The column we didn't need: "A kind of victory"

 

     The Cubs won the World Series. The Sun-Times quickly posted the column I wrote to celebrate the occasion, and it got a lot of traffic -- actor John Cusack retweeted it to his 1.8 million followers. That was nice. 
     The next morning, a regular reader, Kirk Steinhaus, remarked on an aspect that everyone else overlooked, and posted his thoughts under the column on Facebook. He wrote:

I think that we are missing something. You posted this blog last night within five or maybe ten minutes after the Cubs won. It tells me that you had written it before they won, also telling me that you had written a contra-blog to post if they lost. Can we read that one too?

     That caught me off guard. I answered:

Hmmmmm... I'm not sure that would be appropriate. Let me think about it. Something seems amiss.

     What seemed amiss was the magic act quality of journalism. You don't reveal how it's done. As it is, I feel uneasy pointing out that I write obituaries of famous figures months, even years before they die. It's obvious—how else do you get eight pages about the complicated, fascinating life of Muhammed Ali online within 15 minutes of his death being announced? Yet it also seems like something a professional would not draw attention to. "Don't worry folks, the lady is safe, squished up in half the box. I don't really saw her in half."
     Plus there is a braggadocio quality to admitting the work that goes on ahead of time. Your waiter doesn't say, "You know the cook showed up at DAWN to bake that bread!!!" Don't brag. Braggarts are punished.

"The Dugout" by Norman Rockwell

     I talked about it with a couple colleagues, and an editor, and nobody thought running the "Cubs lose" column would violate some cherished journalistic norm. While I was puzzling on it the New York Times  "Insider" blog shared a Cubs lose graphic and page layout they had obviously expended so much effort on that it seemed a shame to let it remain unseen.  The Times is a class act, and they obviously felt it was okay.
      Then again, it was a beautiful painting, an homage to Norman Rockwell's famous 1948 Saturday Evening Post cover, "The Dugout."  Which led to a second qualm about this column. It isn't very good, in my mind, because it echoes an essay,  "Looking Failure in the Face." Yes, it was written by me in 2007, and yes, it ran n Forbes magazine, so few Sun-Times readers would be familiar with it.  But I try not to repeat myself, and while the words are not the same — it isn't plagiarized — the overarching concept, "Dante turned failure into success and so can you," is identical. Re-reading the column after a few days, it seemed a lazy, overly-facile journalistic solution to the problem of the Cubs losing the series.
    Well, considering that my column is not supposed to run at all on Thursdays, yet I turned in two, one if they won, one if they lost, maybe not so lazy. And there is an allure to the idea of unpublished works. When the Cubs neared the pennant win, Ald. Joe Moore wrote, reminding me that I had mentioned in a column in 2003 that I wrote an editorial about the Cubs winning the pennant that had made me cry and made my mother cry, and that I would tuck it away until they actually won. Should they win the pennant, he asked, can we read it? Amazed he remembered after 13 years, I tore up my office looking for it -- we've gone through a computer system or two since then and I don't have it electronically. But it's lost.
    Might as well put this online where I can find it someday. And besides, I am nothing if not a full service columnist, and since a reader requested it, and since none of the reasons not to settled the question in the negative, and since I have to fill this space today somehow, with apologies for its derivativeness and for a build-up longer than the column itself, here is the column that would have sought to comfort people had the Cubs lost which,  thank merciful God, they did not. They won.

     Dante Alighieri never got the girl. Beatrice Portinari, the love of his life, whom he first saw in the streets of Florence when he was 9 and she was 8, married someone else. Then she died young, at 24.
      Heck, Dante didn't even get to live out his days on the streets of his beloved Florence. He threw his lot in with the wrong political faction, was exiled and sentenced to death if he returned. He spent his last years sleeping on other people's sofas, basically.
     "Bitter is the taste of another man's bread," he wrote. "Weary the tread up another man's stairs."
     Kind of a loser really. But he made the best of it, forging his "Divine Comedy," immortalizing his lost Beatrice, placing her at the gates of heaven, and creating a fiery hell to roast his real-life enemies for all time.
     Quite the accomplishment.
     That is the art of life, which does not consist of one triumph after another. Instead, it is a chain of trying and failing and putting a brave spin on it and making your defeat into a sort of victory.
     When the Cubs dropped a second World Series game to the Cleveland Indians and their lights-out pitching, I cheerily observed that the Cubs had also been down two games to one against the Dodgers, and that worked out just fine. Don't give up hope!
     After Saturday night's loss, well, there was still Jason Kipnis, Northbrook's very own, slugging the first three-run homer hit against the Cubs in a World Series game at Wrigley Field since Babe Ruth did it in 1932. For the wrong team, true, but at least someone from the Chicago area was having a good night. I knew his father, Mark Kipnis, a lawyer for this newspaper who got unfairly singed when Hollinger International went up like a gas refinery explosion. It's nice to think of the karmic wheel spinning skyward for him too.
     I was ready for the Cubs to drop Sunday night's game. But they won that game. Then the next, in epic fashion. It was the Indians muffing easy fly balls. And suddenly the prize that had eluded the Cubs for so long seemed in their grasp at last.
     Only it wasn't, of course. The dust settled after Game Seven and it was over. The Cubs lost, as they always do.
     And yet, remember, the Cubs were in the World Series. They were there, somewhere they hadn't been for 71 years They made some errors, but they were not hapless. They were beaten by superlative pitching. Usually the Cubs lose by choking; this time they were strangled.
     I'm not a baseball expert, but I don't see the shame here. We were conquered, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, we did not capitulate.
     Nobody wants to lose. But we shouldn't be terrified of defeat either. Look at Donald Trump. He's so scared of losing that he's already babbling excuses. The election is rigged. The media biased. Wah. Which makes his defeat even more certain. He's running into the arms of the thing he's most afraid of.
     No need for excuses. I'm not a sports fan; I went to the opening of an exhibit at the Field Museum Wednesday night. But I know the Cubs winning would make people happy, and so I wanted them to win. But as with any victory, there would also be a cost. If you ask what makes the Cubs special, as a team, only two things really stand out: Wrigley Field and their 108 seasons without a World Series win. Each adds to the mystique. Sure, you could build a bigger, more modern ballpark. But it wouldn't be Wrigley, and the Cubs wouldn't be the Cubs.
     So sure, they could have beaten the Indians. Came close. But then they wouldn't be the Cubs, not the Cubs we knew, but some different team, the kind that wins a World Series. If you look at the Red Sox, winning the Series in 2004, 2007 and 2013 made them less the Red Sox that people loved and more of a Yankees Lite.
     By all means, be disappointed. Then make the best of it. All told, it worked out pretty well for Dante. He didn't get the girl. But he got the fame he hungered for. The Cubs didn't win the series. But they got to remain the Cubs we've always known and loved. And that's a kind of victory.

And the parade passed by....

Cubs victory parade (photo by Dav Ero)

     "But you love parades!" my mother said over the phone, as I drove to Palos Heights Friday morning.
     It's true. I always troop to see the local Northbrook parades, July 4 and Memorial Day. I love to stand and clap when the vets march past, appreciate the marching bands, thrill to the fire engines.
      But it isn't like I'm rushing downtown to watch the St. Patrick's Day Parade. I see them if they're convenient.
     Which is odd, because I used to hate to miss parades. I have this memory, from being about 4, visiting my grandmother in the Bronx. I was just old enough to know there was a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And that we weren't going — my parents didn't even go into Manhattan when they visited my grandmother— why bother? What was there? I kind of pressed myself against window, straining to look down the streets and, perhaps, catch a glimpse of the parade I didn't know was miles away.  
       "I have a job to do, mom," I said. It was true. An interview set up before the Cubs won the series, on the campus of Trinity Christian College. They were nice enough to gather together students for me to talk with. I wasn't about to cancel so I could go see a parade. Duty first.
     The students were polite, thoughtful. I wandered the campus, located on a ... no, save it for Monday. Let's just say I was glad I went.  Other reporters covered the parade.
    I heard the hoopla on the radio as I drove back. And I have to admit, listening to Theo Epstein laud Tom Ricketts, made me glad I wasn't there. I'm not a fan. I went to one game this year. This was for fans.
     My wife sent me updates, from the kids drinking wine on the 7:36 Metra Milwaukee North train, to the happy high-fives in coffee shops. I gritted my teeth, and almost said, "You can stop doing that any time you like." But I held back. Why spoil her fun? She didn't mean to taunt me. I wanted to know what happened. A big day for Chicago. 
     People crushed into the city, from everywhere, just to see the players passing by. I get that. A communal celebration. A manifestation of how important it is to them. And I would never say a word against it. Many of societal ills come from a lack of exactly that: cohesion, unanimity, shared experience. Everybody there, everybody under a blue hat was a Cubs fan. No papers, no religious test. We need more of that, not less. 
     What does not taking part mean?  St. Augustine defined "city" as a group of people united by the love of the same object. So not to love that object, and not to partake in the festival. It was like pressing my palm against the cold stone wall, separating me from everybody else.
     Also a necessary function. There needs to be outsiders, observers, the guy who doesn't go, or who stands there, scratching his chin, apart from it all, watching. That guy has always been me. It started growing up in Berea, the only Jew in Fairwood Elementary School, watching the heads swivel in my direction as the one droning Hanukkah carol is rolled out for my benefit. Hating that, at first, wanting to vanish. But growing to like the difference. "What did you expect, horns?" I'd taunt people who said I don't look Jewish (improbably, because I look like the cover of Der Stermer. They must have never seen a Jew, and expected a skullcap and black coat). 
     I don't want to hide behind the faith. Plenty of Jewish Cub fans, no doubt, such as my pal Rich Cohen, who wrote a lovely piece in the New York Times about his lifelong Cubs fandom.  I'm just not a crowds guy. They puzzle me. When the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, I was downtown at the paper, so wandered a few blocks south to see the double decker buses blow past. Shrugged, then went back to the office. Of course I could come upon the entire Blackhawks team playing a pickup game on the ice rink behind my house in Northbrook and I wouldn't recognize it was them or care particularly if I did. 
     At a certain age, you accept yourself, while being open to what changes and revelations come. And though I didn't go to the parade, I did notice something surprising. Before the series began, people asked me, growing up in Cleveland, which team  I was rooting for, and I'd shrug and say, "Doesn't matter. I win either way."
     But in the 8th inning of the seventh game, when the Indians scored, I did not cheer, but groaned and covered my face. And in the 10th I was on my feet, shouting for my wife, who couldn't bear to watch and had walked out of the room, to come back in, and we watched the next few minutes shouting and hugging. Not so impartial anymore. 

Michigan Avenue, Nov. 4, 2016

Photos courtesy of and copyright by Dav Ero. You can see more of his work at his website. 

Compassion can help battle loved ones' addictions

    The Sun-Times started a new wellness section, aptly entitled "Well," that debuted a week ago Wednesday, and the features editor asked me to write last Wednesday's cover story, reviewing Christopher Kennedy Lawford's new book. I enjoyed talking with him -- an open, rough-hewn sort of guy. I'm not sure of the utility of the book, but then again, I'm not everybody in the world, and I imagine there are people who will find guidance and support in it.   

     Society has a habit of viewing any particular illness first as shame and then as triumph. Not too long ago cancer was something families hid — you didn’t even tell your friends you had the Big C and certainly didn’t mention it in the inevitable obituary. Addiction is following the same path. What was once — and to some still is — seen as a personal failing, weakness and sin is increasingly recognized as disease, a complex mix of genetic, biological, social and psychological pathology scything through our nation.         

     Twenty years ago heroin was what happened to inner-city junkies who could be comfortably ignored. Now it afflicts suburban teenagers and society sits up and takes notice in a way it never did before.       

     Part of the process of dragging addiction into the light is expanding the circle of sympathy for people it affects. There is the addict, or alcoholic, of course. But then the ring of harm expands outward to include family and friends, who cope with the situation, or more likely, don’t cope with it. In some ways they’re in a tougher position; the addict at least has the brief refuge of using. For families, the pain can be unremitting, and they need all the help they can get. 

     Christopher Kennedy Lawford, author of best-selling books on recovery such as “Symptoms of Withdrawal and Moments of Clarity,” has joined up with family therapist Beverly Engel, an expert on abuse, to write “When Your Partner Has An Addiction: How Compassion Can Transform Your Relationship (And Heal You Both in the Process).”

      That’s a big promise to pack into the title of a book... 

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'Unbridled joy' of Cubs' win brings family together

Wayne Juhlin, Mark Grace and Penny Lane

     All over the city, the state, the country, Cubs fans gathered to be with their loved ones Wednesday night to watch their team win the seventh game of the World Series. It was something you had to do together.
     For Jennifer Juhlin, that meant going over to her mother’s house. “I felt I had to be with her,” said Jennifer, 35. “I didn’t want her to be alone.”
     You might remember her mother, on Chicago radio as Penny Lane, married to Wayne Juhlin. You might also remember Wayne — a comedian, voice-over talent, radio show host at WDAI and other stations. That’s how he met Penny — she was a disc jockey on WSDM, “The Station with the Girls and All That Jazz.”
     Even though Wayne was a lifelong Cubs fan — “a super fan,” she called him — when the game began, Penny hadn’t planned on watching the game with her husband of 34 years.
     It wasn’t that she minded his trips to spring training, or the pricey Cubs Fantasy Camp, where he once “struck out Jose Cardenal.” (After that, Wayne would sometimes meet the former Cub at Gulliver’s for pizza.)

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The Cubs win the World Series

A pterodactyl delivers the good news Wednesday night at the Field Museum . 

      It starts with a ball. Foam or rubber or one of those hollow blue plastic spheres that comes in a set with a fat red bat and a brown toy mitt.
     But a parent, a mom or a dad, tosses that ball to a toddler. And the baby, joyful, grabs the ball in a fat fist and flings it back in the general direction of the delighted dad or mirthful mom.
     So it begins. Working toward a real hardball and more complicated games: catch in the yard; base runner; pick-up with the kids on the block. Enter professional ball, watched on television, tucked safely under dad's arm, cheering when he cheers.
     The dream builds slowly. Those backyard players troop off to Little League, to park district squads. Parents watch instead of playing, mom drives from game to game, dad camps out in the stands.
     Others may not play, but channel their passions in baseball cards, into fandom, memorizing stats and records, half hobby, half religion.
     By then they've divided their loyalties, North and South. Few root for a distant team; you grow where you're planted. South Siders cleave to the White Sox, who lived their dream not long ago. Lest you forget—as ESPN did—the Sox won the World Series in 2005.
     But the Cubs didn't—and North Siders embrace the Cubs. As do those empty spaces without teams—lots of Cub fans in Indiana.
     It's a complicated passion. Lovable Losers, our hapless Cubbies playing in their gem at Addison and Clark.
     Each fan has an iconic initial Wrigley Field visit. Who can forget the first glimpse, coming up those stairs, the green and brick unfolding like a mirage, an impossible vision.
     The sacred space where so much happened for so long. Ruth's called shot. The collapse of 1969. Rick Sutcliffe and Steve Bartman and every person who ever played, or ever watched, as the Cubs tried hard but fell short. Years of hope and agony.
     "It was like coming this close to your dreams," as Moonlight Graham says in "Field of Dreams," holding thumb and finger an inch apart. "Then having them brush past like a stranger in the crowd."
     Getting the brush-off became a way of life. The first game was played in Wrigley Field on April 23, 1914. And ever since then, the Cubs had never been champions. Never. Not once.
     Until . . .
     This season started in optimism, but so did last season. The Cubs were young, and good, but how many times in the past has being young and good not been enough? They won 103 games this year and the chance was there, but how many chances were bobbled? In 1984. In 2003. Cubs fans hoped yet did not dare hope.
     Winning the pennant was a dream not lived in the waking world since 1945. That dream became real. Yet our fulfillment was not complete. There were four more games to win. Otherwise, winning the pennant was only a new twist on losing. Not flying but falling with style.
     When the Cleveland Indians took the first game, the old heaviness tapped us on the shoulder. Oh right. They're still the Cubs. Maybe our dream was hurrying past, like that stranger in a crowd. Again.
     But the Cubs battled back in the second game, on the road, buoyed by slugger Kyle Schwarber, injured in early April, returning unexpectedly, our hero.
     The Cubs lost the next two games, at home at Wrigley Field, to add insult to injury. The heaviness settled in our stomaches. Oh well. At least we were there. At least we were beaten, by extraordinary pitching, and didn't just muff the thing away, as usual. Cold comfort but comfort nonetheless.
     Then the Cubs won the fourth game. And the fifth, their bats awakening, the other team, for once, missing the easy fly ball. Addison Russell, all of 22, hitting his grand slam. Even as he was reaching the dugout, you had to think, "He's going to bask in that glow for the rest of his life." As will we.
     We were confident going into that seventh and final game and our confidence was not misplaced. We won.
     Time stopped.
     It was the miracle we had waited for, and our fathers and mothers had waited for before us, and their parents before that. We were bathed in healing waters. The family that taught us the game, the city that nurtured it, the friends we played with, memories we shared, pros we admired, all returned, all alive again, awakened by the crack of the bat, the flash of the ball, the smell of the grass. Alive in our knowledge of how happy this would make them, how happy it makes us now, all of us here, together in victory, for one perfect moment, round and pure.
     Like a ball.

Even Sue the T-Rex couldn't help but smile. 

  

Words have meaning even if they aren't true

     People just say stuff.
     Such as “How are you?” when they couldn’t care less how you are. And “I’m fine” when they’re not. It’s expected, the grease that society slides forward on. Hardly worth noting.
     When it comes to politics, however, this just-say-stuff habit is more worrisome. Then the grease can send our nation skidding off of a cliff of toxic nonsense and paranoid fantasy. Politicians make promises that they can’t possibly deliver. They air claims that can’t possibly be true, that directly conflict what they just said a day or two ago. And their followers, well, follow, saying things they neither mean nor think about.
     Such as? Abortion. “Abortion is murder,” the anti-abortion crowd claims. You hear it all the time. First, that’s incorrect. Since murder is a legal term, and abortion is legal and thus it is by definition not murder. What they mean is “Abortion should be murder.” Except they don’t mean that either, as you can demonstrate by replying, “Oh really? If it’s murder, then for how long should the murderers go to jail?” And the answer is “umm.” We can translate that grunt as “OK ‘abortion is murder,’ is just something we say because it sounds powerful and more compact than, ‘I want to force my religion on you while dragging gender roles back to the 1950s.'” Admittedly quite a mouthful.
     Donald Trump is a master of saying stuff. A mighty river of words flows out of his waggling lips, vague promises and idle threats and broad accusations. They sound dynamic, and his fans lap it up. Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Bar Muslims from entering the country. Deport 11 million illegal residents. The election is rigged. The media are corrupt.

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What do you get for a friend in rehab? This.

    There are no "Hooray You're in Rehab!" cards, that I know of. There should be. Swapping a life that's gone off the rails for one that's functional, fulfilling and disciplined should be a cause for celebration, not shame. 

    Which is why I was delighted when my friend Lise Schleicher, who owns BasketWorks in Northbrook, suggested creating a One Day At a Time Recovery gift basket around my new book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, written with Sara Bader.     She's been doing land-office business with her Chicago Reads basket featuring my Chicago memoir, You Were Never in Chicago, and was looking to do some brand extension.  And yes, I sign the books for those who want me to.

    Lise consulted with me designing her basket, and I suggested the sweets—sugar touches the part of the brain that booze wallops, and you tend to go through a lot of candy in the early days of rehab. Coffee of course. And the "One Day at a Time" sign because you need that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determination to get through those arduous first months of recovery.  

    And the book, which has been out now for about two months.. It's still getting notice—just last week Newcity ran a perceptive review  by lit editor Toni Nealie. I also taped a podcast that I thought went very well for the Poetry Foundation which should be up any day. And in a few weeks Sara and I will go into the studio to cut a segment with Scott Simon for "All Things Considered" on NPR.

    With gift-giving season approaching, I wanted to spotlight Lise's new basket. I've used her company before, and can attest that she's prompt and the baskets are wildly appreciated. Particularly under these circumstances, when a person tends to feel alone, facing a life radically different from the life they've become accustomed to. They could use some support, and nothing says, "I'm with you" like a basket of goodies. I believe this sort of thing could catch on. It's a great idea.