"This is not the hill to die on."

Years ago, the principal of my kids' elementary school used a phrase that I had never heard before: "This is not the hill to die on." Meaning: no big deal, this isn't the issue you want to dig in and fight over. For some reason I liked that saying, and thought of it earlier this evening, when I got an email telling me that a few paragraphs had been sliced off the end of Wednesday's column for reasons of ... ah ... let's just say, in order not to inject insinuation into the Illinois political process. There was a time when that would have upset me, when I would have fled the dinner I was attending, called my bosses, argued my case, that we were supposed to shake things up, not smooth them over. Then at least I'd grumblingly write a few additional paragraphs so the column would be the usual length. 
     Instead—standing in the Notre Dame-like splendor of the University Club's main dining room, where the University of Illinois was honoring my late colleague, Roger Ebert—I looked at the email, shrugged and thought, "Okay then, the column will be short. This is not the hill to die on." Which is either a good thing, or a bad thing, I'm not sure. A similar phrase is, "you have to save your silver bullets." You can't fight every battle. Maybe that's maturity. Maybe it's growing old. But it felt like the right thing to do at the moment. This is the truncated column:

     The gay marriage debate seems to have largely ended in the United States. Even our timid, lick-a-finger-and-check-the-wind president decided that yes, by gum, gays are human after all and form relationships society should recognize. 

      Not all quarters have gotten the memo, of course. The same national nether regions still working their Can’t-We-Just-Go-Back-to-the-Past-Where-We-Felt-Comfortable game plan that includes holding out hope for teaching creationism in public school are dragging their feet on gay marriage, insisting they can stay as bigoted as they please so long as they claim God tells them it’s OK. 

      Good luck with that one. God is commanding me not to pay taxes, yet I’m not expecting my sincere beliefs to be respected.

      Fact is, it takes these debates a long time to end. The idea that gay people should hold jobs — teach school, be cops, deliver mail — might have receded from memory, but it still manifests itself, as seen by the hoopla over Michael Sam, a defensive lineman at the University of Missouri, announcing he is “an openly proud gay man” who wants to play in the National Football League.

      Now being a football player might be an exalted, highly paid job, but it is still a job, and it will be interesting to see, after the smoke clears, whether the NFL decides that an openly gay man should be allowed to slam into other men on a football field. 

      “Why didn’t he wait until after the draft?” one of my sons asked during our dinner table conversation. I said it seems the cat was already out of the bag; he had told his Missouri teammates, and scouts were asking his agent if he had a girlfriend. Rather than let rumor and the strange American fascination with parsing other people’s sex lives run the show, Sam cannily — and, I believe, courageously — decided to continue being honest about who he is. 

     Are there teams that won’t draft him because he’s gay? Without question. But there also will be a team — he only needs one — that wants a player of his skills and might even want the burst of publicity that will come with signing Sam. Or maybe not. Jason Collins, a free agent in the NBA, said last April that he was gay, and he is still looking for a team. 

     So if Sam gets drafted, what will he face? It’s 2014, so I don’t think he’s going to be the new Jackie Robinson, playing through a howl of catcalls. I think, and this is just a guess, that after years of gazing in fixed horror at the Westboro Baptist Church preparing its neon “GOD HATES FAGS” signs and picketing the funerals of soldiers, even a zealous football fan would pause, dripping brush above poster board and wonder if this is really the hill to make his stand on. Then again, sports fans are known for their savage abuse, so why should Sam get a pass? 

     What do we as a society think? Should gay people be allowed to hold jobs? Any job? Even football lineman? There are people, gay and straight, who think you just can’t hold certain jobs and be an out gay man. I would argue that is incorrect, that being out is the more honest, more open, more laudable approach than feeling compelled to lie about who you are. Of course it’s hard. But the hardest work has already been done, by people coming out in rougher times. Coming out now is landing on Normandy Beach a week after D-Day.

     Remember, we aren’t talking about doing the job. Gay men have already played professional football. It is the rest of us who are the issue here. What will we accept? Is the fear and ignorance that still rattle so many over this issue, combined with the close identification people have with their football teams, so great that Michael Sam will never get the chance to play in an NFL game? Possibly. Yet denying him the chance doesn’t seem the fairness that gets so much chin music in sport. On the other hand, Sam is not J.J. Watt — a player of such extraordinary ability he just can’t be overlooked. Better players than Sam have been overlooked. 

     The history of modern life is, in part, the story of the mainstream accepting that heretofore marginal groups can actually do things they once supposedly couldn’t — that women could vote and run companies and perform surgery, and blacks could be soldiers and quarterbacks and presidents. Thus allowing gays to openly play in pro sports is an inevitable step. I hope it comes now; it’s an embarrassingly retro conversation to be having, like wondering now whether football players should wear helmets.

CVS exits the cancer business

     "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,” Oscar Wilde wrote, in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.” “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.”

      I can vouch for that. In springtime, years ago when I was dating, the combination of nice weather and a night on the town would spark in my wife-to-be the desire for a cigarette. Dutiful swain that I was, I would trot off, first to the bar to get $4 in quarters, then to the inevitable cigarette machine tucked back by the restrooms, for the long pull of that raspy mechanical knob, rewarded by the gentle thud of a pack of Marlboro Lights falling into the stainless steel tray.

      I would return with the cellophane-wrapped pack. She would smoke her cigarette and I would smoke the other 19, one after another, enjoying the little cool thumb of relaxation that nicotine presses upon the vibrating anxiety center of the brain.

     Smoking late at night was bliss. The next morning, however, after that tobacco orgy, my mouth felt like the floor of a cab, my lungs did not breathe with their usual avidity, and as much as I wanted to keep the party going, I couldn’t pop another $4 for a pack — another life saved by cheapness.

     More lives will no doubt be saved by CVS Caremark announcing last week it will stop selling cigarettes at its 7,600 drugstores. Not so much because smokers won't be able to buy tobacco—there's always somewhere else, though other chains, particularly No. 1 Deerfield-based Walgreen, will surely follow—but from CVS giving a big turn to the vise of social disapproval that has been tightening on smoking for my entire life.
     When I was in kindergarten in 1965, 43 percent of Americans smoked. That was the year after the surgeon general's report linked cigarettes with cancer. Neither of my parents smoked—my mother didn't despite her mother urging her to, for her figure. But they kept a drawer of big glass ashtrays, because when people came to your house, hospitality demanded you let them light up.
     No more. Now guests would no sooner smoke in our living room than go to the bathroom there. Businesses have similarly transformed. When I joined the Sun-Times in 1987, reporters stubbed out their butts on the newsroom's tile floor. Then smokers were banished, to foul "smokers' lounges" or, more often, kicked to the curb to form the shivering phalanx of nicotine addicts mobbed around most building doorways, despite the signs shooing them away. Then airplanes snuffed out smoking. And bars.
     Smokers howled, as if inhaling smoke were some sort of constitutional right.
     Not this time. The most interesting thing about the CVS shift, beyond the fact they did it, is how little public chatter there has been. Maybe because CVS is a business, and the Complete Liberty for Me crowd thinks everything businesses do is right. Maybe smokers, now 18 percent, have crossed some Rubicon in their long retreat from being considered patrons of a "perfect pleasure" to being seen as a tiny minority indulging in a puzzling, shameful and deadly vice, rather like Philip Seymour Hoffman's heroin use.
     They're all birds of a feather, you know; tobacco and nicotine and booze and drugs and sugar, all ways to hotwire the pleasure centers of our brain that nature intended only to fire when we were making kids or escaping tigers or digging into a platter of roasted mammoth. People who were goggling at Hoffman's death—23 years sober, how could he?—miss the point: Each of us has a balance between our pleasures and their consequences, between the primal lizard brain and the higher intelligence holding tightly on its leash, or not holding, and every 300-pounder, every drunk, every drug addict, every one of the nearly half a million Americans who died from smoking-related illnesses, let go of that leash and then had to face the consequences. You don't need to mainline bad heroin to die from your addiction; it's only more obvious that way. Ironically, the protraction of smoking deaths help shield them from us; if people died match in hand and cigarette on lip, we'd see it more clearly; but they have 10 years of horrible suffering first, hidden in hospitals, so the connection is harder to make. Ironic.
     Some pleasures have no limits. Though I used to warn my studious sons about the dangers of "word poisoning," you cannot in fact read too much. You can't OD on religion (well, you can, and people do, but not in the same sense). But those are subtler pleasures. You never say, "I need music now!" Otherwise, it seems the world is perversely set up that, the more enjoyable a thing is, the steeper the eventual price. Or, as Montgomery Gentry sagely sings, "For every ounce of pleasure there's a pound of pain."

"Death is not an event in life"

     Several months ago I gave a speech to a luncheon at Chicago's Standard Club. I didn't think much about the locale beforehand — the Standard Club was founded by German Jews, who thought highly of themselves, and used to keep out their unwashed Eastern European brethren. The line I like to float about the Standard Club is, "it's the rare Jewish organization that discriminated against Jews."
     That sense of smug jollity vanished when I walked in the lobby, and realized the last time I had been there, two years earlier.  Jeff Zaslow was in town, staying at the club. We were grabbing a quick lunch and met in the lobby. Despite his great success—author of "The Last Lecture" and other huge best-sellers—we managed to stay friends, I think, because we shared a certain level of workmanlike professional pride. We were two schleppers in the same trade, two Jewish wordsmiths, peddling our wares, shrugging and sighing and exchanging tales of the difficulty of pulling into a strange town with a handcart of sentences to sell. 
     When he died, in a traffic accident, two years ago today, I thought mainly of myself. I don't have a bunch of good friends, and now one of the best was taken. I wasn't going to write about it — I owed him that, not to turn him into material — wasn't going to go to the funeral. What would be the point? Jeff wouldn't be there, and I had only met his wife once. It wasn't as if she'd miss me.
      But Eric Zorn — a better man than I am — was going, and I would be damned if I was going to let him drive by himself to flippin' Detroit in this lousy February weather that had already killed Jeff. I didn't want him to go through it alone. So we drove out there, talking about Jeff, talking about lots of things, attended the funeral, which was gut-wrenching and beautiful, in turns, attended by a thousand people, and came back, 600 miles in one day. I'd like to say that the funeral gave some kind of closure, that I was glad I went, but it didn't and I wasn't. 
     The day after I returned, I was sorting things out, or trying to, and wrote the following column. Really just to make myself feel better. A strange column. Actually, it was even odder the way I originally wrote it. My relationship with Jeff was a joshing one, the kind guys will sometimes have. He was always more serious than me. I remembered him calling up, and I asked how he was doing, and he said, grimly, "Not so good — Randy's dying" — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie-Melon professor whose parting talk was the subject of "The Last Lecture."
     "Well he better be dying," I replied — alway the weisenheimer — "or else you're going to end up weeping on Oprah's sofa." "The Last Lecture" is based on the idea that Pausch was dying, and if it turned out he wasn't, well, good for him, but it sort of kicked the book's entire premise out from under it. Maybe you don't think that's funny, but that's what kind of guy I really am, and Jeff tolerated it better than most. 
     In fact, the original ending of this column got sliced off by a concerned city editor.  It ended this way:

    It was only the next morning, waking up feeling a fraction of the chill that his close friends and loved ones will be feeling for years, a thought came that made me smile, one that might even have made Jeff smile, albeit while shaking his head: “If there were a God, it would have been Mitch Albom instead.”  Cold comfort, but a start.

      "It's like you were wishing he were dead," the horrified city editor said. 
      "Better him than Jeff," I replied. But I saw his point, and wrote the ending the column now has. Though I figure, with the more freewheeling ethos of the web, and on a blog that has nothing to do with the Sun-Times, officially, and with the passage of time, I can get away printing it now. I can't imagine Mitch Albom, Detroit sports columnist and author of "Tuesdays with Morrie" and similar treacle, will give a damn one way or the other. 
     Anyway, when I go, I'd want my friends—assuming I have friends, and I'm already one short–to remember me in some way. So I want to re-post this column from the Sun-Times, as a Yartzeit candle to Jeff, who was a really good and decent man, who left a void in my life. "It is not often," E.B. White wrote, "that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." "Not often" is a wild understatement. I'd say almost never.

     Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

     For the person who has died, that is. That person is whisked away to whatever reward or void awaits us after death.

     It is those of us who have not yet died who live through death, big time, who must cope with it, particularly accidental death, which radiates outward, sending shockwaves, first to those at the scene, stunned to find death intruding onto an ordinary day. Then to the officialdom who must deal with death regularly and handle the particulars. Then exploding into the lives of family, who suffer the most and, finally, the thunderclap reaches the outer world, where people hear it and look up, moved to the degree they knew the deceased.

     Jeff Zaslow died in a car accident Friday, as you’ve probably heard. Longtime Sun-Times readers will fondly recall his thoughtful, human and funny advice column that ran from 1987 until 2001, or his best-selling books such as The Last Lecture.
     I don't do grief well — I'm self-centered and over-analytical, a bad mix — and no sooner feel loss then immediately start questioning it, to see if it's legitimate. Jeff's death came as a sickening shock, yet I instantly pulled back, certain that I occupy too distant an orbit among his concentric circles of friends to be entitled to feel awful, which is reserved for his wife and daughters and family, the true epicenter of suffering. Any hurt I feel must be ersatz, overdramatic.
     No matter how I tried to focus my thoughts on others — Jeff's genius, the key to his life: he was a big-hearted, generous man, a true friend — I kept returning to my own experiences with him. Memories bubbled up, random stuff, as if my brain were venting everything it knew about Jeff Zaslow, from the fact that at birth, he was delivered by Dr. C. Everett Koop, the future Surgeon General, to his sister's hand-made picture frames, to his love of Bruce Springsteen — we once went to a concert together — to the day, almost 25 years ago, Jeff was being given his welcoming tour of the Sun-Times newsroom and I hurried over, curious to discover just what kind of idiot leaves a job writing front page stories for the Wall Street Journal to advise women how to get stains out of a broadloom rug on page 27 of the Sun-Times.
     If a Russian novelist tried to create two separate characters to split the spectrum of qualities a writer can possess, he might cook up Jeff (happy, concerned for others, frenetic, sincere) and me (melancholy, self-absorbed, shambling, sarcastic).
     Jeff wanted to help everybody. He held those enormous Zazz Bashes at Navy Pier because he got so many letters from lonely people, and wanted to fix them up with each other, to give each one a shot at the joy he found with his own wife, Sherry.
     I thought he was crazy. "Jeff," I'd say, "You're not a social service."
     When I got the awful news — we have the same literary agency — I dutifully phoned it into the newspaper. "Do you want to write something?" an editor asked. I said "No." The planet of my ego is such — think Jupiter — I knew it would be impossible to launch a tribute to Jeff without having it circle back and crash into myself.
     "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is the final line of Wittgenstein's book. Good advice. I wanted to honor Jeff by shutting up, an underappreciated art form.
     But silence felt even worse. We Jews bury our own, and standing at Jeff's graveside, mutely waiting for my turn with the shovel, I stared at my shoes and tried to block out the sound of his daughters weeping. "This is the worst thing in the world," I thought. "I hate this I hate this I hate this."
     Silence has no utility, it isn't a sharp enough blade to scrape at the icy loss that Jeff's death frosts over the world. I wish I could wrap this up tidily, with an inspiring thought that counterbalances the tragedy in the world and leaves you with a smile. Jeff was so good at that. Alas, he is not here, a hard fact that touches on the often cruel nature of life, one that we lucky enough to have known Jeff will struggle with for a long time.

It's a dirty, thankless task...

     At some point over the past several weeks of this endless winter, one of the nearly 1 million passengers who use the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus system every day contrived, in a manner best not contemplated, to transfer a wad of chewing gum from his or her mouth, to a spot on the floor toward the rear of one of the city’s 1,859 buses. It eventually became a quarter-sized black splotch.

     Now Venus La’V Caston has to clean it up.

     It is just after 11 p.m. in the sprawling CTA bus depot at 358 S. Kedzie, one of seven facilities around Chicago. It is where, after a day of navigating the salty slush of Chicago streets and ferrying passengers who — in another process best not considered — will leave soiled adult diapers behind, plus food wrappers, newspapers and all the more traditional dirt and trash, the city’s bus fleet is hosed down, scrubbed up, swept out, looked over, and in general readied to go through it all again for another day.

     This winter has been particularly hard on the cleanliness of public transit.

     “In the extreme cold, more people are using transit, more people tromping in snow, ice and mud,” CTA spokesman Brian Steele said.

    Plus more people seeking shelter.
    "We have seen increase in number of homeless individuals on our trains," he said.
     Buses arrive after their runs, which could be two hours or 12. The bulk roll in between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m., when ridership plummets. First, the buses have their coin boxes removed and spirited to safety by the city's revenue department. Fuel tanks are then filled, and then one of two cleaning regimens is enacted.
     There is the daily "general clean." The buses go through a power spray, like in a car wash, and workers with long brushes scrub the wheels. Inside, the garbage is first swept out, then the salt and grime mopped off the floors, and windows and surface wiped. The entire process - refuel, wash, clean - is supposed to take 15 minutes, though that is a flexible goal.
     "There's no quota because you never know what you're going to find on a bus," George Cavelle, director of maintenance, said.
     That list of found things is very long, not always something you want to read over breakfast, and includes a microwave oven.
     Periodically, there is the "deep clean" - think auto detailing, but for a bus - where the stainless steel is polished and gross blotches of gum removed. The CTA tries to deep clean buses and train cars every 14 days, though now with the heavy winter use that real figure is once every 20 days. The deep clean takes about four hours for a 40 foot bus, six hours for the 60-foot "accordion" bus, though again, that is an approximation, as some buses come in heavily abused, or damaged, or covered in graffiti, and thus take more time to get ready to go out again.
     If buses seem cleaner than L cars, there's a reason: They are. L cars get used more and cleaned less, with a cursory operator walk-through at the end of the line, and the same deep clean every two weeks, but no nightly general clean unless an L car is flagged as being in urgent need. The L also lost 65 servicers in a felon work program, because of union complaints, so they moved over to cleaning buses.
     Cavelle said he has instituted some efficiencies. For instance, previously garbage would be swept out the door of the bus and into the depot, in a pile, "and then they would come back later and spend an hour cleaning up the mess they had made," said Cavelle, who changed that. "We took a step back and said, 'Why are we doing double the work here?' Culture is always the hardest thing to change."
     Technology lends a hand. If you've noticed less graffiti scored into the windows, thank a peelable protective plastic coating that the CTA started putting over bus windows in 2010, plus as many as 10 cameras per bus.
     Several of those cameras blandly watch as Venus La'V Caston takes a bottle of Intercon breakthrough, a citrus degreaser used to clean clogged drains and remove tar.
     "Just pour a little bit," she says, splashing the liquid on the splotch of gum. She takes a special tool — a little metal scraper with a grooved attachment that mirrors the grooved bus floor, and scraped away the gum. A few passes and it's mostly gone, a small victory in a tiny skirmish in a war that never ends.
     "Sometimes," says La'V Caston, 31, who lives on the West Side, "you have gum from back to front."

"Soon we will marry and our woes will vanish"

Isabel Leonard

     In desperate need of warmer climes, like most Chicagoans in this arctic February, or even a simulation of warmer climes, I slipped out of work Thursday afternoon and shivered my way over to the Civic Opera House, to plunge into Iberian sultriness for a few hours and, while I was at it, hear some music too. 
     The Lyric's new production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" takes place—and don't feel bad if you didn't see this coming—in Seville, Spain, and before a note is sung, set designer Scott Pask's arching doorways, wrought iron flourishes, Spanish tile fountain and orange and yellow light help the audience escape our icy confinement, the frozen grey-white mounds piled like prison walls outside. 
    Perhaps because "Seville" contains some of the most familiar operatic tunes that an American of my generation can hear—the soundtrack from Warner Brother's classic 1949 Bugs Bunny short, Rabbit of Seville, which we practically listened to in the womb, absorbing repeatedly for years while sprawled on the living room floor in our jammies before Saturday morning television—the music seemed exactly right. That overture, and Figaro's first aria, racing and joyous, almost an aural cartoon, is why we start going to opera. As much as I thrilled to it—the overture, composed when Rossini was in his early 20s, sounds like something written by Mozart on amphetamines—because it was so familiar, what really caught my attention were the secondary aspects of the production: the set, the lighting and, particularly, the acting, which is not always a strong suit in opera productions. Often the performers do little more than just stand there, stiffly, and sing, which can be more than enough, but here the music is delivered with considerable comedic deftness and dramatic finesse. It isn't quite a musical number from The Carol Burnett Show, but that did come to mind.
     Right off the bat, director Rob Ashford serves up an earnest, shuffling motley of hired musicians—Count Almaviva's threadbare orchestra, here to woo the lovely Rosina (played by New York mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, a woman of considerable beauty.  She is actually the first character we see, from the back, standing on her guardian's balcony and the thought — perhaps better left unsaid — occurred to me that this alone would be enough to provide an afternoon's entertainment, and the fact that people would soon sing and move around and a performance would be put on was a lagniappe, a mere added bonus).
     She ducks back inside, alas, and the count, played by Alek Shrader, sets the tone with a truly funny comic preening, as he is torn between showing off his best profile—he's no slouch in the looks department either—to the aforementioned balcony, now empty, and twisting his head to see if his beloved is on it. The count's disappointment is our own.
   

Nathan Gunn

   The winter-numbed Chicago audience must have been as primed to enjoy itself as I was, because this is the first time in my memory that a scene change at the Lyric received applause—though admittedly it was quite a scene change, from the arched exterior of the home of Dr. Bartolo, Rosina's tyrannical guardian, to the inside, a smooth transformation of shifting wrought iron screens and ferns and silhouetted characters and orange light, which unfolded like a mechanical egg and was delightful. There was another great moment in silhouette—the entrance of Figaro, the "luckiest man alive," a resourceful ladies man and general fixer, trailed by five adoring misses, to sing his famous ode (click here to hear it and see the Lyric trailer)  to himself and his life ("Work is easy and fun"), a fast-paced patter song which reminded me that the swagger of rap music is only the braggadocio of Italian opera, updated.  Nathan Gunn is a likable rogue as Figaro—he had a Huey Lewis quality, for those up on their '80s pop, with the same hairstyle, the same smug, yes-I-am-good-looking twinkle of self-satisfaction.
     Though I generally prefer dark entertainments — give me "Faust" over "Cosi fan Tutte" any day — there was enough edge to keep the show from slipping into treacle, from an aria — la calunnia — in praise of slander, one noting the silliness of old men who marry, and a discourse on the limitations of opera, by the aforementioned coot, Dr. Bartolo, played with a pleasing mix of leaping randy menace and nodding flustered senility by Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli. 

Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader

     The happy ending goes on too long for my tastes — sort of a Wagnerian death scene, only joyous. Here people do stand around singing a tad too much, as if this ornate music box of a show were winding down a little early, and maybe a few turns of dramatic business, some additional directing, could have helped. That said, Act II contained two great moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.
     One was Rossini's storm, which takes place just before the count and the ever-useful Figaro arrive with a ladder to spirit Rosina away. There is no singing, no characters onstage at all, just billowing sheet-like curtains, the surging orchestra and furtive figures hurrying around at the back of the stage, flashes of lightning, a general sense of foreboding and drama, like a half-remembered storm from youth, swirling portend that peaked for a moment of unexpected ... well, something verging on terror, a quick intake of breath and then it was over, but a deeply affecting bit of stagecraft. That five seconds alone made me glad I came.
    The other moment came toward the finale, when Rosina realizes that the poor man she fell in love with is actually the wealthy and powerful count. She steps toward the audience and her face does the slightest of twists. Not quite a lifted eyebrow, but a tiny flutter of delight, a Scarlett O'Hara flash of congealed sauciness —a count! — that drew applause just for its sly perfection.
      That's how well-crafted the Lyric's production of "The Barber of Seville" is—the audience applauded a set change and a facial twitch. The music is pretty good too. 

Photographs courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago
     

Divvy Diary: Why did the rooster cross the Loop?

     This could have been written without the Divvy aspect, but people seem to have an endless appetite for anything involving the bikes, and I was riding one Tuesday when I met this man and his bird. Plus, I suppose, there wasn't a whole lot to say of interest, beyond the fact that I saw a rooster strolling down Randolph Street on a very cold February day in Chicago. 

     Once upon a time, I dreaded appointments at the University of Chicago. That meant driving the better part of an hour on the Edens, finding a parking meter for a couple hours downtown, doing a bit of work at the office, then jumping onto Lake Shore Drive, trying to avoid a ticket driving the ridiculously slow posted speed to Hyde Park, then trying to find a spot there , knowing I’d have to reverse the process.

      Now I take the Metra Electric. It costs $3. The prospect alone is enough to make me happy. Then Divvy showed up in July, with a station at the Merchandise Mart, right outside my office door, and a station on Michigan Avenue steps from the Millennium Park Metra Station entrance. To be tucking in at the Quadrangle Club at noon, I need to take the 11:30 Metra Electric, and to get that, rather than walk 20 minutes, I can Divvy for six. My joy is compounded.

 

   On Tuesday, I return from Hyde Park, weighed down with books from Powell’s on 57th Street (I limit myself to three so I don’t buy 30, and build an extra 20 minutes browsing time into any campus visit). At the station, I notice that someone in Metra sees to it, mirabile dictu, that there are real fresh flowers in a vase on the men’s room sink — purple daisies, yellow lilies and carnations. Kudos from the press; with such details is a glorious city made.

     Outside, I yank a bike from its dock, walk it across Randolph, hop on and am pedaling west, about to turn north onto State when I see something that, in 30 years of wandering the Loop, I have never seen before: a rooster. An orange rooster. Just standing at the corner, as if waiting for a bus. I pull onto the sidewalk, set the kickstand, and take a few pictures, doing my reporter thing. The rooster did not seem to belong to anyone, but a crowd had gathered.
     “I’m from the city. I’m not used to live animals on State Street,” exuded Erick Russell, a passerby. “I didn’t know roosters were so pretty,” said another pedestrian.
     On the ground was a piece of cardboard, a sign, and I figured its owner must have stepped away. It occurred to me that, this being downtown Chicago, leaving a $1,200 bike unattended with my REI bag bungied into the front carrier, was an unwise practice. So I rolled it three yards away to another Divvy station right there, slammed the bike in and grabbed the bag, only to realize I had managed to trap the strap in the station’s docking mechanism (Practical Divvy tip: Remove personal items from front rack before docking your bike).
     In the time it took me to fish out my fob, the imagined scenario formed clearly in mind: The strap of the bag remaining jammed the mechanism, the bike refusing to budge. The panicked call to Divvy. The 20-minute wait for the van to arrive. The grinning mechanic, a young man in a jumpsuit, greasy hair falling in his face, using exotic tools taken from a case, a crowd gathering, while I stand helplessly by, the rooster pecking derisively at my ankle.
     “We had another elderly gentleman get his suspenders caught in the docking port once,” the Divvy repairman would drawl, concentrating on the mechanism. “Somebody called the police instead of us. Poor guy had his pants half off by the time we got there. Can’t figure out how he did it, or why he was on a bike. These old people,” a quick glance in my direction, “don’t know when it’s time to give up the trappings of youth.”
     In the real world, I pulled the bike out, freed the strap, jammed the bike back in and turned to meet Jose, the owner of the rooster, whose name is Garfield, after the park where they live.
     “I found him in the park,” said Jose, who declined to give his last name but said he is 48. His breath was perfumed with a scent I will call eau de booze. “I’ve had him since he was a baby.” He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.
     Jose had a battered black rolling bag and explained how when the bird becomes cold, he stashes him in the bag to warm up. They sleep together in the park, which is a problem because the rooster, which is 7 months old, is not housebroken, evidence of which Jose indignantly showed me on his jeans. He has been homeless for five years, since being injured, he said, and he turned, lifted his shirt and displayed a long scar down his spine.
     The rooster definitely drew a crowd, and made me think of beggars in Paris, who often pair with cats, knowing that humans feel pity toward animals far more readily than they open their hearts to other humans. I gave a buck toward the upkeep of the bird, wished them both well, freed the bike I rode in on and was on my way again.

A conversation on matters racial

    What is racism? It isn't just knee jerk hatred of some group, but an entire framework of perception or, rather, misperception. Not just ignorance, but a forced skewing of the world, a filtering, to keep the despised category viewed negatively. Thus, for instance, Holocaust denial. Since the ultimate atrocity runs the risk of casting Jews in a poignant light, as victims of an incredible wrong, perhaps even deserving of sympathy, it's easier to wave it away — never happened, another Jewish lie — than try to grasp its implications.
     Racism leads to a fixed gaze at the negative qualities of the feared minority, and a dismissal of positive qualities. We saw that in the "English only" crowd which complained about a beautiful Coke commercial that ran during the Super Bowl Sunday, and featured immigrants enjoying regular activities while singing "America the Beautiful" in a variety of languages, which is anathema to those locked in their own white bread box. It boggles my mind that anyone would be so ignorant and twisted and oblivious as to object. But they did. 
     Yesterday's post, and column in the Sun-Times, was about one of the more puzzling realities in our society. Why is there so much poverty and dysfunction in African-American urban society, when other groups, even foreign-born blacks, come to this country, adjust, and thrive? What holds African-Americans back? The column touched upon an experiment that seems to demonstrate that impulse control, key for making the sacrifices that helps a person, or group, accomplish goals, is more difficult when you believe the game is rigged. That seemed a hint at what is going on here.
     Most of my email was from people intrigued with the subject. Then there was this  reaction from a reader, who we will call only by his first name, Richard, since he seems to be an attorney, and therefore perhaps litigious:

It keeps getting harder to explain the failure of African Americans to succeed when other "groups" do so well. The current rationale apparently is that after 40 years of affirmative action, a trillion dollars spent on the War on Poverty and African Americans in all sorts of successful positions including POTUS, that as a group, African Americans haven't yet understood that the path to success is open to them. The 70% out of wedlock birth rate, school drop out rates and high numbers of blacks in jail are cited as things preventing success as if the blacks themselves had no role in creating those roadblocks in the path to success. Here is another theory. Blacks are held back because government is still treating them as if they can never succeed on their own. No one is coddling Asians, Indian Americans, Cubans etc. (BTW take the "America has been tough on blacks" element out of the discussion - where in the world, including Africa are blacks as a group successful by American standards?) If politicians want to fix this problem, quit making failure by blacks so expected and so comfortable.

   The key words in the above are "coddling" and "comfortable."  Richard seems to be arguing that African-Americans have it especially easy in this country. Affirmative Action -- an attempt to get blacks into colleges and jobs, is the reason there's a high incarceration rate among African American men.
    How to respond? The safe thing to do would be not to. "Thank you for writing," and leave it at that. But I'm always tempted to probe this mindset, and I write back to anyone who is halfway civil. He was civil, or trying to be. I replied:

 You think African-Americans are coddled in this country? Thanks for writing.   NS         

    He answered:

           I think they are treated like children. 

    Again, I was tempted to end the conversation. But he at least was talking. I thought a moment, then wrote:

That all depends on how you treat your children. Welfare was corrosive, but in  case you haven't noticed, Bill Clinton got rid of welfare. Anyone who thinks that black Americans have it cushy and thus deserve whatever they get a) doesn't know what life is like outside of their cocoon b) already has hatred in their heart and is trying to rationalize it by blaming the victims. Thanks for writing.

     Richard was not about to back down. He replied:

So a person who thinks lowered expectations for blacks is holding them back - not an inability to see there is a path to success for them in America - is either a) ignorant or b) racist? Pretty standard response when argument fails.

    Again, I try not to waste time engaging with people who cannot re-evaluate themselves, and who dismiss your sincere beliefs as the "standard response." But the inconsistencies in his reply, its general tone of Fox Newishness, and the fact he, sadly, speaks for multitudes, were overpowering. I wrote:

"I think they are treated like children" says nothing about expectations, lowered or otherwise. Are we arguing here? What is your argument? I don't see one. I've made my argument, you replied that blacks have it cushy. I said you're mistaken, and now you're claiming ... what?

      At which point Richard fell silent, either satisfied in his intellectual victory, or not willing to waste further time grappling with the Lunatic Left. I don't often print replies -- the comments section is for that -- but I wanted to preserve our exchange, just because it reveals a mode of thinking that is no doubt common. The high crime on Chicago's South and West Sides, the brokenness of our schools, the plague of drugs, are because society makes it too easy for those who fail. Their lives are a bed of ease, of free breakfast programs and blocks of surplus government cheese. If many black people don't do well, it's their own fault, and the society that shoved them into that box can sleep easily, knowing it has done all it can and its generosity was met with grinning abuse. All those after-school programs, the prenatal care — that's why we don't have more black fire fighters. We've made being in poverty in Englewood such a sweet deal, that nobody can stir themselves to try to escape it. I wouldn't think anybody in the world would believe that, just as I never imagined that the Coke commercial would send xenophobes howling to the ramparts. But it did, and obviously they do feel that way. The point of the column is that a roadblock to African-American success is that, no matter how they strive, society will often be arrayed against them, casting their successes as undeserved freebies, their sufferings as self-inflicted. I think Richard's perspective sheds light on the validity of that fear.