Pssst: guns are dangerous

Bedroom in house about to burned at UL, Northbrook.

     Department of Homeland Security ...

     Gosh, that’s an awful name, isn’t it? It’s been around for almost a dozen years, and I’ve never gotten used to it.

     Anyway, Department of Homeland Security officials announced they’re seeing ...

     I’ll tell you why it’s such a bad name. Have you ever, ever, referred to this great country of ours, the United States of America, or America for short, or the U.S. for shorter, as your “homeland?” Have you ever said anything like, “I like to travel abroad, but it feels great to get back to my homeland”?

     Of course you haven’t. No American has. Pretend you’re writing a play, and I gave you the line, “We must fight for the homeland!” What kind of character would you create to utter that line? A proud Soviet officer? A jaded Nazi colonel? It sure wouldn’t be a U.S. Army Ranger who would say that.

     You wonder what kind of bureaucratic imbecile came up with the name. The same person, perhaps, who changed The Medill School of Journalism to “The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications” or who called the Bloomingdale Trail “The 606,” which will never be popular.

     Sorry. Department of Homeland Security officials say they’re seeing greater numbers of armed dopes trying to bring guns through airport security checkpoints, a reminder of what a Bad Idea a gun-carrying nation truly is, and how the sober, level-headed in our country — what few of us remain — do everyone a disservice by shrinking before NRA fanatics for whom packing heat represents patriotism at its zenith.

     I heard the news on the 7 a.m. CBS radio report at WBBM-AM. Like most nonzealots, I shrugged it off. Not as bad as those buffoons carrying their AK-47s into Targets to revel in the fact that they can.     
     Like most Americans, I’ve surrendered the fight. Our congressional leaders are bought and paid for by the NRA. Nothing to do but take cover and pray it passes.

     Which it may. This isn’t the first time Americans have armed up, a fact I was reminded of less than an hour later. On the 7:36 Metra into Union Station, I fled the bad news of today, losing myself in my book, “Brann and the Iconoclast,” Charles Carver’s 1956 biography of William Cowper Brann, the great 1890s poison-pen journalist, whose Waco-based Iconoclast newspaper gleefully scourged and scandalized.
     Then this paragraph, discussing nicknames given 1890s Waco, leapt out of the book and gave me a revivifying slap across the chops:
     "'Six-Shooter Depot' was a title bought with the blood of hot-tempered citizens who adjusted their differences according to a relaxed interpretation of the dueling code of the Old South. In the days of the cattle drives following the Civil War, Waco lay close to the Chisholm Trail, and the town supplied the drivers with recreation, which often involved high-spirited killing of one another. This buoyant mood lasted through the century - as long as guns were a usual item of wearing apparel."
     Well, well, happy days are here again!
     I don't say it much anymore, because nobody is listening who isn't at the same time hocking spit to prepare a formal reply, but I will, out of habit, restate the key, undeniable fact regarding the carrying of firearms:
     The moments when having a gun is useful are very, very few, even for police officers. Even for soldiers, one can serve years in combat zones and never fire a shot.
     The rest of the time, every second, the gun is a threat to the owner, no matter how well-trained, and a threat to whatever passersby the owner might, through mistake or anger, feel obligated to shoot. The romance of guns blurs this fact. It would be clearer with any other precaution: If I carried a welder's mask 24/7 so I'd be ready to look at the sun during an eclipse, you'd think I was an idiot. But at least I'm not going to drop the welder's mask and maim myself, which happens quite frequently with gun owners.
     The redeeming quality of Americans is that, while we have proven ourselves all too willing to embrace nutsoid self-flattering fiction, eventually the truth will dawn on us. Look at gay marriage. After decades of legal repression and social persecution, suddenly the basic fact - there's no reason gays shouldn't get married that isn't mere Bible-based bigotry - became clear, and society shifted. Some states (Helloooo, Indiana!) haven't read the memo yet. But they will.
     Ditto with guns. They're dangerous and don't help beyond whatever gild-the-lily ego boost owners get from swaggering around armed. Someday we'll figure that one out.

Notre Dame: Very Catholic and in Indiana

     Lucky is the parent who enjoys the process.
     While I could portray last year's exploration of potential colleges—14, count 'em, 14 campus visits, from Wash U, in St. Louis to Dartmouth in New Hampshire, quite a lot really—as an ordeal, the truth is I vastly enjoyed touring these historic campuses with my family.  And though Son No. 1 did decide to go to a school, Pomona College, that we hadn't visited together, an irony for certain, it was still fun and interesting to explore these places that I had heard about all my life.
     To be honest, the information sessions did tend to blend together, and our tour guides did eventually blur into one interchangeable coed, fiercely proud of her ability to walk backwards, dubbing all good things "awesome" and using "actually" as an every-other-sentence intensifier. 
      I will admit that setting about to do it again, a second summer in a row, for Son No. 2, a rising high school senior, was sort of like running a marathon, collapsing over the finish line, sprawling for a moment, then shakily getting up, turning 180 degrees and loping off to do another.
      But it must be done.
      So we found ourselves at the University of Notre Dame last Friday.

      Yes. I know. Not my choice. If I had two associations in my mind with the renown university that is near—though not in, let's get that straight—South Bend, Indiana, the first is football, and the second is Catholicism.  And while my younger boy did play for a season in junior high school, he has no great affection for the sport, nor has he shown an interest in religion in general, never mind Catholicism in particular. But it's a brave new world we're living in, and you can't very well expect religious sorts to adapt to modern life if we seculars aren't willing to at least see what they have to offer. 
      Besides, he is leaning toward business, and Notre Dame has a highly-regarded business school, not to mention a tight-knit buddy network of graduates, which couldn't hurt in the scrabble up the greased pole of life. Its Mendoza College of Business is so popular, according to Mary, the spritely young lady leading the information session, that, new this year, prospective students must declare when applying whether they are interested in attending and, if so, whether they are willing to still go to Notre Dame and study something else if they don't get into Mendoza. Perhaps finance, Mary suggested, evoking in my mind a grumbling limbo of in-but-not-quite Notre Dame students dwelling on the chill periphery of their heart's desire, trying to replicate the Mendoza experience with economics courses and what stray Mendoza class they can jam themselves into. To keep the business school from being overwhelmed, Notre Dame now limits yearly admissions to 550 students, meaning that more than a quarter of each incoming class is there for business.
     That seems reason enough to attend.

One of many redheads

      "You can be the Jew," I told my boy, half-jokingly. "They must need one." (Actually, they do. According the U.S. News and World Report, Notre Dame, among the nation's top 25 universities, has the fewest percentage Jewish students, while 82 percent of the student body is Catholic). Not to devolve to stereotypes, but I saw more carrot-haired young men in our three hours on campus than I've seen elsewhere over the past three years. "The Fighting Irish" is more than just a motto.
      Trying to get with the program, I told my lad that we'll happily show up once a year to take in a football game with him. I went to a Notre Dame game once, the only previous time I'd been on campus, and found it an epitome, a finely honed ritual of pomp and grandeur that you don't really have to care for football to appreciate. The extra tall Irish Guard, the golden helmets, the fan frenzy, I felt like I was in ancient Rome to watch a mock naval battle at the Colosseum, or an anthropologist transported back in time and permitted to observe the Mayans sacrifice atop their pyramids. It was an amazing thing to see.
      The only drawback was, the team didn't play half as well as the band, a perennial problem, I understand.
      My younger boy shot me a cold look and said, "The hell you will," or words to that effect. A newly-minted 17, he's ready to push back at the world, which at the moment consists pretty much of his mother and me. 
      After the end of a film that brought tears to my eyes, the tour guides introduced themselves and—rather charmingly—displayed their favorite dance moves, then let the visitors pick which one they'd follow. Most went with the various buff athletic sorts (one strapping young man spoke at length about his involvement in inter-mural sports, only belatedly remembering, after the next guide had begun talking, to mention that he is studying physics). My younger son chose a slight, bespectacled tour guide, Sam B., whom we later agreed was hands down the best guide we've had in more than a dozen schools, including such places as Princeton, Yale and Williams. A philosophy major with three years of Latin under his belt, he had none of the blathering bonhomie of most guides. Instead, he enthused about having had the chance to go to a monastery in France to study Gregorian chants.
      Given the reputation of football at Notre Dame, I thought both the info session and the tour showed an admirable restraint. Sam did point out Touchdown Jesus, the famed mural, and mentioned that students are allowed to buy game tickets, with the freshmen sitting nearer the end zone, advancing toward the 50 yard line as they rise toward being seniors (except for grad students, who are tucked back by the freshmen). Parents are also permitted to purchase tickets to one game a year, usually against Navy. I shot a glance at my younger boy, who seemed a bit abashed, as if suspecting for the first time that wanting to go to a game was not just a freakish desire of his own intrusive father, but might be a trait shared by other parents.
      When we got to Knute Rockne Memorial Gym, our guide observed that it was named for the famed coach. 
     "Known as the 'winningest coach in college football,'" Sam said, with almost a sneer, then added. "I don't like 'winningest'. That's not how gerunds work."      
      "Finally, a real person," said my older son, who gamely tagged along on the trip to wrangle our dog. 
      Notre Dame still has sex-segregated dorms, which isn't quite the blue sidewalks for boys and pink for girls at Bob Jones University, but seems a charming anachronism, though Sam pointed out that visiting hours are from 9 a.m. to midnight, which struck me as time aplenty for resourceful undergrads.
     The school also holds 140 masses a week, every dorm has one, though students are not compelled to go, a policy that they are perhaps more proud of than they should be in 2014. "I have many friends who are not Catholic," Sam revealed, trusting us to not judge him too harshly.
       Notre Dame's campus itself is new and deluxe-looking, well-manicured and obviously the result of a flowing cataract of grateful alumni cash (though, when the mother of the other student on our tour asked if we could see a dorm room, which are shared by up to six students, Sam told us they were "locked." It might be the first college in our experience which didn't show off a dorm—some schools start there and show several—and when I related this puzzlement to my neighbor, whose business works closely with colleges, he tossed his head back and laughed, explaining that the dorms at Notre Dame are notoriously "crappy and old" and that's why they don't let visitors see them. He added that Notre Dame has lost hot football prospects who quailed at the thought of living in the dorms). 
     I was surprised to learn that Notre Dame doesn't have a Greek system, which seems out-of-place considering how big football is there. 
     "Maybe the place is one vast frat," I mused. 
      We passed through the Jordan Hall of Science, opened in 2006, with cathedral-like stonework, including, on our way in, Madam Curie venerated with a full-body statue, like a saint, as she ought to be.  I noticed that the displays inside pointedly hail evolution, and the age of the earth, as if to say, "We might be religious, but we don't blinder ourselves with it."
     Walking out, I noticed Galileo given the same treatment, which seemed ironic, given his suppression by the Catholic church. 
     "Galileo," I whispered to my older son, pointing. "All is forgiven."
     "He recanted," he replied, dryly. 
     In my capacity as encouraging dad, I try to be supportive of my kids, and sang the official party line on Notre Dame: a fine school my boy would be lucky to get into. I kept that up, a breezy banter as we walked to the car. 
     Though my older son, acting as a sort of Greek chorus, did speak my hidden thoughts as we ambled across the tree-lined campus.
     "It's very, very Catholic," he said. "It's also located in the state of Indiana."
     Hard to argue that.

The shot that started World War I

 

     Like most people, I studied World War I in junior high school then let the subject go fallow—well, except for reading John Keegan's "The First World War" when it came out in 1999. But even that was a while back, so I appreciated the chance to reacquaint myself with this epochal and tragic event. Which is the purpose of anniversaries, to force us to contemplate hard histories we'd rather forget, and all too often do. 

   
     Six assassins lay in wait that morning, armed with pistols and bombs, along the archduke’s route in Sarajevo, hoping to strike a blow for Serbian nationalism.
     It was June 28, 1914.
     The first two men failed to act as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Franz Joseph, emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, rode past with his wife, Sophie.
     The third threw a bomb that bounced off the open retractable top, rolled under the car behind and blew up.
     Incredibly, the official schedule continued, with the kind of mechanical lockstep that would bring about the enormity of World War I, whose centennial begins with the actions of the fourth assassin, Gavrilo Princip.
     Forty-five minutes after the initial attack, with the royal couple on the way to visit the wounded, the motorcade turned by mistake down the street where Princip lingered. The chauffeur put the car into reverse so it came to a stop in front of the 19-year-old Serb, who fired twice from 5 feet away. The first shot cut Ferdinand’s jugular. The second killed the duchess.
     Thus was set into motion a clockwork of ultimatums followed by military action that drew in other nations, bound by various alliances, to enter what became the first global war, stretching from Japan to Brazil.
     On July 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared a war of retribution on Serbia, which had armed the assassins. Within a week, Serbia’s ally Russia declared war on Austro-Hungary. So Germany declared war on Russia, then France and Belgium. Then Britain declared war on Germany.
     In some ways, the world was vastly different then. Leadership in Europe was dominated by royalty. Italy and Greece had kings, Russia a czar, Germany a kaiser—an "emperor."
In some ways, it was familiar; 1914 was 99 years after a great European conflict, Waterloo. The U.S. president was another bookish Democrat, noted for his oratorical gifts, a good writer without much experience in foreign affairs, a fact he acknowledged.
     "It would be the irony of fate," Woodrow Wilson noted in March 1913, "if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs."
     The Great War, as it was called then, might be viewed today in the golden light of nostalgia, as an era of wood and fabric biplanes, plumed helmets and cavalry charges. But WWI was a blood-soaked horror, as 19th century military tactics met 20th century weapons like the machine gun, the tank and poison gas. Certain battles yielded 60,000 casualties a day.
     For the next four years, until the guns fall silent on Nov. 11, 1918, you'll be hearing a lot about World War I. Yes, it has passed from living memory—the last surviving U.S. WWI vet, Frank Buckles, died in 2011.
     But the war is not dusty history. It shapes our world to this day. From the artificial borders drawn in the Middle East, to the expectation that America will ride to the rescue in a crisis, again, as we see right now in Iraq,World War I lingers.
     It was the first war brought directly to civilian populations, with zeppelin bombings of London, German atrocities in neutral Belgium and U-boats sinking unarmed ocean liners.
     Nearly 10 million people died in World War I, and tag another 50 million in World War II to the toll, because the second world war was, without question, a continuation of the first. "It cannot be that two million Germans have fallen in vain," WWI vet Adolf Hitler wrote, digging the graves for four million more.
     While America was not nearly as affected as Europe, it was affected nonetheless. The impact on Chicago was profound. Its German-American population, the largest immigrant group at the time, was at first vocal in support of the Kaiser (joined, oddly, by Chicago's Irish, inspired by their loathing of Britain). After the United States joined the war in November 1917, it took a low profile the country never really emerged from, inspired no doubt by rabid anti-German sentiment, such as when the Chicago City Council scrapped Germanic street names including Berlin, Cologne, Frankfort, Rhine and Bismarck Place, part of an overzealous war effort that the city would look back on with chagrin.
"A city which needed but a hint of something required by the soldiers to so overdo the supplying of that need that at times it became an embarrassment," a 1929 history of Chicago noted.
     The Great War stoked Chicago's manufacturing might and, in the process, got the Great Migration really rolling, as men going to fight overseas left jobs to be filled here.
     "The migration had begun before then, but that's really where the spigot opens up," said Elliott Gorn, professor of history at Loyola University. The influx of blacks, particularly those in uniform after the war, sparked race riots that jarred the city in 1919 and led to its current configuration.
     "At that moment, Chicago made the decision that black folks will be segregated on the South Side," Gorn said.
     One lingering question is whether, had the archduke not been killed, would the war still have occurred? Given the rise of Germany and the general belligerence that was unleashed, it's tempting to answer an emphatic "Yes."
     In May 1914, Wilson sent his political adviser and friend Edward M. House to Europe to assess the situation. "It's jingoism run stark mad," House wrote to Wilson from Berlin. "There is some day to be an awful cataclysm."
     Others aren't sure.
     "My view is, it certainly is an open question," said John Boyer, professor of history and dean of the College at the University of Chicago, who speculated that, without Ferdinand's assassination, tensions might have "led to regional or localized conflict instead of a four-and-half-year war.
      "This didn't have to happen. Certainly not a World War I in 1914," he said. "Some of these empires would have lasted longer. But unfortunately, he didn't miss."


 

Gone fishin'. Well, not fishin'. But gone somewhere.

     I woke up this morning on South Bass Island.
     Which you're probably never heard of.
     It's just north of Sandusky, in Ohio.
     Kind of a Midwestern Fort Lauderdale.
     Very party centric.
     But that isn't why I come here.
     Anymore.
     I come here because a pal's family has a house.
    A number of houses, actually.
    Nothing fancy.
    A cluster of white structures, slamming screen doors, wide-open windows allowing in cool breezes.
    And a tremendous 1947 Buick convertible.
    Hidden in an old barn, as such cars should be.
    It turns heads whenever we drive it to town.
    A nice feeling, sprawled in the front seat, watching the town go by, heads turn.
    Where we head to the antique carousel.
    Which we don't ride as much as we used to.
    But we still ride.
    And salt water taffy. And pizza. And ice cream.
    We've been very lucky, having this place to go, all these years.
    Kent learned to ride a bike here.
    And I flipped a kayak once.
    And I rode a jet ski for the first and last time.
    Not that it wasn't fun.
    But I don't come here to do anything.
    Except sit in a chair, read a book, occasionally look up at the flat blue line of the lake.
    That's what summer is for, doing nothing.
    An underrated activity, in our go-go-go world.
    Back in the days, my buddy and I would hit the bars.
    And the wineries.
    Ohio wine.
    Which is just as awful as it sounds.
    Though one gets used to it.
    Eventually.
    Just as one gets used to not drinking it.
    Eventually.
    And while I do miss it.
    A little.
    I can't say I miss it a lot.
    Anymore.
    The island is still there.
    And the lake.
    And the town.
    And the houses.
    And my family.
    And my friends.
    And summer
    Which are, after all
    What's important.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

      This is the sort of thing you never notice, until you do.
      Of course, who could fail to notice a large golden man struggling to take the cap off an enormous bottle of wine.
      Or whatever it is he's doing. 
      Actually, I know. 
      But  don't want to give away the game.
      Though I imagine someone will recognize this fellow fairly quickly.
      Provided they frequent the spot where this guy is found.
      Which they probably don't do as much as they used to. 
      I sure don't. 
      If I can avoid it.
      Though I found myself there the other day and lingered.
      Long enough to snap his picture.
      Which wasn't really hard.
      Since he wasn't moving very fast.
      Which I suppose is typical, given his environment.
      Where is he? And what's he doing?
      While my gut tells me it'll be answered quickly.
      If history is any judge
      And given that the ones I think will be hard in reality aren't.
      Maybe the one I think will be easy will turn out to be a stumper.
      The winner will receive .... hmmm.... a copy of my blog poster, since I'm hot to get rid of them. 
       To clear the decks for next year's poster. 
       Which I'm already looking forward to.
       Remember to post your guess below. 
       And be patient—I'm not sure if I'll be on the grid Saturday, so I might not be able to confirm the answer until Sunday.  
      Play nicely together.

Bus accident.

     It wasn’t much as far as accidents go.
     No fireball. No fatalities. No screeching tires. In fact, one car wasn’t even moving, according to Bruce Hopkins, who was sitting in his blue Volvo wagon at the intersection of Courtland and Hermitage earlier in June, his 3-year-old son strapped in the back seat. They had just been to a class at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
     A Chicago Transit Authority bus, trying to turn left, bumped into his car.
     “The side of the bus is getting closer and closer, and I’m thinking, ‘Surely not,’’’ Hopkins said. “Surely they’re going to realize it’s too close. I’m tooting my horn and thinking: ‘Hang on. This isn’t going to happen.’”
     As the alert reader will suspect, from the “surely not” and the “hang on,” that Hopkins is British, married to Natasha Loder, the Midwest correspondent for The Economist, someone I’ve shared a number of pleasant hours, trading tales of Rahm Emanuel. That’s how the story came to me, but not why I’m writing about it. I’m writing about it because of what happened after the bus hit Hopkins’ car.
     The driver of the bus got out and accused Hopkins of driving into her.
Rather than being indignant, Hopkins really pegs himself as a fair-minded Brit by sympathizing with the dissembling driver.
     “What really struck me,” he said, ignoring the bus, “is why would a bus driver feel, laying aside the potability that they genuinely believed that a car stopped at a four-way stop sign was moving, why would a driver not feel able to say, ‘Sorry, mate.’ The level of fear somebody must feel that they can’t admit a simple mistake. People are generally decent.  Why would somebody make something up about something so trivial?”
     Why indeed. He went online, where all our answers dwell, and found bus "drivers, after a third accident, they're fired."
     Actually, like much online, that isn't true.
     It's four. CTA drivers get four accidents before they're sacked, to use the U.K. term.
     "If you have four minor accidents within two years, you can be discharged," CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase said. "If you were to have a major accident, you can be dismissed for up to one serious accident."
     Being British, Hopkins was not so much aghast at the minor damage or inconvenience, as the fear in the driver's face.
     "It seems terrible," he said. "I don't think a little scrape where nobody was hurt merits such a thing, or the fear of such a thing, particularly in a country such as America where losing your job can be disastrous for them and their family. Their health care comes with their job. People with chronic illness are going to die."
     See, that's why we Americans are so loath to get an overseas perspective, to read magazines like The Economist (really, you should, it's like having an extra brain). Because then we have to gaze into the mirror, full on, at just how screwed up we are. Get in a fender bender and your children may die.
     "Why is the driver put in a position where they feel it's necessary to not come clean about it?" Hopkins persisted. "What is CTA policy? Do they have instructions to deny liability? It wouldn't surprise me."
     I asked Chase if they tell drivers to deny liability. Perhaps inevitably, she denied it.
     "Our operators are definitely not instructed to deny anything," Chase said. "There's no truth to that." She also pointed out that buses are silly with cameras, so assessing what happened is not much of an issue.
     "If need be, there are disciplinary procedures," she said.
     Hopkins is concerned, but not for himself.
     "In the global scheme of things, if the worst thing to happen in summer is the day your Volvo gets a bit of a scrape, the American dream still has a decent pulse from where you're standing," he said. "It's troubling that someone would feel it necessary to not be able to fess up to simple misjudgment where nobody was hurt. Probably happens 100 times a day, every day. It should be no big deal, and it is ridiculous to be that upset about it. That's what insurance companies are for. There shouldn't be these severe consequences.
     "I don't believe the driver is a bad person . . . " he continued. "I kinda feel someone's got to be incentivized by fear of consequences. The system shouldn't be arranged that way. America should have a socialized health care system, so [if] somebody loses their job over something trivial, their dependent with a chronic health condition doesn't die."
     But that isn't the American way. Speaking of which, the CTA reviewed the bus' video and this week told Hopkins what he already knew: The accident was their fault.

A Harbinger of my Death in the Form of a Young Woman

    Gustav von Aschenbach is not Huck Finn or Jake Barnes or even Humbert Humbert.
     But he is one of the great characters of literature, little known though he may be.
     The protagonist of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, "Death in Venice," he arrives in that hot, cholera-ridden city, to sit in his hotel lobby and bathe at the Lido, where he falls in love with Tadzio, an adolescent boy he glimpses on the beach. He could leave but doesn't, hanging around to ogle the lad, and is punished. Good to the title's promise —spoiler alert!—he dies at the book's end.
      Usually when I think of Gustav, I think in terms of his struggle to look young, under the spell of his infatuation, letting a barber dye his hair, rouge his cheeks, looking of course more aged and frightening and death-bound afterward than he had before. 
      I can't tell if "Death in Venice" is a joy to read for anybody who picks it up, or I just was lucky enough to read it under the tutelage of Erich Heller, that great German scholar at Northwestern University. It has been 35 years—more—but I can still hear Heller explaining the death symbolism that appears in the book. The gondolier—"I will row you well"—of course is Charon, the oarsman on the River Styx. And the strikingly snub-nosed foreigner in the graveyard, staring at him, seeming to rest with his walking stick propped against his hip, one leg crossed over the other? That pose, evoking the classical allegorical Death, makes him the Grim Reaper with scythe, resting in between his endless harvest of souls. Or so Heller told us.
      I can't say that reading "Death in Venice" sensitized me to death imagery, or whether I was predisposed to be that sort of person anyway. I'm not exactly free and easy. But let a large black crow settle on the ground in front of me, and cast me a pitying look. I feel a chill. Or a large, dusty moth flutter up from somewhere and throw shadows around a bare bulb. It seems a portent. Particularly the crows.  
      Even at the strangest moment. I was heading home early Wednesday, to catch the 3:55, after a day studying up on World War I — the centennial approaches.  Maybe all that trench slaughter put me in the mood. But one glance at the back of this young woman's dress was enough. It struck me immediately. I diverted from my path to the train, followed her, squeezing off a few photos, and was about to approach her and ... say what?
     "Excuse me, miss, but is that really a memento mori woven into the lace of your dress?"
     "I've seen skulls on socks and caps, but is that a skull on the back of your dress?"
      "Would that be the noseless one, to use Jack London's phrase, or am I just projecting my own morbid fears upon your outfit?"
      And how would that be received? It would not be received well, would it? Remarks from older gentlemen upon the clothing choices of young women, acquainted or unacquainted—especially unacquainted—are neither wise nor welcome. She'd probably squirt one of those little purse-sized Mace sprays in my face.
      Or  what if I were right? I never saw her face. What if I hurried up to meet her, fell into step alongside, put on my best, disarming smile, and turned to address her... 
    Because I could not stop for Death -
    He kindly stopped for me -
    Or she, in this case.
    What if, only then did I see a face that truly was a skull, hidden by her hair, the skin shrunken and taut, like brown parchment, like a Peruvian mummy, the sockets dark, empty, the mouth already opening, to flash its hideous grin, a rictus smile as it came in for that unwanted final kiss? What then? 
      "That man just collapsed beside me. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, then fell over. I think he's dead..."
     I slowed my gait, did a gentle 180 degree turn and headed for the train, feeling both relieved and cowardly. What would be the purpose of a dress like that? Who would buy it? It can't be intentional, right?  Just pattern recognition, like seeing the face in an electrical outlet. Her hair, covering up the rest of the pattern, that would obliterate the skull. Yeah, that's it.
     The sky was overcast but no longer gloomy. I reached Union Station, lost in thought, went down the stairs. No sulfurous smoke billowed out. My fellow passengers had eyes.  The conductor looked normal. He did not mutter any obscene demonic oaths. 
     "Papé Satan, papé Satan, aleppe...."
     "I beg your pardon!?"
     "Please stand clear of the doors..."
      The canned voice calling the stops were the usual: "Glenview," not "Gehenna;" "North Glenview," not "Netherworld." 
      Literature is literature. It lives in a separate realm and does not invade our own. We read it because it offers a knot of complexity and significance, hidden meaning and drama, and a frisson of fear that is absent in our plodding regular life. Right? It's absent in real life, right? As in, not there. Except of course this. It was there. I saw it. 

Postscript — Thursday morning.

     "There are more ways to be stupid in this job than you can shake a stick at," I called down to my wife.
    "What?" she called back.
     "I'll explain later." I was looking, grimly, at a tweet from Mark Czerniac: "Do you have Google?" And then this link, connecting the reader to the spectrum of skull back dresses—21 million hits. I muttered a silent prayer that I had not irredeemably tarred myself as old, and out-of-it, that every passerby under the age of 50 wasn't intimately familiar with these dresses. I flashed to coming home last night, infused with zeal to write the above, checking the Emily Dickinson quote—those dashes, must get those right, or her zealots will be upon me—and the Dante line, which I put in the mouth of the conductor, and of course pulling down "Death in Venice" to make sure I had the publication date right—yup, 1912—and to check my memory of the death figure. Nope, not a gardener, a "foreigner" —wonder how I did that? The passing of the years.
      The thought, "better plug 'skull back dress' into Google to see if it a quotidian fashion known to all," never crossed my mind. The sort of thing that having another person read this before posting might save me from.
     And a matter I will explore more fully in a post describing my attempts to figure out which end of the train at Northbrook is the end that will be closest to Madison Street, a challenge that thwarted me on my first attempt, and a failing that—I hope—makes me human and not sub-human. We're all dumb, we're just dumb about different things. Part of being smart is knowing that.  

Post-postscript — July 11, 2014

     So I head up to the 10th floor lunchroom for a quick soy milk, and what do I see but the same young woman in the same dress. It turns out she is not Death incarnate, but an intern from St. Andrews in Scotland, working for Splash, the Sun-Times' fashion and nightlife magazine. She took the news of the above post, which I felt obligated to share, with amused curiosity, or at least polite interest.  And so the story comes full circle.