Ignorant or complicit?

     There are so many ways to say it: between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea or -- for you classics fans -- between Scylla and Charybdis, the dilemma Homer rolls out for his seafaring hero, Odysseus, in The Odyssey.  
     Scylla is the six-headed monster, "the yelping horror," in Robert Fagles' essential translation. "No one could look on her with any joy. She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each, each head barbed with a triple row of fangs."
     Charybdis, the sucking whirlpool, gulping water down, vomiting it back up, is hardly better, "like a cauldron over a raging fire, all her churning depths would seethe and heave—exploding spray showering down ... she swallowed the sea-surge down her gaping maw the whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared, terrible, deafening." 
     Steering clear of one means straying into the clutches of the other.
     For embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the choices are ignorance or complicity. Either he was in the dark as his top aides shut down the George Washington Bridge in a truly insane effort to create a days-long traffic jam to punish the mayor of Ft. Lee, New Jersey for the laughable offense of not endorsing Christie in the last election, plus the additional acts of political pay-back that have already begun dribbling out, with the promise of more to come. 
     Or he knew. And with it going on, not as a lapse, but a habit, he almost had to. Unless the notorious bully really was in the dark about the bullying go on in his name all around him.
     Which is worse?
     Had to decide. I suppose knowing is always worse, from a criminal point of view. But ignorance, the figleaf Christie tried to squeeze his bulky humiliation behind during his already infamous two-hour press conference, carries its own price. How can a guy who wants to be president of the United States shrug off that he was at the center of an idiotic carnival of dirty tricks involving his closest and longest-serving aides? "I was aware of it" gets him hounded from office, and "I was blind to it," kills off the political future that he obviously craves. 
    Those are the only two options, frying pan or fire. There isn't really a third. 
    Odysseus, by the way, opts for Scylla, figuring better to lose a few sailors than risk losing them all in the whirlpool. And he does, three crewmen plucked from his deck like little fish snagged by an angler. In the same way Christie, allowed his compromised underlings to be jerked off the political stage, one by one. Odysseus, his heart wrenched, continues on his voyage toward home. But no safe port for the governor of New Jersey, looking more and more a figure out of Greek tragedy himself. I'm betting that, reeling from Scylla, Chris Christie ends up blundering right into the swirling vortex of Charbydis. 

Reading books for a living

     Audible, the audio book company owned by Amazon, issued my 2008 recovery memoir, Drunkard, as an audio book this week, which drew my attention to the growing popularity of listening to recorded books. 
     To me, audio books are to written books as Tastykake pies are to real pie. That is, they belong to the realm of accommodations made for long car trips. Audio books are something to put on the CD player to lull the boys in the back seat into passivity and help the miles click past. I've only listened to one audio book outside an automobile and that was more than a dozen years ago: To Kill a Mockingbird. And that only happened because of a confluence of circumstances: a) the audio book company sent a box of tapes; b) I had never read the Harper Lee classic and c) Chicago picked it as the first book featured by its "One Book, One Chicago" reading program.
     The experience was wonderful. I would sit down on the train, become lost in the story and then, poof, we'd be at Union Station. One of my happiest summer 2001 memories, in the weeks leading up to 9/11, was lingering on the walk from the station to work, sitting in the warm September morning on a bench at Daley Plaza, stealing a few extra minutes to listen to the book read in a rich, Mississippi drawl by actress Roses Pritchard.
     Yet somehow, as pleasant as that was, I never sought out another audio book. Blame habit.
     When Audible contacted me, they asked who I'd recommend to read my book for them. They have quite an A-list of performers, Ethan Hawk, Nicole Kidman, Kenneth Branagh. I listened to a bunch, then picked Jeff Woodman, just because his voice sounded right, and he had done a number of best-sellers such as Life of Pi and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Maybe a bit of that mojo would rub off on me, maybe he could add some upmarket shine to my own little wheezing steam engine of a midlist career. (Not that it would affect me financially—Audible drives a hard bargain, and takes all profits for the next eight years in return for their lump payment. At least at my level—I'm sure Stephen King cut a better deal). In the weeks before he taped my book, Woodman phoned to go over the pronunciations — my hometown of Berea ("rhymes with Maria") the socialite Mary Cameron Frey (rhymes with "cry.")
    I was impressed with his preparation, and that a person could make a living reading books. Audio books are having a renaissance -- this is one creative field that technology is not killing, but supercharging. What loped along with cassette tapes, then DVDs has exploded with downloads. Audible alone recorded 10,000 titles in 2012. Woodman himself has done, what, 300?
     "I've done 400 plus," he said. "I lost track at some point, about 200." A few others have done more, but he's "at the high end of the output."
     Is it fun? As a guy who reads books out loud as entertainment, or did, when my kids would allow me, it seems a delightful way to make a living.
     "It's a chore, it's a lot of work," he said. "One thing people don't realize."
     At least fiction and memoirs are a chore. Self-help and instructional books? "That's gravy," he said.
     The difference is preparation. Self-help can be read cold. With books such as mine, with memoirs or fiction (I've heard it argued that those two categories are the same genre under different names) he has to read a book in its entirety first and make notes about developments with dialogue, character and action.
     "I read it to myself, start marking it up," Woodman said. "The manuscript is a mess by the time I'm done. Notes to myself about where this character is going, what you need to be thinking." Since moods and emotions change over the pages, an actor needs to set the stage if, oh, a character is going to be crying at the end of a chapter.

Jeff Woodman

    Not every professional book reader prepares this way. Woodman's rule about alway reading the book all the way through before recording came from a time when he wasn't able to read the passages he would be reading until the morning of the recording sessions, and it got him into trouble.
     "The plot hinged on whether a guy was named 'Werner' or 'Verner,'" he said. "We had discussed how heavy an accent to use, and didn't want to go the "Vee haff vays to make you talk,' route. In the end it was a plot point." They had chosen the wrong pronunciation, and had to go back and overdub -- something they do only in extreme circumstances, as studio time is expensive, and actors are paid by the finished product hour, so whether it takes three hours or 80 minutes to create an hour's finished product—which Woodman can do on a roll—the pay is the same, in his case from $225 to $350 per finished hour. (Top stars can command more, up to a six-figure salary for a big Hollywood name to read a best-seller).
     Though well-paid — Woodman got more to read Drunkard than Audible paid me for the rights to sell its sonic version  —audio books don't receive quite the notice that books themselves do, though he has had his share of praise. "Anyone who was beguiled reading John Berendt's  saga of venality and voodoo in Savanah will be bewitched listening to Jeff Woodman, who doesn't misplace a breath or a pause in 15 hours," People magazine wrote of his reading of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That said, audio book narrator is not a particularly bright star in the constellations of either literary or thespian fame.
    "Joseph Mankowitz said the playwright's wife is the lowest form of celebrity," Woodman said. "That's because in 1950 the audio book narrator hadn't been invented."
    Actually, it had. In 1932, the American Foundation for the Blind received a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and began Talking Books, as a way for the blind to be read to. At the time, a 78 rpm record was heavy, fragile and played for about five minutes, which made them impractical for book purposes. You'd need dozens. It was technicians working for the AFB who developed the idea of 33 1/3 rpm records on a lighter, cheaper, less-fragile new material called "vinyl," as a way to make audio books more practical and affordable for the blind, and incidentally ushered in the era of long-playing records.
      They began recording passages from the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and works by Shakespeare.  The first living author to have her work recorded was, fittingly, Helen Keller, though she herself was against the idea of recording books for the blind, as a needless extravagance in the Depression, though she eventually changed her mind.
     The federal Works Progress Administration got involved, hiring actors who would later become well-known -- Lloyd Bridges recorded several books in the late 1930s. Authors also read their own works: Thomas Mann recorded Buddenbrooks in 1941; Harry S. Truman read his Year of Decision, in 1956. In 1970, Maya Angelou recorded I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Books on Tape was founded in 1975, Recorded Books in 1979, and in the 1980s the practice of listening to taped books, on Walkmans and car stereos, began to take hold.
    Woodman said that the skill needed to narrate  book is under-appreciated.
     "You can make or break a book by naration," he said, mentioning a celebrity, whom he didn't want to criticize by name, mangling a book. "Obviously he hadn't pre-read it," Woodman said. "Reading it cold, he didn't make any choices, so couldn't make a wrong one." The result was flat, uninteresting.  "You have to perform a book, it's a performance. If you don't bring that to it, you can kill the book. A good book needs a good narration and a bad book needs a great narration, you have to keep all these balls in the air. Which is really tough when you have bad writing."

     Woodman has turned jobs down -- the Left Behind series of fantasy Christian apocolyptic nuttery. And some books require work you wouldn't imagine. One Mississippi, by Mark Childres, is about a high school student who performs a musical called "Christ!" "The author had written these hysterically awful lyrics, and I had to write melodies for the audio books," Woodman said.
    I couldn't help but ask Woodman what it was like to read my memoir.

     "Doing Drunkard was a great deal of fun," he said. "I just found it was so full of humor, and that was my way into it. It's a pretty harrowing story, but becasue there was so much humor in it, that was one of the appealing things. The narrative voice had so much humor."
     Of course, the book he read was a little funnier than the published book. The palladins at Dutton had been concerned that the book was too funny -- this is rehab, gosh darn it, you're not supposed to laugh. So my editor took his cleaver to a few of my favorite lines, which Woodman gamely re-inserted into the text, at my request, adding the original ending, which was deemed too light to use and lopped off. So that's a bonus.
     Five years after its publication, I still hear quite frequently from people who read Drunkard and are moved, or are helped on their own paths, and I'm glad for that. All authors want is to have their stuff linger on, and I take the book being recorded as a flicker of life. I enjoyed meeting Woodman, a serious artist who also does live theater -- you can see him in "Hellman v. McCarthy," which runs from March 14 until April 13 at the Abingdon Theatre on West 36th Street in New York City.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Woodman doesn't listen to audiobooks himself, for recreation.
     "I get lost," he said. "I get distracted, all of a sudden I realize I have to back up. Besides it would be sort of a busman's holiday."
      Re-reading Drunkard isn't a party for me either. I haven't listened to the audio version yet — it's a harrowing enough story when it isn't your own life. But I imagine I will, sooner or later. 

You can listen to a sample of Jeff Woodman reading Drunkard by clicking here.

The tragedy behind those "Falling Ice" signs

     The warnings are out in force. Yellow plastic tripods. Big metal signs. “CAUTION: Falling Ice.” They cause a flash of unease — what to do? Look up and get a plummeting icicle in the eye? Look down and hurry past, hoping for the best? That’s what most pedestrians do.

     And wasn’t there some tragedy? Years ago. Someone killed on Michigan Avenue? 
     Yes there was. The accident dwells at the periphery of mind for many Chicagoans, a place of half-remembered horror, like an urban myth except, of course, it actually happened 20 years ago.

     Donald Booth, 48, of Brookfield, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb, was escorting his 16-year-old daughter, Amanda, to Chicago to take a college aptitude test. He was a hardworking manager at Briggs & Stratton, and a loving family man with a warm smile. Taking a day off work to ski with his children, or go to Great America, or join his middle child on the train to Chicago to take a test to see what kind of career she might be interested in was exactly the sort of thing he loved to do.

     It was Feb. 28, 1994.

     Booth left Amanda at the testing center. They planned to meet for lunch. With time to pass, he strolled south down Michigan Avenue on the unusually warm day. In front of the grand, pink granite entrance of the Neiman Marcus department store at the precise moment a 100-pound block of ice the size of a microwave oven came loose 45 feet above.
     Booth was killed instantly. Passersby covered him. Amanda waited, and waited. Her dad was always prompt; his not showing up was out of character. She ducked around the corner for lunch by herself at a sandwich shop. The lady administering the test began making calls, eventually to the police, who were already looking for her. The test administrator walked her over to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, but they wouldn’t let her see her father, wouldn’t tell her anything. Amanda’s uncle eventually met her there, drove her to her aunt’s, and her aunt drove her home.
     And if the ice warning signs are unsettling to you, imagine what they mean to Donald Booth’s daughter, now Amanda Dwyer, having married last year and working downtown for the past decade.
     “I see the signs every year,” she said. “Living in Chicago, it’s hard when I see that every winter. Obviously a constant reminder.”
     Her attitude toward the signs is not too different than the reaction of most.
     “What the hell do they mean?” Dwyer said. “Should I stand right here? Should I stand closer to the street?”
     Actually, the signs, which multiplied after Booth was killed, are not put out for the benefit of pedestrians. They’re put out to provide legal cover for building management.
     “Their way of trying to protect themselves from liability,” said Tom Demetrio, a partner at the Chicago personal injury law firm Corboy & Demetrio. “Sometimes you will even see buildings put out little ropes to make sure you don’t walk too close to the building.”
      Demetrio represented the Booth family in their lawsuit against Neiman Marcus and Olympia & York, the company that manages the building. He said that the law states “building owners owe a duty of care to pedestrians lawfully using the sidewalks.” They have to clear ice or at least warn of it.
     Neiman Marcus did neither. Not only didn’t the luxury retailer fail to put out signs, but the building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, tended to collect ice and had a heating system designed to prevent ice build-up at the flip of a switch. But nobody flipped the switch. The department store and the building manager paid a $4.5 million settlement to the Booths in 1999.
     While that might sound like retire-to-Tahiti money, you have to remember that the lawyers get a third. For Dwyer, her mother, who had already gone back to work, and her two brothers, it’s more a chunk of cold comfort for the loss of their father.
     Dwyer graduated from the University of Wisconsin. For the past decade, she has worked as the national sales manager for Hostelling International USA, which has its second largest hostel in the country on Congress Parkway.
      “My dad would be proud that I came back and moved to Chicago and got on with my life,” she said. “I obviously think of him often.”
     She got married last year, to the comedian Pat Dwyer, and the couple is expecting their first child at the end of April.
     “I wish he could be here to meet his first grandbaby,” she said. “I’m not a very religious person, but I know he’s there. I feel him, here and there.” 
     While the threat of death-by-ice weighs on Chicagoans’ minds, and people have been killed by other falling objects—plywood sheets, crane booms—nobody in Chicago has been killed by ice since.
     “I haven’t heard of a similar type tragedy in our Chicagaoand area,” Demetrio said. “The Neiman Marcus case was unique.”
     But just because a hazard is rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean people don’t worry.”
     Demetrio worries.
     “I always walk loser to the curb of the street,” he said. “They usually don’t fall out that far.”
      Dwyer tries not to let it bother her.
     “I just try to keep living,” she said. “I’m not going to avoid every big building because something might fall.”
      Although.
     “I don’t shop or walk around Neiman Marcus,” she said. “I do not walk that block and will probably never walk that block.”
     Otherwise, she tries to use the memory of her father as a boost to get the most out of life. She studied abroad, in France, lived abroad, and credits her father’s influence.
      “I’m such a big traveller, and for me, that’s a big part of how I’m able to continue his legacy a bit,” she said. “A big part of this is try not to take any day for granted, I get mad at myself when I do, when I get caught up in silly, small things in life, as we all do. It made us all closer. I’m very thankful for my family, my mom, who is absolutely amazing, one of my best friends. I try to remember the bigger part: we’re here for a very short time.”

Each society picks one of many paths

      It was a long week, between the crazy weather—a 50 degree shift, from 15 below Monday morning, to 35 degrees now—and more than the usual work. Phone calls and interviews and fact-checking. Whatever the reason, I just felt ground down. I even took the Brown line down to Congress instead of hopping on a bike.
      "Thank God it's Friday" I told co-workers on the elevator, not a usual cliche of mine, as I gratefully left the office and headed over to the Lyric Opera to see Johann Strauss' "Die Fledermaus," a sugary linzer torte of an operetta, with catchy tunes and dancing girls and a plot of masquerade and mistaken identity. The first act takes place in a sumptuous house, the second in a palace, the third in a jail, and it was good to see the Lyric return to its gorgeously ornate sets -- no bare stage with a strip of neon here—lush scenery and colorful, intricate costumes. No bats however — "Die Fledermaus" is "the bat" in German — but there was a guy flapping around in a bat wing costume, at one point.
     The superb cast is headed, aptly, by an actual Austrian, soprano Daniela Fally, who plays the saucy parlor maid hot to shuck her duties and head to a fancy party, unaware that she, like  the rest, is being drawn into a velvet trap -- "The revenge of the bat" — an elaborate prank, sort of the 19th century Viennese version of "Punk'd" with music and lots of Champagne.
      There are many reasons to love these Viennese operas -- Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow" is also a favorite.  Not just for the music, but the wit, the easy immorality — everyone in "Fledermaus" is cheerily cheating on everyone else, or trying to. The constant drinking, the unashamed adoration of wealth. It probably wasn't all that great to live through, especially for the majority who weren't wealthy. But it sure is fun to watch.
     Despite the pure entertainment value, I can't help but find myself wondering where they went wrong, the Germans and the Austrians — Strauss was an Austrian, and his life overlapped for 10 year with his countryman, Adolf Hitler.  Here they were having so much fun. And then ... 
     Okay, stop. Not much upside in going there. History is set, done. But the future is not. It is yet to be determined. And the only thing to do after contemplating the Road Not Taken for the light happy people who wrote entertains like "Fledermaus" is to recognize the various elements at work in every country, in our own country. America is a light happy place, too, as well as a dark dangerous place, with deep poverty and ignorance, abundance and education, all grabbing at the steering wheel, trying to point our country in one direction or the other. It matters which direction we steer. Is health care a basic human right, or a kind of intrusive government oppression?
     So which will it be? If the United States is to become a xenophobic nest of heavily-armed haters, well, you can't say the seeds weren't there. Or if we are to somehow hold onto our progressive freedoms, our respect of diversity and social progress? We see the tug-of-war, and sometimes wonder if it's worth it. At least I do.  After Chris Christie ran into his traffic jam scandal this week, I dipped into the Troglodyte Right Wing press -- the Drudge Report, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the Tribune, that sort of thing, to see how they were spinning it. Oh. My. God. It was almost breathtaking, the warped, nasty blowback, a realm of almost pure hallucination. How to argue with that? And what's the point? The temptation is to draw back, shiver with disgust, leave the field, lose oneself in art. Turn up the opera. Let them fight over this thing. 
     But art refreshes, thank God, and I left "Die Fledermaus" renewed to my purpose.  It was dark and rainy and slushy and Metra is still having trouble making the trains roll. But none of that bothered me. Seeing something so light and funny and happy, and done so well, is a bracing reminder to push for the good.  This is the point. To keep ideology from squeezing out our quirky musical selves. To hold onto what's good.
      And it is a good production. I won't review it, but the cast was outstanding. Emily Fons' archly scowling drag turn as Prince Orlofsky and Bo Skovhus' eagerly debauched yet somehow naive Gabriel von Eisenstein. Fred Wellisch's happily drunken turnkey Frosch has the best line of the night, trying to silence a singing prisoner with, "You're not in an opera house!" It takes a second to register and the audience laughs, because of course, we are in an opera house.  There's a lesson there -- we forget we're in a place where we can always hear music, but we really are. Frosch shuffles off with "and now it's time to make room for the Mayor of Toronto," one of the several topical references that help keep the humor fresh. He didn't say "make room for Rob Ford," because not everyone would know the mayor of Toronto by name, despite his extreme notoriety.  Which has to be encouraging too. Politics is forgettable and temporary, but important. Art is memorable and permanent, but unimportant, in that it doesn't set the policy of the day. But art is in another sense keenly important, in that it revivifies those who fight the good fight. Which starts up again on Monday.  There are also three more performances of "Die Fledermaus" next week, so if the walls close in, you'll know where to go. 

Photo by Dan Rest, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago

Sort of like an app, only paper.

     Kofi Acquah-Dadzie, Assistant Registrar and Master, High Court of Botswana. Francois Bujon de l’Estang, Ambassadeur du France. Richard Melman, Chairman, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

     If I were to come up with a new technology that would take your business information — name, phone number, address, the logo and particulars of your place of employment — and somehow worm that data into the lives of random people you met, where it would live for months and years and decades, popping up now and then, I bet I could score big on the technology front. Give it a funny name: “DataBlast,” sell stock.

     Alas, business cards are low tech, 31/2-by-2-inch rectangles of stiff paper. A centuries-old technology, the descendant of calling cards. And I’m finally getting rid of mine. All of them. 

     Ethan Matlin, Fiddler. Junaid M. Afeef Esq., The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Roel M. Doherty-Roque, Police Officer, 20th District/Lincoln Station.  

     Blame it on not having a proper New Year’s resolution. I’ve already lost weight. I still don’t drink. Somehow my attention was drawn to all this clutter, drawers of stuff, papers and files and coral reefs of useless junk that I have set aside for some purpose and now are just in the way. I figured, get rid of it. I figured, start with the business cards.

     Why not? Some are for defunct establishments: LaSalle Bank, now part of Bank of America. Aigre Doux, now the Gilt Bar. The Division Street Russian Bath, now enjoying a second, snazzier life as "Red Square."
     Some are from defunct people. Phil Pagano, the Metra chief who stepped in front of a train. Did I really meet him? I don't recall. But I must have; I've got his card.
     Some I kept, intending to write stories. I have several cards from the Cactus & Succulent Society of Greater Chicago, picked up during its annual show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I always meant to join, not out of any particular love of cacti, but out of the charmed notion that there would be all these comic political dramas going on in the society, bitter power plays and raging conflict. But it seemed too unhinged a project, even for me, and I never followed through.
     I did actually pay dues and join the Napoleonic Alliance ("William Hurlbutt, President") and found myself at its annual dinner, holding a glass of Champagne high and crying, "Vive l'empereur!" Can't make that up. The phone's disconnected now.
     Martin L. King, chairman, Rainbow/PUSH. Frederic P.N. Chang, vice minister, Republic of China. Colin Hall, Allen Edmonds Shoe Corp.
     The cards got me wondering — with email, LinkedIn, Facebook, you just don't go digging for business cards the way you used to. How are they doing, as a product?
     "People still need them," said Jack Serrano, partner/manager of AlphaGraphics, one of the larger producers of business cards in Chicago. "They're a good tool and a big part of my business. Especially traveling overseas. Huge in Asia. You can't say hello without a business card."
     That's even true in this country. People who don't have business cards are unemployed. (Though there must be a separate column in the jokey, grandiose faux business cards that newly retired men seem compelled to print up for themselves. They strike me not as dashing, but desperate.)
     Serrano said the trend is toward double-side, with shiny stock — like Susan Goodenow, vice president of branding & communications at the Chicago Bulls, whose card lists their six NBA championship years on the back and has rounded corners, another popular touch. Hers, I'll keep.
     The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce has a square QR Code — you take a picture with your phone and it gives more info. It looks like a black blot, to me, but then a few years ago I thought people who wore their security passes on a lanyard around their necks look like sheep. Now I wear mine.
     Some cards yanked me back to where I got them. Touring UIC's Illinois somber Craniofacial Center with Dr. Mimis Cohen, Division of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Cosmetic Surgery — facial prosthetics. Some left me puzzled: Who is Alexander A. Babich and what is the American Multiethnic Educational & Promotional Center? No clue.
     I couldn't throw them all out — Robert W. Fioretti, never know when I need to call him. And some were personal. June Steinberg, Independent Beauty Consultant for Mary Kay Cosmetics (Hi mom!). Rabbi Mordechai Tarkieltaub, Certified Mohel. Circumcised both my boys without a hitch. In business? Dial the number. A come-on for a Bahamas cruise. "You'll have a fabulous time on your free Bahamas cruise. Press one now." Pass.

Tough geese

    It's amazing how quickly we get used to stuff. I was walking across the Loop Wednesday and thought, "Wow, this is great. It has to be 15 degrees outside!" And I wasn't being sarcastic. Fifteen degrees would have been knee-knockingly cold last week. But on Wednesday it was 30 degrees warmer than it had been in days. Happiness.
     In other words, it's all perspective. Not a very profound thought, I know. When I was a kid, my mother had a philosophy which boiled down to, "Be happy you don't have cancer." I'm not sure she actually said that, or I was just summarizing her thoughts. It's not the most practical outlook, once you realize you're setting the bar fairly low. You might as well say, "Be happy you're not dead" and then the people with cancer can be happy too — which, now that I think of it, they often are, perhaps for that very reason. 
     First, you don't have to be happy all the time. Bad stuff happens, you get to be upset. Our society puts such a premium on being positive, on calling in the grief counselors the day after the massacre, we forget that it takes time to grieve, takes time to heal.
     Unhappiness, on the other hand, can happen over time, or can happen in an instant. The same "getting used to stuff" mechanism that works when things turn from bad to less bad also cuts the other way. Just as 15 degrees comes as a relief after 15 below, so after a few days of perfect 70 degree weather in Bali, you walk outside and its 60 and raining and you think, "God damn this sucks!" It takes an act of will to remind yourself, "But it's still not terrible, and I'm still in Bali." 
     A delicate balancing act then. Too accepting, and you can rationalize any misfortune and you have no standards. Too discriminating and nothing is good enough. 
     Crossing the Orleans Street bridge, I saw 16 geese huddled on the ice on the Chicago River (only 13 are in the close-up above). At first it seemed  an unwise spot for geese to camp out—aren't they cold there?— but then I thought: they're geese. Trust them. They must know what they're doing. They're close to water. What else should they do? Check into a hotel?
     Maybe that's the final message. You have to trust instinct, including your own. Just as you shouldn't doubt geese -- they've survived a very long time, they're up on this cold weather stuff — so you shouldn't doubt yourself, too much. A little is okay. Then you accept the situation, whatever it is, give yourself time to stumble around in misery, for a while, then yank the reins and guide yourself into the relative warmth of happiness, if you can, because you only get X amount of days, and you might as well be happy, generally, however cold it is outside, whatever your circumstances. 
    Fifteen degrees is pretty cold, usually. But this week it's warm. And it's going up to 40 by the weekend, which will feel like paradise. Forty degrees. I wondered what the geese could possibly be thinking, inside those walnut brains, as they tucked their heads against their bodies and waited. And my hunch was, if you could read their minds, you'd know the geese are thinking: "Spring's coming."
     Or perhaps I'm being wistful. Perhaps the geese were thinking, "Fuck, it's cold on this river!"

 

Do we expect Rahm to vacation in the Dells just to make us happy?

     In the suburbs, we do a little something I call “maximizing our advantage.”
     That means even though we’ve pretty much got it made already—nice houses, generally; good jobs, often; and our kids pampered at top schools, frequently—we still can’t help going that one extra step into the ridiculous, the whole pump-Mozart-into-the-womb, sit-waiting-in-the-SUV-in-the-fire-lane-instead-of-parking, gild the lily and scrape out the last drop of privilege we are convinced is our due route that leaves some—or at least me — wishing we’d leave well enough alone.
     Sunday, just after noon, the robocalls and texts flooded in from Northbrook District 225, lighting up six, maybe eight cellphones and computers associated with our household, telling us in close harmony that school was canceled. After I got over my mild surprise that my two brainiacs were grinning widely and practically vibrating with glee (really, it was like seeing Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein pump their fists in the air and start woofing because the particle accelerator was down), I was immediately troubled that Chicago schools hadn’t done the same. They seemed intent on marching their kids like doomed polar explorers heading into the frozen wasteland of Monday.
      Why? What did the suburban school districts know at midday that took the city until evening to figure out? Wasn’t the weather the same both places? Were the lives of city children not quite as valuable as our own babes? And in the northwest suburbs, going to school on a dangerously cold day means something very different than in the city. School on a subzero day in Northbrook means a line of Honda Odyssey vans delivering their precious cargo, Gortexed and Thinsulated and decked out in hand-knit wool Peruvian hats for the 10-yard stumble from the curb to the door. In Chicago, geez, who knew how many of the 400,000 kids, who risk being murdered on a warm day, would go astray in the 15-below-zero trek to school? Frankly, I suspected some federal finance was at the back of the CPS mind—losing one school day cuts X percent of money from Uncle Sam. Can't have that. Then Karen Lewis and the teachers union called for school to be canceled, and while I doubted their intentions, too—teachers demanding a day off, now that's unexpected—I gave them credit for being right. A few hours, then CPS finally lurched into motion and canceled class. Well glory be to God. Still, it's scary how long it took.
     Yes, it's more complicated than that. You could argue that, for a lot of kids in the city, it's safer to be at school than at home, warmer with more food and less chance to get into trouble. On the other hand ...
     OK, let it drop. Bad enough to be cold without being frenzied, too. Reading coverage of Rahm Emanuel's fresh-from-Indonesia, I'm-in-command Monday tour in both papers made me think everyone had gone a little cabin crazy. In the Tribune, he was tanned. "Nice tan, Mr. Mayor!" opined one of their columnists. The editorial in the Sun-Times noted, "He didn't even look especially tanned." Which is it? To me, Emanuel always looks tanned. His father was an Israeli, remember, and he has the olive-complexioned Sephardic Jew thing going on.
     Besides, complaining about his vacations is silly. It's begging him to deceive us. He's a rich guy. You think New Yorkers were twitting Michael Bloomberg for having his own jet? Rahm goes on the nicest vacations he can, just like you do. His only mistake is not being upfront, not saying, "Hell, I'm off to Indo-freakin'-nesia!" Sure, the Bungalow Belt, with its envy-based view of the world, is going to hate him. Bulletin: They'll hate him anyway. Had Rahm taken his family to Noah's Ark water park in the Dells for Christmas, he'd be slammed for that, too.
     There are two bedrock truths about the mayor that cut through this silliness: A) he's doing the right stuff to fix Chicago's horrendous problems, basically, and B) nobody's going to run against him in 2015 anyway.
     Pensions, crime, schools. People complain about how his solutions affect them, specifically - sure, unions don't like losing pension perks; I hated losing mine, too—but you can't say he isn't making the right decisions.
     Given the lack of an opponent in 2015—the most significant figure contemplating a run some 13 months from the election is Ald. Bob Fioretti, a nice enough guy, but more buzz-saw fodder than buzz saw—Rahm could have stayed in Indonesia Monday, Instagramming back photos of himself on a beach, flipping his famously truncated right middle finger at the camera and telling the suckers stuck at home to stay warm, and it wouldn't really affect anything.