Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     Who knows how many churches are in Chicago?
     I wouldn't hazard a guess—one local TV station estimated 6,000, but they didn't source that figure.
     Though it sounds about right.
     Of course first, you'd have to define what you mean by "churches"?
     Does that refer to church buildings? Because some of those are empty, or have been pressed into other purposes. There's a church on the North Side that was made into condos. Is it still a "church?"
     Or a congregations? Because many of those meet in storefronts.
     It isn't as if the city keeps a master church list, to my knowledge. You don't have to register your church, or get a church license.
     This lovely structure caught my eye during my wanderings around the city this week, for its charming maroon-roofed tower, and its matching awning announcing "LOVE."
      (And yes, I plugged those into Google to see if they give the game away: they don't. Lots of churches, lots of love).
      So where is this particular church?
      I've gone through something of a transformation during the "Saturday Fun Activity" process. As much as I want to stump you guys, I think part of me will be sad when that finally happens, if it finally happens, the way the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series drained away a little of the specialness that came from their long string of defeats. As thwarted as I've been in my attempts to frustrate the Hive, I think when I eventually do—perhaps with this church, hiding in plain sight—it'll be a melancholy victory.
     Or heck, maybe I'll be triumphant. Hard to predict these things.
     So place your guesses below. The winner gets a package of excellent Bridgeport coffee. Except for Dale—he's already got his. When I shipped him his prize package for last Saturday, I tucked in an extra bag, as an advance against his next victory. Seemed an efficiency. I probably should have shipped three. Good luck to all. And if it's King Dale, well, I'm okay with that too. 

Postscript
     In case this put you in the mood for more photos of churches—and synagogues, and mosques—the winner, who photographed the church above last year, shared a website, "Chicago Houses of Worship" featuring thousands of pictures of, well, you know. 

"So these three terrorists walk into a bar..."

     

     The slaughter at Parisian satiric weekly is an attack against the fraternity of the irreverent.  We who don't accept the world as it is given to them, the way true believers and zealots do, but who scoff, who doubt, who question and criticize and complain.
     That's me. I've been a wisenheimer all my life. Snide, sarcastic. Even as a child. 

     When I grew up, and started writing, poking fun at stuff came naturally. The first piece of writing I sold for money was to National Lampoon in 1980. Since then I've written for Spy, for Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards, for Rolling Stone. My column at the Sun-Times is not what I would call a beacon of gravitas.  

      Mockery is my business. I'm not of the Charlie Hebdo mold, only because they were so ... what? So French, with all those sloppy kissing cartoons. So European, meaning they slid into an easy xenophobia. They'd reply by saying they made fun of everyone, but you still had to wonder whose side they're on. Not my taste, but not something people should be killed over, either.  

     Friday's column required a balance, and I hope I pulled it off. Basically I wrote what I felt, what struck me as funny and, to my delight, the paper printed it. 

     And if it seems like I'm joking about tragic issues, well, you kind of have to. That's what Charlie Hebdo was all about, and our response should do no less.

     Knock-knock

     Who's there?

     Muhammad.

     Muhammad who?

     It better be Muhammad Ali, or you're in trouble.

     That isn't funny. But then, knock knock jokes are never particularly funny. They're more about wordplay ("Lettuce in, it's cold out here") and bad puns that cause 6-year-olds to spurt milk out their noses.

     Although, as jokes sometimes do, the one above, which was written by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune (psst, non potential terrorists: it as-way eally-ray itten-wray by e-may) , illustrates a truth that might jar if stated plainly:

     Terrorism works.

     For all the "Not Afraid" bluster that came in the wake of the slaughter of 12 staffers at the Charlie Hebdo satiric newspaper in Paris, there is a chilling effect. There has to be.  "Will this get me killed?" is not a question conducive to humor. Even the Onion, in its typically dead-on response to the Paris massacre, sounded a note more somber than hilarious, under the headline: "It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives at Risk," written in an intentionally unattributed, vague, will-we-die-if-we-say-this? fashion:

     "Today’s horrific events only reinforce the idea that we cannot and will not let extremist zealots dictate what we can and cannot say,” is a comment that we will quote, but one that we do with a legitimate sense of uncertainty over whether it could incite an attack against the speaker or their loved ones, a sense of uncertainty that feels awful, grotesque, and wholly unnecessary in this day and age.

     That isn't funny, or rather, is funny in a dry, puff-cheeks-and-sigh-kind of way. If you compare that piece to the one the Onion ran immediately after the 9/11 attacks, with the 19 hijackers shocked to find themselves roasting in hell, you can almost think that Western society has slid backward in 13 years, that our freewheeling freedoms have lost a step in the face of a constant stream of videos of journalist beheadings and bus bombings and the like.

     Myself, I never worry about that kind of thing, because I sincerely believe I'm not important enough to kill. Plus, at 54, I've already had the good part of my life and now comes the dismal denouemont of failing body, failing finances and descent into utter obscurity. Maybe having it all end in a white flash might not be such a horrible thing.
    

     No, I don't believe in mocking God for a variety of reasons. Everyone needs to claim false significance for something, and whether it's opera or football or a loving deity is merely a matter of personal style. If God is imaginary, so is Carmen, and I wouldn't want anybody claiming that makes the whole pageant a waste of time.
     Yes, one is tempted to blaspheme the prophet on general principles, to show that we can. The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has coined a variety of explicit jokes about Muhammad that I would share, except I believe doing so is wrong. Muslims in this country are members of an extreme minority whose position is only undercut by brutal acts such as we saw this week. The irony is that the attackers are in silent conspiracy with haters everywhere. A fringe zero commits a crime, and others claim it somehow represents the whole. Arguing that the crime in Paris reflects on Islam is like insisting that Bernie Madoff indicts Jews.
     And no, Zorn hasn't really done any of that. He's a good friend of mine, or was, before I dragged him into this. I just think the notion of projecting these dangerous, imaginary insults upon him is funny.
     But that would change if somebody threw a brick at his house. Or mine. We have to hold, on faith, that we haven't passed some kind of tipping point where jokes are not allowed. I don't want to pretend that Islamic radicals invented terrorizing those who disagree with their dogma. We in the U.S. have a long, rich history of doing just that, from John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts to the 1960s South, where supporting voting rights could and did get you killed.
     One of the dozen Charlie Hebdo staffers killed was Stephane Charbonnier, editor and cartoonist. The magazine had been threatened and firebombed before, and in 2012 he said something worth repeating:
     "Muhammad isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law."
     Charbonnier said something else: "I'd rather die standing than live on my knees."
     This is a moment of truth, where we decide whether to cower in fear or stand up. I admire Zorn for standing up and boldly insulting Islamic terrorists everywhere, almost daring them to come after him. I only wish I had his courage.

Tis the season, for flu

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.

     Shortly after 9 a.m. I heard it for the first time. An eight-second message, I learned when, after hearing it for 10 minutes or so, I took out a stopwatch and timed it, along with the gap before the message repeated.
     

     Every seven seconds. Like a ball peen hammer tapping against the side of my head.
     

     I wondered if, assuming I ever get through to the nurse, and assuming she gives me an appointment to see the doctor, whether I should ask: "I assume the purpose of the message is to thin the herd of sick callers waiting for help."
      
     But doctors can react poorly to that kind of thing. They don't like to be questioned. And they are genuinely busy. This year's influenza outbreak started early, hit harder, and is now widespread in 43 states; 21 children have died. Serious stuff.
     

     Particularly when it happens to you. The Steinberg household is not faring well. My younger son succumbed a day or two before New Year's and has been battling it for a week. My wife was felled like a tree over the weekend. I assumed I was immune because of my hardy Eastern European lineage and general bullets-will-not-harm-us exceptionalism.
     

     Then I started to cough. And sneeze. And get ... well, achy. And very tired.
     

     Nothing to bother a doctor with. I'm a big believer in soldiering on, waiting and letting things go away. But my wife, God bless her, insisted, I get tested. If I catch the flu early, she said, I can take something called "Tamaflu" which will shave off a few days of misery. If I don't have it, I can get a vaccine, which are 50 percent effective in good years, but only 33 percent effective this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

     

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.

     "Influenza" is an interesting word. Italian, obviously, for "influence," and it refers, not to what a person needs to get through to a doctor quickly, but to astrology. In the Middle Ages, people though the stars influenced illness (some still do, but that's a different column) bringing sickness on, particularly plagues and general outbreaks, and the word was applied first to any sort of epidemic, then to a certain kind of contagious respiratory ailment previously known as "la grippe."
     

     "News from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there call'd the Influenza" The London Magazine reported in 1743.
  
   

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
     

     Half an hour. I'd say they've blown "promptly." Let me say, lest I malign hardworking, dedicated professionals, that I've gotten my health care there for years, and am always very happy with their treatment, and I'm sure I would be happy again now. If they'd pick up the phone.
     

     Do I even need to go? The CDC points out that you shouldn't seek medical attention unless you are in a high risk group: young children, the elderly, already suffering from lung or heart ailments, or have severe symptoms such as high fever. The CDC recommends you stay home for 24 hours so you don't spread the thing around. People worry about being sneezed on, but the virus can live for hours in dried mucus. I've taken to using the paper towel that I wash my hands with to open the rest room door, fat lot of good that has done me.
     

     Up to 40 million Americans get the flu each year; what makes it so contagious is that the flu viruses constantly adapt. This year's strain is not the same as last year's, and you can have various types of flu being passed around at the same time.
     

     Because of the mutation, settling on a vaccine for the strain of flu that might be around is considered a "crap shoot." This year the doctors lost.
   

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
    

     I set the volume down on the phone and put it on speaker, making it more of a background, the gentle hum of anxiety that all medical situations bring. I avoid doctors and hospitals—half the time they get you sick there—and you usually get better whether treated or not.
   

     The hour mark—that seemed a decent period to abandon the quest—the sun was dazzling the frost on the window. I listened one more time to the friendly mantra.

   

      You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
     

    At least this column was about done. I wandered downstairs, figuring I should tell my wife before I hung up. My wife made a face, grabbed her cell phone, dialed the same number I had dialed an hour earlier. Someone answered immediately. My wife shot me a just-how-stupid-are-you glance, then handed me the phone. I'm seeing the doctor this afternoon. Better safe than sorry.

     Postscript: I didn't have the flu. 

The atrocity in Paris

Calligraphy by Stephanie Shapiro

     Journalists are very fortunate in this country. We can write what we please, without fear that somebody is going to come around and kill us. Some nasty remarks from disgruntled cops, some noxious posts by Right Wing haters, but nothing that can't be shaken off with a shiver, like a dog coming in from the rain.
     But the slaughter of 12 staffers of Charlie Hebdo, a French satiric newspaper, reminds us how precious that is, how threatened. How history is dominated by the brutal and the powerful crushing those who question or laugh at them. Or, in this case, the armed and the fanatical, trying to.
     You know why they do it. It's hard to be ridiculed. To have your most cherished beliefs held up for mockery. The intelligent person examines the scorn and satire directed his way, roots around in the mess for what kernels of truth may be, and tries to learn from those. None of us is perfect, no belief system without flaws.
     The fanatic doesn't have that option. When you can't examine your own beliefs, the only outlet is to attempt to silence those questioning you. Just a few days ago a Chicago cop started demanding online, in posts and tweets brandishing images of his badge, that I apologize for something I said about the police. I saw his efforts, shrugged, and thought, "I don't have to ask permission from the Chicago Police Department to say what I think, nor do I have to apologize to them when I do." What I said was true, and even if it weren't, that's what freedom is, a cacophony of voices, some respectful, some irreverent, some false, some true. In a democracy, we respect citizens enough to let them sort it out. Some of us do, anyway.  Some haven't gotten the memo, or refuse to read it, or have read it but can't quite grasp the concept. Free speech is great for them. For others, it's just blasphemy.
      A shame. Free speech makes you strong. It creates a world where ideas thrive because they work, not because those who would point out the flaws are beaten down. Fanatics who must gag opposing thoughts, inspired by their supposedly powerful faith, ironically have less faith, in themselves, in what they believe. Otherwise, why couldn't they trust their ideas to succeed on their own merits? Terrorist outrages like the one in France are, in essence, expressions of weakness, of doubt. My God—or at least God as I would envision Him—is a powerful God, not undercut by cartoons. You would think that would be an easy position for anyone of faith to embrace. Alas, it is not.
    The purpose of these crimes is to instill fear, the fear they already feel, terror of life, of otherness. We should react the opposite: by renewing our courage, our belief in the redemptive power and beauty of free speech. These terrorists do not represent a faith, they do not represent a philosophy. They are ragged stragglers fighting for a cause that has already lost, long ago.

Those Winter Tuesdays

    
    
    "It's six below out," I told the back of my younger son's head, as he sat at the computer in the darkened living room, eating a bowl of cereal.
     He mumbled wetly in reply.
     "I'm going to take this recycling to the curb," I continued. "You want me to start the car for you? Warm it up?"
     It was about 6:30 a.m. He'd leave for school in a few minutes.
    "If it can be warmed up," he said, turning. "The heater light hasn't been on." 
    He's been complaining about having to drive such an old car. "A 20 year old car is not a thing," he'll say, trying to explain to me, through logic and figures, that buying a slightly used car is much more economical than continuing to own a car that needs a minor repair every six months. He has not yet convinced me.
    "Or not," I said, moving toward the door. "Up to you."
     He handed me the keys.
     "Tell me if the heater works," he said. 
    It was dark, the moon cast shadows through the trees, the snow was grey and crunched. I ferried a few shopping bags of cans and cardboard to the recycling bin, then opened the garage, got in, started the car, which groaned to life. I backed the sedan up, set it in park, lights on, running. 
     There's a popular poem, "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. Well, popular might be overstating the case. Popularity is relative, and you could argue that no poems are popular, not compared to, oh, video games. The Columbia University Press called "Those Winter Sundays" "the 266th most anthologized poem in English" which is either high praise or the worst kind of damnation. David Biespiel called it a "heart-wrenching domestic masterpiece" in his essay on the poem on the Poetry Foundation website. 
     The poem begins:

                 Sundays too my father got up early
                 and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

     I won't reprint the entire 14-line poem—copyright law—but you can read it on the site of the Poetry Foundation, which did get permission, by clicking here. The father pokes the fire into life, calls his son into the warm room. "No one ever thanked him," Hayden notes.
     There is,  I realize, an element of self-justification in my quoting Hayden's poem, like those successful businessmen who love to quote Teddy Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" as an attempt to stifle valid criticisms against them. The Hayden poem is not a perfect fit. I am not a laborer whose hands ache. Our house does not seethe with unspoken anger, at least I hope it doesn't.
     No matter. As I backed the car out, I thought, justified or not, of the poem's great closing lines, as the son recalls his father long ago. I think I can get away with quoting them here.

                 Speaking indifferently to him,
                 who had driven out the cold
                 and polished my good shoes as well.
                 What did I know, what did I know
                 of love’s austere and lonely offices?  

     I went back inside, stamped the snow off my shoes.
     "How is it out there?" he asked.
    "Not bad,"  I said. 
    "The car going?" he said.
    "Yeah."   
     I looked at him. Handsome. Trim. Seventeen. 
     "You have a button half done on your sweater," I said, pointing to one big blue button not quite pushed through its buttonhole. He looked down, annoyed at first then. Then seeing that what had been said contained some grain of truth, apparently, despite being spoken by his father, pushed the button all the way through.
    We looked at each other.
     I thought of filling the silence with, "The phrase you're groping for is, 'Thank you.'" But that what good would that do? And, besides, it was unnecessary. No one raises a kid for the thanks. 

Is there life on Mars?

    It was so cold Monday that I thought of outer space.
    Zero degrees on the Metra platform, in a long, bundled line, waiting to exit Union Station onto Madison Street. I watched the warm breath steam out of my fellow humans and thought warmly, or as warmly as I could, about the 125 degrees or so above us, the temperature range of human life, of all life, excepting some hardy bacterium that live in thermal vents. 
    A pretty narrow window. Then again, life is very localized event, as far as we know.  
    Space is a different matter. Space is very big and very cold, and time is very long, so it's poignant that people waste so much of their far more limited time pondering whether  extraterrestrial life is here, now, watching us from nearby, when it's a far more probing question to ask if extraterritorial life is anywhere, ever, even long ago and far away. 
     I would say, given the vastness of creation, that the answer is probably yes, with an asterisk, and that asterisk is a) it's most likely so far away we'll never know about it and they'll never know about us; and b) it probably took place a billion years in the past, or will, in the future, or both.
     Two asterisks. 
     Which doesn't even raise the question of "intelligent life" as if that weren't pretty rare here on earth, among humans. Why does it have to be intelligent life to matter? If there are solar sponges, or unicorns on Mars, would they not count? Would that not rock our world in the way our world is supposed to be rocked by the wise and gentle overlords of Rigel 6? I suppose a being has to be smart so it can appreciate us. That's what this whole UFO charade is really being about: drumming up imaginary fans, ginning up some cosmic interest in we oh-so-important humans so we can feel as significant as we'd like to be and not as small and trivial and alone as we actually are, like some jilted interstellar suitor, in our straw hat and candy-striped suit, our bouquet wilting in our hands as we stare with sagging hope, awaiting our star date who never arrives or, rather, only arrives for those willing to make the leap and interpret a splotch in a photograph as the Starship Enterprise.
    Of which, I should point out, there are quite a number of us. About a third of Americans believe that UFOs are in fact space visitors. But then, a third of Americans believe in angels, and there is no doubt significant overlap in those two groups of believers.
    People turn every blur that someone else glimpsed in the sky into motherships from Alpha Centuri out of neediness and vanity. Once God was watching  over us and now, in his apparent absence, we conjure up new protectors and new judges to peer at us through the clouds. 
     So life, probably, somewhere, sometime, based on the undeniable fact that we popped up here, now—it's been done once, so it could be done again. One roll of the biochemical dice led to us, after only a billion years of slow transformation. Given the number of times those dice are being thrown, on trillions of planets over billions of years, odds are ... maybe not good, but certainly there, that other planets evolved similarly though, as I said, 10 million years ago and a billion light years away. Completely cut off from us by unspanable expanse of time and space.
    Not as satisfying a plot line as aliens picking us up willy-nilly for sex experimentation. Very few fairy tales involve a beautiful princess in a castle in Never Never Land and a handsome prince in Shangrila who never meet, though one suspects the other does exist. 
    That said, the issue is  worthy of at least a little contemplation. I think it is romantic, to stretch the idea of romance a bit. Usually the parties meet cute, interact, something happens, leading to the loss, and yearning that bring wisdom. But in this case, we start with the absence, the ache. You've got our swain hungering for company here, gazing up at the sky—and a tremendous yellow full moon Monday morning, the "Wolf Moon," the Native-Americans called it, which might have helped prompt all this. And whatever unimaginably alien multi-tentacled sweetheart over there, somewhere, across the galaxy and back, or ahead, in time, regarding the heavens with her one giant eyeball, or whatever, and wondering, in her own strange way, about us. Both parties never meeting, never knowing. But still, a kind of love.
     Anyway, it was enough to get me to the end of the Metra platform. 

"Dear Friend" — A final kindness from Judy Baar Topinka

     It couldn't be.

     Could it?
     I had been burning off a few excess vacation days at the end of December, working at home on home stuff instead of working at work on work stuff, when I stopped by the office the day before New Year's Eve, to write a column, schmooze and collect my mail. Last-minute Christmas cards, a manifesto of some sort and . . . a white legal envelope, bold return address: JUDY BAAR TOPINKA.
     Judy wrote to me — and I assume to all reporters, perhaps to all Illinoisans — more than any public official I know. I received more mail from her than from the rest of state government combined. After she died Dec. 10, I had hopelessly pawed through the piles of clutter in my office, looking for the quaint little 1950s-style folders she sent with a clipping tucked inside. One last one, as a keepsake. They were designed to send to constituents, but she used them to praise things I had written, with underlines and highlighted sections and exclamation marks and comments in her tiny, crabbed hand. The sort of thing you'd look at, smile at and throw away. I couldn't find any and felt bad. It would be good to have one.
     This . . . oh wait. I quickly remembered how a Topinka staffer had come by the office, the day after she died. Could she buy a few extra copies of the paper, with Judy's obituary? No, I said, she couldn't buy one. But we of course would be happy to give her some, and I handed her a stack. This must be her note of thanks. Who does that? But if anybody still did, it would be someone from Judy's office.
     No, not a thank you. The same cheesy folder, with a photo of the Capitol in Springfield, shaped to the outline of Illinois, with a retro "I Saw You in the News!" across it, and "STATE OF ILLINOIS COMPTROLLER — JUDY BAAR TOPINKA."
     "Dear Friend" began the form letter printed inside. "I enjoyed this clipping about you in the newspaper, and thought you might like a copy. Congratulations!"
 

   The clipping was a Nov. 17 column, where I begin by talking about the variety of books in my home office and end by talking about Kim Kardashian's backside. "What a wonderful column," Judy scrawled in the margin. "Gets me somewhat motivated to organize my voluminous library of books. If you ever need anything ever written about Elizabeth the 1st and her age, let me know (Sincerely) Comp. JBT."
     For the record, it wasn't a particularly good column, never mind wonderful. But if you were puzzled by the outpouring of general sadness at the passing of Judy Baar last month, I think that note explains a lot, and perhaps gives us all a few tips about living our own lives in the coming year.
     What does it show?
     1. Make an effort. Judy put herself out. She went to the trouble. There is no part of the comptroller's job that involves greasing reporters' massive egos and, indeed, her note wasn't done with the idea of a quid pro quo, of tilling the soil for good coverage. Her kindness would curdle if it were followed up by her rattling the cup for publicity. But she didn't. She was just being nice.
     2. Be nice. When people have a complaint, you sure hear from them. And sometimes I want to say, "You've never said a word, for years, about ever liking anything, and now something bothers you and I'm supposed to listen to you grouse?" Being nice is planting the seeds that flower later. I guarantee you, had Judy Baar been irked by something, I'd have snapped to attention, because that wasn't her way.

     3. Be interested. My column started by talking about books and ended by talking about Kardashian's butt. Judy moved the focus into the age of Elizabeth I. There's something refreshing about that. The range of interesting things is boundless, unless we blinder ourselves. Look around.
     There are more conclusions I could draw, but that's enough.
     I checked the postmark of the envelope. Dec. 2. I've never been so grateful for the foot-dragging of the post office, though the paper's decimated back-office staff might also have had a role. My guess is it worked its way through the Chicago mails for a week and spent another week in a bin at the paper.
     No matter. I have it now. I carefully returned the clipping to the folder, the folder to the envelope, and filed them under "Topinka, Judy Baar." A little scrap, a tangible token of the love and enthusiasm that she radiated. I was lucky to know her. We all were. And if you want people to miss you, too, when you're gone, the way everybody misses Judy, you might consider adopting a few of her practices.