But Charleston seemed like such a nice place

     The murder of nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a scowling 21-year-old racist mope with the apt name of Dylann Roof transfixed the nation. Several readers asked my opinion, but I resisted, as my views can be expressed in a single sentence both brief and obvious: "There are too many guns, mentally ill people can get them, and nothing will be done now because if it were possible something would have been done before." I suppose I could parse the difference between being motivated by hate and motivated by craziness—it can be a fine line—but that seems like splitting hairs.
     The only other possible contribution I could make—and I'm not sure this is worth mentioning either—is that Charleston seemed like such a beautiful and refined place to have this happen. I was there 16 years ago, on my ocean voyage with my father, and was awestruck by the city. I'm sure, touring Charleston for a few days, I missed the racial hate roiling under the surface, a reminder to those keening for their magic pasts, that the rot of American's racial pathologies is always there, hidden. I smiled at the mention of searching the town for a New York Times. There was an Internet in 1999—the ship's radio operator transmitted my column at some maddeningly slow rate: I think it took half an hour. And people carried cell phones, but not offering you the news of the world at a glance, which we have now, as unwelcome as that news often is.

     I always thought those Ralph Lauren ads were a lie.
     Where in the world, except in a magazine layout, would women that beautiful and men that handsome be decked out in summer linens that splendid while cavorting in public parks with children wearing, not oversize neon T-shirts with the names of skateboard companies splashed across them, but white button-down Oxfords with ties, or little yellow dresses with straw bonnets?
     The answer is: Charleston.
     Over one weekend, I saw more boys in sailor suits and knee socks, more girls in Laura Ashley florals and patent leather shoes, more women in smart sleeveless summer dresses, more men in suits while not at the office, more elderly ladies in wide-brimmed hats, than I would see in a year in Chicago.
     I glimpsed them at restaurants and in the parks.
     I passed a picnic at St. Michael's Church and had to collect my jaw off the street. It was like stumbling upon a living Seurat painting.
     And that was just the beginning. Since travelers always moan, based on their experiences at the Airport Hotel, that the Gap and McDonald's have turned America into one vast undifferentiated nowhere, I am happy to report that it just isn't true.
     At least not here.
      Besides natty clothes, Charleston was filled with behaviors unknown to a place like Chicago. I was in a cab where the cabby, noticing a little boy standing by himself in a parking lot, stopped the cab and quizzed the boy about where his daddy was. The boy was a little uncertain at first, and the cabby kept talking to him until the daddy appeared. I was in a rush, late for a party. But falling into the Charleston spell, I kept quiet and tipped big.
     I'm here with a bunch of New Yorkers, and they told similar stories.
     One man said he never had the door held for him so much in his life. One woman said that when she tried to get the check and hurry onward after lunch, the waiter challenged her, wanting to know what the big rush was about, and why wouldn't she sit a spell and relax?
     Not all of the differences were charming. Some were plain odd. The first restaurant I went into had only little airplane bottles of booze behind the bar. I figured it had to be some eccentricity of that particular place. Maybe the owner was a nostalgic pilot.
     But no. Every bar and restaurant in the state is forced to have these tiny bottles by some arcane law designed to hobble vice. The poor bartenders spend a lot of time twisting off these tiny caps, and tapping out the last drop.
     The other strange thing about Charleston was the way I kept running into culinary trends that played themselves out 10 years ago in Chicago, if not before.
     Take croissants. They're still a big deal here. So is olive oil. At one place, as soon as we sat down the waitress poured a pool of olive oil into each bread plate. Talk about a nostalgic moment. I couldn't have been more stunned if the waitstaff had suddenly started doing "The Loco-Motion."
     I can't remember visiting a city that was more provincial — not only couldn't I find the New York Times, I couldn't even find a drugstore that sold Newsweek. I might as well have been looking for a snowman.
     But for someone who tires of the T-shirt shops and china clown face boutiques that wreck most historic cities, Charleston is refreshing. I kept thinking about my visits to New Orleans, wandering around the French Quarter, wondering what the place must have been like before it was completely overwhelmed by tourism, overgrown with a coral reef of frozen drink stands and fudge shops.
     Now I know — it must have been like Charleston.
                  —first published in the Sun-Times, June 3, 1999

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is a great city to wander in. 
     I gave myself an extra hour to get where I was going Thursday morning, and was rewarded, when the bus I was on was rerouted due to the Blackhawks rally. As we detoured south, I was completely non-plussed, watching the blipping blue circle of our location on the iPhone map drift south of my destination, which normally the bus would go right past. When we were as close as we were going to get, but a mile or so away, I hopped off and strolled.
     There were many sights. A big empty park. A low-rise Chicago public housing project, neat as a pin, not a soul in sight. And this stunning mural,. I particularly loved the bear dripping languor, an expression I read as, "You're fuckin' kidding me," though it might just be hung over. And  this calavara, below, with startlingly realistic, female eyes. I admired it tremendously, and it is enough off the beaten track that I hoped it wasn't outed at 7:03 a.m., as usual.
     The walk made me very happy, a joy underscored because I was not one of the 2 million people at the Blackhawks rally—God bless 'em, no criticism, but we get to choose what satisfies us, and I can honestly say I savored this painting more than I enjoyed the third period of the final game between the Blackhawks and the Lightning. At least I could see it, which was not always true for the puck. 
     Where is this lovely mural? The winner will receive my own feeble contribution to the artistic life of Greater Chicago, the 2015 every goddamn day wall poster, suitable for pasting onto a wall. Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Give dad something besides the shaft

     Really?
     You waited until now?
     With Father's Day this Sunday, mere hours away, you haven't figured out a gift to give dear old dad. Your pop, your pappy, your old man, daddy, the guy who brought you into this world, taught you to whittle, carried you on his shoulders when you were tired, and never asks anything of you now except that you listen to his endless reiterations of the same threadbare stories you've heard for years.
     Shame on you.
     Father's Day always gets short shrift. Because we shot the wad on Mother's Day the month before. We all understand Mother's Day, the after-echo of the odd 19th century cult of motherhood, with rocking chairs, coal scuttle bonnets, and weepy "Mother-O-Mine" songs and poems.  So the bouquets get ordered, the charm bracelets bought, the reservations for expensive brunches made.
     Then Father's Day comes around and catches us flat-footed.
Fathers are a cultural joke. We're just so many Dagwood Bumsteads, ogling our giant sandwiches, scratching our heads over some crazy contraption we're building in the basement. Our passions are ridiculous fixations, our careers, essays in  disappointment and failure.  I could win the Nobel Prize in Literature and my sons would refer to it as "The Swedish thingy that dad's so puffed up about."
     Then again, Fathers Day was always second fiddle.  Congress passed a resolution establishing Mother's Day in 1914; Richard Nixon signed a law creating a national Father's Day in 1972.
     Typical.
     Of course there's more history than that. Mother's Day was first marked in West Virginia in 1908. Father's Day loped along, an afterthought, and here Chicago plays a role. Jane Addams suggested Chicago honor fathers in 1911, and was ignored. But Harry C. Meek, the past president of the Uptown Lions Club of Chicago, started making speeches in 1915 urging that the third Sunday in June should be Father's Day.  The Lions dubbed him "Originator of Father's Day (how they resisted calling him, "Father of Father's Day" is a mystery).
     Enough history. What to get dad? A few general strategies pointing to possible specific gifts:
     1. Get dad something he can use. This gift reverie began Thursday morning piling

grapefruit rinds into the miniature garbage can under the sink that my wife gave me last Father's Day. It's solid steel, finely machined, and replaces a system where I would pile the coffee ground and apple cores in a series of rusty coffee cans. The Chef's Stainless Steel Premium Compost Bin holds a gallon of banana peels and potato skins, only $25.99, and will make him feel like a God of the Compost Heap every time he uses it.   For non-composting dads, consider a Gerber pocket knife, a Zippo lighter, or small flashlight. You always need another one.
     2. Get him the best of something. You can buy a good axe for $30. Or you can spend a hundred bucks more and buy the best axe made: a Gransfors Btuk Scandinavian Forestry Axe. Cutting wood is like hacking at butter with a hot knife.  Perfect for camping, it's light, and comes with a book explaining the cool Swedish blacksmith shop where it's created, including a picture of the Swede who made it.  If money's tight, get the best of something cheap: a really expensive pair of socks, a top-of-the-line mechanical pencil.
     3. Get him a book. Father's still read, cause they're old. My father doesn't spend a lot of time reading non-fiction, but I had a hunch he'd enjoy David McCullough's "The Wright Brothers" and gave it to him as an early Father's Day gift. He's eagerly plowing through it.
     4. Pop for electronics. Since $10 will get you a pair of serviceable Skull Candy earbuds—real earphones are indulgences. This year my wife splurged on some Bose QC15 noise cancelling headphones—another early gift—and I nearly cried, because I couldn't imagine shelling out the dough.  The difference is incredible.
     5.  Give him your attention.  Okay, you've run out of time, and you've got that bag of Dunkin Donuts coffee you just wrapped in the Sunday comics on the drive over to dad's place. All is not lost. Hand the coffee to him and say, "Hey dad, let's have some coffee together." Brew it up, hand him his cup and ask, "Didn't you once go golfing with Eisenhower?" (or whatever well-worn, self-aggrandizing, almost certainly untrue story he's been afflicting you with all your life). He'll be grateful. Dads often are, whatever you do.   That's part of what makes them dads. Happy Father's Day.

Kent Week #5: Dumb dad discovers terrible truth

No mention of Yellowstone's scenic sulfur pits.

  

      My younger son turned 18 Tuesday, and I've been celebrating here all week.
       Yet a more somber note is in order.
       Sometimes there are indications that my younger son inherited my genetic curse, a facility for writing. I noticed the writer's eye early, when he was 7. We were walking home from baseball practice, and a police car cruised by.

     "Dad, what do the police in Northbrook DO?" he asked, itself a trenchant question. 

      There were a number of ways I could have reacted, but I decided to play it straight.

     "Well," I began, "they protect us..."

      "Protect us from what," he said,  cutting me off, "spiders?"

       I can't tell you how much I admired that. Of course, being a writer means picking your subject, dealing with it honestly, and accepting the consequences, and Kent was doing that when he was 12. I think I'm going to wind up Kent Week early—it feels as if it has run its course—with this column, capping our epic trip to California in 2009:

   

     This autumn has been extra colorful. The big maple in my front yard is a glorious universe of warm yellow. The burning bush, a heart-swelling rich maroon.Normally this is the time of year when I pause to realize that the summer is gone and, again, I blew it, chained to the oar of daily newspapering while the soft June mornings melted into spicy July afternoons and hot August nights.
     Only this year, I reminded myself giddily, I didn't blow it, I nailed it -- that fabulous five-week, 7,000-mile journey with the boys through 13 states and nine national parks. An unbroken chain of golden moments, an unmitigated triumph that no one can take away . .
     Umm, not quite. There is some late dissent I feel obligated to share. I hold in my hand my 12-year-old son's language arts assignment. A personal essay.
     To his credit, he did ask beforehand if it was OK to write about. Confident, I gave my consent with a kingly wave of the hand.
     I was smug, until the moment I read the resulting paper's title, "Bad memories of a great vacation."
     Bad memories? How can that be?
     "As all great vacations have to start somewhere," the 10-page paper begins, "ours started with Spam."
     To him, Minnesota's Spam Museum was not the font of wonder that I described here.      

     "The start of our vacation couldn't be duller," my son wrote.     
     Boring is preferred to "horrible," which came when we tried to camp overnight in Yellowstone.

     "We had to pitch our backpacks over a tree," he wrote. "But before we did I noticed the tree was rotting at the bottom and I knew it wouldn't hold our backpacks. So I told my dad, but he didn't believe me. He tied the backpacks to the tree and it was fine for one split second. Then the tree snapped under the pressure and we had to hold it up."
     It gets worse. The low point of the vacation, if not my entire life -- I was too ashamed to mention it at the time -- took place in Nevada.
     Our motel happened to be next door to one of those giant fireworks stores. I was reluctant, but the boys pleaded. I knew better than to let them get big rockets or mortars. Just a few small devices, including a "Barrel of Fun," a firework the size of a Ping-Pong ball that throws out sparks. Harmless.
     The next day, I pulled off the interstate at a lonely road, and drove until it turned into gravel. The middle of nowhere, a desolate patch of desert, barren but for a bit of scrub. We set the firework in the middle of the road.
     "Then the trouble began," my son wrote.
     The Barrel of Fun, designed to shoot in the air, did just that. But it toppled over, sending sparks skittling to the side of the road.
     "A fire began," my kid wrote.
     In the time it took me to run over and try to stamp the burning scrub, the fire was 5 feet high, so hot I couldn't get close. It spread while we piled panicking into the car and retreated to a safe distance.
     The fire burned long enough for me to imagine it engulfing the state, to contemplate the brave young smoke jumpers who would die battling the result of my stupidity, the enormous bill and, later, prison.
     The fire went out on its own.
     "After this experience we knew fireworks were bad," my son wrote.
     Reading his essay, like anyone whose ox has been gored, I first felt outrage. "Fine!" I fumed. "If he feels that way, we'll just park him at Camp Piney Lake next summer while his brother and I set off on fresh adventures!"
     That passed, with the help of some soothing from my wife. It was, she observed, a finely written piece. He was, she pointed out, exactly like me. (And whose fault is that? I blustered. Her fault! She should have warned me that being myself and manifesting my own personality all these years would lead to children who are similar to me, visiting my own sour negativity back upon myself, a contrapasso punishment straight out of Dante's hell.)
     "Why couldn't you focus on all the good stuff?" I whined to him. "The Snake River? Santa Barbara?"
     "Right Dad," he said, with bored languor. "Which would you rather read: 'We stayed in a room. We played tennis. They gave us fruit.'
     "Or would you rather read about the time we nearly burned down Nevada?"     

     TOUCHE, YOU LITTLE . . .
     Well, there you have it. For those who, over the years, have felt my lash, have written outraged letters to the editor, demanding that action be taken, you'll be pleased to learn that a fate worse than being fired has engulfed me. I have been delivered over to the scant mercies of a live-in 12-year-old Torquemada.

     And it is all of my own doing! I knowingly sired my judge, raised, nurtured and fed strained peaches to my jury, clucked over my critic while he gained strength and powers of observation, biding his time until he could, in the most skillful manner possible, explain to the world exactly what kind of doofus I am.
     Why is this a surprise? How could it possibly be a surprise? What kind of idiot am I?
     No need to answer that. It will be further explained, I assume, in the next language arts assignment.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times Oct. 21, 2009

A guy can be a gal, but white can't be black. Yet.

 

 

     Who am I?
     Well, I'm a man, for starters, because I was born male, have all the requisite male equipment, and embrace a range of typically masculine behaviors, my interest in opera notwithstanding.
     I'm white, having Caucasian parents, being light-skinned, and reflecting the range of white attitudes (see opera, above).
     There's more. I'm an American, Ohio born. And Jewish, both technically, coming from a Jewish mother, the standard definition, and in practice, holding Seders and such, and enjoying foodstuffs like gefilte fish, which you really have to be Jewish to consider putting in your mouth.
     Some of these identities are mutable: I could renounce my U.S. citizenship and move to France, learn the language and become a French citizen. I could convert from Judaism to Christianity, like Bob Dylan. And based on the Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner path, now I can change gender. Society would tolerate these changes, in theory, though in practice not the French, nor Christians, nor women would welcome me with open arms. A convert carries an asterisk, the shadow of stigma.
     But white, I'm stuck with, race being seen as an identity that cannot be changed, yet, not without calls of deception, as the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Rachel Dolezal, demonstrated this week. She thought she could simply declare herself black and be accepted. But while wearing a cross or carrying a baguette might be smiled at, straying into another race's realm is an insult, as Sen. Mark Kirk learned with his "bro without a ho" remark.
     Which raises the question: How come Bruce Jenner can take some hormones and claim he's a woman, spouting the most cliched notions of femininity and the country — myself included — brushes away a tear at how far we've come in accepting the heretofore marginalized, but if Rachel Dolezal insists she's black, that's unacceptable dishonesty?
     Biologically, it should be the other way around, since there is are huge chromosomal difference between men and women (XY for men, XX for women, if you are keeping score) while the genetic shift between races is far more subtle.
     This is a matter not of biology but culture. The differences between genders and races both are mostly social construct. Nothing in human genes makes boys like trucks and blue and girls like dolls and pink. If race were only a matter of skin tone, then George Hamilton was black while Lena Horne was white. Like religion, there's an entire cultural identity to race, one that you can't just seize.
     Why? Why can I embrace Jesus and become Christian, like Shia LaBeouf, but not Asian? I like Asian food. It's complicated, but the short answer is: race is earned, in part. I can't put on burnt cork and pretend to be black for the same reason I can't slap a "Semper Fi" bumper sticker on my car and pretend to be a Marine. Both conditions require annealing in the furnace of experience. A real Marine joins the Corps and goes through basic training. Asians — or blacks, or whites for that matter — are raised in the cradle of their ethnicity. To simply claim membership is to seize what isn't yours.
     There's a backstory to Rachel Dolezal that gets lost in the media roar. A boatload of pathology, and my hunch is she was allowed to be black by her immediate circle for the same reason that a 4-year-old with cancer is allowed to wear a police uniform. We feel pity for the sick child, and you'd be a jerk to complain. ("You can't be a police officer, Timmy, you're far too young and sick.")
     There's no law that says society must limit its sympathy to sick children. I sparred with readers who had a sputtering, the-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes indignation at the newly-minted Miss Jenner. They insisted: Vanity Fair be damned, the guy has a penis, he's a man.
     I see where they're coming from. But Jenner also underwent a personal catharsis, and society, to its credit, is now questioning the utility of oppressing such people. Whether Rachel Dolezal is an anomaly or a pioneer will depend on whether others start wanting to change their race. I have a hard time imagining that, but the future is always tough to imagine. We forget how unimaginable certain identities once were: a woman doctor; a black president; a gay public school teacher. Right now, the idea that people can just pick the race they identify with is crazy. But so was the idea of women wearing pants, once.

Kent Week #4: "No one left here for you to murder"

Kent with Gizmo

     My younger son turned 18 yesterday, and I thought I would celebrate by sharing some of the items I've written about him in my column over the years. This was the beginning of a longer column, believe it or not, about abortion rights.
    
     Cats kill fish. It's in their nature. For food, sometimes, or just for sport, as was the case this week when our younger cat, Gizmo, nudged a fish bowl containing a black tetra just given to our younger son, Kent, from its spot in the center of his dresser, off the edge and onto the floor. Nobody else was around.
     Kent later came upon the scene—overturned bowl, a spray of gravel, the very dead fish—and let out a howl that brought us all on the run.
     The culprit had fled. I grabbed toilet tissue and performed fish disposal duty. My wife uttered some poetic words over the lifeless form before it was flushed away.
     "At least we didn't have it long enough to form an attachment," said Ross, our older boy, trying to put a good spin on the situation.
     "But Kent did," said his mother, and we all patted him on the shoulder and said words of comfort as he sat on his bed, slump-shouldered, head bowed, desolate.
     The cat eventually slunk back into his room.
     "There's no one left here for you to murder!" Kent said, hotly.
     I thought about right-to-lifers. They present their values as universals—life, even a speck of life, matters because God says all life matters. It certainly mattered here. But it is also obvious that the fish's value comes not from above, but because it was cared about, by us, or at least by my son. Significance is a human gift we bestow capriciously. A billion, if not 10 billion, creatures will die today, from blue whales to gnats. As will 155,000 human beings — 155,000 people expire worldwide every single day. Yet my son sat on his bed and cried, a little, for a fish the size of my pinky that had sat on his dresser in a bowl for exactly one full day.

       —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 2006

Kent Week #3: "Last game of the season"

 

     My younger son Kent turns 18 today, and this week I've been looking back at his appearances in the newspaper over the years. An editor at the paper liked this so much he framed it for me — it's the only column of mine I have framed on the wall. A reminder that, if we're lucky, we learn from our children as much as they learn from us, if not more. I was never into sports as a kid—I wasn't very good and wasn't willing to get good. Kent played basketball, baseball and football, and through him I got a whiff of the sports experience I missed. I've been watching the Bulls games for the past five years because he does, and I the only regret I have is that they didn't win the championship, yet.  And then there was this, when he was 10.

     All spring, my younger son, Kent, wouldn't pitch.
     "Your team needs you," I'd say, as we played catch in the back yard.
     No.
     "You've got a great arm."
     No.
     "You're just afraid."
     No. "I just don't like pitching, Dad," he'd say.

     I'd open my mouth, then close it. Shutting up is a lost art. Particularly among dads. You talk and talk, spewing advice and wisdom, because you can, and you forget that sometimes you just need to zip it.
     So I let it go. You don't want to pitch? Then don't pitch. The season passed. Fourth grade is a sea change from third grade in the Northbrook Instructional Baseball League. The kids who gingerly approach the plate as if living out their worst nightmare and never get a hit are pretty much gone by now.
     In third grade, you're surprised if a fielder catches a fly ball hit to him. In fourth, you're surprised if he misses it.
     The pitchers, who could barely find the plate last year, now have their own personal styles. There is much grace in a 9-year-old pitcher's wind-up. Much — dare I say it? — beauty. Like a Balinese dancer, they join mitt and ball together over their head with ritual slowness, bend both elbows, the gloved ball sinking slowly back as if of its own weight, while a leg goes up, coiling and firing the ball to the batter.
     The batters, too, have their own stances. My son's batting stance has a rough-and-tumble, Pete Rose majesty, his cap askew, tapping the plate, impatient, sometimes giving the bat a quick, bring-it-on twirl, sometimes a Casey-at-the-bat, slugger's glance of contempt in the pitcher's direction.
     I tried to burn the image of that stance into memory, particularly after he announced he wasn't going to play baseball next season.
     "I wish you'd reconsider," I said. "I really enjoy going to your games."
     No. He prefers tennis.
     Tennis.
     Again, I tried to keep my mouth shut. I decided to focus on what was left, savor every game I could. Though that old song murmured in mind as he put on a batting helmet and walked to the plate: "It was a long time coming, it'll be a long time gone."
     Then the team won a close game. Kent scored a run and made a solid defensive play. Which seemed to shift his mood. After the big win, still in his uniform, he asked me to play catch, which was unusual.
     He zipped the ball in. Not a casual toss, not a lob, but a screaming fastball. I considered making a rueful comment about pitching, but again kept my yap shut. A lost art.
     What I did, instead, was silently lower into a catcher's crouch, my gloved hand straight out in the strike zone.
     He fired the ball. Thwap!
     "High," he pronounced. A few more throws — one low, bouncing two feet in front of me, ricocheting right up into, ummm, a part of the anatomy you don't want a well-thrown ball to hit.
     "Sorry, Dad," he said as I shook it off.
     More pitches. More silence.
     "Maybe we could get one of those pitching nets, with the target, that bounces the ball back to you," he said.
     "What for?" I asked.
     "I thought I might pitch next year," he said.
     Toss and return, toss and return.
     "I thought you weren't going to play next year," I finally said.
     "I am going to play," he said. "I changed my mind."
     I stifled a whoop, groping instead for a Clint Eastwood concision.
     "Good," I said. "I'm glad."
     Another pitch.
     "You pitch next year, I'll get one of those practice nets . . . and a real catcher's mitt, for myself. And a cup, too—also for me." We both smiled.
     The night before the last game, the coach asked the boys if there was anybody who hadn't pitched in the playoffs who wanted to. Kent looked at me and I pantomimed lifting a finger. He raised his arm.
     "Steinberg?" chuckled his coach — Jeff Simon, by the way, a first-rate baseball coach. "You don't pitch all season, and now you want to pitch in the playoffs?"
     He made a note on his clipboard. And before the last inning of the last game, he came over to me.
     "Warm him up," he said, and walked away. I scrambled to grab somebody's mitt, and we worked at the side of the diamond. I think you had to live my kind of life, to be as distant from sports as I am, to understand how much I enjoyed the next few minutes. An unexpected gift.
     With two outs in the bottom of the last inning, the coach waved Kent in.
     He walked to the mound and struck him out.
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 20, 2007