Saying goodbye to Ed McElroy

Sept. 8, 2016, Poetry Foundation

     The third to the last time I saw Ed McElroy alive was in early September, when he showed up at the Poetry Foundation for my book launch. That's what Ed did: he showed up. Old-school, no excuses. While typical friends are always there when they need you, Ed was always there, in a suit and tie, driving a black Cadillac. Though he wasn't always happy about it. "I thought there would be food at this," he said after the reading, his subtle hint that maybe I should invite him to the foundation's private dinner, so I did. He parked in a crosswalk on Clark Street, which puzzled my New York publishing pals — why was the car still there 90 minutes later? I pointed out the ceremonial police baton with its red tassel placed conspicuously on the dashboard. Welcome to Chicago.
     Ed was famous, once, in the 1950s and 1960s, on WJJD. He announced wrestling, boxing, bicycle races. He hung out with Ted Williams. When he married Rita in 1955, Richard J. Daley attended the wedding. Daley once sent Ed to the airport to pick up a young senator from Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy and Ed had dinner on Rush Street.
     "Ed knew Martin Luther King," I told our table mates. "King was very good to me," agreed Ed.

     The second to the last time I saw Ed alive was at the end of September. He invited me to dinner at Gene & Georgetti with Marc Schulman, owner of Eli's Cheesecake. The occasion was pure Ed, in that I had no idea why we were there -- for Marc's benefit, or my benefit, or his. After radio, Ed became a publicist, for the Water Reclamation District and the Fraternal Order of Police and countless judges. He worked so smoothly you forgot he was working. We talked about Marc's dad, Eli, and the last time Ed and I ate at his namesake steakhouse on Chicago Avenue. Colleague Ray Coffey had grown weary in retirement, and we were cheering him up. That was also the sort of thing Ed did. He kept tabs. If you were Catholic and homebound, he'd slide by and give you communion, removing the wafer from a gold box he kept in his pocket. If you needed cheering, he'd take you to a steak house.
     In that light, maybe dinner was for me.

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Rita and Ed McElroy ins his home office. 

Oddness and telephone service

     The phone stopped working.
     So my wife called AT&T, to see what the problem was. 
     During the 45 minutes she was on hold, she asked, "Should I just cancel our line?" Lots of people are doing that now. No need for land lines. Cell phones are sufficient. 
     "Go for it," I said. The only people who call are surveys and charity come-ons, inevitably while I'm trying to nap. And my mother, though she can call my cell. 
      But when my wife finally got a representative, she found it would cost $10 a month more to not have a phone, under our plan. It seemed odd to pay for a service we'd no longer be getting. Might as well keep it. 
     She continued on hold.  A thought came to me. 
     "Why get the line fixed?" I asked. We didn't want a phone. We could pay the extra ten bucks a month to have the line discontinued. Or we could just leave it dysfunctional and get the same result: no phone. Heck, we could throw our phones away — except of course for the rotary dial classic that I bought for $5 on eBay just because I wanted one. 
    My wife's face fell.
     "We're paying for it," she said. "We might as well get the service."
     A service, I hasten to add, we no longer want.
     That's psychology for you. 
     So we'll have to wait until our contract is up, in January, when we can discontinue home phone service without paying the penalty. It'll seem odd, without it. Then again, lots of stuff feels odd lately. Oddness seems a condition of 21st century existence. 

Something new along with the Gideon Bible.

      I've stayed in a lot of hotels, high and low.
      There was the Gritti Palace in Venice, the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec. 
      Those were highs.
      Then there was that motel on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, the one were you paid for your room by pushing your money into a stainless steel tray under a bulletproof window. The dump in Des Moines where we couldn't open the windows nor turn the heat off. And that place with the flies.
     Those were lows.
     But I've never, ever, been in a hotel anywhere in the world that set out earplugs on the night stand, along with a cheery business card, trying to put a bright spin on it. 
     Don't get me wrong. We loved our stay at the Starved Rock Lodge. A Civilian Conservation Corps classic, with an enormous lobby with a huge stone fireplace. Rustic rooms. An adequate pool.  We've already booked our room for next year.
      But the moment we checked in, well, it was in room 201, at the end of the hall. And I thought as we trooped toward it, Well, at least we'll be far away from the elevator. But just as we approached the room, we passed another, single elevator, right next to our room. We opened the door, as I was processing this, set down our bags, and my eyes fell on these ear plugs. "Just how loud could that elevator possibly be?" I wondered. My wife went outside and pushed the button. I sat on the bed, feeling unfortunate, and listened. You could hear the ping of the elevator loud and clear, like a ball peen hammer to the base of the skull.  You'd think hotels would turn those pings off. I would have passively cursed my lot, jammed the earplugs in and worn them for the next day.  But my wife is a woman of action—while I sat morosely on the bed, staring at my foot, she trooped down to the desk and got us moved, to room 208. 
     Which also had earplugs. I realized they were standard issue. Every room has 'em. Yes, the hotel is old, and poorly insulated. We would hear the whoops and muffled shouts of families parading down the hall. But you get that in most hotels, and none of them have earplugs.
     We never availed ourselves to the earplugs, despite the familial clatter, though we did take them home, for use at Union Station, where I'm an enormous fan of earplugs—people don't realize they're deafening themselves by standing for hours, cumulatively, next to roaring engines. 
     Earplugs are a bad bit of equipment to set out on the night table. Necessary or not, they set the wrong tone, and says, "This room is really loud." To be honest,  the Starved Rock Lodge didn't seem louder than any other hotel, once we got away from the elevator. So much about life is psychological. It's as if they had a can of air freshener, or a fly swatter. I am not a hotelier, but I do have a single word of advice:
     Mints.

But a Trump presidency would be so interesting...

     C’mon, are you certain that some tiny part of you doesn’t secretly want Donald Trump elected president?
     Aren’t you even a teensy bit curious? Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, Rex in Mundo, seated in majesty on his gold-plated throne, flanked by stuffed lions, killed by his son. What would that be like?
     I’m not talking about Trump supporters, those knee-jerk Republicans who vote GOP no matter how far their candidate strays from their alleged values, moral, religious and political. Nor the haters, emboldened to creep out of their basements at mid-day, blinking in the unfamiliar sun, salaaming at his feet. He’s still Their Guy; they’re following him into the abyss.
     No, I’m talking about Democrats, those responsible, thoughtful, patriotic citizens who consider government as a vital part of a decent society. We recognize a Trump victory as the bench-clearing brawl it would certainly be, his troglodyte haters running wild in the streets, his main lackeys Chris Christie, Rudolph Guiliani, and Newt Gingrich — a trio of henchmen straight out of “Dick Tracy,” characters only Chester Gould could have invented, perhaps as Pruneface’s gang — striding into the White House, staking out their prime offices. We don’t want that.
     And yet....

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Sign of the times

     Upon reflection, I decided that this post was unfair, and removed it, and apologize to the people who were offended by it. I should have spoken to the parties involved before I supposed what their motivations might have been. Not doing so was lazy and timid, not to mention bad journalism.  I will try to do better in future. 

Joe & Lacey—or is it "Lacy"?—4ever

     "Why do people write graffiti?" my wife asked.
     We were sitting on a bench, eating our lunch at Starved Rock State Park, having decided to take in a few days of fall color. While the park was beautiful, the signage and fence rails were well-scribbled and gouged.

  "I suppose it's their stab at immortality," I replied. Although in a park such scrawls are doubly bothersome, first in that they disturb the beauty of nature, particularly when they are scrawled over trees and stumps, a common practice at Starved Rock. And second because they show a failure to grasp the essential message of nature: she endures, perfect by definition, while we pass through, momentary, evanescent, making our little dent in a field somewhere, and then returning, more or less immediately, to the utter oblivion from whence we came. Carving your name in a tree perpetuates your being, in the grand scheme of things, only a second longer than tossing a rock into a pool does. A few ripples and gone. 
     We were at "Beehive," a lookout point, enjoying our sandwiches, and I noticed a particular graffiti to my left, just because it was so  

bold and fresh. Last year's have already faded. Turning my attention ahead, I saw a second version. You'll notice that the girl's name is spelled differently in each. So one of them is wrong. You have to wonder about the story behind that. Did the swain really not know how to spell his girlfriend's name when he went to immortalize their love along with Romeo and Juliet? What was the moment of correction like? With anger or pity or a laugh? A reminder of another reason people do graffiti: because they're stupid. Never underestimate the importance of stupidity in the business of the world. Sometimes it seems the central operating principle. 


     

Why not add some moral support to that hotline number?

    I'm a fairly opinionated person. Which is good, in the main, because I'm in the business of presenting opinions, bolstered by a scaffolding of fact, of course, to give them form and structure.
     So if I don't have a view on something, I tend not to write about it. Thus, no columns on ... oh for instance ... golf. Never done it. Don't have strong feelings about those who do. If you like golf, well, go for it. It's a free country, at least for now.
     But on Sunday I wrote about the sign at right that Metra has put around its station in Northbrook in order to discourage suicides. I felt ... uncertain ... about them (they are two that I noticed). But I couldn't exactly say why. There was discussion here, but there was also a spirited conversation on my Facebook page, and reader Sarah E. Lauzen offered a key to my unease by posting this flier:

     This struck me as something of actual use to people considering suicide. Don't get me wrong -- a phone number for a suicide hotline no doubt helps certain people. But there is also a not-my-table aspect to it — the problem isn't being addressed, it's being delegated. The above could save a person immediately. Then I thought of Galway Kinnell's lovely poem "Wait," which I used to frame the Time chapter in my new book. Kinnell wrote it for a student who was considering killing herself after a failed love affair. It begins:

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.

     You can read the entire poem here.
    Metra should post the "Everything is Awful" questions, or the Kinnell poem, AND the hotline number. To just have the number is minimal and reeks of the same societal indifference that nudges people toward suicide in the first place. Which is why the signs troubled me. It's as if, on the bridges downtown, they placed, not a life ring behind glass, but a number to call to request a life ring. Big difference.
    Oh. And while we're on the subject of Sunday. I used the word "Masonic" to describe the sign with the shaking hands. I was not implying something dark or indifferent about Masons, not suggesting they wouldn't leap to assist those in need. It's just that Masonic banners sometimes use the shaking hands iconography being discussed. As Sigmund Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.