Cookie the Cockatoo, Brookfield Zoo's oldest resident, dead at 83

     I was going to simply post my visit to Brookfield Zoo's elderly bird from three years ago and be done with it. But I kinda liked the idea of jumping in for a rare Tuesday column on a big breaking story like the passing of Cookie the cockatoo. 

     He was crusty, a curmudgeon, as only the elderly can be. Sometimes he would shriek. While he did tolerate certain people, others he just wanted to bite.
     "If he didn't like you, he let you know it," said Tim Snyder, a business associate. "He was like a cranky old geezer."
      Then again, he had reason. He had his infirmities — osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, cataracts. And perhaps the lingering effects of a broken heart.
     "Back in the 1950s, we tried to introduce him to a female," said Snyder. "She was not nice to him. He didn't want anything to do with her."
     But Cookie the cockatoo, 83, who died Saturday, was seldom alone. He was the coddled patriarch of the Brookfield Zoo. His years of putting on shows, and being on TV and on public display, were behind him, and he was cared for, outside of the public gaze, in an office at the Reptiles and Birds House. Cookie was the oldest Major Mitchell's cockatoo known, a fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was one of the zoo's "biggest stars," and the last of 270 animals present at what was then called the Chicago Zoological Park when it opened June 30, 1934, in Brookfield, on land donated by Edith Rockefeller McCormick. He had come from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia and was estimated to be a year old.

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Cookie the Cockatoo remembered

Cookie in 2013

     Sad news from the Brookfield Zoo that Cookie the Cockatoo passed away Saturday at the ripe old age of 83. I had the privilege of spending time with Cookie in 2013 and wrote this report, which I share now in honor of the famed bird.

     He was a star.
     One of Brookfield Zoo's "biggest stars," in fact, though a critic 25 years ago dismissed him as "a bit of a ham" after seeing a performance, suggesting that he talks too much.
     Yes, like other stars, he liked to say his trademark lines: "Peek-a-boo," "Quit your screaming," and "Hi, Cookie."
     That is his name, Cookie the Cockatoo — a Major Mitchell's cockatoo, to be precise — and while his onetime co-stars such as Mora the Capuchin monkey and Maya the Yucatan miniature pig are long gone, Cookie endures.
     He no longer performs in the Animals-in-Action show at the Children's Zoo, or appears on television, as he once did. In fact, Cookie is no longer seen in public at all, but enjoys his retirement in seclusion, ruminatively gnawing on a piece of wood in his cage in the office of the Reptiles and Birds House.
     His feathers, only a little threadbare, retain their brilliant pink hue, shifting to salmon toward the head. His crest ruffles majestically when angry - and this bird is definitely a curmudgeon.
     "He really wants to bite someone," said Kathryn Pingry, lead keeper in the Bird Department.
     Occasionally a zoo visitor will knock on the office door to ask about the 80-year-old bird, the oldest of his breed on record, older than the zoo itself.
     The Chicago Zoological Park opened on June 30, 1934, on land that Edith Rockefeller McCormick donated for that purpose. She thought it should be like the modern zoos she had seen in Europe. Thus it was built as the first "barless" zoo in the United States.
     On opening day, the zoo had 270 animals including Cookie, who came from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, and was estimated to be a year old. His hatching birthday was set as June 30, same as the zoo's.
     Over the years, other famed bird stars have come and gone. A quintet of penguins Admiral Richard E. Byrd's second expedition brought back from Antarctica in 1935. Or Sally, another cockatoo, whose deft use of a pie plate reminded keepers of stripper Sally Rand and her bubble, then seen at the Century of Progress fair.
     Cookie was most recently on display in a round window of his own at the Perching Bird House. But five years ago keepers noticed his mood had begun to sour. In the winter, when there aren't many visitors, Cookie would get lonely.
     "He would just sit in his window and had nothing to do," said Pingry. "We noticed he just didn't want to go out there anymore, wanted to stay in his office, where there is always a keeper nearby."
     In 2009 he was permanently taken off display.
     "He was just so much more engaged, and happy to have company," she said.
     Well, certain company. Like other old folk, Cookie prefers the familiar.
     Approach his cage and you might be greeted by an earsplitting shriek.
     "The patience wanes," explained veterinarian Jennifer Langan. "He's not quite as tolerant."
     But if Cookie can be hostile toward humans, they nevertheless still love him.
     "We get calls," said Pingry. "He also gets cards, especially around his birthday."
      So how is Cookie doing? Well, to be honest, he's old. Birds, like humans, suffer from a variety of indignities as they age. Osteoporosis. Cataracts. His left eye is cloudy, his left claw mangled from a long-ago bite. Cookie has to take daily anti-inflammatories, for his joints, plus a "parrot pellet" containing vitamins. He uses a rope perch instead of wood: easier on the feet. He takes frequent naps, and keepers opening his cage to say hello worry about him pitching forward beak-first onto the floor.
     Like many an old bird, there is no more soaring: He doesn't fly anymore, and hasn't for a long time.
     "I worked with him the past 16 years, and he hasn't really flown," said Pingry. "He used to flap a lot in his picture window, but he never actually took off flying."
     Cookie doesn't speak his trademark lines, either, though he'll make "cute happy noises" and the occasional wolf whistle. He can see well enough to have favorites - he likes people in glasses - and dismiss those he has taken a dislike to, people he greets with a sort of annoyed scream of disapproval, characteristic of his breed.
     Up to now, Cookie would be briefly taken out on his birthday, to be greeted by well-wishers. But this year, that's canceled.
     "I think Cookie would like his birthday, but it could be a little too much for him," said Sondra Katzen,Brookfield's media relations manager. "Our top priority is his well-being, and we know he's most comfortable off exhibit."
     So don't worry about Cookie - you may not see him, but he's there. Nor is he without his pleasures. His cage is filled with toys and distractions. He's fed chopped-up apples, oranges, carrots, sweet potatoes and - the day's highlight - two peanuts, unsalted, in the shell, a forbidden treat, like a coveted daily 5 p.m. martini.
     "He really likes that peanut, twice a day," said Pingry.
                                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 26, 2013

The South Side is the best, doughnut-wise

     “We’re taking a detour,” I said, turning south onto Cicero Avenue from 55th Street. “Five minutes.”
     7 a.m. Sunday. We had just dropped off our oldest at Midway for the flight back to college. A half-hour beyond O’Hare, as I pointed out hurtling past its runways on the Tri-State Tollway. “If your flight were from O’Hare, we’d be there.”
     But he pays for his own tickets now, and the $50 saved is worth it, to him and, I suppose, me. Fifty dollars for driving an hour on a Sunday morning seems smart. Besides, I had a plan to offset the melancholy of his departure.
     My wife came along to say good-bye at the airport. It wasn’t exactly the same teary farewell had he been, say 3, with his name on a big tag pinned to his coat. But close.
     She had no idea where we were going, but she’s sharp and solved the mystery before 67th Street.
     “Doughnuts!” she cried....

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If you can sing to strangers you can do anything

    I was walking the dog Friday and something happened that has not happened in a decade. 

     "Are you associated with CleanSlate?" a passing neighbor, walking with her young son, asked.

     CleanSlate is an organization that connects reformed drug addicts with janitorial work.  I was wearing a CleanSlate baseball cap, acquired when I wrote the story below. I like it because it's comfortable, it looks cool, and has a kind of anti-status: I assume no one knows what "CleanSlate" means.

     We talked for a while — she has just moved to my neighborhood from the city. I started to tell her the story, but it was too involved for conversation. Later, I looked it up, and thought it merits a second visit. Written back in the day when my column filled a full page and had several parts, I'm leaving in the "Opening Shot," a brief observation, as a reminder that sometimes I'm in the right. More than two years before the FBI handcuffed Rod Blagojevich on his condo floor, he might not have seen it coming, but others sure did.

     

OPENING SHOT

     So when do we start viewing the gubernatorial race as being not so much between Judy Baar Topinka and Gov. Blagojevich as between Topinka and Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who would take over the job should his boss find it necessary to, ah, spend time elsewhere?
     Quinn strikes me as an affable goof, a view formed during his grass-roots consumer and environmental activist days. The sort of do-gooder who usually never gets within spitting distance of public office. He might surprise us. I have a good feeling about Quinn. Wouldn't it be ironic if both Judy and Rod end up in history's Dumpster, digging for chicken bones with meat still on them, while Quinn is putting his feet up in the governor's mansion? Stranger things have happened.

'MO-TI-VATE ME!'

     Every morning at exactly 8:30, several dozen people gather in a square room in a nondescript brick building at the corner of Desplaines and Monroe.
     The men are dressed in suit coats and ties, the women in skirts and jackets or turtleneck sweaters and slacks. They sit in a circle. One man stands in the center.
     "Good morning!" he enthuses. "My name's Duane!"
     "Hey Duane!" the people shout, so loud that for a moment I think they're miked, "mo-ti-vate me, he's my friiiiiieeeeeend!" and at "friend," they do a sort of slow lariat twirl with one hand.
     "You know what brings me great joy?" he begins. "Cara brings me great joy. . . ."
     The Cara Program is an innovative center designed to jump-start lives that have fallen apart. The people in the suits and dresses have slid into that bog of unemployment, addiction and personal collapse lumped together under the unfortunate heading of "the homeless."
     Agencies handling such people tend to be grim places. Not Cara. The morning program is half gospel revival, half Mary Kay Cosmetics convention. The idea is to pump participants — who must be referred to get a spot inCara — to hurl their energies into the hard business of rebuilding their broken lives.
     ''You give me strength to do the things I couldn't do before," one lady tells the group. "I am recovered. I am healed. You have given me the keys to the kingdom."
     Those keys include access to a room filled with 35 new Dell computers upstairs. Plus rack after rack of donated clothes.
     "Before you can get a job, you need to look like you can work a job, and more important, feel in your heart you can do it," said Cara CEO Eric Weinheimer.
     Later in the day comes job training and job interviews and help setting up bank accounts. Cara has its own company — CleanSlate — and works with banks and insurance companies to place Cara graduates, who do better than employees hired over the transom.
     After saying what brings them great joy, the participants must sing a song — the idea is, if you can sing in front of several dozen strangers, you can do just about anything.
     Visitors, too, are pressed into the center of the circle. The chief of staff of the Illinois Medical District won't sing — too inhibited. Cara members jump up to help him out.
     Inhibition is not a problem with me. I stand in the center and tell them I take great joy from my family, from my work, and from being a recovering alcoholic — not something I toss out at every speaking opportunity, but I figure it might help these people.
     "I only know one song," I say. "I started singing it as a good-night song when my oldest son was born. If I knew I was going to sing it every night for the next 10 years, I might have picked something more, um, Jewish. But I'm stuck with it now, and it goes like this."
     I begin:
     "Ahhhha-mayyyyy-ziiing grace, how sweeeeet the soooooound. . . ."
     The rest join in -- real loud. Turns out they know it, too.

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 15, 2006

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

   
     The problem with paintings in public spaces is they tend to be garish modern works of the lowest quality, bought no doubt by the square meter from art farms in China. Or generic seascapes in doctors' office, of similarly bland, lifeless, unaesthetic works, a vast assemblage of the unskilled and the unmemorable.
    Then there is this, spied in a public building in one of the suburbs ringing Chicago. It caught my eye for the almost Seurat-like pointillist style, the nice use of complimentary colors, green and orange, and the lovely young lady in the center who is, upon second glance, doing something quite out-of-the-ordinary.
    Yes, there is a certain amateurism about it—that's a hint—if you look to the left to the rude rides of grassland abruptly yielding to brown, like a stripe in a flag, the way the water seems to pull up a foot from it, or how the young lady seems to be more hovering above the water than sitting on the grass.
     So where is this? I'll give you another hint: it's not in a museum, obviously, though I suppose it could get away with being folk art. A difficult challenge requires a better-than-usual prize, so no poster. The winner gets a copy of my new book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader, and published a week from Monday by the University of Chicago Press. Place your answers below, and good luck.

Postcript
    An alert reader, Tate, points out that this painting is an homage to Pissarro's "Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook" in the Art Institute. 

Criticize me and you criticize everyone like me

     Being black and being stupid are two entirely separate, independent conditions. Blackness does not make you stupid any more than stupidity makes you black. If it did, a lot of Donald Trump supporters would wake up aghast to find themselves suddenly African-American (though not as horrified as African-Americans would be to suddenly have all these Trump supporters in their midst).
     The two conditions can, of course, reside in the same individual, such as former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun who was both black and dumber than a rock. She manifested this in a variety of alarming ways, including, as I pointed out during her quixotic bid for mayor in 2011, by ballyhooing a deeply flawed poll that suggested she would defeat Rahm Emanuel which, let the record show, she did not.
     When I wrote a column elaborating upon that theme, Moseley-Braun howled that I was a racist — you can go on YouTube and see videos of her minions picketing the paper, demanding I be fired — arguing that to criticize her was to criticize all African-Americans.
     This came to mind when the senator currently holding her seat, Mark Kirk, said Barack Obama was “acting like a drug dealer in chief” and Kirk’s opponent, Tammy Duckworth, called the remark “unhinged,” which Kirk denounced as an attack on all stroke survivors everywhere.

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A brief visit to Seattle

     Eric Zorn asked if I've ever told this story on the blog, and I said no, I don't think I have. While it is probably much improved by being told in person, with me goggling my eyes and wildly gesticulating to emphasize the quivering horror of the thing, I will do my best to convey it here with all the brio at my disposal.
    The subject is book signings, an odd ritual of authorhood occasionally remarked upon, usually to underscore the humiliation of sitting at a table in the back of a bookstore, puffing out your cheeks, watching strangers cast you indifferent glances as they hurry past to the cookbook section. Every writer goes through one of those. 
     I try not to worry about book signing disasters, since I've already had the worst signing humanly imaginable, at the old Barnes & Noble on Diversey. They put me in the coffee shop at the section of the store. My wife and a pair of our oldest friends had tagged along; the idea was to share in my glory, but they turned out to be unfortunate witnesses. Some harried clerk introduced me at a podium. The dozen or so folks sitting at tables, drinking coffees, busily cribbing from Foder's guidebooks they were too cheap to buy, swiveled their heads up in unison. I began to read. Their heads swiveled back down, again in unison. I soldiered gamely on, my voice both amplified and muted at the same time. Chairs scraped. People came and went. Old friends greeted each other, loudly. Sweat cascaded down my face. It was so awful I really don't have much of a memory beyond that. If my wife told me she sponged me up with a mop, a puddle of shame, and carried me home in a bucket, I couldn't contradict her with confidence. 
      That wasn't the incident Eric had in mind. Too bleak to make a good story. 
      I should point out, that I have had my share of successful signings. I don't want to paint myself as a sad sack. I once spoke at the Arizona Kidney Foundation's literary luncheon and, afterward, 247 people stood in line and bought a book. I remember the number distinctly and, if I ever get a tattoo, I think it would be "247." 
    But signings are a random thing, and success one day doesn't guarantee success the next. The Arizona triumph was for my "Failure" book, which was published by Doubleday, a big publishing house that, in the pre-Internet mid-1990s, would send authors around promoting their work. They arranged to send me to Seattle in October, 1995.
     I wasn't sure if I should go at all. My wife was more than eight months pregnant. What if she had the baby early? We decided I was really only a few hours away—I would phone from the airport in Salt Lake City, where there was a layover, and if labor had started, I would turn around and immediately fly home.
    As the event approached, another reality began to dawn on me. The signing was on Oct. 17, at an hour which also happened to be the middle of the sixth game of the American League Championship series at the Kingdome between the Seattle Mariners and the Cleveland Indians. Nobody but nobody was going to skip the ballgame and go to my signing. I was tempted to duck out myself, and go see my beloved Indians play. I grew up, remember, in Cleveland.
    "You have to cancel this!" I begged the publicist.
    That was impossible, she informed me, I was doing television—some forgettable midday news show on KOMO. I was doing radio. We had to fulfill our obligations. No canceling. 
     I flew out like a man condemned. Met at the airport by Chic, my handler, a man in his 50s. That is an actual job: squiring authors to publicity events, or was, I imagine it has melted away along with so much involving words. But at the time the publishing house not only sent you to cities to drum up publicity, but when you arrived there was a perky local fellow or gal to take you where you needed to go, chatting all the way about actual authors, authors other than yourself, that he has been privileged  to meet. A sort of primitive Uber.
      He took me to the Hotel Alexis, a small boutique hotel downtown. I repaired to the bar for a few quick Jack Daniels. The wonder isn't that some authors drink, but that they all don't. Then we were off to my signing.
      I can still see the Borders in Tacoma, Washington as we approached, lit up like a cruise ship on a flat sea, the parking lot. A couple cars—staffers—and nothing. Lines on asphalt. We were met by a bookstore clerk who, at least in my green-tinged memory, was wringing his hands in embarrassment. He conveyed us to a back section of the store, where there were 30 chairs set up and a lectern and a metal pitcher of water.
     I can see the chairs, empty but for the clerk, gamely holding down the first row. I can see the pitcher, the beads of condensation on it. The empty glass.
    So what do you do in a situation like this? What is the graceful, charming way to redeem the situation? Pour a slug of water, crack open my book, glance around at the empty chairs and, with a brisk, welcoming nod, begin to read.
      Eventually, a couple drifted by. In my memory they are a "hippie couple," a pair of moldy 1960s sorts with stringy hair, the sort of people who would be at Borders in the middle of the Mariners/Indians playoff game at the Kingdome. They perched tentatively on their chairs. So now I had an audience. I began to read with extra gusto. But something about their body language said they were poised to flee. Very quickly I stopped reading, closed the book, and addressed them directly. 
    "You're not going to buy this book, are you?" I said, breaking the fourth wall. Perhaps the lingering effects of those bourbons.
     They looked at me, befuddled.
     I reached into my jacket pocket, withdrew my wallet and removed a business card.
    "Tell you what," I said, leaning over the podium, waving the business card in the air. "Take my card. Buy the book. If you don't like it, send the book back to me and I'll refund your money."
    Still silence. They sat there, looking at me, perhaps wondering if they could make a break for the door with me in howling pursuit. 
     We looked at one another.
     "Okay," I said, improvising. "How about this. Take my card. I'll go to the register with you and buy you the book, for you. Read it, and if you like it, send me a check."
     That worked, not in that they let me buy them the book, but that it shamed them into buying it themselves. I observed from a respectable distance as they performed the transaction. They never asked for a refund.
      Later that night, in the hotel bar, I discovered the Indians had won the pennant for the first time since 1954. I flew home the next day. Exactly one week later, my son was born.
     The moral? As I tell young authors, if you don't care about your writing, then nobody will. Sometimes you fly to Seattle to sell one book. I've actually performed greater feats of desperate salesmanship than pressing a book on that couple. Once, in Washington, D.C., at another solitary signing, I convinced a bookstore clerk to buy the book. The idea of these trips is to move copies. They're hard enough when a publishing company underwrites your trip, but an even more queasy odyssey when you pay for them yourself—which is what I'm doing when I go to Cleveland, which sparked this whole book signing conversation in the first place.
     What's another couple hundred bucks after nearly five years of work? People make the mistake of valuing their money but not their time, when it should be the other way around. The ash heap of those five years sits cooling behind me, the only tangible product, this new book in my hands. The trip, striking another match that might or—much more likely—might not set anything ablaze. Maybe there's some guy who's going to be browsing in that Barnes & Noble, someone who'll hear my voice, wander over, and his life will be changed. Could happen. But you never know, and if you don't try, well, you know how that works out. You know the butterfly effect: who knows what ripples of success will echo forth from that 1 p.m. signing at the Barnes & Noble in Crocker Park on Sept. 17? "It is," as I tell my boys, "called 'trying.'" Or put a better way.
    "I will be conquered," Samuel Johnson once said. "I will not capitulate."