Italy Flashback #4: Road worrier misses home

     I'm on spring break. And since my older boy will soon be exploring Venice, I thought I would reprint a column from when I visited there in 1999.

 

Venice, by John Singer Sargent (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   DATELINE: ABOARD THE EUROSTAR TO VENICE — The moment I opened my laptop computer on the little pale gray fold-out table at my seat on this lovely Italian train, flashing through the Tuscan countryside at 90 miles an hour, it struck me:
      "This is it. This is the dream. The success fantasy from all those financial security TV commercials."
     You know what I'm talking about. Those companies — and I have no idea what they do. Something financial. They take your money and, in theory, give you back more money, keeping a bit for themselves.
     Anyway, you see them all the time on TV, flashing images of the kind of good life you'll enjoy if you do business with them. You'll stride across cobblestone streets while pigeons take flight. You'll confer with colleagues, eat room service breakfasts, climb into luxury cars.
     And, inevitably, you will curl up with your laptop in scenic spots -- on mountaintops in Katmandu, beaches in Bimini, at the end of rustic wooden docks in Maine and — I was thrilled to realize — on foreign trains while terra-cotta towns fly by.
     I've seen the image 100 times.
     Reality of course doesn't quite measure up. Those men floating across the globe like milkweed tufts seem so at ease, so happy.
      Even after two hours on the train, listening to light pop music on the tiny pair of headphones they give you, even after the nice man came by with the trio of fancy cookies handed out in first class (second class gets a trio of malt biscuits), I didn't feel quite at ease, not the International 1999 Businessman in Motion.
     For one, I was worried about being robbed. Sports columnist Rick Telander, a man projecting an air of calm, competence and control, got back from Italy the week before I left, and reported the only flaw of his trip was getting his briefcase lifted on the train. This was deeply troubling to me. I figured, if it happened to a cool character like Telander, who played one-on-one with Michael Jordan, what would happen to me? Robbed and beaten and left naked and weeping by the side of the tracks. In the rain. In Italy.
     So whenever I walk the 10 feet to the bathroom, I have to fold up my laptop, tuck it under my arm, and cart it with me. And even then, I cast a long, appraising look at the pair of innocent, grandmotherly types dozing in the seats across the aisle from me, trying to determine if they were tensing to leap up and rifle my luggage the moment I step into the bathroom.
     But they haven't, yet. In fact, none of the thieves waving newspapers and pickpocketing people that every guidebook warns about in five separate places have made an appearance. I've been wearing this stupid money belt, fishing around in my pants like a man with a rash, for a week, for no reason. Nobody has so much as asked me for spare change.
     Perhaps because I've been gone for 40 days — the same amount of time, I realize now, that Noah was on the ark. I don't know how people in times past traveled for years. Even with Venice before me, the city of Thomas Mann and Henry James, do you know what I find myself thinking about? The bratwurst sandwich at the Berghoff stand-up bar. Awash in mustard and sauerkraut. Fresh rye bread. Companion pickle. Stein of cold Berghoff brew. I'm not saying that I won't enjoy Venice. But that's not what, at this point, I'm really, honestly, looking forward to. Maybe some people aren't made to travel.
                          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 6, 1999

Rome flashback #3 -- You don't have to Catholic to dig the Vatican

     I wasn't exactly a simpleton as a young man, but re-reading these columns from 1999, they do have a certain gee-whiz quality that was wrung out of me in my 40s and 50s. Don't get me wrong, I'm still looking forward to going back to the Vatican someday very soon. 

Interior View of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, by Giovanni Piranesi (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     VATICAN CITY—As a good Jewish boy, I don't know why I felt the need to bolt here the moment I got to Rome, even before seeing the Colosseum or the Parthenon or any of the other scenic piles of rubble that define this ancient place.
     My father, with whom I'm traveling, certainly had other priorities. He wanted to see the synagogue -- he always wants to see the synagogue in every city, though he doesn't go at home regularly. I think it makes him comfortable while abroad, the way some people go to McDonald's.
     But the synagogue in Rome, which turned out to be guarded by four cops with machine guns, wasn't on the top of my list. The Vatican was.
     I'm not certain why. I can't recall anybody grabbing me by the shirt front, drawing their face close to mine and babbling that St. Peter's Basilica is the most fantastic place ever constructed, the boldest architecture ever to rise out of the human mind, and to see it is to impoverish every other wonder you've seen in the world.
     But it is. Or it was, for me.
     Perhaps it was that my childhood was spent building things out of blocks. The square in the Vatican is what a child would build if he or she had all the blocks in the world. An enormous dreamscape flanked by curving colonnades of paired columns built around a gigantic Egyptian obelisk.
     And that's just the appetizer. As grand as the square is, it contracts to nothing and falls away the moment you step inside the Basilica. The interior nearly defies language. The first thought to fight its way out of my blown mind, boggled from the dim enormousness of St. Peter's, was that here is the limit of communication. Mere words—"gigantic," "soaring," "grand," "wonderful," "119 meters tall"—struggle to get anywhere near the reality. No photos, video, CD-ROM would offer more than a whiff of the collect-your-jaw-off-the-pavement impact of the place. You just have to go there.
     I don't mean that as a bland cliche—that a person has to go to the Vatican to appreciate it. I mean that as a specific command—that you, the particular person reading this right now, must go there, if you possibly can. Sure, it costs money. Maybe you can't afford it today. But it's something to shoot for. I'd make the 10-hour plane trip just to walk through St. Peter's for an hour, then go home. Really.
     And I'm not even Catholic. I can't imagine the effect on people to whom the images are more than bravura examples of art and architecture. It must be overwhelming.
     Many of the adult Catholics I know do not have the most charitable feelings toward the church, and they couldn't see the Vatican the way I did, without baggage, as an amazing structure erected by one of the world's many faiths. A Catholic co-worker, hearing me praise the Vatican as the gem of Italy, contorted her face in a mask of disgust. "I hated it," she said, adding that it seemed obscene in light of all the coins they dropped into collection plates for the poor each Sunday.
     Well, yes, I can see that. Perhaps there was something disloyal in my embracing the Vatican. But that's how I felt.
     The Basilica provided an hour of respite from hard feelings, a misericord, to use the church's term. It was emotional and not intellectual. I tried to remind myself to be offended, but it didn't work. As I made a slow circuit of the place, from Michelangelo's Pieta to Bernini's canopy and back, I tried to tell myself that this was the stone proof of how the simple teachings of a carpenter's son could be inflated into a fever dream of power and splendor. That this was the marble pep rally for every pogrom over the last 400 years.
     But I didn't believe it. Maybe I was duped by deft stonemasonry. But I found myself thinking as I walked, head tipped so far backward at times I almost lost my balance, "Of course they'd repress dissent. Who wouldn't, coming home to this every night?"
     Perhaps it boils down to the question of whether you can separate artwork from the circumstances of its creation. In my view, that's like not enjoying your dinner if the chef is a Republican. You can let matters of politics influence matters of taste, but why?
     And the Catholic Church, if not perhaps a force for universal good, isn't burning heretics anymore. Times change.
     Besides, I left puzzling over a deeper mystery. St. Peter's was built almost 500 years ago. For the last half millennium, people have been making pilgrimages to it, and coming away, as I was, amazed. A thousand years from now they will still be visiting, still be amazed.
     And what have we done, in this brief century, that can compare? Are people going to file by that first McDonald's, preserved as a museum, in awe of the splendor of franchising? Maybe the power of our science and ideas will amaze future generations. But I don't think so. As my visit to St. Peter's shows, a tall ceiling will trump ideas every time.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times July 4, 1999

Flashback 2010: Religions share core yet keep us divided

 

    I'm taking a few weeks off. But no worries, I won't leave you high and dry. Since Passover began Monday night, this is something from the eve of Passover, 2010.  Back then my column ran a whole page and had subheads, and I've left those in.

     OPENING SHOT    

     Passover begins tonight (at exactly 7:13 p.m., for you fans of precision, though of course there's debate over this). Easter follows this Sunday (without any argument about its minute of arrival; with such efficiency is the world won).

     There are similarities to the holidays -- both involve eggs, for instance. There is a sense of rebirth, of springtime liberation to both, with Passover conveying this through the exodus from Egypt, while Easter pivots on the resurrection of Jesus.

     It feels almost naughty to point out similarities. That's because to see your religion reflected in another risks undercutting its unique validity. What are you saying? That all of this is the same? That one is as good as another?

     Of course not. Oh no. Yours of course is the one, true way, while the rest of mankind are deluded sinners pointlessly grinding out their empty, meaningless lives until their inevitable rendezvous with The Pit.  

     All religions have this same piece of code written into their programs somewhere: "Won't it be great when every single person believes exactly like we do? God will love that, and lots of good stuff will happen."

     I prefer to view the various faiths like art students in a life drawing class. Each religion gazes at the model, whatever Ineffable Secret Something sits at the heart of life (or Elusive Neutral Nothing, if you prefer), and crafts its own representation, using matzo balls and chocolate eggs, stars and crosses.

     Not a popular view, and certain to irk those convinced that the whole point of faith is to grant themselves license to pour contempt upon their inferiors. A viable approach when the world began and ended at your village. But it's a much bigger world now, and we can all play nicely together. Or not.

A TORAH FINDS A HOME

     For all its adjustments to modernity -- off with beards, away with dietary laws -- Judaism is surprisingly resistant to Gutenberg's invention, movable type.

     Maybe because Gutenberg was printing Bibles. But while conservative churches have no difficulty using printed texts, even the most liberal, offbeat, incense-and-drums Jewish congregation still wants a hand-printed Torah -- which can be a problem, because the scrolls take a year to make, are rare and expensive, and there's always someone trying to burn them along with the people reading them.

     Why the scribes and turkey quills? The thinking seems to be: "It's the word of God -- let's make a big deal setting it down."

     The result is without question beautiful. Whenever friends mention my son's bar mitzvah, they inevitably cite one particular moment. (No, not when the jumbo Hummer conveying the bar mitzvah boy burst through a wall of dry ice fog to the pounding opening of Queen's "We Will Rock You!" -- actually, we didn't do any of that North Shore potlatch excess, through a happy union of having neither the inclination nor the money.)

     The moment that everyone remarks upon was when our rabbi, Eitan Weiner-Kaplow, invited my son's friends to come up and watch him read from the Torah. They whooshed over -- a dozen teenage guys -- and formed a semi-circle around him.

     You don't see a real Torah every day, not up close. They're big, over 2 feet tall, each of the 304,805 letters drawn with great care. Torahs are not the sort of thing that strangers show up and give to you, but that's happened a few weeks back to my synagogue, Shir Hadash.

     Deborah Simon, a lady from Kansas City, arrived at the temple office on Dundee Road carrying a bundle wrapped in white plastic and bubble wrap and laid it on a table.

     Rabbi Weiner-Kaplow opened the bundle.

     "This is a beauty, folks," he said. "This is exquisite -- beautiful calligraphy that isn't seen much anymore."

     The bundle came from Kansas City, where Simon had tried to start a reconstructionist congregation (reconstructionism is a newer branch of Judaism that tries to buff the faith, shedding its more sexist elements and adding actual music).

     Not that the Torah was penned in Kansas. It was created in Romania, before the war. Jews fleeing the Nazis gave it to gentiles in Klowz, who hid it inside a hollow wall, awaiting their return.

     "But they never returned," said Simon.

     The Torah found its way to Israel, and then to Kansas, and then to Shir Hadash, where Simon had attended a bar mitzvah.

     "Everyone was so warm, so welcoming," she said. "There was so much joy." When her congregation fizzled, she didn't want its Torah to end up in a closet; she wanted people to read it.

     With Passover upon us, Weiner-Kaplow turned to the portion dealing with the Exodus, where the letters themselves are stylized into a compressed checkerboard-- "some say to represent waves, some say to building blocks," he said. "That's the way the Song of the Sea is always written."

     He read a bit of the Hebrew, and translated:

     "And the children of Israel walked on the dry land in the midst of the waters."

     That is one of the more subtler joys of being Jewish, one that I don't believe is familiar to non-Jews -- heck, I'm sure many Jews live their whole lives unaware of it, a certain walking-through-the-sea-yet-still-dry element.

     Let's face it; we're not exactly on the winning team, compared to the big boys of faith. Yet with tyrants from Nebuchadnezzar to Ahmadinejad hot for our blood, we're still here, for another Passover, reclining on pillows and eating macaroons, undrowned. It's a miracle, which, unlike Biblical miracles, we can be certain, actually occurred because it is occurring now, in our own day.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 2010

Rome Flashback #2: the little things jump out

    My older son is hanging out in Rome, I can report on good authority. I'm reprinting some columns from when I was there in 1999, so that I can keep my focus on il pranzo which means, well, you'll have to read it to find out. Of course the lira is gone now, replaced by the euro.

Portrait of a Man (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    ROME—At first it seemed to be just another funky fashion: a man wearing orange pants. I mean bright orange, Popsicle orange, signal orange, the color usually associated with life jackets and distress flares.

     Italians dress pretty much like Americans. A little sharper, maybe, a little snugger. But I hadn't seen anything too strange, certainly nothing as wild as all those 14-year-old American tourist girls with geometric bands hennaed around their necks. (Gosh, I hope it's henna, and not a tattoo. Imagine selling that to Mom.)

     Still, my first reaction to the orange pants had been bland acceptance. Why not? Europe in 1999.
     But the orange-panted man was unlike most every other man in Italy. He wasn't strolling down the street, gesturing expansively with one hand while pressing a cell phone the size of a pack of playing cards against his ear with the other. He was standing in a trench, working on a sewer pipe. I stopped, and saw that the guy with the orange pants was accompanied by other men, also wearing orange pants.
      Then it hit me. Not fashion, but practicality. People drive like lunatics here. A roiling commotion of motor scooters, tiny cars, lumbering Mercedes, all hurtling pell-mell around each other. A man standing in the street for any appreciable time is in mortal peril. Visibility is crucial for survival. Besides, it gets hot here, and while a construction worker might take off his safety vest, he certainly wasn't going to take off his pants, not in the street, not in Italy.
     I know one goes to foreign countries to see the splendors — the churches and castles and art museums. And I saw those and enjoyed them, at least until numbness set in. But I observed with keener interest, I admit, the small-yet-smart differences that Italian culture has from our own, the slight improvements.
     Some are slight indeed: The toilet in our hotel here had a small indenture in the cover, exactly four fingers wide, located just where you would reach down to flip the seat up. Not a revolution, but a nice touch.
     Or take money (and boy, do they ever, with both hands). Of course their money is beautiful, colorful, well-etched, far superior to the dull green clumps of ill-wrought lettuce we wave around. They also make a greater attempt to differentiate between denominations. A 1,000 lire bill is tiny; it looks like play money, and basically it is, considering what it will buy. The 5,000 lire bill is larger, the 10,000 lire larger, and 100,000 larger still. I assume a 1 million lire bill (about $550) would be enormous, but I never got my hands on one, afraid I would blow it all in one spot, say on a shirt, easy to do in a nation where you are charged just for sitting down in a restaurant.
     The chair fee points to the flip side. For every good Italian idea, there was a matching bad idea or bit of absurdity, at least to American eyes.  

Portrait of a Woman (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Consider mail service. Since smallness and slowness (except when commuting) are cherished values here, the Italian mails are even worse than the notoriously bad U.S. Postal Service. This was demonstrated to me in dramatic fashion one morning in the main post office in Rome.
     Hoping to wow my friends with letter postmarked in a foreign land (my circle doesn't get out much) I took a handful of letters to the post office, and purchased stamps from the slumped, indifferent clerk.
     Italian mailboxes are red, suitcase-sized metal boxes bolted to the wall at eye level, about half the volume of squat, U.S., ground-standing counterparts.
     I pushed one letter through the slot and, pushing in the next, felt my previous letter. Peering through the slot, I noticed the mail was jammed to the brim, my two letters sitting on top at about 10 a.m., across from the front desk inside the main post office. Imagine what boxes must be like in the provinces -- packed like garbage cans at Taste of Chicago.
     Worried about theft, I reached in, plucked my two letters back from top, and went to find another, less densely populated box.
     The postal clerk, by the way, had a cigarette dangling from his fingers. American smokers might consider a trip overseas just for the nostalgic thrill of seeing people strolling in and out of stores and businesses while smoking, unashamed.
     But the best idea in Italy is one that might take a bit of explaining to an American audience. It's called il pranzo, or in the closest English translation, "lunch." Not that the average American meal, bolted back with joyless haste, has much resemblance to a leisurely Italian midday repast. How important is lunch here? They close the stores. They close the banks. The streets empty.
     The next two hours or so are spent spooling pasta, cutting into veal, pouring ceramic pitchers of red wine, spooning gelato (they don't need to watch their diets here because all those cigarettes are going to kill them anyway).
     The Italians sit and sit and sit, talk and talk and talk, eat and eat and eat. As will come to no surprise to regular readers of this column, it is a concept that I immediately and wholeheartedly embraced.

                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 27, 1999

Rome flashback #1 "There never is a next time"

(From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     My older son is studying at the Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris this semester (and if you suspect I enjoy saying that, you're darn right). But he's smart enough to take his spring break in the Eternal City. In honor of that, and supporting the idea of breaks from work, whatever your work happens to be, I thought I would join him in spirit and take a breather from rolling this stone up the hill. Though I'm on vacation, we can still tour Italy along with him, if we puff the dust off a few columns from 1999, when I was in Italy myself, after the cruise with my father that turned into "Don't Give Up the Ship." I imagine that you never read these columns or, if you did, you don't remember. Heck, I sure didn't remember these columns and I both lived and wrote them.  Of course, forgetting them might have been protective, some kind of submerged interior defense mechanism. Whatever the ungraspable truth, the great computer in the sky never forgets.

     THE STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR  — Passage through this famous channel was supposed to be a moment of drama -- Europe off the port bow, Africa off the starboard.
     With the strait, at its narrowest, about seven miles wide, we'd have a good look at both continents, simultaneously, plus a gander at the famous Prudential logo . . . excuse me, I mean, the Rock of Gibraltar.
     It didn't work that way. Fog. A morning mist, plus the fact that the strait is sort of like a two-way street, with ships heading into the Mediterranean hugging the coast of Morocco, and ships heading out into the Atlantic sticking close to Spain. We saw the beach resort towns on the Moroccan coast.
     Which is more than what I saw of Gibraltar. No Rock. No Pillars of Hercules. No nothing. I leaned over the rail and gazed hard at the murky horizon and thought: next time.
     There never is a next time, which is what can make traveling so frantic. You find yourself in a new place, somewhere far away you've never been before and are never going back to, and a sort of madness sets in: You feel compelled to see everything; every sight, every monument.
     Travelers reach a point where they aren't relaxing, aren't having fun, but lunging from one requirement to the next, all so they can claim they went there when they get back home — "We saw the Royal Palace and the Art Museum and the Shimmering Monolith and the Deep Gorge..."
     Big whoop. I am of a different school. I believe in going somewhere and sitting there and not doing much of anything, just like the locals do. I was in Barbados for four days late in May. People off the ship were renting cars and visiting caves, touring rum factories, strolling through cigar-rolling plants. They scuba-dived, sailed, fished and signed up for day cruises.
     I sat on the beach. After I had been to one beach twice, passion for novelty overcame me, and I went to a different beach. Big mistake. Rocks. And an oversweet rum punch without any detectable rum in it. Disaster.
     So we bolted back to the original beach. We sat in the same place. We stared at the same aqua waters. It was very restful. Educational, too—Banks beer, the local brew, is good, cold and enjoyable. I never knew that.
     I cannot take full credit. I am learning at the feet of a master. Alone, I might have broken down and actually done something. But I'm with my father, who has a genius for inactivity. For instance, I was weak and felt compelled to swim in the ocean, even though the ocean is wet and salty and inconvenient.
     My father didn't swim. He was never tempted. He has perfected a scowling quick shake of the head that snuffs out any whiff of initiative. "Are you interested in the rum tour?" I asked. "No way," he said, doing the head shake. "I toured a winery in California." I didn't see the connection, but let it go. He's always saying stuff like that. When I suggested seeing the Vatican, he said, "I already saw it." He saw it in 1952.
     I have not yet resigned myself to spending three days in Rome sitting at an outdoor restaurant, writing postcards. I have a plan, at least to see the Vatican. My plan is to tell my father there's a Vatican Square Borders Bookstore; he loves Borders. We'll wander around, looking for it, noting the sights as we pass.
    After an hour, I'll slap my head and say, "Oh gee, I'm sorry. It's not at the Vatican. It's next to the Colosseum." And away we'll go.
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times June 22, 1999

The Great Loop Flood, 25 years on

     My first thought was: A bomb went off.
     An atomic bomb, maybe. Why else would thousands of office workers be evacuating the Loop at midday?
     The truth — not that we knew it right away — was far less cataclysmic but in a sense even stranger.

     It was noon, and I was getting ready to head downtown for the 2-to-10 p.m. shift as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. I turned on the TV in that pre-Internet era, and the noon news showed workers carrying files, streaming from buildings downtown.
     In September 1991, workers aboard a “spud scow” from the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company had been on the Chicago River, replacing rotten pilings — those wooden poles driven into the river bottom to protect the foundations of drawbridges from errant boats — at the southeast end of the Kinzie Street bridge.
     Putting new pilings exactly where the rotted ones proved difficult. The bridge tender’s house was in the way. So they moved the new pilings — wooden telephone poles chained together — about a yard south. Just enough of a shift — by a foot, it was later estimated — that it cracked the ceiling of the network of tunnels that crisscross downtown underground.
     The arched tunnels were hand-dug around 1900 ....

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J.J. Madia, the city employee in charge of making sure the tunnels never flood again. 

Garry McCarthy's real friends would be telling him not to run

     The reattachment surgery must have been a success.
     Former Supt. Garry McCarthy, whose manhood resided in a jar on Rahm Emanuel's desk for nearly five years while he ran Chicago's troubled police department into a ditch, seems to be working himself up toward taking a crack at steering the whole city.
     I misstate the case. The East Coast transplant is not himself considering candidacy. But "a lot of people" are urging him to run. He is just the reporter, odd for a man who so scorns the media. Just passing along information, noting that he himself is not the mayoral sort. Politics is "not in my DNA," McCarthy said. He's "not very good at that."
     I bet. In that light, maybe the surgery wasn't a complete success — the man can't even float his own candidacy without fobbing off the blame onto others. We are supposed to see this feint as modesty — a cliche 400 years ago when Shakespeare put it in Richard III's mouth: "Alas, why would you heap these cares on me? I am unfit for state and majesty."
     McCarthy wants to be begged. He expects us to throw our hats in the air, let out a cheer and demand the salvation he is too humble to offer without prodding.
     I'd prefer a list of those friends' names. Who are they and why do they think McCarthy should be our next mayor? Aren't we already enduring one bantam cock on the fifth floor? Is their solution really finding a different rooster?

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