oblivion it richly deserves, let us pause to consider the whole notion of cultural icons.
    Not just Santa and Jesus — who Fox also whitewashed — but all the rest. From Uncle Sam to Smokey the Bear. Some symbols were once real—Honest Abe Lincoln. Others only notionally — Benny the Bull — while some fall in between.
     Icons do ... what? Entertain us, sell us stuff, comfort us. We rally round them—that's their use in sports—they unite us, represent us, are something we all agree upon. 
     Or did. You're supposed to agree. But in a culture when agreement is in short supply, and disagreement is more the norm, our common symbols become problematic.  
     Some people cling to them. Some attack them. I'm in between. I feel their attraction as strongly as anybody. I hated when the Big Boy chain of hamburger joints squeezed out their iconic Big Boy mascot. What was the point without him? It was just another crappy burger chain then, Denny's without the charm. I was relieved when the Boy returned, so much so that I actually patronized Big Boy restaurants, several times, with my family and friends, before we were forcefully reminded just how lousy the food and the service were.
      I grew up in Cleveland, was a passionate Indians fan in childhood, and a long-distance fan for the rest of my life.  I cried when they won the pennant in 1995. To me, Chief Wahoo, the crude, racist caricature representing the team, is a symbol of great beauty and worth.  In years past, when people argued over it, I would conjure up a similar leering Chief Yahoo face, only with a beard and earlocks and a fur hat. Rabbi Wahoo or, I suppose, Rabbi Vahoo. Say he was the symbol of another team—the Brooklyn Hassids. I would love that. I would have a felt Sluggin' Brooklyn Hassids pennant on my wall, no question asked.
    That was the logic that, in my mind, trumped arguments against him—if you put my people under similar treatment, I would think it was okay. Ergo Chief Wahoo is okay. 
     Yet others conjured up that same theoretical Jewish Wahoo figure in an attempt to prove the opposite. Imagine a team, The New York Jews, they say, assuming the argument was settled, assuming, for us, that we'd hate that, ignorant that, no, of course, many, maybe most, Jews would LOVE that, because it goes against every stereotype of their people.
     Just as individuals are different, groups are different.  Italians cringe at gangster images of themselves, because it feeds into a strong negative stereotypes.  But Jews often celebrate our gangsters, their 1930s boxers, in the guise of history, because it goes contrary to the Jew-as-weakling stereotype. The only thing my father ever told me about his religion growing up was that the rabbi from his synagogue was the guy who walked Lepke Buchalter to the electric chair. 
      Native-Americans have the whole athleticism vibe down already, thank you very much. No need for them to catch a contact high of physical grace off sports teams, like everybody else.
      Just as, not being black, Fox News team of four white analysts might not be the ideal person to judge the value of a black Santa, so here, I'm not the marginalized member of some betrayed and slaughtered Native American tribe. If I were, I could see how these symbols would rankle, to see Chief Wahoo or, worse, the Redskins. Sure, fighting them is symbolic. But what other victory are they going to have at this point?
     For years, Cleveland has been nudging Wahoo into the shadows, and this year he is almost completely gone from their helmets and materials. 
     And I thought ... okay. 
    Not quite "good." I did, as I said, grow up with him. But I did grow up. And if the Cleveland Indians have decided to dial him back, so be it. We'll love the next mascot too. People in Chicago picketed Marshall Field's after its name was changed to Macy's. As much as I agreed with the idea, they were idiots. To live in this world, and get exercised over that issue, to have Frango mints drive you into the street with a sign. It's almost perverse.
     What they forget, what the anti-change crowd forgets, is the lesson the Fox people are breaking their teeth on. Old symbols go away all the time. We create new old favorites.
     The key question is: who controls these images? Not so much sports mascots, they're exceptions, created and literally owned by specific teams. They change them when it's good business to change them, or cave in to make the hassle stop. But cultural images. Who says what race Santa is? What Jesus looks like? And the obvious answer is, we all do. It is a collective decision, made by millions of tiny choices. That's what makes the Fox complaint, at heart, so cowardly and weak and foolish. They are in a competition, of sorts—what is the image of our cultural icons? They fear they are losing, because the minorities they scorn are both growing in numbers and boldness (though not racing to change Santa. That was just a blog post). Still, rather than play — run "The Miracle on 34th Street"over and over if it's such an urgent issue; they're a goddamn TV network; they could do it—they whine and cry and complain. It isn't the "Happy holidays" crowd that is spoiling Christmas; it's Fox News.
     When I saw Cesar Augusto Martinez's "Mona Lupe," pictured above, at the National Museum of Mexican Art, I was delighted. It's beautiful, and whimsical, and everyone else has had a crack at parodying the Mona Lisa, so why not? I think I like it better than the original. 
     If you have your head on straight, you are not threatened by someone riffing on your cultural icons, a black Jesus, a blues classic being covered by a white singer. Because they're not yours, not really. They're everybody's. That should be clear. But a lot of people don't have their heads on straight, and this kind of thing flushes them out of the woodwork. Probably a good thing -- it reminds us they're there and what they really think, and it probably makes them take a baby step toward understanding the diverse world they actually live in, even if they don't know it.

Boulder bound

Car parked on my parents' block in Boulder. 

       People fall in love with Colorado. They take one look at those craggy mountains, that clean air (except for Denver, which is Cleveland with mountains) partake of the vigorous lifestyle, sample the way-left-of-center politics, at least in Boulder, and never return to wherever home happens to be.
      I am not one of those people. Even though — and very few of my acquaintances know this about me —I first visited Colorado 40 years ago, and have gone back frequently ever since, and lived there, oh, the better part of a year, all total, if you add up various summers and sojourns and visits. My parents live there still.

Photo by Carle Calvin @UCAR

      It began in 1973, when my father, a government physicist, started spending summers working at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. We all came along. If you've ever watched Woody Allen's "Sleeper," you caught a glimpse of NCAR--I haven't seen the movie in decades, but somehow, the scene where the nose gets flattened by the steamroller comes to mind. We'd rent the house of a professor who was somewhere else, and I'd wander Boulder, not doing much of anything I didn't do back in Ohio — reading, riding my bike. I must have done some outdoorsy Colorado things -- I do remember climbing the Arapahoe Glacier. 
      In 1987, my father retired from NASA in Cleveland, and they moved full time to Colorado-- but by then I was working at the Sun-Times, and dating Edie, and to be honest, never felt the pull as much as other people have. The mountains are nice, but Colorado struck me as being for the mountain-addled. You could hang out in Boulder and enjoy a sort of full-time Scoutmaster existence, gobbling handfuls of gorp and identifying spoor. Or you could live in Chicago and be an adult and accomplish things beyond learning Tai Chi. 
    It helped they didn't want me. Boulder had a newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, and I clearly remember interviewing . The editor who talked to me said, in essence, "Our janitor has a degree from Harvard, and is mopping the floor, just waiting for his break here. Why should we hire you?" They didn't quite grab me by the collar and the back of the belt and heave me out the door, but the result was the same.
    It was an interesting place. Lots of Volvos. I had my 1963 P1800 for a while, and remember, at one intersection in downtown Boulder, that there were three other P1800s at a four-way intersection.That probably couldn't happen any other place outside of Sweden.  The University of Colorado named its student union snack shop the Alferd [sic] Packer Restaurant and Grill, after a notorious Colorado cannibal who devoured his traveling companions on terrible snowbound winter. That always struck me as clever.  
    So I have a fondness for Boulder, for its restaurants, and quirky shops like the Artists' Co-Op, the Pearl Street Mall and all that nature. I even ... and nobody knows this ... sometimes ski. I'm putting on my Colorado uniform -- Keen hiking boots, rag-wool socks, REI fleece—and heading there Tuesday, with Kent in tow, and will try to file a report or two from the People's Republic of Boulder. I'll try to find the right Colorado-bound reading material for the flight, but it'll be hard to top the year I brought along, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance by Stephen Herrero. "Unflinching" the book's inside flap says of its exhaustive, graphic account of every bear mauling on record. Which is not a claim that the reader can echo.  

A van worthy of its doughnuts

     My first glimpse came as it paused, making a right turn onto LaSalle Street, an improbable old blue step van with "Doughnut Vault" emblazoned on the side. Robin's egg blue and quaintly rounded — it looked like the milk trucks of my youth.   
     It is a 1957 International Metro in the service of Chicago's heralded Doughnut Vault, which I wrote about a few months after it opened in 2011. Besides making incredible doughnuts—the gingerbread cake is to die for—the Vault is known for the long lines which persist most days outside the tiny shop at 401 N. Franklin Street from the time they open until they run out of the thousand doughnuts they bake every day, usually by lunchtime.
    So not only is the van cool, but it fills an important function. No need to find the shop, immediately north of the Merchandise Mart, and wait in that line for 20 minutes or half an hour for your $3 doughnut. Now the shop would find you. 
    I couldn't run up to it as it turned, though I thought about it. Then the truck was gone, vanished into the air, like some exotic bird, seen for a moment in repose, then flapping off.
     Online, I gleaned that the van was created by Vintage Step Vans, a Columbus Ohio concern, and hit the streets in September. In case you don't want to rely upon serendipity, the van tweets its location @vaultvanChicago. 
     I didn't check its tweets. I waited. A few weeks went by. I was hiking to the County Building, when I caught sight of it perched outside Block Thirty Seven -- nesting on the sidewalk, as if it weren't incongruous enough. It was there as part of a NOSH event, trying to draw customers to the moribund development. But the truck remained outside, as if to be removed from the taint of the cursed structure.
     In the back was a young man wearing a fedora. His name is Derek Repsch, and he said not only are Doughnut Vault customers attracted but the van, but so are its employees.
     "It was a big draw for me," he said, selling me a birthday cake doughnut filled with frosting. "Frankly, I thought it was a lot of fun."

Derek Repsch

     The Doughnut Vault is the creation of culinary wunderkind Brendan Sodikoff, who also owns the Gilt Bar around the corner and several other hot area eateries. It was his sincere frustration with the lines outside the Doughnut Vault that led to the creation of the van. "I feel bad about the line," he told Chicago Magazine last year. "I called the city to see if I could sell doughnuts out of a Dutch-style bike to help cut the lines. But they said no, it had to be a motorized vehicle." 
     They didn't say it had to be such a delightful motorized vehicle. That's just the kind of attention to detail that also makes for great doughnuts. It was natural that they would create a vehicle that stands out from the generic colorful cupcake wagons and waffle vans.
     "Throughout the whole company, there's a kind of aesthetic," said Repsch. It shows.

Kids won't ask, so you need to give them books

This column didn't quite turn out how I wanted it to. It started with the news of Bernie's Book Bank, which filtered down through the Sun-Times hierarchy, and ended up with me, I guess, because it's about books. I might have let it go, but I had the vignette from Jack London burning on my brain pan. And I meant for it to reach into books as objects. My gut tells me that writing is writing, and just as it can be read as easily in a book as on a parchment, so it can be read on a screen, and when you compare the dollars for print books versus pennies for electronic ones, of course people will gravitate toward ebooks. But look at the proliferation of orchestras, or live theater, of artisanal everything, flying in the face of the mass-produced, the virtual, the recorded. Maybe reading a book, with covers, is a tactile act. We'll see. Anyway, I got more reaction to this column, which appeared in the paper Wednesday, than I expected, so I decided to post it here too. 

     When Jack London was 10, a teacher loaned the future author of “The Call of the Wild” a book: “Tales of the Alhambra,” Washington Irving’s sketches of exotic Spain.

     What she did not realize was that London lived in dire poverty; it was his only book. He read it over and over. But eventually it became time to give the book back.

     “I was not a forward child,” London remembered years later. “Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for more. When I returned the ‘Alhambra’ to the teacher, I hoped she would lend me another book.”

     But she didn’t.

     “I cried all the way home on the three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch,” London wrote. “I waited and yearned for her to lend me another book.”

     That’s how kids are. As much as they may need and want them, they do not typically say, “Please give me books.” Because they’re shy or because they don’t know who or how to ask. That’s where adults come in, adults like Brian Floriani, founder of Bernie’s Book Bank, a Lake Forest charity that this week will give away its 2 millionth book to needy Chicago-area children.

     "We started four years ago," Floriani said. "The object was to create a revolutionary children's book-bank model."
     Rather than giving one child one book once, Bernie's forms relationships with schools, visiting twice a year, year after year, giving kids bags of six books at a time.
     "The kids are so excited, it's like it's Christmas when we show up," he said.
     Floriani had been a golf pro when his father — the "Bernie" in Bernie's Book Bank — died suddenly, at age 58 in 2005.
     "It shook me to my core and led me from the golf business toward a life of service," Floriani said.
     His father had been a professor of reading at Lake Erie College in Ohio. Given that his death notice ends, "Because of Bernie's love for reading and books, the nicest memorial for him would be to read a book and make a donation to your local library," his son had specific ideas about how to channel his energies into service.
     "The only way that transformation can happen is education," said Floriani, talking of his father's rise from humble beginnings in Pennsylvania coal mine country. "It wasn't because of who he knew, but because of what he knew."
     One thing about a program like Bernie's — you couldn't do it with e-books. Electronic books have benefits - they're cheaper, eventually; you can search them; they're often lighter to carry. But they have significant drawbacks; besides the common ones - you need a device to read them, you lose the tactile experience of turning pages - you lose serendipity. Buy a book, you have it, can loan it, donate it, put it on a table. A bookcan pop up, years after you've forgotten it, and present itself to be read again.
     Books still help kids learn, in part because books still grab readers in ways that online text doesn't. For all the emphasis on electronics, books have proven surprisingly resilient. This season, sales of e-books and e-readers are flat, and many kids can't afford technology. While computers are sometimes educational, sometimes just a distraction, books are still essential, though not in many households.
     "Some kids come to school not knowing what books are," Floriani said. "Those kids don't have a chance."
     Bernie's is celebrating giving its 2 millionth book on Thursday at the Academy for Global Citizenship, 4647 W. 47th. As good a thing as this is, I couldn't help but pause at the emphasis on number of books. When I asked Floriani about the quality of the books, he thought I meant the condition.
     "If a book is overloved, it doesn't cut the mustard," he said. "Fifty percent of our books go out used, 50 percent new. You'd hardly be able to tell the difference."
     No, no — what sort of books? Is Bernie's just a conduit between publishers with overstock? Good-hearted people with too many books and kids who take what they get?
     He said they rate books by grade. "The leveling, that's done by us," he said, explaining age groups used by their staff of seven.
     That will have to do. The goal is to get books to kids who have none - to get them great books, well, that's a star to reach for.
     Floriani said Bernie's Book Bank is serving about 80,000 at-risk kids, of 300,000 he estimates in need ofbooks. He sees his organization as expanding, not only to surrounding counties, but to other cities.
     "It's a monumental task, but I know it's going to happen," he said. "We want to be an American institution."

You can't just drive by

     It was the morning after Thanksgiving. The feast from the night before was still being digested. Food was the last thing on our minds. 
    Since the out-of-towners were in for the holiday, it seemed a good moment to dedicate my mother-in-laws gravestone. So we all gathered in the cemetery in Westchester. People snap at honors, but I can't think of a better one than 15 of your closest relatives standing in the foot-stamping, finger-numbing cold, for a solid hour, telling each other what they already know: what a fantastic person you were, how much you are missed.
    Finally we ended. "I can't feel my feet," my wife said, signaling the tribute had come to a close. Then we all had to adjourn to Bellwood, it being so close, to see the old house, where my wife and her siblings grew up. 
     After the house had been sufficiently admired, it was time to go to lunch. But I was driving. So though we had feasted the night before, and though the boys, who didn't know any better, questioned the decision, I had to stop at Victor Lezza, cause really, how often are you in Bellwood?  
    ("No, no," my wife objects, "I had to stop at Victor Lezza's...") 
    So we both had to stop. Not so much wanted to, though we did. But had to. It would have been an insult otherwise. Because we were there. I went in, shamefaced, to pick out a pound of Italian cookies. As I was doing so, my wife appeared beside me and ordered four cannoli -- for later. Then my two sons came in even though they said they wouldn't. Just to see. Then my sister-in-law and her husband, unexpectedly. And another brother-in-law.
     Lezza is one of those Chicago places that you just cannot drive by. It would be a kind of sin, like passing your mother in the street without acknowledging her. Yes, you can get Lezza spumoni in supermarkets -- Sunset carries it in Northbrook —and I do. But to buy the cookies, to see their abundant varieties through the case, all forms and shapes, powdered, sprinkled, scalloped and colorful, to select them one by one, the clerk pausing, awaiting your command, you have to be there. And of course cannoli do not tolerate time or travel well -- you need them fresh. They get soggy. And soggy cannoli; just not the same.
       I'm sure everyone has their own list of Chicago places that have some kind of tractor beam, where you just have to stop in, or pull the car over because you are literally unable to drive by. Food mostly. Bennison's Bakery in Evanston. Kaufman's Deli in Skokie. Lots of places on Devon. It feels wrong to pass Tahoora Sweets without going in for piping hot milk tea, for my wife, who loves the tea. And a few of those green trapezoidal pistachio things, for me, since I'm there. The tea is so hot, scalding, that it's still hot when it gets back to Northbrook. 
    Once I was heading home down Devon Avenue and the car just  pulled itself over at Tel Aviv Kosher Bakery. I waited in line, the only secular Jew in a room full of guys in beards and black hats and ladies in long dresses and wigs. I felt like I had stepped back in time. The challahs were fresh and hot from the oven, and, well, without going into self-indicting detail, not nearly as much loaf came out of that car as went into it. 
      Which is another tradition, the parking lot feast. Yes, at Lezza's, we were heading to lunch, but the cookies were right there. By force of will we each limited ourselves to one -- okay, two. But they were really, really savored and appreciated cookies and, frankly, I consider it an admirable act of restraint that we didn't gobble them all. 
      If you're wondering whether I realize how, umm, weak and indulgent this is, yeah. What of it? Schopenhauer I'm not. I'm not. Self-disciplined people reap rewards, no doubt, but sometimes the path of the hero is to plunge into life's feast, and save reserve for another day. And while it is wonderful that we can get everything everywhere, scarcity creates value, and there's something rare, magical, about stuff available at one spot and nowhere else, and to indulge when it is fresh and new to the world. My younger son Kent and I once hopped into the front seat, fresh from New York Bagel on Dempster, and helped ourselves from the big brown bag to one warm, doughy bagel apiece. I should be ashamed to say that it was a highlight of my life. But I'm not and it was.