Curdled sky

 

     Every morning I walk the dog. Were walking the dog a chore, I would dragoon my wife to help. But I am habitually awake far earlier than she, and enjoy walking the dog, as it involves two of my favorite pastimes: walking and the dog. 
     So I do it. Heading down the front walk, sometimes the dog will tack left, curling around the house north toward the library, a route I don't mind because I get to pass my Lake Superior hemlock tree, and note with approval its steady progress skyward. But we typically go right, a standard route -- three blocks down, a block over, and three blocks back. 
    Dogs like routine. As do humans. I make a point to always grab a few old blue newspaper bags before we go, to clean up after the dog—let the Internet try expropriating that important journalistic function. Some dog walkers are careless in this, but I am not. Once, forgetting bags, I used my handkerchief, throwing it away afterward. 
    I seldom forgot a bag after that. What I don't always remember is my phone, a lapse I only think of when confronted with something I'd like to take a photo of, like the banded sky above. I couldn't recall seeing clouds so evenly striped in straight lines like that, and wanted to record it. Clouds don't stick around, typically, waiting to be documented. But when I returned home, I puzzled the dog by leaving her in the foyer, bolting upstairs, grabbing my phone in my office, and heading back outside. Finding the best spot for observing an unbroken expanse of sky, I stood next to a neighbor's house, snapping happily away, until I paused, realizing that I was standing five feet from a brightly-lit window, worried my interest in clouds might be misconstrued, and retreated home.  ("Truly officer, it was an intriguing banded effect....") 
    I plugged "striped clouds" and "banded clouds" into Google and didn't find much. A bunch of chitchat, none of it definitive. But my copy of Fogs and Clouds came through almost immediately. Published in 1926, written by W. J. Humphreys, identified on the title page as the Meteorological Physicist of the United States Weather Bureau, author of Physics of the Air; Weather Proverbs and Paradoxes, Rainmaking and Other Weather Vagaries—who among us wouldn't snap that up in an instant?—among other works.
      The book contains 93 photographs, in stunning black and white, "Radiation fog" and "Billow cloud" and "Cumulus boa," and flipping through them I came to No. 27, a "Cirro-culmulus" that has the same striations as my cloud. 
    Okay, it might not be exactly the same -- Humphreys' looks whispier, and mine seems denser, and more wintry. But it seems very close.
    Cirro-cumulus, Humphreys relates, are "arranged in groups and often in lines," and often referred to, at least in the world Humphreys traveled, as a "mackerel sky," because:

    The term "mackerel sky" is an abbreviation of "mackerel-back sky," so named because of the frequent resemblance of rows of cirro-cumuli to the patterns (not the scales) on the backs of one or more species of mackerel. When the cirro-cumuli are small, numerous, and without order or pattern, they often are called "curdled sky."    

Mackerel

     Which would have the average Chicagoan trying to picture a mackerel. Don't feel bad; I couldn't conjure one up either. Here you go. 
     Interesting word, "mackerel." Disappears into antiquity, at least 700 years old, with the Oxford Dictionary not even hazarding a guess where it might be from, noting that "mackerel sky" is at least 300 years old. ("Mackerel" has also been a synonym for "pimp" for at least 500 years, again for reasons mysterious). 
     A common enough word to inspire a host of sayings—of course you know "Holy Mackerel," a softening of "Holy Mary" with a nod to the Catholic preference for fish on Friday's thrown in (One obscure slang for Catholics was "mackerel-snappers.")  An article in the London Sunday Dispatch from 1936, cited in Supplement One of H.L. Mencken's The American Language claims that London swells had stopped using profanity, and instead were inserting names of flowers and animals, preserving this supposed snippet of their cleaned-up conversation: "Hullo, you old baked walnut. How goes the mackerel-footed flea?"
     Dryden refers to a "mackerel-gale" which Samuel Johnson, in his great 1755 dictionary, guesses means "a strong breeze, such, I suppose, as is desired to bring mackerel fresh to market." 
     Which had to be done quickly, because mackerel were famous for spoiling fast. In his definition of the word, Johnson quotes this bit of verse, from William King's 1709 Art of Cookery: "Law ordered that the Sunday should have rest; And that no nymph her noisy food should sell, Except it were new milk or mackerel." What good is observing the Lord's Day if it results in bad fish?
     Plus there are a variety of similes, "silent as a mackerel," which needs no explanation. 
     You see why the fish is used to describe the clouds. But how do the clouds get those mackerelish rows? That's the aspect that really caught my attention, these broad lines conveyed across the heaven in such regularity. What's the mechanism for that? What holds them together? Humphreys, as if reading our minds, is right there with an answer:

     Those occurring in rows presumably are on the crests of air waves or billows at the interface between wind layers of unequal speeds or different directions, or both, and commonly unequal in temperature and humidity.

     Does that make sense to you? Me neither. But then again, I have a bad cold—been battling it for days; I figure, I picked it up on Lower Wacker Drive last Thursday, visiting the homeless.
     Or maybe I'm just blaming them, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Maybe I caught it from a rich swell at a fancy restaurant. Either way, the last thing Humphreys says about cirro-cumuli (yeah, I dig using the plural) is "they are quite thin and contain but little cloud material."
     Which is about how I'm feeling. So my last question is this: did I truly never see such banded clouds before? Or did I see them but didn't notice? My guess is the former, since seeing them this week drew such immediate interest. But you never know. Have you ever seen any? Perhaps they were there, but I was not in the proper spirit to receive their presence. People often confuse what's going on inside with what's going on outside, such as all those Democrats convinced that our nation went through some kind of epic change over the past two months, when what actually happened was we all suddenly looked up and really noticed how curdled the sky had become.
       

Lies are not only damaging, they're contagious

   

     Et tu, Barack?
     I was biting my lip, trying not to criticize the president in his final weeks. What would be the point? He's history, toast, riding off into the sunset for his date with a postage stamp. Yes, after the 2016 election he reverted to the same Spock-like, over-intellectual passivity he glided in on, nodding pleasantly the way people do in nightmares in the face of imminent danger, as his successor rears out of the swamp of American psychosis and names his misfit Cabinet.
     But Obama must know what he's doing, right? A wily politician to the end. Just as during the 2008 election he knew that one flash of temper would paint him as an Angry Black Man, he sought to maintain whatever slight influence he might have on the Trumpian entity by welcoming it into the White House with grace. At least then Donald Trump might see what grace looks like. Hoping to mitigate the disaster, Obama kept his lip zipped while the scaffolding of our national humiliation is erected.
     Then, talking to David Axelrod for his podcast, Obama blurted out that he would have beat Trump: "I'm confident that if I, if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it."
     Obama's boast is meaningless on several levels. In no particular order: a) he couldn't run again; b) a majority of the American people don't vote at all; c) Hillary Clinton did win most of the votes the American people cast among the candidates and she still lost; and d) Trump has already cornered the market on preening, unwarranted confidence in one's own ability.

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Street medicine brings health care to the homeless

Night Ministry medical case manager Tiffany Green talks to a homeless man on Lower Wacker Drive.

     You can't always tell if it is a person in there, or if that person is alive or dead.
     "Night Ministry!" Jeff Ayoub calls out, approaching a human-shaped pile of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. "Night Ministry!"
     The Night Ministry is the last strand of our fraying safety net. Despite "ministry" in its name, it is not a religious group, except in the sense that all religions have scripture about helping the downtrodden, edicts generally ignored by the faithful but the linchpin of this 40-year-old Chicago organization, which runs a shelter and a medical clinic on a bus that offers health care, counseling and life necessities to Chicago's homeless.
     I tagged along Thursday because, one year ago, the Night Ministry began a program, where nurses carry backpacks filled with medical gear seek out the homeless under viaducts, in fields, and other odd places where they hide.
     "We were restricted with what we could do with the bus," said David Wywialowski, director health outreach.    

Smoking crack cocaine. 

     The Night Ministry was inspired by Dr. Jim Withers and his Street Medicine Institute in Pittsburgh. So last year they visited him, observed his operation, and brought it here.
     Homeless people are prone to asthma — one complained of the dust raised by cars blasting by. They have allergies from the rat feces scattered inches from their heads, difficulty filling prescriptions, early onset arthritis and undiagnosed diabetes. Not to mention the woes of addiction that cause many to fall off the grid in the first place.
     As we moved from one encampment to another, handing out bottles of water, food, Christmas gift bags of toiletries and sweets, it struck me that homeless people do not gather randomly. They might live on the street, but they separate out into communities that reflect society. Thus you have African Americans along one stretch of Lower Wacker Drive, while around the corner is a neighborhood of young white IV drug users.
     Guatemalans live under an overpass near Chinatown, where some have jobs in nearby restaurants. And the neatly tented people living under Lake Shore Drive at Wilson and Lawrence tend to be the de-institutionalized mentally ill.
     Just as in the society they've tumbled from, different groups scorn one another.
     "They really do," said Matthew Sorenson, 54, a nurse practitioner at the Night Ministry. "There's definitely an elitism among substance abusers. They separate themselves from other groups, have their own identities. The alcoholics will speak badly of the heroin users; the heroin users hate the meth addicts — everyone hates the meth addicts."
     Though they had invited me to see the medical program in action, on Thursday there wasn't a nurse with us — I interviewed Sorenson later, by phone. Requests for inhalers and other treatment requests by the dozens of homeless people we met had to be deferred.
     The big difference between what the Night Ministry is doing in Chicago and Pittsburgh's program is the lack of a Dr. Jim Withers. Their street medicine team started going out only one day a week, saw the enormous need, and now goes out five, but staffing and funding is still an issue.
     They are hoping to hire a part-time nurse, What they could really use are a bunch of medical volunteers — nurse practitioners who want to give back to the city, and maybe get some experience treating trench foot and scabies that they might never get at some shiny suburban hospital. Christmas is over, but the need remains, and one truth of helping such people is that the person you end up helping is yourself.

From the Economist: "A curfew tolls..."

    Yesterday's blog post was pretty dark for Christmas. Apologies. To be honest, I had something lighter and more fun in mind, the post below. But when it came time to actually set it down, I forgot, and so instead unloaded my random, almost unfiltered thoughts on the closing out of 2016. Yes, I realized it wasn't Christmasy, but I had just done that with "Mr. Tanner" the day before and, besides, it's really not my holiday. 
    But we're still in the post-Christmas lull; a day off for most people. Actually, now that I think of it, Dec. 26 is an even more apt—it's better to be lucky than good—since it's Boxing Day in Britain, the post-Christmas bank holiday. The perfect day for me to make up for my Debbie Downer Day yesterday, which people did complain about, with the belated delivery of the present of Christmas whimsy I meant to share yesterday.

     The Economist is one of those rare endeavors that is so well done, it makes you proud to be a human being. Reading it regularly is like having an extra brain. The magazine's key leap of faith is to assume its readers are as smart as the publication. Thus it doesn't pander, doesn't talk down, doesn't trivialize. Its "Holiday Double Issue" steps back from the clatter of news affairs and offers a smorgasbord of intelligence—an essay on the economic ramifications of the Norman conquest of 1066, something on silence, on clothespins. 
    And the obituary. The back page obituaries in the Economist are so consistently excellent that often I start reading the issue from the back, and I'm sure I'm not alone there. The new issue obituary is a rarity, in that it is not about a person, but a business—the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the oldest manufacturing firm in Britain, an institution stretching back some 500 years—no one is sure when it began, but it forged both Big Ben and the Liberty Bell (insisting that the famous crack was caused by rough handling by the rebels, not due to any flaw in manufacture). Whitechapel announced Dec. 2 that it would be closing, and the Economist's page about it chimes in celebration of its existence while tolling its passing. I had never heard of it, and assume most readers hadn't. Reading of its demise reminded me of G.K. Chesterton's famed summation that "Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." That always sounded negative, a slur on both the trade and its readers in a single stroke. But learning of Whitechapel's existence and demise in the same breath felt like an enormous benefit, and I wanted to share it with you here, as a kind of belated Christmas gift.

2016 was a good year, in that we were alive. Otherwise....

     The year is winding down, and I noticed people online making a point of listing some of the good things that happened this past year, lest 2016 be remembered solely as the year that a brittle, angry, unfit fraud told America he would make their dreams come true, and 60 million people fell for it. 
      To be honest, I was tempted to join in. And it was a good year for me—the new book did well, I traveled, from Joshua Tree National Park to Washington, D.C. to rural Japan. The boys kept hitting it out of the park, rounding the bases of college with an easy, casual grace.
     And really, considering the 14 billion years of void that come before we wink into consciousness, and the untold billions more of darkness and oblivion to come, any year on the sunny side of the grass is a good year.  It beats the alternative.
     But it feels wrong to pin a few lacy highlights on 2016, hoping they'll obscure the gathering disaster. It isn't just Trump's election, but a worldwide retreat from the modern, interconnected, tolerant, intelligent, caring, scientific approach that got us to this world of smart phones and flatscreen TVs and CT scans. We've gone off the rails, from Britain and Brexit to the Philippines and Dutarte, with God knows what's to come. The dice are tumbling, the world is tumbling, bobbing along in the rushing sewer of events that flows through the ditch we've fallen into. If we're going to be at war with China in a year, or watching boxcars of Mexicans rumble south, I don't want to have history catch me showing slides of my as-yet-unruined life up until the moment the whole thing goes to hell. 
    One of the many reasons 2016 was a good year is because 2017 is going to be worse. I'm fairly certain of that. Oh sure, Trump is erratic, and can renege on an insane promise as easily as he can make one. But again, there is a global context here. It isn't just us. And if it were, the prelude is so ghastly and horrifying we already have begun to re-jigger down our standards of exactly what ghastly and horrifying means. Donald Trump sent out one tweet recently that, while no worse than dozens if not hundreds of others, seems to me to show just what a pickle this country has put itself in. 
     As you probably know, the inauguration looms, and the usual A list of stars is balking at the idea of performing for this awful man. So far he has a few corporate entertainers -- the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Rockettes, though not without individual dancers raising a howl of protest. Some child, 16, who obviously doesn't know better, will sing the National Anthem. 
     If you or I were in Trump's situation, we'd nod, and wonder if perhaps we weren't conducting ourselves in an ideal manner, given that all professional entertainment was shunning us. Or we'd lose ourselves in the million important details of putting together an administration.
    Not Donald Trump. Not pettiness incarnate. Here's the tweet:

      The first sentence is an obvious lie. Donald Trump's entire life has been one long genuflection at the gilded void of celebrity, in himself and others. The idea that he would reject any mildly famous person is laughable. Then he somehow twists that into a barb at Hillary Clinton -- these celebrities failed to elect her, so he doesn't want them. He wants "the PEOPLE!" The vox populi who elected him. The lumpen proletariat -- and I sincerely feel for them. It blows not to have a job, an industry, to be so hateful that you look at our departing First Family and see only apes, their elegance and intelligence and dignity for eight years unperceived, meaning nothing to you. That's a level of narrowness and crazy I can only squint my eyes and imagine.
    And it blows to be in that precarious position and be duped, to place your trust in a con-man, and only realize after the bank account is drained that the Nigerian Prince who promised to share his fortune with you, provided you put up some earnest money, was not real after all. Not that I expect them to grasp that, soon or ever. You become invested in the deceit you fall for. Better to be cheated than a fool. 
    We've turned our country over to this man and these people. That's an enormous pile of shit that will counterbalance all the individual personal good we could possibly heap on the other tray of the 2016 scale. 
    Not that I am despairing, I'm not. Life has become more complicated and difficult and awful for millions of Americans than it would have been had Hillary Clinton won, while millions of others are ululating over good that will never come their way, except through shared delusion. I am confident good will come from this — after years of suffering, certainly. But it will come. It's coming now. Each ghastly day of jaw-dropping revelation will be one day, one step toward reaching -- and we assume eventually passing through and then, please God, putting behind us -- whatever cataclysm the world is heading toward. 
     It would not help anybody to  suggest that my buying a snowblower somehow slightly mitigates the year America was brought low, garlanded with shame, and drop-kicked into a nightmarish hall of mirrors hell the dimensions of which we can only guess at for now. I won't do it.

"Music was his life, it was not his livelihood."

      While I don't want to become one of those guys who can't stop working, one challenge I have is the intersection between what I find fun and interesting and what I consider work. Wondering about "O Holy Night" on Wednesday got me thinking it might be a good Christmas Eve post, if only to share that Jennifer Nettles video, which everyone should listen to. But digging into why I like the song brought me to Harry Chapin and Martin Tubridy, the discovery of whom prompted me to polish up this blog post and offer it to the newspaper, where it's running as a front page column Saturday. I'm posting it here in longer version—I have to tuck in under 700 words at the paper—because I wrote it on my day off. While Tubridy was identified on a Harry Chapin fan site in 2004, and in Wikipedia, it hasn't, to my knowledge, been in any newspaper outside of Weston, Connecticut. Making it news, of a sort, in my eyes. Anyway, It seemed worth pulling together in time for Christmas.

     Saturday night is Christmas Eve, and while I don't usually write a column for Saturdays, this fell in my lap late in the week. It isn't quite a Christmas miracle, more of a Christmas wonder, as you'll see if you can bear with me to the end.
     On Wednesday, an acquaintance asked if I were doing anything for Christmas. Yes, I replied, as always, on Christmas Eve, I'll play R&B singer Tevin Campbell's version of "O Holy Night."
     "It isn't celebrating Christmas, like having a tree," I explained. "It's just a pretty song."
     If you like that, my acquaintance said, you should hear Jennifer Nettles sing it. He sent me a link.
     Wow. Tevin Campbell has been topped.

     As I listened, I wondered: there are lots of carols, many quite beautiful. Why "O Holy Night"? Kinda religious for me, with all that falling on one's knees and nights divine. A French carol, incidentally, composed in 1847, the familiar English lyrics written in 1855 by a Unitarian minister, John Sullivan Dwight.
    I pulled at the thread, and immediately realized: Harry Chapin.

Harry Chapin

     When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of his songs about sad, thwarted people. Many dismissed them as sentimental, but to me they were moving. He had a couple hits—"Cats in the Cradle," "Taxi." I liked him enough to go see him twice in 1978, at Blossom Music Center outside Cleveland, and at Pick-Staiger Hall in Evanston. At both concerts he did something I had never seen a performer do, before or since. After the Blossom show, he stood amongst the fans, signing his "Every Year is World Hunger Year" t-shirt. I bought one and he signed it. 
     And at the Evanston show, he was running late coming straight from the airport. A student with a guitar was pressed into service, as an impromptu warm-up to distract the crowd until he arrived, and after he did, he not only thanked the kid, but had him sing a little with him. Later in the show, Chapin stepped around the microphone and sang, acappello and unamplified. He had a powerful voice.
    Of all his catalogue of songs, about small people and their frustrated dreams, the one that really got to me was "Mr. Tanner," the story of a mediocre talent from Ohio that begins:

Mister Tanner was a cleaner from a town in the Midwest.
And of all the cleaning shops around he'd made his the best.
But he also was a baritone who sang while hanging clothes.
He practiced scales while pressing tails and sang at local shows.

    But the joy music brought to him wasn't enough—fame beckoned.  His friends urge him to do something with his talent. Mr. Tanner gives in, goes to New York to try to grab the brass ring. He holds a recital.  In the song, Chapin recites the scathing review: 

     Mr. Martin Tanner, baritone, of Dayton Ohio, made his town hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary for it to be consistently interesting....

     Tanner returns to Dayton and never sings again, except late at night, softly to himself, sorting through the clothes.
      At several points in the song, Chapin bassist Big John Wallace sings the refrain of "O Holy Night," a soaring counter-melody.
    "Fallllll on your knees, hearrrrr the angels' voices..."
     So that's where "O Holy Night" came from, pressed into my mind by Mr. Tanner.
     But why is "O Holy Night" in the middle of a pop song about a cleaner from Dayton? That was trickier. Harry Chapin died in a fiery car accident in 1981—in a VW Golf, if I remember correctly, something that kept me from ever wanting to drive in small cars.
      I tried his surviving brother Tom, put in a call to the Harry Chapin Foundation, which carried on his work to fight world hunger. 
     The answer was waiting in an obscure interview in a Chapin fan publication from 2004, where Wallace is asked that exact question. He replied: "It was spliced together because it was operatic, and Harry knew it from Grace Church. It came from a review he read about Martin Tubridy and is the actual review."
     Tubridy was an ad man, not a cleaner. He was from Astoria, Queens, not Dayton, Ohio. But he really was a baritone who sang at local shows, good enough, at least in his own mind, that he rented Carnegie Hall and put on a performance. The New York Times sent a music critic. Its single paragraph backhand March 28, 1971 on page 63:
     "Martin Tubridy, a New York bass‐baritone, made his local debut in Carnegie Recital Hall on Friday night with Mitchell Andrews at the piano. His performance of two Purcell songs and Schumann's 'Liederkreis' cycle was not up to professional standards, lacking tonal steadiness and adequate phrasing...."
     That's what inspired Chapin to write the song, which appears on his 1974 album, "Short Stories." After Wallace outed him, people began calling Tubridy, asking: was he Mr. Tanner? Was he from Dayton? 
     So Tubridy was a little frosty when I phoned. But once he realized I wasn't one of those people, he warmed.
     No, he hadn't been a Chapin fan, he said, or had any idea he was the inspiration of the song until a decade ago. 
     "I fell in love with his music once I found out about him," he said.
     Unlike Mr. Tanner, Tubridy did not quit. He kept singing, despite the negative reviews—there were more to come—and a good thing, too. He met his wife, Marlane, while both were performing in an off-Broadway production of Guys & Dolls. For a long time, he didn't want to be associated with Mr. Tanner.
     "I knew about this, but just wanted to push it out of the back of my life," Tubridy said. "Only when Howie Fields called did I realize what it means to people."
     Fields is the drummer of the Chapin family band, which kept performing after Harry Chapin's death, headed by brothers Tom and Steve. Fields called over the summer, wanting to know if Tubridy, now in his 70s, would perform the 'O Holy Night' part in "Mr. Tanner" at a concert last month raising money for the Harry Chapin Foundation.
     "The man just gave and gave and gave," said Tubridy. "I decided to do the performance with the band."

Martin Tubridy (left) and Howie Fields before the Nov. 12 concert
 (Photograph by Peter A. Blacksberg © 2016)

     You can see the Nov. 12 performance on YouTube.
     "It was surreal," Tubridy said. "It doesn't seem like this could actually happen. A standing ovation. Incredible, really."
     There really is only one thing left to say:
      Mr. Martin Tubridy, baritone, of Weston, Connecticut, sang the 'O Holy Night' counter melody in 'Mr. Tanner' with a fullness, strength and conviction which, while at one point hard to hear over the audience cheering, was consistently interesting.
     Particularly, at the very end, when the lyrics are, "He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole," but you hear Tubridy shift to, "it just made me whole."
     Music will do that. Critics pan and the years pass. But if you stick with your dreams long enough, keep singing, and are very lucky, maybe, just maybe, you'll get to do your stuff for people who cheer and critics who rave. Or even if you never do—the usual result—just the trying will make you whole. Merry Christmas.

A taste of heaven

     I visited a slice of heaven and a glimpse into hell Thursday, all within the span of a couple hours.
     Heaven might be overstating the case. But it was very white, and lovely. Which came as I surprise, because I was driving east along Lawrence Avenue, one of the more unlovely streets in Chicago. It was getting on 9 a.m., I had not had my coffee, and I was looking for a place, anyplace, to get a cup before I arrived at my destination. I pulled over at a Greek bakery, Hella's Pastry Shop, 2627 W. Lawrence -- only now, as I type it, does the name seem ironic.
    "Do you have coffee?" I asked, and as Gus, who has worked there 30 years, poured it, I looked around. Usually a bakery has a wide variety of offerings, but this place had one, predominantly. Tray after tray of kourabies—to use the bakery's spelling—a Greek Christmas cookie, filling the glass case, and the wall behind the counter. The effect was surreal, cinematic, charming. 
    I asked about the cookies, of course, and Gus suggested a dozen at $9.50. I already had breakfast, so compromised with a half dozen.  Gus gave me a complimentary honey cookie, wrapped in a napkin, and I ate that on the spot. It was very good, and I mentioned another Greek restaurateur of my acquaintance. His honey cookies ... Gus knew him, and he and I exchanged a knowing, sorrowful glance. Yes, well, baking is an art, is it not? And art, by definition, is not open to all, despite effort and intention.
      The bakery, he said, has been there for 50 years. These things take time to perfect. There was a sign in the window I admired on my way out. "All nicely wrapped." That was very sweet, in a way as sweet as the cookies. 
     The kourabies were very powdery -- not the best cookie to eat sitting in your car, but I managed. They were worth the care needed to eat them and the clean-up required, some diligent brushing and flicking. These crescents can be made with almond, or walnut, but these seemed a straight shortbread. I limited myself to two, saving the rest for the family, though that took an application of will as the day progressed. 
    Leading us to hell. As for hell, well, that's more complicated, as hell tends to be. You'll have to read my column on Monday. There too, I might be overstating the case, but again, only slightly.