Looking to son's future is a sentimental journey

Ross, age 5

     Our elder son Ross turns 21 years old today. I can't express how proud I am of him, or how unfathomably great being his father has been. But this column, written when he turned 5, touches upon it. 

Dear Ross:
     Surprised? I thought you might be. It didn't take a genius to realize that databases such as old newspaper files would hang around for a long, long time, and a bright guy like you would figure out he could plug his name and his dad's byline into some search device and kick out everything the old man wrote about him while he was growing up.
     Wasn't like that when I was a lad. No fancy search engines for us. No, we had it tough. We had to trudge miles to libraries, through blinding snowstorms, to scour thick indexes and court eyestrain reading scratchy microfilm reels. . . .
    I won't start. You've heard that enough. See, that's the thing about being a dad. You set off in one direction and suddenly find yourself somewhere else entirely, off on some stupid tangent, about to explain how music sounded sweeter played on a thick vinyl 33 rpm record.
     Begin again.
     Five years old, this week. Hard to believe. The time just snapped by. That's a cliche, I know, but it's also a fresh reality for me. I knew it was coming, I tried to avoid it, seizing the moments, clutching at them, observing closely, listening hard, taking all those pictures, and it flashed by anyway. You were born, now you're 5, and a few more flashes from now you'll be—what? 30, 35—reading this in the blue glow of some sleek little computer gizmo at Mach 5 high above the Earth.
     I picture you tall, handsome as sin, of course, hair closely cropped at the temples with maybe some sort of a weird futuristic touch — a single Anakin Skywalker rattail, beaded or dyed or something. You're wearing the charcoal-colored spandex business suit we've been projecting into the future for the past 30 years, and relaxing in the big aqua leather seat on the 7 a.m. suborbital shuttle from Chicago to Tokyo.
      You glance out the window at the curve of the Earth, give a last look at the sales figures for carbon fiber data couplings in the Asiatic rim, sigh, then hit a few buttons, and up pops one of dad's old columns.
      Five years old. Happy birthday, boy. Did you like the metal Chicago police car? Just like the real ones. The doors open, and everything.
     I wish you could see yourself as you are now – the videos just don't convey it. Sprawled on the floor, doing a hard puzzle, working through a maze, tossing tough questions from the back seat. "Dad, what's the difference between hornets and wasps?" "Dad, why does the moon follow us?" "Dad, what happens if somebody shoots a missile at us?"
     I remember well the moment you were born, howling complaints like a Steinberg. They cleaned you up, and then they did something I didn't expect, despite all the books and preparations and Lamaze training. The nurse shoved you at me, and everybody turned to pay attention to your mother. I looked down – there was a baby in my hands – and got another shock. Most babies are all red and creased and squished and look like Jake LaMotta after 12 rounds. But you were beautiful, china pale and perfect, and I held you and sang the Air Force song –"Off we go, into the wild blue yonder, flying high, into the sun . . ." – because it was the only thing I could think of.
     I wrote it all down in a letter to you that night. I meant to write letters on every birthday, but you know what happens. Time passes, everyone's so busy, and important things get pushed aside.
     I did try to soak moments in, to look at you and see what was in front of me. It's so easy for adults to ignore kids, to treat them like the curtains, the stage scenery, and not as the point of everything. I will take credit for that much; I realized, when you were born, that you were what everything I was working toward was about, you were the thing I was going to leave behind, you and your brother, and everything else ratcheted down a few notches in significance.
     That sounds nice, but there's a downside to that attitude. Expectations grow and grow. There is no glory that I haven't imagined for you, from smashing World Series-winning homers out of Wrigley Field, to being sworn in as president, to saving the world.
     In fact, I lied about the shuttle to Tokyo image. That's the watered- down version. My actual thought was something grander. I imagined you on a mission to Mars — Lt. Col. Ross Steinberg, NASA, commander of the International Mars Mission. It's a three-year-trip, so you have plenty of downtime, and you found yourself surfing the Tabloids of Yesteryear Web site.
     I was embarrassed to admit that. I know how harmful expectations can be. They're good in that they set standards of ambition, but bad in the sense that life falls so short so often. Expectations can be a trap that parents, with the best intentions in the world, set for their kids.
     That might seem like an odd message to drop into an electronic bottle and toss into the churning sea of cyberspace. Maybe you are reading this, not aboard the shuttle to Tokyo, not on the flight to Mars, but in the free computer room of the public library. Maybe you play the washboard in a skiffle band on Madison Street, and you've come in to get out of the cold. Life does that to people. I'm still proud of you.
Love,
Dad

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 22, 2000

Cleveland and Chicago: A Tale of Two (Baseball) Cities

 

  

     About an hour after the Cubs won the pennant Saturday night, my boss told me to get myself to Cleveland "pronto.' I was on the 7:35 a.m. flight Sunday. By 10 a.m. I was on the Rapid downtown. I dropped my bag at the Hyatt at the Arcade—I wasn't sure if I was going to stay a day or a week—and was snapping this picture about 12 noon, while wandering around Progressive Field, looking for ... well, anything. My only instructions were to compare the two cities. It was Sunday, and all I could think to do after checking out the ballparks was go to the East Side and talk to black Clevelanders about baseball. I figured, if nothing else, I could look at race and baseball. Somehow the whole thing came together and by 4 p.m. I was back at the hotel, writing this.  Rahm Emanuel hasn't been very high on my list for the past few years but, I have to admit, comparing his remarks to the mayor of Cleveland's, you have to give him credit for verve.

     CLEVELAND — Both downtowns bear ghostly scars, names of great department stores now gone: Marshall Field’s in Chicago, The May Co. here. Plaques in both commemorate where Abraham Lincoln once trod, and both struggle today with notorious police shootings of young African-Americans, reminding us that Lincoln’s work remains undone. Both have hollowed-out industrial zones, more memory than manufacturing, and startup tech centers straining to replace them.
     Still, Chicago and Cleveland, whose Cubs and Indians meet for Game One of the World Series on Tuesday, are more different than alike, starting in size. Chicago is a behemoth. The third-largest city in the United States, 2.7 million people in 234 square miles. Cleveland is a relative sliver, barely squeaking into the top 50 at No. 48, a bantamweight 390,000 people over 82 square miles.
     Which means Cleveland has 15 percent of the population of Chicago and about a third of its density; walk around, and Cleveland just seems emptier: weedy lots, empty streets, distant suspension bridges and rusty warehouses slowly reverting back to nature. Parking downtown can cost $7.50 a day. On Monday morning, a stretch of Concourse C at Cleveland Hopkins Airport contained no people at all.
   Still, Cleveland has pride and a sense of beleaguerment. Signs in bar windows read, "Cleveland against the world." Chicago has pride and attitude, which you can see by comparing our mayor, Rahm Emanuel, with Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. I asked both to comment on the relative merits of their cities.
     "Cleveland is a city of champions, and all of us are working hard every day to create a better Cleveland, together," said Jackson, displaying the low-key boosterism rampant in his town. "The strength and determination displayed by our sports teams are a reflection of our city and its people. On a national level, many are surprised by what they see and experience in Cleveland, but Clevelanders know that this is who we are and what we do. We win together, and we move forward together."
     Emanuel's comments pack more zing.

     "Cleveland is a perfectly nice town but let's be honest, no one outside of Cuyahoga County is pulling for the Indians," our pugnacious mayor remarked. "And I'd be willing to bet there are more than a few people there who would like nothing more than to fly the W."
     And why not? The cities can't compare on most metrics: Chicago is famous for architecture, with dozens of buildings known worldwide, including Willis Tower, for decades the tallest building in the world. Cleveland has the Terminal Tower, which looks like the box the Statue of Liberty came in.
     The Cubs have Wrigley Field. No more need be said. The Indians have Progressive Field, nee Jacobs Field, an asymmetrical, blond brick ballpark, built just as Camden Yards was about to make Wrigley-like nostalgic hip again in baseball park construction.
     Unlike Chicago, Cleveland hollowed out; it has less than half the population it had when the Indians last won the World Series in 1948. Chicago is predominantly white: 45 percent, with 32 percent black and 31 percent Hispanic. Cleveland is a majority black city: 53 percent, with 35 percent white and 5 percent Hispanic.
     Yet Cleveland is also less segregated, somewhat. In a recent study, Chicago was the second most segregated city in the country, after Detroit. Cleveland was fifth, and black residents I spoke with paint a cheery picture of the situation.
     "I grew up in Cleveland. It's a melting pot of diversity, nationalities," said Harold Childres, a bartender/server at Stonetown on Prospect Avenue. "You have your Asians. You have your Hispanics. You have your Caucasians. You have your African-Americans. We all get along together.
     "Certain areas might be more laden with one particular race, but we all get along. It's like a different city, a mixture of everybody. Even Little Italy, at one point in time, black people wouldn't go to Little Italy. We can work there now. I don't know what has changed. People have mellowed in their feelings as far as racism."
     Baseball has struggled to create a diverse fan base; but black Clevelanders I spoke with waxed nostalgic about the Indians, how their fathers taught them to love the game. Others spoke of the general civic pride of having a winning team with a diverse roster of athletes.
     "The simple fact is the Cavs did it, now the Indians are going to do it too," said Nate Rivers, 20, standing at the Windermere train station on the far East Side, wearing a cap with the controversial Chief Wahoo caricature on it. Some sports shops in Cleveland won't even carry merchandise depicting it.
     Which leads to the one thing that is exactly the same in both Chicago and Cleveland: championships are good for business, for restaurants, stores, souvenir and clothing manufacturers, and, yes, newspapers.
     "That the city might have another winning team makes everybody happy," said Lee Battles, 31, riding the bus down Euclid Avenue through Cleveland's extensive medical district. "Everyone buys the shirts and baseball caps, gives everyone a reason to be proud. A lot of people have jobs, cleaning up, food preparation, and that's cool too. A lot of black people play on the team, and I'm happy about that. It's cool to see your city on ESPN, and you say, 'Oh my God, Cleveland's on ESPN!'"
     More than one person asked me, having both grown up in Cleveland and lived in Chicago for 35 years, which team I'm rooting for. And I reply with candor, "I win either way."
     Play ball.

WikiLeaks snooping is as scary as the election

WikiLeak's founder, Julian Assange

     Imagine a politician’s relative who is a very private person. Could be his wife, could be his grandmother. Someone not in the public eye.
     Say I decide to gather insights into that little-known relative’s personal life gained by kicking in a basement window at the family home, creeping into their bedroom and rifling through her diary. It says here, on the entry for May 17, that she worries her children are . . .      What? Intrusive? Some of you are wondering if I had any right to break into her house and snoop around? How about if I don’t actually break into the house — which for the record, I did not actually do. How about if I just stole some letters to friends after the relative put them out for the postman?
     Still bad? How about if I hacked her emails and found some cutting observations about various politicians? You want those?
     You see where I’m going with this. The 2016 campaign is so fractious, the standards of civility so degraded, we’ve all overlooked a very bad precedent that’s being set.

To continue reading, click here. 

Fight cancer with more than a book

     The last time I was in Myopic Books on Milwaukee Avenue, I faced a dilemma. They had Time on Fire, Evan Handler's funny and terrifying account of surviving leukemia despite being treated at Sloan-Kettering in New York City. It is something of a guerrilla guide to beating cancer (Practical Tip #1: don't feel reluctant about hectoring reluctant medical technicians about washing their hands) and I give it to all my friends when they get cancer, and every single recipient survived (well, Jim Tyree is no longer with us, alas, but he wasn't done in by the cancer, but by the ineptitude of a med tech trying to insert a line for dialysis. Handler is right; you have to watch them like a hawk). 
     I always pick up a copy, because someone is always coming down with the Big C. The challenge was that Myopic had three copies -- my instinct was to buy them all, to have a reserve. 
     But that seemed a commitment to my friends getting cancer en masse, and I didn't want to err on that side. I bought one, and still have it, so I made the right decision. 
     Passing along books to people who contract cancer is, I admit, a rather low key approach to fighting the disease. Which is why I'm so much in admiration of my friend Eleni Bousis, who last year took much more dynamic course of action: she formed the Hippocratic Cancer Research Foundation. 
    The HCRF has one goal -- "to eliminate cancer and save lives" — and is doing so by supporting the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Canter at Northwestern University, in the forefront of what is called "translational research," which basically means speeding new therapies from the lab to actual patients who can be helped by them. 
     Toward that end, the HCRF is holding its Inaugural Gala at the Hilton Chicago on Nov. 5, hosted by Susanna Homan, Anna Davlantes and Lou Canellis. That's only two weeks away, but there are still tickets available. I'll be there, adding my sequin's worth of sparkle to the black tie evening.  I'll also auction off my new book, though I'll warn you -- I'm instructing Edie to jack the bidding up so it doesn't go for less than the Amazon price. And yes, there is dancing.
    You can learn more about the event and buy tickets by clicking here. As you know, I don't ballyhoo causes upon my readership here very often -- in fact, I never have. But I'm a big fan of Elani Bousis, and I think that cancer sucks, so it's also the least I can do. By the time I deliver a copy of Time on Fire to friends, they're already in the thick of the struggle. Curing cancer seems a much more more aggressive approach to the problem.  It's a fun night for a great cause and I hope you can join me. 

Cold? Flu? Yes, that's the ticket

     A colleague asked me if I were excited about the Cleveland Indians winning the pennant this week, and I answered, candidly, that I was excited when they won it in 1995 and actually saw a World Series game in 1997, leading to the column below, which got me in hot water at work, for reasons I will explain afterward. As you read, try to imagine what landed me in the editor's office, having my future employment called into question.

     I'm sorry, but there won't be a column today; I'm feeling under the weather.  
     World Series tickets!
     Must be some kind of virus I picked up Monday — I forgot my wool hat at home, and with the change of weather and all those people sneezing on the bus. 
     An old friend from Cleveland called and said he had a big piece of Fall Classic pasteboard with my name on it.
     Much as I'd like to be at work Tuesday, finishing that piece on global warming (really), it seemed the responsible thing to stay at home and not risk infecting my co-workers. 
     "I can't. . . ," I began, pausing long enough in shock that he began to reply when I cut him off, ". . . believe it! Yes! In a heartbeat." There was the sticky matter of my job, however, the livelihood supporting me, my loving wife and two adorable children.
     Because colds have a way of racing through a workplace, especially at this time of year.     
      Southwest Airlines. One-hundred and sixty-three dollars. That was a lot. But my God, the World Series. I'm 37 years old and I've never been to a World Series, never mind one in Cleveland, with the Indians, whose dismal record of endless, soul-crushing mediocrity served as the dreary background to my nondescript youth.
     And who knows if it's just a cold? The flu, pneumonia, meningitis — all going around this time of year. Better to take a day and rest and not risk making it worse. 
     Game starts at 7:20 p.m., Chicago time. Though I'll be there an hour or two early, just to gaze in abject awe at the red-white-and-blue bunting surrounding the upper decks, to soak in the atmosphere and, if history is any judge, a couple of big cold ones.
     To be honest, as sick as I am, I still hate taking a day off. Responsibility is key to any job, and if you don't show up one day, well, that just adds your burden to the weary shoulders of your co-workers. 
     Of course we'll win in dramatic style, the way the Giants beat us back in '54. The only thing people remember from that is Willie Mays running to make The Catch, and then that tremendous throw to the plate, his cap flying. A nice moment for him and most everybody else. Not so nice for those in Cleveland.
     Slack off and you risk getting in trouble at work. That's awful. Your boss is all grim-faced, and everybody is discussing what to do about The Problem, and you feel like you're back in first grade, in the principal's office for building a volcano of snow on the radiator. 
     The Marlins aren't even a real team, just a marketing concept put together to sell sportswear to teenagers. Teal? How'd they come up with teal? They had to do a survey of what teens wanted to wear on their hooded sweat shirts to get a color like that.
     I remember getting fired from a job once — my last job before this one, now that I think of it. A small suburban daily newspaper. For something I wrote in my column, coincidentally. My boss looked like he just swallowed a lemon, and he asked me to go for a walk. He did the deed on the side of Schmale Road, in Wheaton, with the traffic whizzing by. 
     Did I mention that my grandfather took me to my first Indians game? It was the only thing we ever did together in our entire lives. I can still see him sitting there in his neatly laundered sports shirt, smelling of cigarettes and Luden's cough drops, cheering. He's long gone now.
      But things have a way of working out. That newspaper folded shortly after I left, and the guy who fired me took some job in the distant collar counties and was never heard from again. I ended up here. 
    Well, not here, not at the moment, but at the World Series in Cleveland. I'll be back here tomorrow. Eight a.m. flight. Don't tell anybody.
      —First published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 21, 1997

    "What is this?" the editor at the time asked me, an hour after I turned in the column. I brightly explained to her that I was going to call in sick and attend the World Series in Cleveland. She frowned. "You know you could be fired for this? For calling in sick when you're not sick." 
     I'm not sure what I replied. Certainly not, "But I'm NOT calling in sick, not really, you muddle-minded martinet. I lay it all out in the column. I'm attending a World Series in another city at no cost to you whatsoever! Plus you get a fun column out of it. Isn't that the important thing?" 
    Apparently not. I no doubt apologized and wheedled, my only goal being to get my ass to the game, which Cleveland lost to the ersatz Florida nine in what I remember being a 4 and half hour ordeal in 42 degree weather that saw my pal and me at a bar in the flats before the final pitch was thrown.  I do remember seeing Bob Hope at the beginning of the game, a distant speck in a box, waving to the crowd. 
      The editor, incidentally, went on to a glittering career at the Tribune, where fidelity to rules is highly prized.

Trump brand now shining like a lead balloon

     There are many ways to vote against Donald Trump.
     Vote early now or at the ballot box Nov. 8.
     Either way works. But that still isn’t enough for some to register their disdain for the talking yam who would shrug off our cherished democracy.
     Walking through a Barnes & Noble this week, Michele Kurlander turned books by Donald Trump around, so their covers faced the wall.
     “Childish,” she said. “But it made me feel better.”
     In May, when the Los Angeles Dodgers were at Chicago and staying at the Trump International Hotel and Towers, first baseman Adrian Gonzalez refused to join his teammates at the hotel.
     “I didn’t stay there,” Gonzalez said. “I had my reasons.”
     And Elonide Semmes, president of Right Hat, a boutique branding agency headquartered in Chicago, instructed her staff not to stay in Trump hotels as they crisscross the country helping companies forge corporate identities. The epiphany came on the Chicago River during an architectural boat tour.

To continue reading, click here. 

A sort of genius really

    Donald Trump exists in that surreal zone of stupidity that is so extreme, you'd almost feel sorry for him, that is, if he weren't trying to lead the country over a cliff. 
    The day after his third scowling, shrugging, blathering performance at a presidential debate, he raised what has become one of his trademark baseless charges: that Hillary Clinton was "inappropriately given the debate questions."
     Which leads us to the subjects raised at the debate: the Supreme Court. Immigration. The economy. Couldn't of seen these coming, eh? These were surprises to Trump? No wonder he was so badly beaten by Clinton and her secret information. No wonder, even as the debate was transpiring, Trump was aware enough that he was blowing it, again, badly enough that only cheating on Clinton's part would explain it. He lashed out at her, poised despite his constant interruptions, insults, one of which, "nasty woman," instantly became a badge of honor, the way that the ((())) denotation used by Trump's anti-Semitic supporters to tag Jewish names was seized and used by Jewish writers on Twitter.
      While I have been slow in surrendering my pessimism, my nagging fear that he will win, the polls are such that I'm beginning to yield that up to actual hope that he won't. 
    Still, it's grim that he's even running, that he's in contention, that anyone supports him. He'd be embarrassing as a fringe candidate that got a whopping 10 percent of the vote. 
    Let's touch upon the undeniable qualities: a bigot and a bully, a fraud and a liar. Rolling like a puppy at the feet not only of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, but too dumb to be ashamed of it. Lauding Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad, calling him smarter than both President Obama and Hillary Clinton in Wednesday's debate, when he hobbyhorsed on his dozen or so familiar concepts, ignoring the substance of the questions he was asked. 
    Hillary Clinton didn't get the questions ahead of time.* Any idiot would have known what policy questions Chris Wallace would raise. But Donald Trump is not just any idiot.  He's special. Idiocy is the one area where he truly excels. 


* Events later showed that, actually, she had, the rare instance of one of Trump's wild charges actually being true. That said, I think the point still stands.