Caitlyn Jenner: "We can talk about this"

 

Caitlyn Jenner (photo courtesy of Kat Fitzgerald)

      Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympic champion, current reality TV star and symbol of America's shifting sense of gender, spoke Thursday at the Hilton Chicago.
     "What I have learned in the past six months," said Jenner, referring to the time since Diane Sawyer's profile of her on ABC in April and her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair in July, "is how many good people are in this community ... it's really been overwhelming."
     Jenner's appearance was her first since receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs in July. The luncheon was to benefit Chicago House, a residence for transgender people in Edgewater, and the TransLife Center, its program offering social services and job placement.
     Some 700,000 Americans are thought to be transgender, or about 0.2 percent of the U.S. population. Though they face intense discrimination and violence and their unemployment rate is double the national average, public attention in recent months has focused not on their struggles but on debates within school districts about where transgender teens should change for gym and which restrooms they should use — issues Jenner avoided.
     Instead, she insisted she is not a spokesperson for the community. "No. I'm a spokesperson for my story. It's the only thing I can tell. It's the only thing I know." That said, she hopes others will follow her example. "Open up this conversation. We can talk about this. It's part of society. It's part of humanity."
     Jenner has dealt with this since she was a young boy in Tarrytown, New York.
     "I want people to know this story didn't just happen," she said. "For me, it's been a lifetime. When I was a child, 8 or 9 years old, I used to sneak into my mom's closet, cross-dress when they weren't around."
     Sports, to that boy, "was my place to hide."
     After winning the decathlon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Jenner plunged into a job as a TV announcer, embraced his celebrity lifestyle, all the while keeping "this woman living inside" of him hidden from a public that idolized him as a hero. She said that in the mid-1980s the New York Times was preparing a story about Jenner being a cross-dresser, but that her PR team managed to pressure the newspaper to abandon it.
     She was received with a standing ovation by the audience of 1,000, although some transgender women in attendance grumbled that Jenner, for all her talk of giving back, took an honorarium, which Chicago House confirmed. It would not verify the amount, said on good authority to be $150,000. The event raised $250,000.
     "I have never had one negative comment in six months," she said. "As long as I don't go online. What a mess."
     Indeed, tweeting Jenner's remarks drew a howling chorus either insisting she is still a man (like most transgender women, Jenner has not had gender reassignment surgery) or bringing up a fatal traffic accident she was involved in earlier this year. Although I couldn't help but notice that the most vigorous tweeter, whose Twitter ID is "His Names Bruce" has sent out 27,700 tweets passionately condemning Jenner, including thousands of clonic repetitions of "His name is Bruce and he's a man" and gained just 29 followers for his troubles. That's scary, sad and reassuring in equal measure.
     Listening to Jenner speak, I tried to gauge my own reaction. She did not seem as aware as she should be that she is the beneficiary much more than the instigator of these changes in society. She fought the truth leaking out, tooth and nail, until TMZ dragged her out of the closet. Plus, well, it wasn't so much that Bruce Jenner is now a woman, but a woman with lots of plastic surgery, with that pinched, vulpine, Joan Rivers face. One of the cultural conundrums of this transgender moment is that they're embracing a vision of femininity that could be viewed as outmoded, as a man's view of what being a woman means, one that many other women reject as superficial. Is a small nose and big breasts really necessary to be a woman? Many don't think so, but Jenner obviously does, and given her role in "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" that can't come as a shock.
     Or is that carping? Contempt for the media peppered Jenner's talk, and considering her past experience with paparazzi, who made her life "hell," perhaps she earned that right.
     For those confused by all this — sometimes me, sometimes even Jenner, who, listing her privileges, began a sentence, "I am a white guy ..." then caught herself, adding, "was" then admitting "I can even mess up." — what's happening here should be laid out. The realm of people who get to play on the playground, unharassed, is expanding. Women got onto the playground, then blacks, then gays, and now transgender students can swing on the swings without fear of being beaten up, at least in theory. The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.
     For anyone still under the illusion that this is still a marginal group, the event was sponsored by BMO-Harris Bank, Walgreens, Pepsico, Aon, the Chicago Community Trust, the Chicago Sun-Times Trust, among other gilt-edged organizations.

Wozzeck: The shock of the (90-year-old) new

 David Portillo as Andres,
 Photo courtesy of the Lyric Opera. 

I realize that today's discussion about Alban Berg's Wozzeck, currently on stage at the Lyric Opera, will not be everyone's cup of tea.  But the opera puzzled and irked me and, trying to make sense of the thing, I turned to the Lyric's General Director, Anthony Freud, for help. He was such a sport, that while we sail off into deep waters, I hope you will either tag along with us or, if you do not care to, forgive me and show up tomorrow, when we'll be hearing what Caitlyn Jenner has to say on her visit to Chicago. 

     The Magic Flute is beautiful and happy. Madame Butterfly is beautiful but not happy. And Alban Berg's Wozzeck is neither beautiful nor happy, though others disagree, at least about the "beautiful" part. The critics at both Chicago papers raved about it. 
    What did they hear that I didn't?
    I last experienced—I almost said "endured"—Wozzeck when the Lyric performed it 23 years ago and,  not to mince words, hated it. It struck me as shrill and ugly, an ordeal imposed upon the audience for reasons mysterious.
     It would be exaggerating to say I enjoyed it more on my second viewing, but I disliked it less, and  found myself plunged into thought, even as it was unfolding, asking questions like, "Why are they doing this?" then "Why am I seeing it?" and "How can people like this?"
    The plot, thin as it is, matters more than the plots of most operas. It is about a common soldier, Wozzeck, living a life of regimented brutality as the servant of the swinish Captain. His love, Marie, the mother of his child, is canoodling a vile Drum Major. A team of grim doctors gleefully anticipates the fame that will be theirs when Wozzeck's condition, whatever it is, is fully dissected. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.
     The music is atonal, meaning that there are not lush harmonies that swell and follow rhythmic patters we associate with songs. There is nothing to hum. I could easily have shrugged it off as the kind of eat-you-peas homework plucked out of the long history of opera that the Lyric feels compelled to inflict upon its audience, out of a strange compulsion to shine its light into the darkest corner of the canon, the way art museums intersperse their Monet and Van Gogh and Renoir shows with the occasional rude black and white slashing shock of Franz Kline. 

     That seemed simplistic. I beseeched the Lyric's general

Anthony Freud

director, Anthony Freud, asking him to help me. 
      "Why are we doing it?" Freud mused. "I think it is, in common with all great art, about the human condition,  about post-traumatic stress disorder, about poverty, about the relationship between an oppressive society and and oppressive system, and about people making moral judgements. In my mind, it's an incredibly topical story."
     "So it's about modernity?" I blubbered. The romantic age could be expressed with murmuring Bach harmonies but once you started gassing people in trenches you required something that sounds as awful as the reality it represents?
     "If you are talking about music, that's completely subjective," Freud replied. "You are entitled to find it ugly. I find it incredibly expressive, moment by moment, describing the characters' thoughts, feelings, relationships. I think there is a lot of really beautiful music."
     Freud's reference to the characters' thoughts "moment by moment," made me think of James Joyce, and I received a whiff of the philistinism that might be underlying my complaint with Wozzeck. If somebody told me that, heck, why chew on Ulysses, where you have to consult Cliff's Notes just to realize somebody is taking a piss, when you can slurp down a dozen Agatha Christie mysteries, one after another, like milkshakes?  And the answer is that Joyce is trying to replicate the sweat and funk of granular reality in words, which is not always pretty but ultimately worth the heavy lifting. Not everything in life is fun and beautiful. Why should art be?
     But Freud said there is beauty aplenty in Wozzeck,  if you know where to find it.
    "All of Marie's music is really lyrical, " he said. "The third scene of Act 1, the opening of act 3, very beautiful; a kind of aria in the 3rd scene — the way Berg writes for Wozzeck is totally different, music capturing the jagged, angular moment." 
    That's it, isn't it? If reality were one long carnival, we could move happily from Puccini to Mozart and back. But the reality of war and death jars, and so does Wozzeck. My go-to-man on these issues, Henry W. Simon, says it quite well.

    Berg and his operas Wozzeck and Lulu epitomizes one aspect of a certain time and place. Wozzeck was conceived during World War I; its composition was completed immediately after that war; and it received its first stage performance, in Berlin, in 1925. It deeply stirred all of Middle Europe of that period. And that period was the period of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the period of Franz Kafka, the period of the rise of National Socialism. In music it was the period that saw the most violent breakdown of old ideas of melody—and, even more, of harmony.  It was revolutionary, it was intellectually curious, it was unstable, and it reflected the sickness of the German soul. 

    But Freud—the director, not the doctor—would not yield the field on the loveliness of the piece.

"The orchestral interlude, the passacaglia  between the penultimate scene and the final scene, Wozzeck has just been drowned and we're about to be confronted with the horror of the ending: all we can hope for in the future is more of the same," said Freud. "It is a catharsis,  in an orchestral interlude, up to that point are incredibly short, 20 and 30 seconds, here we have an emotional climax of the piece that is extraordinarily expressive, to my ears, an intensely emotional passage, lasting three or four minutes, an eternity in the context of Wozzeck. In it, I hear Puccini, I hear Mahler, I hear a music founded in Romanticism. I think Berg constantly shifts, the whole idea of atonality means no more music anchored in predictable keys or series of patterns. It's completely free to respond moment by moment to characters ' thoughts, actions, it's full of tune but the tunes last three seconds rather than 30 seconds. 
     If you consider it was created in 1925, it was a time of shock in art, and Wozzeck stands out because, while we came to embrace certain radical works, lessening their impact, it still has a sting. 
    "Picasso's portraits, when they were created regarded as utterly radical and offensive," said Freud. "Now they possess a classicism of their own ,compared to what has happened to visual arts since. One of extraordinary things about Wozzeck, a piece 90 years old next month,, is this: in which other art form would a 90 year piece be regarded as modern? Yet it is radical. It is revolutionary. Berg forged ahead in way he composed, in way he structured , but it is anchored in tradition. He is not rejecting tradition. He values his inheritance, but sees himself as a champion of moving that inheritance in new directions....It is now nearly 100 years old, yet it speaks to us as if it were written today. Our our ears are more accustomed to more comfortable sounds, but actually I think Beethoven,  in his day, was as radical as Berg."
    Beethoven died nearly a century before the premiere of Wozzeck. Maybe that's the problem. At 90 years old, Wozzeck is too new to be comfortable, not yet. But that's coming. Maybe in 2115, a dilettante-yet-unborn will emerge from the Civic Opera House, blinking into the day after seeing Pffft! an opera composed in 2020 using chainsaws and chickens in vises, and think. "Heck, what was that? Why can't they put on something fun, a good old classic opera, like Wozzeck?" Something to look forward to.

To be honest, after talking to Anthony Freud, I'm tempted to see it again, just to see if I can draw more out of it. Third time's the charm. For those similarly inclined, "Wozzeck," three shows remain: Nov. 12, 16 and 21. 





 

Mmm mmm good!

     Campbell's Soup is delicious. Right now, in our pantry are five cans of delicious Campbell's Soup: Chicken Noodle, of course, Cream of Chicken, Chunky Manhattan Clam Chowder, Cream of Mushroom, vital for making green bean casserole at Thanksgiving, and my favorite — heck, everybody's favorite — Tomato.
     Still, five cans of delicious, economical Campbell's Soup are not enough, and next time I'm at the grocery, I'll have to stock up on even more delicious, economical, nutritious Campbell's Soup ... sorry, I was reading the website for One Million Moms, a fundamentalist hate group — whoops, a group that, to use its own words, is "fed up with the filth many segments of our society ... are throwing at our children."
     An organization that, a few days back, called for one of its famously ineffective boycotts against Campbell's Soup.
     Why? This time, what they consider filth is a TV commercial that Campbell's began airing last month to promote its Star Wars-themed cans. Here's how One Million Moms describes the spot:

     A homosexual "married" couple is featured prominently with a young boy (their son) in the new Campbell's Soup advertisement. Campbell's #RealRealLife campaign aims to change the face of the American family. It starts off with the first man feeding soup to the little boy and in a "Star Wars" Darth Vader voice says, "Cooper, I am your father." Then the other man also feeds his son a spoonful of soup and says, "No, no, no, I am your father."

   A fairly accurate description, except for the contemptuous quotation marks — the couple, a pair of New York actors, aren't "married," quote unquote, they're married, period, two real men actually married as is legal, thank merciful God, in every state in the United States. The "aims to change the face of the American family" crack speaks volumes of the kind of person upset by this. Because — stop the presses — the face of the American family has changed already. Some people have not gotten the bulletin obviously. They wake up every day expecting to find themselves in Mayberry in 1962, if not Salem in 1692, and thus the world of 2015 as it actually is must come as an awful shock to them, a daily stupefication they of course project onto others:
     "How confusing for this little boy and for all children viewing this commercial," the One Million Mom website imagines. "Obviously, Campbell's is sending the message that homosexual men are raising children."
     Umm, homosexual men are raising children, who seem to wrap their heads around the two dads thing quite easily. 

     And Napoleon escaped from Elba. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you.
     I'd credit Campbell's for being pioneers, but they're not. Mainstream companies were rushing to win the hearts of gay and lesbian consumers (not to mention people like me who are just patriotic Americans who like to see our country's freedoms respected) last year. If you want to point to the first gay couple in a television commercial for a major company you have to go back to — ready? — 1994, when IKEA focused on a gay couple buying one of their high-quality tables. The heartbreaking detail is the commercial ran only after 10 p.m. so children wouldn't see it and — oh, I don't know what was supposed to happen to them — be flabbergasted.
     One Million Moms — a notional name if ever there were, perhaps because "A Few Dozen Angry Frightened Moms" didn't carry the same punch— seem to think heterosexuality is so lightly held that a Campbell's soup commercial can shake its foundations. They also, I should point out, illustrate the fundamentalist betrayal of the faith that supposedly motivates them, since all major religions preach that we are formed in God's image, and that He loves us, as his creation, one and all. By casting gay lives as sinful choices — as irrational as presenting left handedness as a sinful choice — and using it as a pretext to demonize certain people is a strategy that is not going away, no matter how much it fails, time and time again.
     And fail it does. One Million Moms not only serves as de facto PR staff for companies like Campbell's, publicizing the thing they hope to decry, it actually brings such commercials into being. J.C. Penney once created a TV ad featuring a gay couple as a direct reaction to One Million Moms attempting to punish them for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as a spokeswoman.
     Bottom line: Huge retailers like Campbell's, IKEA, Procter & Gamble, Tylenol and Nabisco — all of which have featured gays and lesbians in commercials in recent years — do not lead society. They follow, tagging along, selling stuff. By the time Campbell's Soup is running ads featuring the people you hate, you've already lost. Of course bigots — bigotry being a subcellar of ignorance — don't realize this. Maybe they can't. Their tragedy. And ours.

The secret ministry of frost

     A fine, frosty morning dawned Monday, and Kitty and I took an extra few turns on our morning ramble to inspect nature's fleeting handiwork. 
      Frost could use some PR. As far as precipitation goes, it doesn't get anywhere near the attention of its more voluminous brethren, rain, snow, hail or even fog. 
      Perhaps because frost inconveniences no one. No one ever said, "I'd love to go, if it weren't for this darn frost." The most powerful punch frost delivers comes as metaphor, for creeping age and death.
      It used to be called "hoar frost," though that term would only confuse people if used in conversation nowadays, as it would no doubt be heard as "whore frost," and imagined to be perhaps a colorful antique term for some symptom of venereal disease.
     "Hoar" means a grayish white, usually relating to hair—we speak of people being "hoary with age"—and I noticed Monday this little display of flattop hairiness on the frost atop our Weber grill, a quality associated with frost. Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, if nothing a book of fine distinctions, defines frost as "more fluffy and feathery than rime which in turn is lighter than glaze."
     Frost forms first on metal easiest because metal cools quickly, and frost is a phenomenon of cold drawing out moisture from the air.  Frost is really just frozen dew, the condensation that forms when the temperature drops and the air can no longer hold the water that's evaporated within it. The night before had been clear with little wind, perfect conditions for forming frost, a situation that Samuel Taylor Coleridge refers to in his beautiful ode to his son, "Frost at Midnight," whose opening lines are, "The Frost performs its secret ministry/Unhelped by any wind."

Coleridge

       When Coleridge wrote that, frost already was well-freighted with symbolic value.  Six years before Coleridge used frost as a somber frame around his son's new life, Robert Burns had written, in "Highland Mary" in 1792, "But, oh! fell death's untimely frost/That  nipt my flower sae early." The habit frost has for killing plants — in full evidence Monday, as a purple Persian shield I had meant to whisk into the house was turned black from the cold — was transferred to human.  Shakespeare wrote of "An envious sneaping frost," in"Love's Labor Lost," "That bites the first-born infants of the spring." ("sneap" is an archaic term for a rebuke, what we'd now call a "snub.")
     Just as it is winter that makes the springtime so sweet, so it is death that makes our lives so precious. At the ending of "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge places all his good wishes upon the cradle before him, while pushing away thoughts of frost and its friend, " the sole unquiet thing" stalking us all. 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw;
whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

     For writers, there is a parting lesson here in the value of revision. Coleridge re-wrote this poem at least seven times, changing what had originally been "the secret ministry of cold" to "the secret ministry of frost," which just sounds more poetic. Indeed, that's perhaps the best way to think of frost: as poetic cold.

Frost, left.

Chicago could use a new poet

     Think about your mother.
     How would you describe her, to a stranger?
     "Nice smile" or "brown hair" or "made angels out of copies of The Reader's Digest, folded over and painted gold"?
     Here's Patricia Smith, writing about her mother:

     Whenever I dream her young, I see red dust on her ankles and feet. Those feet were flat and ashy, steady stomping, the corn on her baby toe raw and peeled back. No shoes could hold them. Those feet were always naked, touched by everything, stones asked her to limp and she didn't. Low branches whipped, sliced her skin, and they urged her to cry and she wouldn't.

     And that was her mother only below the ankles, as a child, still in Alabama. Though that changed after what another writer would describe as, "she took a bus north."
     This is how Patricia Smith put it:

     Apple cheeks, glorious gap-tooth fills the window of the Greyhound. For the occasion, she has hot-combed her hair into shivering strings and donned a homemade skirt that wrestles with her curves. This deception is what the city asks. I dream her sleeping at angles, her head full and hurting with future, until the bus arrives in the city.

    The city she's heading toward is Chicago, so Smith can be born here, 60 years ago, and become our city's poet.
     What? Chicago's poet is Carl Sandburg? Really? Still? Nice guy, played the guitar. But he's been dead almost 50 years. "City of the Big Shoulders" first appeared in print 101 years ago. Saying Carl Sandburg is the city's poet is like saying the Cubs star is Gabby Harnett.
     Better off with Patricia Smith. A living city deserves a living poet. Smith writes poetry that sears and sizzles on the page. Like Sandburg, she worked at a Chicago newspaper, the Sun-Times, which she joined on March 23, 1987 — I know that date precisely because I was hired on the same day. We two made up the staff of The Adviser, a Wednesday insert that taught readers how to organize their garages and exile Japanese beetles from their lawns.

Patricia Smith

   We didn't like each other. In her eyes — she never said it, but she didn't have to — I was a privileged white guy, buffed by Northwestern University to a bright white guy sheen and deposited near the summit of the hill that she had to drag herself up by hard work.
     I called her "Queen of the Nile," behind her back, a sort of backhanded compliment to her air of dignity, if not hauteur. She wrote her poems in the newsroom, on the glowing green ATEX computer screens.
     Smith left the paper, went to the Boston Globe, then left journalism, under a cloud that becomes less worth recounting with each new honor given her: last year, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, early this year, the Library of Congress' Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. There's many more, but you get the idea. She teaches at the College of Staten Island now.
     She does get back to Chicago. She has won four National Poetry Slams, and reads at the Green Mill, whose Uptown Poetry Slam would be the pride of Chicago, if the city knew enough to take pride in the pivotal place Chicago holds in American poetry. Home to Poetry magazine, which published T.S. Eliot's first poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when both were young, and continues to offer wonder, every month.
     I've seen Pat read at the Poetry Slam. Jaw-dropping, and it'll be interesting to compare her performance in the loud, crowded, boisterous bar to how she manages the austere glass shrine the Poetry Foundation built to itself at 61 W. Superior when she reads there at 7 p.m. Tuesday, joined by fellow poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm going, and my wife, after I read her "Building Nicole's Mama," is eager to go, and you want to go too, even if you don't know it yet.
     Because as powerful as Patricia Smith's poems can be to read — and some are delivered like a slap — they really should be read aloud, preferably by the poet herself. But until then, here, try this, from the essay about her mother I quoted above:

     Chicago. Say it. Push out the three sighs, don't let such a huge wish languish. Her world, so big she didn't know its edges, suddenly not enough. She's heard the dreams out loud, the tales of where money flows, and after you arrive it takes, what, a minute? to forget that Alabama ever held sugar for you.

Operable bollards

     Some words you're proud to know.
     "Neurofibromatosis," for instance,  the medical term associated with what people think of as The Elephant Man's disease. It feels like an accomplishment just to pronounce the word, and I admit, after learning it while writing an article on facial disfigurement last year, I let it roll off my tongue a few times more than I needed to, just to savor the mastery of saying it.
      And other words are something of an embarrassment.
     "Bollard," for instance—those squat posts used to keep vehicles out of certain areas. I'm quite ashamed, actually. Maybe I just assume that nobody knows what "bollard" means, that it's too esoteric a word. Maybe it sounds somewhat naughty, like "bollocks."

Bollards

      Which is why I took a small comfort from this sign. "Operable Bollards," which must baffle some people -- it refers to those circles in the ground to the left. The bollards rise, either manually, or pneumatically, at the touch of a button in some engineer's office, to cut off the driveway to the Allen Center at Northwestern University. (It was the lower sign, "Authorized Vehicles Only," that prompted me to park my car, stupidly, and walk to the building, while other cars, either authorized or, more likely, not as cowed by signage as myself, came and went).
     I seem to recall a Wall Street Journal article, years ago, about bollards that rise out of the ground being a thing in Los Angeles, both a status symbol and a way to make certain that nobody is going to steal the Ferrari parked in your driveway. I did a bit of digging. They're also known as "retractable" or "telescoping," bollards, and will set you back about $500 if you raise and lower them manually, ten times that for automatic bollards that rise up using a mechanism. 
     The word, by the way, is not that old—an 1840s nautical term, according to the OED, referring to the posts on ships where ropes are secured. The Oxford guesses that it comes from "bole," a term for tree trunk that dates to the 1300s. 
     Now the question is, knowing "bollard," how long will it be until you're showing off to friends. "There's the store, just past those bollards." My bet is, if you read this blog, it'll be sooner than later. You can blame me.
     

Drone encounter

     Heading to the train Thursday afternoon, I noticed a white drone hovering about 15 feet above the center greenery of Wacker Drive, just south of Lake Street. A DJI Phantom drone, operated by a young man who toggled a joystick on a remote control box. 
     I shot a brief video of its flight. 
     Drones are buzzing around the public imagination, and not in a good way. Much in the news, and worrisome to people who assume they'll be peering through our windows and killing us randomly. Though as a student of the history of technology, if I know one thing, it is that every new advance is greeted as an unacceptable threat. As if we have this deep well of terror in our souls and grab out a handful to smear on every new thing that comes along. 
     Electric light, the telegraph, the telephone, TV, computers, all were the opening gong of doom.  Yet each was woven into the daily tapestry of our lives, no longer unacceptable, because each did change us, in ways great and small. What we didn't realize was, being changed, we were not the same people who fretted at their arrival. Even that most perilous of advances, nuclear energy, proved tamable in the long run, or at least didn't kill us all, as we once expected, and not without good reason.
        Right now drones are little more than expensive toys. The drone I saw costs about $1,000. I know that'll change, and soon. I can't imagine the air will someday be thick of them, hurrying on their business. But then I couldn't imagine we'd all carry cell phones either. 
      I know this. Yet every time I hear about Amazon wanting to deliver packages by drone, I still think, "Huh? How is that going to work?" A drone is going to take off from the roof of an enormous facility in Des Plaines, motor over to my place, to drop off a book?  That can't be. They still seem like their cousins, jet packs, as one of the will-0-the-wisps of the future that we pine for but never achieve. They'll be good for taking arial shots of real estate and not much else.
     Said the guy who hasn't ordered a ride on Uber yet.

     When the young man brought his drone down, I asked him what it was for. School perhaps?
     "We're doing a project right now, for something called Radpat," he said. I should have quizzed him more, but I had a train to catch, so thanked him and hurried to Union Station, assuming I'd be able to figure out what "Radpat" was. 
     All I could find is a project measuring background radiation, which makes sense, I suppose. That might be something a drone could be helpful with, though I'm not sure how. Maybe he meant "Radpad," a service for finding apartments. That could work too. 
     Anyway, Nov. 5, 2015 I saw my first drone hovering above Chicago. I figure, I might as well make a note of it, to look back on when they crowd the sky like migrating geese.