Meet my pal Joe

Ann and Joe Scheidler

     I've written about Joe Scheidler before  And while I know he represents something truly despicable, and has enough baggage to fill an airplane, I find it impossible to hold it against him. Perhaps because he's always so friendly—that counts for something in life. He pushes his beliefs, energetically, yet maintains a certain decorum, at least to me.

     “Hey, it’s my pal, Joe Scheidler!” I said, happily, seeing the white-bearded man on the corner of Madison and Wacker holding a 5-foot-tall sign showing a fetus at eight weeks. I pumped his hand. Good old Joe, known him for years.
     “Honey,” I said to my wife, who works downtown now and commutes with me. “This is the famous Joe Scheidler, national director of the Pro-Life Action League.”
     He stuck out his gloved hand. She looked at it.
     After nearly 25 years of marriage, you’d think I’d know the woman. But I forget. My wife’s a hardass. When I found myself in a booth at Gene & Georgetti, having coffee with then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, I also forgot. We were getting on, bonding and, wanting to show off, I asked Blagojevich if he’d mind saying hello to my wife. I dialed the cellphone, handed it to him. “Hello!” he said in his fake butch voice. “This is Governor Rod Blagojevich!” The smile died on his face. He mechanically handed me back the phone.
     “What are you doing?” my wife spat. “I didn’t even vote for him. Come home.”
     But that was over the phone. Face to face with Joe, 87, father of seven, grandfather of 23, she melted — a little. After a moment that lasted an eternity, she took his hand with her left and gave it a single squeeze. We continued on our way, pushing east on Madison.
     “The left hand doesn’t count,” she said.
     "Why didn't you want to shake Joe's hand?" I wondered.
     "He's trying to take my rights away," she said.
     That's true. And maybe I'm overly affected by my job, which involves continually talking with people of whom I disapprove. But the entire idea of shunning people is alien to me. I can't imagine someone so loathsome that I'd completely ignore him in person. Jay Mariotti, I suppose. I wouldn't just not shake his hand, but I'd turn and flee, fingers fluttering at my temples, shrieking like a coed in a slasher film.
     I doubled back to talk to Joe. If you haven't noticed, abortion rights are eroding all over the country. The Arizona Senate passed a bill that would require abortion doctors to provide their home addresses to the government to make it easier for fanatics to find them and harass them. A Kansas bill would bar the most common form of abortion after the first trimester. The Montana legislature is exploring requiring doctors to administer anesthesia to fetuses.
     And on and on.
     "You're winning," I said to Scheidler.
     "We are," he replied. "We've had a lot of good comments today. I feel a change in the atmosphere. The attitudes are really changing. We've been doing this for years. I don't know how many people have come up and said thanks for what you're doing, glad you're out here. Things are changing."
     Less harassment from commuters?
     "We get some," he said. "But not nearly the way it used to be."
     His wife, Ann, stood a few feet away, handing out colorful brochures titled "Life before birth," showing a close-up of a fetal face and hands, providing the straight dope on abortion: "Long-term psychological and spiritual effects include guilt, anxiety, depression, anger, sense of loss, nightmares, death scenes, deterioration of self-image, and even suicide," it reads. Joe introduced us, and I couldn't help but notice that she warmly shook my hand, despite my being morally opposed to just about everything she holds dear.
     Maybe that's why I like Joe. He's battling for what he believes. The people who believe otherwise, well, they're just sort of sitting there, letting it happen.

Republicans seek to lead us ... back in time

 

"Looking into my Dreams, Awilda" located in Millennium Park, by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. 

     Quite a fuss this week over Ted Cruz, the conservative Texas senator who announced he is running for president. Even though his far right wing views—Nate Silver created a chart showing him to be not only the furthest right of all the presidential candidates vying for position now, but the furthest right ever, at least over the past 50 years, even more conservative than Barry Goldwater. 
      Who, if you recall, got shellacked in 1964 by the not-particularly-beloved Lyndon B. Johnson.
      The Onion of course nailed it, with the headline: "Ted Cruz Boldly Declares Nation Not Deserving of Better Candidate."
      The general consensus is there is no need to fret about Cruz—he's on the Sarah Palin track, run for office, pump your Q score, then enjoy a long, flush semi-retirement spoonfeeding Republicans the mendacious fantasies they crave. 
     The chances for his winning are given as nil, or close enough to it.
     But the Cruz candidacy, doomed though it be, prompts me to point out something you should keep in mind during the 2016 election, because whatever temporary success Cruz enjoys will tend to draw Republican candidates toward his extreme opinions. It's a basic truth, but those are the best kind. 
     Ready?
     Time goes forward.  It does not go back. Bells cannot be unrung, pool balls do not re-arrange themselves into their original triangular arrays after being struck by the cue ball, eggs do not uncrack. 
     This might not be news to you—I sure hope not, I hope you realize by now that grandma's not coming back—but the Republican Party just doesn't get it.
    Cruz's views are diverse, but they can all be categorized under a banner popular among his less extreme peers: he is a revanchist, i.e., he wants to lead us back, to a nation of his imaginings. 
    Climate change? Never happened. Cruz mocks the science proves it to be worsening year by year. A demographic shift that has made Hispanics—which Cruz claims to be—the largest minority, with 17 percent of the population, surging to 25 percent in the next 30 years? Ignore it, build a wall, keep their parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers already here in permanent serf-like limbo. 
    Cruz announced his candidacy at Liberty University, the self-styled largest Christian college in the world, and called for the nation to finally be run on Christian values. But the number of people who identify as Christians is steadily shrinking—down to 73 percent from 86 percent 25 years ago, and those who do profess to the faith go to church less, in keeping with a general global shift away from religious observance. The United States never was a Christian country; it will be less and less as the years go by.
     The list goes on. Gay marriage? Undo it. Abortion rights? Allow the states to roll them back even further. Obamacare? Scrub the country clean of it.
      But Obamacare is like that egg that can't be unbroken.  It occurred, and while they might overturn it, the way you can take a tweezers and glue and try to reassemble the shards of shell—you end up with a mess, the damage has been done, if you consider "damage" to be that tens of millions of Americans now have access to affordable health care.
     They can mask who they are. They can nominate Marco Rubio and hope people are too dense to realize that he's Cuban, an elite immigrant group given special status to poke a thumb into the eye of the Commies, and that he stands for all the policies that most Latinos are against. But it won't work. No matter how vigorously you stir the coffee, the tablespoon of cream you added stays mixed; it never reassembles back into the original spoonful. Even if you really, really want it to.
     Every day the country hurtles into the future. We become more diverse, the gap between rich and poor grows greater. And the band of people who are willing to gather under the Republican banner of Religion and Revanchism grows smaller. The past is gone. You can fool some people, you can even fool some people all of the time. But you can't fool enough people that they agree to try to return to the past. Because a) it's impossible and b) even if it weren't, the past of their imaginings was never really there in the first place, not the way they remember it. It's so strange to see people passionately urging the country toward a place that doesn't exist and we wouldn't want to go, most of us at least, even if it did. 

Divvy Diary: Free bike!

     There is only one Thai dish, as far as I’m concerned: beef and broccoli.
     And only one Thai restaurant makes it properly, Star of Siam on Illinois.
     Which explains why last week I found myself biking past a dozen lesser restaurants, ramming my Divvy bike home, yet again, into a dock at State and Kinzie. Since sometimes the mechanism is broken, already closed, or the little green light doesn’t come on, I habitually give the handlebars a hard yank to be sure it’s securely locked in.
     As I do this, vibration caused the bike to my right to roll back on its own and clatter to the sidewalk.
     Obviously, whoever returned it is not a thorough person, such as myself, and did not ensure the bike was properly docked. I gaze at the fallen bike, sprawled on the sidewalk. I must have a larcenous soul. Because my first thought was “Free bike!” I could ride this Divvy anywhere, parking where I please. It was an off-grid Divvy. No need to lock it because it wasn’t mine in the first place.
     I contemplate this.
     A bike toppling out of its dock is something new. But otherwise, eight months into my second year as a Divvy rider, the system has become routine. I rode all winter, again. While Winter Year One had an “Ooh, it’s February and I’m riding a bike downtown” vibe, this winter it was ordinary, just what you do to get to the County Building, Millennium Park or the Clinton L station to grab the Pink Line west...

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Barging Back onto the Mississippi

     Last year, I marked my anniversary on the staff at the paper by re-printing a favorite column about kids watching Park District mucky-mucks inaugurate the Washington Park pool. I thought about letting the anniversary slide by unnoticed this year—just cough into my fist and march on. More than a dozen colleagues recently took a buy-out and set sail; staying, and having been here a long, long time, somehow feels like a lapse, something that the prudent man should not ballyhoo.
    Of course, I've never been Mr. Prudent, and it's a bit late to start now. Besides, it's still a fun job, most days. It always has been. Seldom more so than this hot summer day in 1993 when I not only go to ride a gravel barge for nine hours but, very briefly, got a chance to pilot it down the Mississippi, recently re-opened to commercial traffic (thinking about river regulations, and not wanting to get my new river rat pals in trouble, I decided to leave that part out).
     Maybe nine hours on a gravel barge doesn't sound fun to you; but it was, at least to me.
     There was also a memorable moment with our photographer, the great Robert A. Davis, who would later travel with me to Lithuania and Taiwan. He remarked that we really should have a photo of the entire barge on the river, and I said, that's going to be tough Bob, because we're ON the barge. A few minutes later, a speedboat zipped by with Bob aboard, training his lens on the barge, snapping away as they passed. He had convinced a family on a river outing to let him aboard. Exactly HOW he flagged down a family on a speedboat and convinced them to dock with a gravel barge and let on of the shifty characters aboard it to join them in their boat is a mystery I never fully figured out.
     Anyway, happy anniversary to me, 28 years on staff at the Sun-Times.  The hoofbeats thunder, closer and closer. But they ain't here yet.

     With its twin 250-horsepower Caterpillar engines roaring as if all the noise in the world were trapped inside, trying to get out, the James P. Pearson edges into the center of the Mississippi, bound for another appointment with 2,000 tons of sand and gravel.
     One of the numerous river workhorses idled for weeks by the flood, the Pearson, a towboat, is now pushing barges six days a week, trying to catch up.
     "We're only supposed to work five, but with the flood and everything, we're way behind," says Dave Williams, deckhand of the Pearson's two-man crew.
     A self-described "river rat" with five years on the Mississippi at the ripe age of 21, Williams introduces himself as the fifth generation of his family to work the river.
     At least a dozen relatives still do; one of them, his cousin, Shawn Olson, is pilot of the Pearson. He shows up for work with a bad cold, a briefcase filled with rock 'n' roll cassettes, "enough cigarettes to kill any man" and a supply of juice to combat the sweat-wringing 95-degree weather.
     Unlike larger boats making the trip "from Saint to Saint," (St. Paul to St. Louis), the Pearson is a small boat making a local run - four empty barges to drop off at the Moline Consumer's sand dredging operation in Cordova, Ill., swapped for four full barges of new sand to be brought back to Moline and Bettendorf, Iowa, where it is made into concrete mix. Round trip is about 50 miles.
     They are pleased as can be that navigation is still bottled up down river.
     "We wish it would stay like that until next year," Olson says, not wanting his run to be delayed at Lock and Dam No. 14, the only one of the Mississippi's 27 locks that the Pearson needs to go through.
     Going through the lock is fairly quick and simple: The boat and its barges enter the lock, the south gates swing shut, six feet of upriver water is allowed to flow in, the north gates swing open and the Pearson goes on her way on the higher portion of the river. It takes about 15 minutes.
     On a good day.
     But if there are any boats waiting in front of it, there is delay - sometimes for hours, even days, as the Pearson queues up behind larger boats maneuvering their big clusters of barges into the lock.
     Because of flooding conditions lingering downriver, there are practically no boats on this part of the Mississippi. There is no wait at the lock. In fact, the Pearson passes only one commercial boat in nine hours - the immense Conti-Arlie, pushing a dozen grain barges. "Fifty-six hundred horsepower," Williams says, reverently. "That's a real working boat."
     Mostly the Pearson has the river to itself. The only sound, outside of the clangorous engine room, is the splash of the river against the barges and the sawing of cicadas in the trees lining the shore.
     Olson steers casually between the wide channel markers, barely needing to touch the wooden and brass rudder controls.
     Williams does his real work when the boat drops off or picks up barges, or goes through the locks. He scampers nimbly over the wet steel barges, securing ropes, winching steel cable. It is hard work in the hot sun, and Williams doesn't seem to have enough fat on his body to make a good butter pat.
     "My job is hard to explain," he says. "People say, 'You're a deckhand? What do you do? My grandfather (Don Williams, captain of the Queen of Hearts casino boat) used to say he told people he was a trucker, so they won't ask any questions . . . the majority of people around here are just society. They don't know anything about the river at all."
     Although both Williams and Olson complain about working on the river - Olson pointed out that "nobody got rich as a pilot" and Williams says he would like to find a "white shirt" job - they both obviously love what they do.
     "Some of the nicest people you meet on the river," Williams says. "They'll take care of you, free of charge."
      At Cordova, four barges containing 1,950 tons of sand and gravel are waiting in a large cove carved out of the shoreline by years of sand-dredging. Olson angles the empty barges next to the company's dredging machine as casually as if he were tossing cards into a hat.
     "Look at that big old bird up there," he says, pointing to something flapping over the forest, just as the barges ease against the dock. "That must be an owl, I betcha."
     Williams unleashes the barges, then takes time for a quick dip in the river, executing a neat jackknife dive into the cool water. "Ah yes," he says, breaking the surface.
     The journey downstream is a lot quicker - about 90 minutes less than it took to fight the current. There is still plenty of time to sit on a timberhead and enjoy the warm, soft breeze (river life is filled with quaint, anachronistic terms. Timberheads are the capped pegs used to secure lines - once cut from logs, they are now steel. At the lock, the little tram used to tow barges, if necessary, is called "the mule," a nod to its animate predecessor).
     A long Soo line freight train pulling auto carriers draws alongside at the river's edge and gives a few friendly toots.
     "That's the competition," Williams says, and Olson says hello back with a few blasts of the air horn.
      The James P. Pearson is almost home now. The sun is setting, a huge orange ball peaking out from behind the trees. "Is that beautiful!" Williams says. Olson opens the front window of the pilot house and turns up the volume on some vintage Allman Brothers Band.
     "Lord, I'm southbound," sings an Allman. "Lord, I'm coming home to you."
      In its final minutes, the sun puts on a display rarely seen outside of English Romantic oil paintings - bands of orange, blue, pink, purple and even green, radiating from the horizon. The gold light shimmers off the ripples, swirls and eddies formed by the barges cutting through the river.
      Two barges are left at the Bettendorf dock, below the bucket crane which will empty them before the Pearson returns at noon the next day - gingerly empty them, because the sand is so heavy that, if not unloaded uniformly, they can easily flip over.
      The other two barges are left at the Moline dock. The Pearson ties up at 8:23 p.m., about as early as she has ever returned from a full day's work.
      "That'll do her, Dave," Olson says, and he gives the horn a few celebratory blasts.
      Williams goes down to the engine room and shuts down the twin Caterpillars, which sigh to silence after nine hours of work.
     The only sound now is the gentle lapping against the wharf of the mighty Mississippi, now tamed to a gentle purr.

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 30, 1993

But "never happen again" sounds so bold!

     As a college student, I despised frats, everything they represented, and most of the people in them. As I got older, I met people who were actually decent human beings,

Today's column channels me circa 1982

despite membership in the Greek system, and I softened my attitude toward them, or tried to. But when the SAE incident of a racist chant caught on video came to light, my former self and my current self wrestled over how to view the situation. My former self won. 

     When I was a student at Northwestern University, I kept a fraternity paddle in my dorm window.
     Emblazoned upon it, rather than Greek letters, were the initials “GDI” — God Damn Independent — and a knight holding his thumb to his nose and blowing a raspberry.
     I displayed it because fraternities are such a big deal at NU and, being among the self-excluded, I felt a certain public pride was in order.
     It boggled me, I explained at the time, how anyone, finally freed from parental authority, would run directly into the arms of organizations set on constraining and abusing them. ”I didn’t come to NU to crawl across the Quad at midnight, my hands tied behind my back, rolling an egg with my nose,” I used to say.
     Agreed, the Greek system is large, and many, perhaps most, fraternities and sororities indeed focus on good works, fellowship and the joy of learning. But we all have biases and, to me, that’s a smokescreen, a fig leaf to cover their true purpose: extreme partying, sneering contempt for anybody outside of the charmed circle, and exactly the kind of insular bigotry that got Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s University of Oklahoma chapter in such trouble after a video surfaced of members singing a racist song, celebrating the unwelcome black students face at SAE.
      What’s surprising is they seem to think their problem is an exception that can be banished by apology and programs, and not a flaw intrinsic to elite, self-glorifying groups.

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Photo atop blog by Jackie Kalmes. The New Image Restaurant, May 1982. 

Lost tree found

     No Sunday Puzzler because, frankly, I couldn't think of a good one. With the book due tomorrow, I'm surprised I can think of ANYTHING. But the "every" part of the blog title must be respected, and there is one tidbit I want to share before the snow recedes completely into memory.


     Could bunnies eat a tree? The budding ... well, I wasn't sure what it was. I called it a "Scotch pine" because a Scotch pine had been nearby, once. But it died, so I was grateful to salvage what I considered its progeny, this seedling. It sprouted nearby, and looked Scotch pinish. After a few seasons it was a hale two feet and growing fast.
      Then gone. After a heavy snowfall. I kept searching for it, which was sad. The stick I had placed beside it, to keep me from stepping on the thing when it was tiny, was right there, a tip-off. Hungry rabbits, or maybe scavenging deer. We've had deer—they eat our lilies. Ravenous squirrels—I wouldn't put it past them. Hate those squirrels, they're capable of anything. Still ... a prickly tree. You'd have to be really hungry to eat it. I entertained theories. Malicious neighborhood children? Doubtful. Though they'd have to be psychic to go after that particular tree. I gave up hope. Besides, they'd have to go outside, and kids don't do that anymore.
     Whatever the cause, the tree was gone and never coming back. Trees don't get lost.
     Then the snow melted, and I noticed what I at first thought was the green stump of this tree. Hope! I ran into the garage and grabbed a spray bottle of Deer-Snu, or whatever the liquid fence is called—I figured, protect the pathetic remnant from further assault. Another few years of watching it slowly grow back. That's life. Sigh, start again.
    On my knees, pushing the wet slushy snow away, spray bottle in hand. I discovered, it wasn't a stump. The whole tree had simply been crushed under the snow. It was horizontal, pressed against the ground. I brushed the snow off, and it sproinged back up, good as new.
     I didn't know trees did that. 
     Nothing makes you appreciate something like fearing you lost it. Here's hoping that your early spring is a time of unexpected rebirth.  I don't know if finding a lost tree counts as rebirth, but I choose to count it.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Spring showed up, thank merciful God, last evening at 5:45 p.m. CST And while the first flowers are still pushing their green shoots up through the chill dirt, I thought I would share this bountiful crop of colorful beauties, that I spied Thursday during my wanderings around the city.
     "Spring" is an interesting word, occupying more than five densely-packed pages of my Oxford English Dictionary. It began in Old English describing water "rising or issuing from the ground, the source or head, of a well, stream, or river" a meaning it of course still retains. Then naturally it was applied to other things that also spring forth: vegetation, lions,  coiled metal contraptions, a usage more than 500 years old. 
    All that springing plant activity led, in the 14th century, to the season we have now gratefully entered being called "springing time" then, a century later, "spring-time" as well as "spring of the leaf" and finally, just "spring," which by Shakespeare's era was being used frequently to denote the season, plus anything, such a love or life, enjoying its first flowering. 
      Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary downplays the time of year, starting with"1. n. a leap; a bound; a jump; as of an animal" and gives nine other meanings, including "a fountain of water" before getting to "11. The season of the year when plants begin to vegetate and rise."
     There are of course more definitions; the slang usage of getting someone out of jail being among the most recent, dating back only to about 1935.
    But enough etymology—who has time to waste on that with the weather finally becoming a little nicer? Where is the above flowery mural? The winner receives one of my equally stunning, if not as colorful, 2015 blog posters. Please post your guesses below.