Blood on the tracks

    

    When I first moved to the suburbs, in 2000, I was fascinated by Metra, and did a number of columns on the rail system, such as this one, where I rode in with the engineer and talked about the toll pedestrian deaths take on Metra employees. There have been two this week on the northern lines, which seem like a lot. I also sat down with a Metra honcho to talk about odd questions I had about the rail service. Fans of irony will note that the official fielding my questions was no other than Phil Pagano, who nine years later would step in front of a Metra train himself, ending the complex hash he had made of his life. It was not only tragic and senseless, but an unfathomable insult to everyone who worked at Metra, because Pagano, of all people, must have known the impact such deaths have.

     'We're late," said John Appel, the engineer driving a 3200-horsepower Metra engine toward the city at 70 miles per hour.
      That we were. But just seven minutes late. Only railroads care about being seven minutes late. That's on time everywhere else. Heck, seven minutes late at O'Hare Airport is early.
     I was riding with Appel, in the control car of the 8:17 a.m. Milwaukee line from Northbrook. The engine was in the back, and we were in a little cab area tucked into the top of the foremost passenger car.
     My ride was something of a fluke. Ever since I began the commute in the city, I've been noticing what I called "Metra Mysteries," odd aspects of commuting that I couldn't quite explain. What are those piles of sand doing on the tracks? Why do the switches burn bright blue in winter? I had guesses but didn't really know for certain.
     I approached Metra, and they sat me down with Phil Pagano, the executive director. Pagano answered my questions -- we'll get to them in a minute -- then, in discussing the various ways frantic commuters risk death to avoid being late for work, said I should really ride with an engineer to see the Auto Thrill Show for myself. He wasn't kidding.
     "Right around the gates!" said Appel, pointing to a woman zipping her car across the tracks, maybe five seconds ahead of the train. He said he's had commuters cling to the outside of the train as it pulls out. One unfortunate woman attempted to get from one side of the train to the other by crawling under. The train pulled away, maiming her.
     "It's unbelievable what they'll do," said Appel. "So many horror stories. We all have foolish moments, but here it can cost you your life."
     Appel doesn't want to talk about the suicides, the people who walk to meet the oncoming trains. Metra gives you three days off, mandatory, when that happens, and offers the services of a counselor.
     "It's terrible," said Appel, who called his job "12 hours of boredom interspersed with three or four 10-second intervals of sheer terror."
      He would, however, talk about the time a semi-trailer carrying beer decided to back onto the tracks just as the train was racing toward it at 70 miles an hour. It was, needless to say, memorable.
     "The 18-wheeler wrapped itself around the engine," said Appel. "You never forget that sort of thing."
     Appel was suitably businesslike in discussing his profession. There is a pleasing sense of dignity, of seriousness of purpose and respect for the customer that has lingered in railroad employees while fading nearly everywhere else. I loved that, despite the fact that I was riding with the engineer, the conductor nevertheless insisted on punching my ticket. Otherwise, it would be stealing from the railroad.
     Before we run out of space, on to the Metra Mysteries.
     Q. Just before the train departs, the lights go out for a minute or so -- I think of it as powering up the atomic core. What's happening?
     A. "They're unplugging the train from standby electrical power," said Pagano. They have to do this before they power up the diesel; otherwise the 500 kilowatts produced by the engine's generator -- enough to power a block of suburban homes -- would "fry the system."
     Q. So what's with the piles of sand on the tracks? There can't be that many ill passengers wretching from the platform.
     A. "A traditional braking mechanism," said Pagano. Basically, the engines have reservoirs of sand which, if thetracks are slick or they're going a bit too fast, is dumped over the wheels to give them traction.
     Q. What about the burning switches out in the yard in winter, obviously to keep them from freezing; isn't that kind of low-tech?
      A. "These are techniques people learn through experience," said Pagano. "For a while, the industry went to hot air blowers, steam machines. Nothing worked like the gas switch heaters."
     Q. Anything that can be done about the cell phones? Can't users be forced to ride in special cars, isolated from the non-obnoxious riders?
      A. "We've come up with some creative posters," he said. "The biggest abusers of cell phones are lawyers. The things they talk about in public -- business and clients -- it's phenomenal." He said that experiments of confining them to special cell phone cars, where they can bother each other, have not worked. "They tried that on the East Coast, and the New Yorkers found the conductors have a lot more important things to do than monitor people's cell phone use."
      Q. I've noticed that a good number of my fellow riders start lining up to get off the train at Western Avenue. Are these the same people who bolt out of the Lyric Opera during the last aria? What's their rush?
      A. "It happens all over," said Pagano. "Every train, a small group of people want to beat the crowd. All you're doing is going to work."
      Q. I always notice all the coffee cups, ticket stubs and newspapers left behind by my fellow passengers. Don't they realize somebody has to clean up after them? Didn't their parents teach them anything?
      A. "The majority of people are conscientious," Pagano said. "There's no doubt probably a pretty significant group -- 30 or 40 percent -- who are, I wouldn't say slobs, but who leave their papers and soda cans behind."
      So now you know.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 20, 2001

Vote early if not often

      Tuesday, March 15, is the presidential primary in Illinois, and for the first time in my adult life I won't go to the polls on Election Day.
     Not only won't I be voting, I can't.
     It's against the law.
     I'm tempted to let you chew on that a bit, like the old riddle that stumped people in slightly more sexist times, where the man and his son are in a car wreck, the boy is rushed into surgery, and the doctor there says: "I can't operate on that boy, he's my son!"
     Any idea? (About the voting. The doctor is his mom; you knew that, right?)
     The reason I can't vote March 15 — and good for you who got it — is that I've already voted, on Monday, Feb. 29, at the start of early voting. First time. I'm a creature of habit. I like dutifully marching off to the polls on Election Day. But I'm going to Japan in a few days, and while I'm supposed to get back March 14, I don't want to be stuck on a plane diverted to Guam, gnashing my teeth at the delay, tortured by the thought I'm missing my chance to toss a pebble on the scales for ....
  
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Unstoppable

    I've heard from anxious readers, wanting reassurance. 
    Tell us, they say. Is Donald Trump unstoppable?
    The question is echoed in headlines. "Is Trump unstoppable?" asks a headline on The Hill, and dozens of other publications.
    Unstoppable? God no, Donald Trump is not unstoppable. 
    Stopping him is so easy that I'm certain it's going to happen. I try not to traffic in predicting the future, but you can take that to the bank.
    When panicked Republicans talk about Trump being unstoppable, they mean by other Republicans. And in that they are correct. Marco Rubio is punching too far above his weight to have any chance. And Ted Cruz is too universally-despised: with good reason, by the way. Given the choice between the two, I'd take Trump without hesitation. Better an erratic egomaniac than a laser-focused monster. One reason the GOP is so terrified of Trump is because his conservative beliefs are so recent and lightly held. He could get into office and go back to being a Democrat.
     But he won't get into office. Because Hillary Clinton is going to stop him. Not that Hillary is so great a candidate, mind you. Lots of baggage—the negative word for "experience"—and a personal style that is as careful and measured as Trump's is reckless and improvised on the spot.
     But as long as 51 percent of Americans haven't gone batshit crazy, to use the term that Sen. Lindsay Graham used last week to describe the Republican Party, then it's going to be Hillary.
     And I'll tell you when the moment is going to come. Trump's trademark activity is lashing out at people's personal characteristics, in a low, mean fashion. And Clinton's, remember, is restraint. So they'll be having a debate, and he'll lay into her for some physical trait, make some gross, leering comment, and Hillary Clinton will just look at him, her face frozen in cold loathing, and say something about how that's not the way Americans want their president to be. And then it'll be all over but the voting. 
     At least that is what I hope. 

And you think YOUR school feels like a jail...

     At the end of September, I let out this cry of frustration over not being allowed back into the Chicago public high school inside Cook County Jail, which I visited in 1987. That led to me finally being allowed in, in early January. The tour seemed fairly ordinary, but then I started hearing from former teachers, criticizing the school, and I realized why they hadn't wanted me in; not mere bureaucratic inertia, but concern over how they'd come off. I tried to thread the needle and both do the feature I had in mind, and include the concerns of the former teachers. This story isn't fish nor fowl, but at least it got into the paper. 
    
     "Welcome to Mr. Maloney's Science Class" reads a slide projected on the wall of Room 1306. Posters describe the circulatory system, the skeleton.
     "Today we're going to cool out a little bit and not worry about all our assignments," says John Maloney, projecting a laid-back teacher vibe, welcoming his new class at Consuella B. York Alternative High School. He outlines the grading system he'll use, stresses the importance of tidy folders, and says something that indicates we are not in just any of the 176 public high schools in Chicago.
     "I want to get your court dates," he says to his class of 10 students, who are all wearing identical school uniforms: beige scrubs with "DOC" — Department of Corrections — stenciled on them.
     York High School is the CPS high school within the Cook County Jail at 2700 S. California. The school has roughly 235 students — enrollment fluctuates day by day as students are incarcerated and released — ranging in age from 17 to 22. Only two 17-year-olds are left in the jail after most were transferred to juvenile custody last year. It has 56 teachers and administrative staff.
     Some aspects of York are like any high school: it has a mascot, a tiger. Come summer, there is a graduation with caps and gowns and proud parents.
     "It's a big to-do," says Marlena Jentz, director of alternative programs and education at the Cook County Department of Corrections. "Lots of crying and Kleenex."
     Some aspects are very different. The school is scattered among various divisions of the jail —male, female, drug treatment, protective custody, maximum security. Students in different wings don't encounter one another in class.
     "It's almost like having five or six different high schools that you have to run and manage" says Jentz.
     The students don't go to school because the law requires it but for a variety of other reasons.
     "Some are actually in school prior to incarceration, some do it because it passes the time," says Sharnette Sims, York's principal. "It gives them something to do while they're here. Some do it to impress the judge."
     Whatever school brings to the students, education behind bars is good for society: a recent RAND study found that inmates who participate in any kind of educational program are 43 percent less likely to return to jail.
     The first stop on our tour is the art room; art is mandatory at York. The art teacher is April Clark, 24. She has worked at the jail for four years since graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She finds her students in jail "just regular people."
     "I don't notice a difference at all," says Clark, comparing the York students to students at John F. Kennedy High School, where she was a student teacher. "A regular place with regular people who've made mistakes. They have the same issues, they go through similar things. The difference is they have a different environment. At JFK, they can go home, they can roam the hallways. In this case, a totally different atmosphere."
     In some ways, she said, it's a better atmosphere in jail, where classes are an hour and 40 minutes long.
     "It's more intimate and I have more time to teach, to expand their minds," she says. "They get a whole 100 minutes to work. As with other classes, there is much personal development, discussions of goals and attitudes. Clark's students do "body biographies," addressing "where their heart is, what their hands do."
     "They need to know they're capable of doing much more than people make them out to be," Clark says. "Art is all about self-learning"
     As difficult as it is to teach high school, period, in jail there is the added element of uncertainty. And even that can be spun into a positive.
     "I don't know I'm ever going to see them again," she says. "So we have to make the time matter. ... Every single minute I have with them, we make sure the time we have is not in vain."
     This being a Chicago Public School, however, it is not without controversy. In 2011, it was reported that as few as 20 students a year actually graduate from York, each costing some $300,000 in state money. A new block system, where semesters are 38 days long, was instituted, and graduation rates soared 60 percent. After I toured the jail, I began to hear from teachers who recently quit York, claiming the principal pressured them to give inmates credit for classes they never finished.
     "I left Jan. 8 after 18 years because the harassment is incredible," says Jackie Burger. "There have been three of us in the last two months who have done that."
     "They want a graduation rate so it looks better for the administration," says former teacher Scott Anderson. "I worked there for 10 years, I loved the school, loved the students, was nominated for the teachers award twice. Then last year some of the things that went on got so bad, I just quit. The culture was really toxic, a lot of unethical things with the credits. I did not feel I was teaching students the way they should be taught. The teachers were literally told they would be fired if they didn't give students a credit."
     "You can't have kids who can sit still that long for 100 minutes in a classroom," Burger says. "How do you issue credits in 38 days? Then teachers are forced to issue credits in 38 days. I had a student six days [and they are credited]. When my names on that, I'm responsible."
     Jail officials referred the issue to CPS which, characteristically, did not respond. It took me three months of pushing to get inside the school - at the time I wondered why, but the "toxic atmosphere" might be the explanation. Though the students themselves don't reflect that in the brief time I observed their classes and spoke with them.
     "It's alright, like a real school, a safe environment," says P.W., 19, who has been in jail for two years. (I agreed to not use their names.) He is sketching in an American literature class and says he wanted to be an architect. "Just because you're in jail, doesn't mean you can't make the best of it."
     Why go to school in jail?
     "Help me understand, open my eyes," says Little Drew, also 19, who hopes to be an electrician. "I'm seeing education is important."

Truth in advertising

    Browsing happily over my recovered photographs Saturday, I came across this photo snapped last October in Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, one of those hopping urban gustatory wonderlands, like Los Angeles' Grand Central Market, which are fun to visit and eat in, provided you try not to reflect  too ruefully on why Chicago's own French Market by Union Station is so dead in comparison.  Some academic should do a study and figure it out, so that we can fix the French Market. A great idea. But it just doesn't seem to be working, though it works in other places.
      I took this picture because I had just spit one of these Osso di Morta cookies into the garbage, and wanted to document what I eaten, or, rather, tried to eat. They looked so lovely, white and various shaped. But they tasted like clove-flavored brick, and only after looking at the photo and reading the sign did I notice the description—or I should say "warning"—"A hard, clove-flavored Cookie."
     It certainly was that. You can't accuse them of misrepresenting their product, though "A very hard, rock-like, cookie reeking of clove" would be more to the point. 
     Maybe the cookies are good dunked in coffee, or, better, grappa. Maybe those who grew up teething on them love them, and to those people, my mie scusi. Maybe they're an acquired taste, which isn't going to help me, because I plan to never eat another one as long as I live. 

Memento mori

     Death caressed my cheek, lightly, and in the oddest way.
     It was not precisely a caress, his cool fingers trailing across my skin, chilling me, and then gone.
     Not that. More like a sudden sting. Thursday night iPhoto ate my photos. All of them. Going back to 2009. Thousands of them. Gone.
     I don't know what happened. One moment I was working on my computer, getting my post for Friday ready, and I slid over to iPhoto to look at the pictures, and there were none.

     Just a grid of gray squares, empty as the eye sockets of skulls, jeering skulls, leering at me.
     Where are your precious memories now?!?
     I leapt online. There are forums for this—none sponsored by Apple itself, oddly. But a variety of ad hoc advice blogs run by would-be experts. It's as if Honda didn't print an Odyssey owner's manual, just left problems for drivers to form ragtag groups and puzzle over like Platonic dialogues, wordy and digressive.
     Nothing they suggested, once I figured out what they were suggesting that is, actually worked. I held down the "Option" and "Command" buttons while summoning up iPhoto, checked the "Reconstitute Thumbnails" button, and waiting in hope.
     But nothing. Shut down the computer and re-started it.
     Nothing.
     I wasn't upset so much as focused, determined. I figured the photos were somewhere. I would most miss the ones from the 2009 trip with the boys out West. But those would still be on the chip from the camera, which I saved.
    I explored.  I found a file with all of 2009 in it—1200 photos—and imported those back. The trip, ironically, the one thing I had backed up. But at least something, a scrap of the original bounty. Maybe a reason to hope.
    Then I saw something called "BROWSE BACKUP." And it brought me to what seemed like photos, on the teraflop G-Drive external hard drive I bought over the summer when my iMac's guts were dying. I hit "RESTORE" and got a little spinning candy cane and the hopeful message, "REBUILDING LIBRARY." It seemed to grow very slowly — a good sign. Something was happening. I went to bed.
     I snapped up at 3:30 a.m., rushed to check. The photos were all back. No, not all. It stopped in June, in the middle of Kent's prom. For some reason, the past seven months weren't there. Maybe I hadn't backed it up since then —I have a tendency to unplug the drive. There aren't enough ports for a drive and a printer and to charge the phone.  But I thought I had.
     I went to work musing on this, the loss of the past six months. What, exactly, was gone? I was almost afraid to think about it, to reaching into the void and feel the phantom prick of something important. What picture would I miss?
     It was then that I felt The Grim Reaper, the chill touch, the low chuckle as I walked through all those strangers in the Loop. The pictures for the past six months were gone, as all the pictures would be gone, as I too would be gone, the way your most cherished objects end up sold for a dollar at a garage sale, your favorite shirt a tuft of color on a bale of rags being shipped by the container to Africa. We assemble these careful worlds, our mementos under glass domes, our photos tagged and properly backed up, in albums trimmed with lace, then Fate draws in a big breath and blows and it all scatters away. Your memories molder in a landfill, or are gazed at by distant descendants who didn't know you and don't care.
    Embrace your losses, Seneca says. View them as practice. A few drops in advance of the storm that is going to wash you away. A reminder: someday you will lose everything.  Find a lesson. Keep that external hard drive plugged in.
      Patek Philippe is right. We never really own things, we just take care of them for the next generation, and while there's a chance they'd value your $100,000 wristwatch, most of us don't have one of those, and the threadbare assemblage we spend a lifetime gathering makes for a few melancholy days in front of a dumpster for our progeny. We only possess one thing that is truly ours: time, the minutes and days and hours of our lives.  And that we have in both scarcity and abundance. An endless, or so it seems while it is unspooling, string of moments that are really just one moment, now, blundering alongside us like an eager puppy into the next moment, some good, some bad, too many spoiled and wasted and tinctured with anxiety over something like the loss of some bundles of well-organized electrons.
     Back at my desk, I couldn't help it. I thought about the photos since June. There really was only one that came to mind as a Loss. Kent, on the day we dropped him off at Northwestern, running through the Weber Arch. My wife and I positioned ourselves further along the path, and I caught him as he flew past, young and happy and in motion, literally running toward his future. I'd miss that photo if I never saw it again.
    Although.... Did I not like it so much that I posted it as a cover on Facebook? Yes, I did. We sneer at these technologies, and blush at our use of them, but they do have their value. A click delivered it safe in a grey strongbox at the bottom of my Facebook page. So not everything lost. A little, sometimes the best, remains — maybe the best is what lingers. Or perhaps I'm just returning to the illusion. Lucky me was lucky again. The best photo is here, the rest will be found or, if not, forgotten, which is their eventual fate anyway. The Pale Rider brushes past me but keeps going, galloping toward a rendezvous with someone less fortunate. Leaving me with a souvenir, the briefest touch on the cheek, a cold kiss of fingertips that caught my attention, left me gazing at where he vanished, wondering whether I really saw him at all. That's a gift better than photos, to realize, there is stuff, and there is time. Don't waste the important one worrying over the unimportant one.  Thanks for the warning, Mr. Death, I'll try to take it more to heart between now and when we meet again.

    Postscript: After work Friday I took a longer look at that "Browse Backup" function, and recovered all the photos until Thanksgiving. We'll accept December and January's photos as the slightest of scars, nothing to even feel bad about. The headline, "memento mori," is Latin for "remember to die" meaning, "remember that you will die," and sometimes refers to actual objects, tangible reminders, like the small skull carved from a cow bone pictured above. 


   
   
   

'Plump Trump, chump!'

     Let's play newspaper editor. Here is your green celluloid eye shade, your shirt garters and the stump of a cheap cigar to jam between your lips.
     Close your eyes. Imagine: It's mid-June 2015. A variety of news stories are vying for your attention. A crisis in Yemen. The resignation of Rachel Dolezal, president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, who, despite her vigorous posing, is not really black. The House delays a vote on aid to workers displaced by global trade agreements. Pope Francis calls for action on climate change.
     And Donald J. Trump descends the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce that he is running for president and will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created and, oh yes, Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Squeak back in your chair, Mr. or Ms. Editor, gaze at the yellowed newsroom ceiling and decide.
     Lead with the NAACP, right?
     That's what many news organizations did.

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