Why change yourself when you can demand the world change instead?

Centennial Park, Nashville

    I don't use these posts to air reader's comments, mostly, because there is a space aplenty at the bottom of the blog for that, and any comment on their comment can be rendered there.
    But this email, well, while it touches upon a small matter, there is a universal truth in it, so I am sharing it here.  
    A regular reader, whose name I shall shield, writes:

     A recent column re: riders crossing around the gates, brings to mind another train problem that I have.
     Freight trains taking enormous amounts of time at crossings.
      Aside from just having annoyed motorists ramming the freight cars, would this make for an interesting column?
      You contact the National Transportation Agency, (I assume they oversee the railroads in the country), and suggest that FREIGHT TRAINS RUN ONLY DURING NITETIME HOURS).
      I, for one, would anxiously await their answer.

    "You contact the National Transportation Agency"? What am I, a short-order cook?

    But that wasn't my reply. 

    I read his note on my iPhone, riding the train home Monday night. And it struck me, that not only had he missed the entire point of the crossing column—avoid pointless hurry, be safe, wait—but he was missing it in dramatic fashion. I wrote back:

        Wouldn't it be easier for you try practicing patience, before you set out to recast the rail freight system in the country? Just a thought.

     Not to pick on this guy, who at least is civil. But how often is there a problem where, rather than make a slight change to ourselves, we instead prefer to endeavor to recast the whole world? As if that were easier. This is nothing profound—"Better to light a candle," as the saying goes, "than to curse the darkness." As if it were some physical law: we don't change; somebody else should. We see people doing that all the time. They try to yank books out of libraries—I don't want to see this so nobody should see this. They try to convert the world to their faith, rather than attempt to wrap their heads around the implications of other people believing other things.
     It seems a symptom of always being right, in your own head. Maybe I'm getting zen in my old age. But I've begun to realize that, usually, the solution involves, not an impossible recasting of reality, but a far less difficult (though still sometimes hard) rejiggering of myself. I wasn't even fully aware of the dynamic, which is why I'm sharing the reader's email. Hmm, be more patient as freight trains pass OR endeavor to shift all freight trains to run during the night time, when nobody could possibly be bothered ... hmmm ... I wonder which one I should try?
     Not to end on a negative note, but the reader did not reply. Perhaps investigating ways to shut down the entire email system.

Robert Falls crafts his latest "heartless monster"

     But what I really want to do is watch Bob Falls direct ...  I've been asking for years, at both the Goodman and at the Lyric. For some reason now the clouds parted and I got my chance. I wish this piece could have been longer—he's such an interesting man. But I'm glad I was able to get this in the paper.

    Don Giovanni is not your average hero. Serial seducer, rapist and occasional murderer, he gets by on his good looks, his money and a relentless, serpentine charm. 

     Nor is Robert Falls your average director. Provocateur, trickster, his productions have a sharp contemporary edge and lots of good old-fashioned violence and sex. His “Measure for Measure” last year at the Goodman, set in 1970s “Taxi Driver” New York, left audiences gasping and angry. A critic denounced his 2006 “King Lear” as too grisly. Falls reaches into the body of a work, draws out its essence, twirls its guts on a stick and thrusts it in the audience’s faces. 

     Needless to say, I love it. If I wanted the drip-drip-drip of tedium, I’d stay home. 

    “You were born to direct this,” I whisper to Falls, joining him last week in the Lyric Opera’s second-floor rehearsal space for the first full run-through of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” this season’s first show. 

    “It’s the ‘Measure for Measure’ of operas,” he agrees. “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It never stops; the perfect opera in many ways. Starts like a bat out of hell, with an attempted rape and a murder. Here’s five sequences of violence and gun play — because it’s set in 1920s Spain. The singers are unbelievable; they’re running, fighting, kicking.”

     Watching Falls in action — if “action” is the right term for a man mostly sitting, grinning, jotting on a pad — you quickly scrap cliched notions about what a dynamic director does. Falls is no tyrant bullying his cast. He listens as much as talks, if not more.

     “It’s a total collaboration,” Falls says.

     Donna Elvira, played with ferocity by Ana Maria Martinez, appears pushing a gleaming vintage motorcycle and side car. 

     Falls wanted her to cut across in front of the motorcycle, but her instinct is not to. She asks Falls if that’s OK.

     “Whatever you want to do,” he replies. 

     But a moment later he is up on his feet, the motorcycle is coming in too much. “It’s too far; it’s never been that far,” he says.

     So a balance. Sometimes his vision, sometimes the performers’. 

     This isn’t the cast’s first rodeo. Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien has played Don Giovanni in 19, count ’em, 19 previous productions. Yet he’s learning from Falls. 

     “He is from outside the opera world, bringing new fresh ideas,” Kwiecien says during a break.  “Sometimes I wouldn’t even think of this kind of interpretation for that aria. He is pushing us to try, and when we try, we are discovering absolutely new dimensions. He is open to new ideas, and recognizes good and bad ideas. So do we.” 

     When Don Giovanni and ex-lover Donna Elvira spar, Falls beams, looking around as if searching for someone to marvel with at a wonder. “I do like to share it with everybody,” he says. “I love this because they know it so well, yet are still fresh and open.”

     Falls is the longtime artistic director at the Goodman, and if you’re wondering what he’s doing here, thank Lyric general director Anthony Freud, who tapped Falls the moment he joined the Lyric.

     “I knew about him for many years because he’s a major international director,” said Freud, who was in Chicago, interviewing, when he went to see Falls’ 2010 “The Seagull” at the Goodman. “I was incredibly impressed with it. Really extraordinary. I’m someone who believes passionately that the best opera is the fusion of music and theater.”

     The music is ethereal — “supernatural,” my opera dictionary calls it — but Don Giovanni, well, he’s a bad man. I wonder: We’re all so touchy, what if the Lyric’s audience doesn’t like this guy?

     “Do you like Tony Soprano?” Falls asks. “Do you like Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’? Do you like Don Draper? We’re living in such an era of antiheroes, where horrible soulless people carry a television show for years. I don’t really care if you like Don Giovanni. Personally, I think he’s a soulless, heartless, somewhat monster. That’s the point, for me, to kill the romanticism. Trying to balance the comedy and the violence with the seriousness is what makes it exciting.” 

     Well, exciting, except for one brief patch at the end of Act One.

     “In an hour and a half first act, there’s one 60-second dullness,” Falls frets. “Giovanni is trying to get Zerlina to go to the party and Masetto doesn’t want to go. It’s just dull. It just sits there. The first act is constantly in motion, constantly moving — snaps — and we get 60 seconds that stop. Partly because I was trying to do something and the actors thought it was so stupid they said, ‘Eh, I don’t want to do this.’ ”

     Falls wanted them to join hands, nine days ago, but Kwiecien rejected it: “I hate Masetto, why would we join hands?” Falls now huddles with his staff. “I don’t know yet, but my brain trust is working on it,” he says. They have a little time. “Don Giovanni” opens Sept. 27. 

Cardinal George wasn't loved, but brought a certain grim purpose to his job

   

      I've written some critical things about Cardinal George, particularly when it came to his cruel, immoral view of gays. But when the paper called last night and asked me to put together something on his 16 year (!) tenure leading Chicago's Catholics, a gentler tone seemed in order. 

    When the Rev. Francis George, archbishop of Portland, Oregon, learned that Pope John Paul II had named him as the successor to Chicago’s much-beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the unassuming priest asked in surprise, “Are you sure the Holy Father has considered all the options?”

     He had.

     The former Northwest Sider became Cardinal Francis George, the city’s sixth cardinal and the first priest born within the Chicago Archdiocese to be called upon to lead it, which he has done with seriousness and a firm hand. On Saturday, Pope Francis named Bishop Blase Cupich, of Spokane, Washington, as George’s successor, according to the Associated Press.

     Considered conservative at the time of his appointment — he was named head of the Chicago Archdiocese in April 1997 and elevated to cardinal in January 1998 — George tried to set an accepting tone for the archdiocese’s 2.3 million Catholics.

      “The bishop is to be the source of unity in any archdiocese,” he said the day he was introduced to the city. “The faith isn’t liberal or conservative.”

George, 77, has been struggling with cancer for the past eight years after being diagnosed with bladder and prostate cancer in 2006. It returned for a third time in the spring, and in August he began using experimental treatments to combat the disease.

    To continue reading, click here.

Before rejoicing in a kilt, there's something you should know....

     My only thought on Scottish independence was "Don't do it," but that was wisdom pretty much lifted from reading The Economist, and you didn't need me to for that. But Friday I posted to Facebook a photo of myself wear a kilt, taken four years ago, which was indeed Scottish, and funny—far funnier than I realized when I was wearing it, as the second column in this set from May, 2010 reveals. A reader asked what the story was behind the get-up, and I promised I would pass it along, my way of celebrating the Scots doing the smart thing. 

     The big thing that everybody wants to know about a kilt is: What does a man wear underneath?

     "You're supposed to go commando," my boss said.

     "That's what we all wondered," my mother said, speaking of her girlhood friends in Cleveland.

     "Are you. . . ?" my wife asked.

     I wanted to know, too, since I had to wear a kilt for the first time Thursday. Heading out the door of the kilt shop, my tartan and jacket in a bag over my shoulder, I turned to ask the lady clerk, "What do I wear under it?"

     "Nothing!" she enthused. "Nothing's the tradition!"

WINDY CITY INDEED

     I am not a man given to sporting distinctive ethnic garb.... Not even the minimal headgear of my own clan. The only time I ever wore a yarmulke -- a head-covering the size of a small pancake -- on a public street was while walking in Jerusalem. And even then, I viewed it as a kind of location-induced temporary derangement, the way sedate Lutherans, shocked to find themselves actually in the Holy Land, will sometimes become unhinged, strip off their clothing and declare themselves the Messiah.

     So when an editor stuck her head in my office and suggested that, in advance of this weekend's Celtic Fest at Millennium Park, it might be a worthwhile exercise if I were to wear a kilt downtown, my reaction was not enthusiasm, but a kind of vertigo.

     My mind flashed to 20 years ago. In a fit of sartorial experimentation, I had purchased a bow tie. Knotting my new bow tie, I wandered into the Loop in an agony of self-consciousness. The sidewalk seemed to pitch like a ship in a storm. Every snatch of conversation, every peal of distant laughter, struck me as being about my bow tie. "I could not have felt more uncomfortable," I confessed later, "had I been wearing a cotillion gown."

     But "no" seemed the path of the coward. And I have mellowed in 20 years, and learned an important lesson: People don't care, not really. Don't worry much what they think. Be yourself, hold your head high.

    That said, I did have two concerns. First, I wanted to check that this wouldn't be offensive -- not that I'm against offending, when necessary, but there's no reason to antagonize a group known for its bellicosity on an editor's whim.

      Every Scot I asked thought it a bonnie idea, however, and, indeed, young men of all nationalities wear kilts nowadays without drawing complaints. In my view, Scots display a refreshing lack of aggrievement, despite having been relentlessly taunted for the past 350 years, and by the English no less.

     Even the staid Encyclopaedia Britannica begins its rumination on Scottish civilization this way: "Scotland has retained much of its cultural identity. Superficially, the external perception of this may descend to an image of whiskey-swilling, tartan-clad highlanders in mist-enshrouded castles, looking backward to bloody battles and romantic tales."

     Not quite Groundskeeper Willie, but not a compliment either.

     My other stipulation was: I wanted the full get-up. Not a plaid blanket wrapped around my waist, but the kilt, the sporran -- a furry purse worn in front, since kilts have no pockets -- the special socks.

     This rig was acquired at the Scottish Shop on Archer Avenue in Summit. In the window was a huge sign, "Kilt Rental," which left me wondering why men might rent kilts, though not for long.

     "When's the wedding?" asked the clerk, who decked me out in a Black Watch tartan -- the green matches my eyes -- and a formal jacket.

     Thursday, I began kilt day with oatmeal, an inside joke (the definition of "oats" in Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary is "A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.")

     At the train, people noticed, obviously, but politeness kept them mute. Only one comment, from an acquaintance.

     "I don't have to ask who won the bet," he grinned.

     Striding across the Loop -- from Union Station to the Sun-Times, from the Sun-Times to Petterino's -- it seemed that nobody noticed the kilt at all. Only later, looking at the photos, did I realize that pedestrians were just waiting until I passed to gape.

      Scotland is a small place -- about half the size of Illinois, with about half the population of the Chicago metro area -- yet had a significant role in founding Chicago, in the meat-packing trade, and starting several noted businesses, including Carson Pirie Scott, unsurprisingly.

     The festival sounds fun but, alas, the kilt is due back Saturday morning. As to the central kilt question, well, I think a bit of mystery is appropriate. Though I did worry more about updrafts than is usual.

     TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

While there is no shortage of kilt jokes and thrifty Scot jokes, there are too many notorious put-downs not to share a few, as the greats of English literature lined up to condemn Scotland for being a land not unlike their own populated by a people not unlike themselves.

     "A land of meanness, sophistry and mist," wrote Lord Byron. "Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain/Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain."

    "Scotland," Sydney Smith quipped. "That knuckle-end of England, that land of Calvin, oatcakes and sulphur."

    Boswell's Life of Johnson is 1,500 pages of continual Scot-bashing, but I'll try to give Boswell his due on Sunday.

     The sharpest line is John Cleveland's couplet from 1647:

      Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom.

      Not forced him wander, but confined him home.

                                                                    —Originally published May 7, 2010

Oh that it ended there. But that was just the beginning....

OPENING SHOT

     Humiliation is a lapse in perspective. Your focus narrows to the 300 people jeering at you in the theater, your mind is entirely filled by the one gaffe in a two-hour speech.

     It's agony, nausea. You want to die, but you don't die, generally, and then a miracle occurs -- your perspective opens back up again. All it takes is a generous dose of time for life to magically expand. You realize that 99.999 percent of the world doesn't know about you, never mind your errors. Those who do know, who care now, will care less soon and forget about it in time, while your family forgives, as families do. The idea of shame sticking to you -- of Lord Jim wandering the Far East, while the stigma of his cowardice aboard the sinking Patna follows him around like a faithful dog, is the stuff of literature, not life.

     But some never learn that lesson, and then it's too late.

'PLEATS IN BACK!'

     Saturday morning errands. Coffee, "Rigoletto" and a 40-mile drive down to Summit to return a rented outfit. Park the van on Archer Avenue, swing the red plastic hanger with the rental kilt, jacket and sporran over my shoulder and head into the tiny Scottish Shop, past the rows of hanging tartans and plaid ties.

     "What's the name?" owner Jack Thompson asks.

     "Steinberg," I say.

     "You wanna know something?" he asks.

     "Yes I know," I say.

     "You had the kilt on backwards," he says.

     "Yes I know."

     "The pleats go in back," he says.

     "Yes I know."

     "The plain part, in front," he says.

     I turn to one of the grinning men in the store and ask: "What part of 'Yes I know' do you think isn't getting across?"

     Thompson taps his finger on a page from Friday's Sun-Times -- my column -- torn out, waiting on the counter.

     "We've got the picture," he says. "We're putting it up."

     "Be my guest," I say,

     As an inadvertent expert in shame, let me share a secret with you: It's a process. You have to soldier on, to endure, one day at a time, and if you don't -- forgive my injecting something so serious into a lighthearted column -- you end up stepping in front of a commuter train like Metra executive director Phil Pagano did last week.

     The shock of humiliation grabs you, squeezes, distorts your reason. Perspective gone, you forget the crime of financial impropriety pales compared with the horrendous harm inflicted on your loved ones by killing yourself.

     Nobody wants to lose his job or see his reputation ruined, so rather than experience that, Pagano did something far worse. To avoid . . . what? Sixteen months in jail?

     Compare this tragedy with what Dan Rostenkowski did. The powerful congressman went to prison, head held high, came out, 50 pounds lighter and was warmly welcomed by his friends and family.

     We are taught the only way to avoid embarrassment is by never doing anything wrong.

     That is ideal. But the truth is, your moment can come even if you're both honest and careful. You don't have to be Tiger Woods and invite destruction -- you can be the award recipient who forgets his speech, the Gold Glove winner who drops the ball. You don't have to be John Edwards; think Howard Dean -- one over-exuberant cry and you're a laughingstock.

     Nothing to do but wait and try not to care. That's hard. When the first "hey idiot your kilt is backward" e-mail showed up, 7 a.m. Friday, I tried telling myself it didn't matter. How many people know how to properly wear a kilt anyway?

    Quite a lot, it turns out. Cops especially — they have that bagpipe band, and so are familiar with kilts, and experienced at forcefully pointing out the missteps of others.

     But I knew it would pass. That's a crucial understanding. They should teach embarrassment in school: "Handling Humiliation." Kids could spend an afternoon wearing the special Hat of Shame through the halls, a pointed affair, with bells.

     Because while screwing up is sometimes the result of misdeeds, where punishment is deserved, more frequently it is the result of trying stuff. It was my first time in a kilt, and while I had done my prep work — spoke to various Scots, quizzed the clerk fitting me — there was a lot of information to absorb. How does the sporran go and how do the sock flashes work and how does the kilt wrap and of course the underwear question. The concept of there being a front and a back presented itself when I was putting it on at home. I picked what looked best and guessed wrong.

     "Own the sin," our Colonial forefathers said. Don't cringe from your mistakes, but embrace them. Yeah, embarrassing as heck — but nothing to do about it now, short of going back in time, and the necessary time travel technology just isn't there yet.

     Never commit a crime, certainly. But also, never make a mistake, never do anything that might attract mockery and you run the risk of becoming the kind of overly cautious guy who never dances because he can't stand the idea of looking stupid.

    Everybody looks stupid dancing. Looking stupid now and again builds character, and is a sign that you are still trying. Driving back from the Scottish Shop, mulling over the above, I started laughing, out loud. At least this is a more elevated embarrassment, compared with previous embarrassments, I thought. Progress of a sort.

     Laughter is cleansing, when you're the one laughing.

                                                             —Originally published May 10, 2010

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     Do you have to be a writer to hate books as decoration? Purely decoration, I mean. My house is decorated with books, but actual books I either have read, am reading or will read.
     It's bad enough when real books are trotted out for show, when you go to a department store and start to look at the Readers Digest condensed books and old law texts and such they buy by the pound and scatter on their shelves.  
     Or the homes of rich swells with linear feet of those leather Franklin Mint editions, with the gold stamping and the fat ribbon, that you can tell have never been opened. That's bad, but at least someone had the idea: books look nice. Let's get some books. Even those Restoration Hardware stacks of books, with their covers ripped off, bound in twine, had a certain post-Apocalyptic, at-least-it-was-a-book-once air of authenticity. 
      Look at the above. Faux books. What's with that? As if real books weren't available. Which I suppose at some point in the future they won't be, but this has the air of a premature surrender. This tableau was no doubt supposed to look cool, but I found it chilling.  Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. 
    This is in a public place of accommodation in downtown Chicago—not a store, not a restaurant, but a lobby somewhere. Do you know where? Did you also notice these white sentinels of illiteracy?
       The prize this week is something suitably bookish. When I wrote "Don't Give Up the Ship" in 2002 I took the title from Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry's battle flag, flown durning the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, a banner he took to heart in spirit if not to the word, when he abandoned his disabled flagship, the Lawrence, and rowed over to the Niagara and press the battle afresh, and win. 
      I thought it represented a certain essential spirit of persistence in the face of setback—quite useful in professional journalism— and bought a gross or so of the little flags, with round plastic stands stands, as promotional gifts for the book. They didn't quite work, and I ended up with a lot of them, which are popping up in odd places. It's a bracing message—sort of the American version of the Brit's "Keep Calm and Carry On." If you win—post your guesses below, please—I'll toss in this orange square of the sail material that Cristo used for his Gates installation in New York's Central Park in February 2005—my column was running in the New York Daily News then, and I went to report on the project, and city workers were handing out these little squares, I assume to keep resourceful Manhattanites from going at it with shears. Good luck.

The hidden link between Rail Safety Week, Lord Byron

     Metra tries not to kill its customers.

The actual fine, $250, is half the posted fine. 

     It really does. Say what you will about our commuter rail service: its jaw-dropping top-level mismanagement, creaky equipment and seasonal surprise at finding itself once again in a cold climate. But when it comes to sparing the hectic, harried, charmless lives of the commuters who travel its length, Metra is outstanding.

      If a train is in the station, say going north, and another is going south, the northbound train will linger in the station, deliberately, to the puzzlement of passengers, until the southbound train arrives in the station.

     Why? Because the engineers know, if they were to pull out of the station when another train was about to arrive, passengers who disembarked would surge across the tracks and be killed by the incoming train.

     Considerate of Metra to spare them, I’ve always felt, even though they are not helping me, personally, since I am the one person, alone it seems, among the 150,000 who take Metra every day, who does not wait between the lowered gate and the train, in a runner’s crouch, eyes fixed on the moving rear of the last car, timing my lunge forward so that I am out of the blocks when the train has not quite passed, accelerating as the stainless steel wall clears the space in front of me.

     Usually, invariably they’re fine. There is no incoming train, no Amtrak express thundering by from the other direction. In the 14 years I have been doing this, only a few times do the people surging ahead see another train coming, and half go forward, and half go back, some doing an uncertain little dance on the tracks before choosing.
     Then, this week, something different occurred. The train cleared, commuters surged forward, to confront a lone man on the other side, Northbrook Police Traffic Officer Chris Lacina, in the baseball cap and shades that give suburban officers that coveted SWAT look, his SUV parked nearby.
     Sadly, I couldn't see the expressions of concern on the faces of the herd hurrying away from me. A trio of men froze in front of the gate and conducted a nervous little impromptu conversation. The mass parted around Lacina like a river around a rock, until they realized he was not issuing tickets, just handing out white warning slips. Off the hook, they scurried away.
     This has never happened, in my memory. I sought explanation from Metra. "It's Illinois Rail Safety Week," said Michael Gillis, Metra's spokesman. "Metra is partnering with various suburban police departments for enforcement actions, to encourage safe behaviors around tracks and trains." The special week ends Saturday.
     When the gate lifted and it was safe to cross, I strolled over and asked for a flier. "WARNING: YOUR ACTIONS COULD HAVE JUST COST YOU A FINE OF $250.00 OR EVEN WORSE, YOUR LIFE." Lacina said he gave one ticket, the only one Northbrook issued this week, according to police Chief Chuck Wernick, whom I later asked a question that bothers me. If crossing around lowered gates is dangerous and illegal, yet hundreds do it daily at this spot, why not have officers there regularly?
     "Well," he said with a laugh, "I wish I had 500 policemen too. We don't have the staff to do it. This is a special detail. I only have so many people working, and with all the accidents we deal with, we're stretched thin."
     In other words, it's not really that important. Hmm. Maybe he's right. Maybe it's me. When I moved to Northbrook my boys were 3 and 4. I worried about them living a block from the tracks and vowed they would never see me being unsafe. I've seen parents drag their reluctant toddlers around lowered gates, and it's all I can do not to run after them and hiss, "Are you insane?!" But I don't want to be that guy, and maybe there's a Darwinian, thin-the-herd aspect to it.
     There certainly is a psychological aspect. You can't stand behind a gate for 14 years, watching your neighbors rush away from you across busy rail tracks, despite it being both dangerous and illegal, and not reflect.
     Usually I savor the separation, musing on Lord Byron's "Child Harold's Pilgrimage:"

I have not loved the world, nor the world, me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coin'd my cheeks to smiles,
Nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them but not of them.    

     But that's pompous, right? Maybe the error isn't theirs. Maybe it's mine, by holding back, being aloof, arrogant, separate. Maybe the thing to do is to blend in, utter a complacent "moo" and surge across the tracks with the mob. And if we all get flattened by a train some day, well, we gotta go eventually.

Old Stuff I Love #3: Steiff Lobster

 
     See the lobster? With the bright orange, red and golden yellow claws? Little beady black eyes? Half cute, half realistic, you don't know whether to hug him or draw some butter.
     He's 52 years old. Ancient for a toy, particularly one that looks so good. The only wear he has shown is, he used to have long red stringy whiskers, like a real lobster. But those got chewed off over the years.
      All told, in surprising condition.
     Well, maybe not so surprising. He's a Steiff.
      If you know something about toys, you know that Steiffs are German mohair animals—well, they make regular soft stuffed animals too, but classic Steiff's are hard, dense toys like this lobster -- he feels packed with sawdust. The company was founded in 1880, and still makes old-fashioned toys. The bear's arms and legs and neck move. That's really their claim to fame, along with the brass button in their ears displaying a serial number, and the fact that the company invented the Teddy Bear in 1902 (with a crucial assist from the United States, where Theodore Roosevelt, in the same year, refused to shoot a black bear that had been tethered to a tree by his over-zealous hosts. The incident became a Washington Post cartoon, a Brooklyn toymaker got the ball rolling and then Steiff invaded these shores in 1906, setting off a veritable Teddy Bear mania. The song, "Teddy Bear's Picnic," for instance, dates to 1907). 
      None of which has anything to do with why I love them. My father was a nuclear scientist and, as such, traveled the world, giving papers and attending conferences. In 1962, he travelled to Germany, where he noticed these colorful, realistic, lovely toy animals. He had two kids at home: me, then 2, and my sister, 5. The dollar was strong then, and he bought back Steiff toys—a turtle and an elephant, this lobster and giraffe ... and a lion, a camel, various birds, including a penguin, and ... a squirrel, a big ladybug, a goat—so many that he bought a small case to carry them home.
     The part of the story that I cherish is when he gets home, after his long overseas trip, happily opens the case, with its stuffed treasure, and tells my sister to take what she wants, and her toddling brother can have the rest. My sister surveys the bestiary and bursts into tears: "Didn't they have any dollies?" she wails. She wanted baby dolls, not a lobster, which went to me. He's been a boon companion, lo these many years.
      Maybe that story isn't much, as far as family traditions go. But it was what I had, so I hung my hat on it. When my younger brother Sam's daughter Rina was born, I showed up at the hospital, Steiff in hand. Ditto for his son Ryan, and Sam reciprocated for my kids.
       The day my oldest boy, Ross was born, when Edie beeped me to tell me to get home now and whisk her to the hospital, I was in FAO Schwarz on Michigan Avenue, looking at a little Steiff German Shepherd that ended up in his crib. The cat was a gift for Kent from his Uncle Sam.
      And the Teddy Bear ... was a gift from me to Kent.  Ross later demanding the exact same bear, and when FAO Schwarz let me down, I plugged the serial number into this new Internet machine—this was about 1998—and found a toy store in Coon Rapids, Minnesota that sold it to me, via mail, for $30 less than what I had spent on Kent's. A miracle. 
     What I remember most about Kent's bear was when I bought him, 17 years ago, my frugal wife looked in the shopping bag and was aghast, horrified at the cost—$160—and gave me one of those are-you-mad!? keel-haulings that wives are so good at. "A hundred and sixty dollars?! For a Teddy Bear?!?!  Are you out of your MIND? Spending THAT on some TOY? Why do you always do this to me...?"
     As fate would have it, the perfect retort came to me, and I smoothly sidestepped the crisis with a matador's grace. 
     "When you see it in your grandchild's crib," I parried. "It'll seem like a bargain."
     She, like my sister, started to cry. Game, set, match.
     The bears, to be honest, were never favorite toys of either boy; I think they somehow knew they were special and treated them gingerly. The bears spent a lot of time on shelves, observing. Or maybe they just weren't cuddly, they were hard, and got shunted to the side. I let the lobster be part of their scrum—I dug him out of the toy chest for his portrait—not seeing the point of holding him back, particularly since nothing could hurt him short of a machete. He's still good to go for the next generation. The bears too. That doesn't come for a while, but if Steiff is here, and if I'm here, and have a few dollars to scrape together, Steinbergs unborn be outfitted with beautiful mohair toys, good for the rough and tumble long haul of a life well-lived.