First day of summer

   The first day of summer. 
   Hooray. 
   That didn't sound very convincing, did it?
   I wish I could whole-heartedly laud Beach Boys songs, ballgames, picnics, something warm and fun and scented with woodsmoke.
   But I don't have the stomach for it. One season melting into the next.
   Maybe it's Trump; he is becoming normalized, isn't he? I never thought so many people would debase themselves so much for so little. I'll grant Trump this: I knew he was a fraud. But man, he's a good fraud. Effective. He lays out the trap and people jostle like piglets at a sow to be the next to fall in.
    Maybe it's something else. Maybe  I'm just distracted by the uncertain future of the Sun-Times, rattling like dice in a cup. First it seemed we would be snatched up by Tronc, the corporate entity that owns the Tribune and a bunch of other newspapers. I was resigned to that — at least it would be something different; worst come to worst, we'd have to go work in the big box of Freedom Center. 
    Then Monday Edwin Eisendrath, the former alderman—to general astonishment—put in a realistic bid of $15 million, fronted by a bunch of unions. Not bad on its face -- I've been in a union for most of my 30 years at the newspaper. Unions have their flaws, but sure beat the hell out of no unions.
    This development got me wondering if I had ever written about Eisendrath — I am not always kind, and people bear grudges. 
    Luckily, just this once, when he was running for governor against Rod Blagojevich. A good sign right there. I seem to have gummed him but inflicted no lasting wound. I hope. 
     I also read in Robert Feder's column that, if the sale goes through, we'll all be working at 20 N. Racine (assuming I'm not fired, that is). I called up Google Map—about a mile from Union Station, only a couple blocks more than the current building. So that's something to feel good about. 
    I included the second item, as a stroll down coping-with-Islamic-terror lane.  And yes, I considered that now, on my hobby blog, I had my chance to do what I criticized the paper for not doing, to manfully publish the offending cartoon and let the chips fall where they may. And no, I'm not doing it. I have enough to worry about. Unlike the president, I can cop to it when I'm being hypocritical. It's a kind of freedom.

OPENING SHOT

     Democratic gubernatorial challenger Edwin Eisendrath has failed so far to entice Gov. Blagojevich to debate him on the issues—the governor no doubt figuring, "Heck, I've got $15 million in the kitty, why bother with 10th-grade civics class formalities?"
    Still, Eisendrath is not without options. I heard that he is being urged to stage a mock debate, perhaps against an Elvis impersonator, as the governor is a notorious Elvis fan.
     A funny idea. But could it possibly take place in the realm of dull reality? I placed a call to Eisendrath, who admitted that the concept is being pressed upon him.
     "I have two things to say about this," he said. "[Blagojevich] ain't nothing but a hound dog, and he's turning our state into Heartbreak Hotel."
     I wanted to leave it at that, but Eisendrath, who is not exactly Mr. Jolly (in a debate, I'd worry about Elvis winning), had to set the record straight.
     "I won't debate an Elvis impersonator—I might debate an empty chair piled with cash," he said. "This stuff is so serious—the state's broke—I don't want to make too much light of it."
     Why not? Crying won't fix anything.

ALMOST ALL THE NEWS FIT TO PRINT

     "But I've never even seen the drawing!" my wife said, standing in the kitchen, reading about the latest paroxysm of Islamic rage over some cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad.
     Don't hold your breath, Honey. With the notable exception of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the American media has gone and hid in the basement when it comes to the biggest story to roil international waters this year. A Danish cartoon has set off the Muslim world, embassies are being burned, people being killed. But we can't show you the image. Out of respect. For the rioters . . . er, for their faith.
     That's a bunch of bull. This isn't about respect—the media thumbs its nose at religion all the time. This is about fear. We're afraid, afraid to print the cartoons. We don't want our houses burned down.
     Since when did "deeply held" religious beliefs dictate what goes in the paper? Any daily newspaper is a stick in the eye of one or more of the world's religions, from the astrology pages to the bra ads. The very existence of a Sunday paper is an affront to the idea of the Christian Sabbath as a day of rest.
     Consider this: Jewish tradition also bans depicting images of God—you don't see human forms in most synagogues—but that doesn't keep every paper in the country from printing cartoons showing a big, bearded God, because Jews aren't going to start turning over automobiles in front of your newspaper office.
     It's easy to claim respect. No newspaper editorial says, "We don't want the threat and the hassle." I thought the New York Times' explanation in an editorial Tuesday morning was particularly disingenuous and prim. They rationalized not printing the cartoon this way:
     "That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words."
     What image isn't? "A woman kneeling, arms spread, over a student shot at Kent State." "A pile of bodies, including children, in a ditch at My Lai." Spike those photos!
     And "gratuitous," in my dictionary, is defined as "uncalled for, lacking good reason." I understand that the initial printing of the cartoons might have been exactly that.
     But what about now? Half the world's irate about a drawing. I'd say that's reason aplenty. But no, we can't show it to you, because then they'd be upset at us, too.
     Guess what? They already are. And were, last week and last year and 10 years ago. So now the Islamic street—to a small but very real degree—is editing your daily newspapers and censoring your TV (CNN blurred the images, as if they were child porn).
     Believe me—no one will be placated by our restraint, no hearts won by our timidity. Surrender today begets more surrender tomorrow. This cartoon is a lost battle—instead of them becoming more like us, we are becoming more like them. The fear that rules their lives is beginning to rule ours.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 2006

Can't we wait to pontificate until the blood is squeegeed away?

    Wouldn't it be nice if we could all agree that...
     No, scratch that, since we can't all agree on anything. And "nice" is pretty much off the table when it comes to discussing matters of national import. "Vile" is much more apt, and I can't see how the free-fire zone of contempt can be called a "discussion."
     So I'll just toss this concept out there, a single idea hocked from the frontal lobes and spat into the enormous bruise green whirling cyclone that is Media 2017.
     Wouldn't it be, ah, useful, if we could all at least consider that the period — say the first three days — immediately after the mass shootings which increasing mar and define our country is not the ideal time to chew on matters of public policy?
     Because really, what good does it do?
     The drawback of that is once such shootings happen every day — we're almost there now — then it'll never be appropriate to debate each other rationally about our political problems. Which is sort of where we are now anyway, though in the immediate after-echo of a bloodletting we are even less capable of civil discourse than we usually are, which is really saying something.    

     The news hits.  
     There is a moment of stupid shock, gazing dumbly at whatever carnage has just occurred. And then the howl is raised again. Everybody talking, nobody listening.
     Extremists who live to hate a particular group feel extra vindicated that their mean little biases have just been proved once again. On the opposite end of the spectrum, dewy dreamers who hope for impossible standards of warm political brotherhood announce that now is the moment when Americans who...

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A crumpled photo, and a daughter's search for the father she never met

     This is an odd, out-of-left-field story, my second big Sunday feature in two weeks. It happened this way—in March, Monica Scanlon called me. She had read "Drunkard" and for some reason thought I could help her find her father. Without the photograph above I don't think I would have written anything. But the fading Kodochrome was just the tantalizing detail that caught my interest. I spoke to her, spoke to her adoptive parents and her birth mother, at length, and something unexpected came into play. They were all so candid, unusually candid, that I felt I had a story, not so much because what they had to say was extraordinary, but the opposite.  It was ordinary, human, the sort of thing you don't see in the paper much. I set it aside for almost two months, went to Europe, finished the long falling piece that ran last week, and then luckily took it up again. I half expected the paper to shrug it off, but thankfully Paul Saltzman, our Sunday editor, liked it. 

     Monica Scanlon has never seen her father's face. Not in person. Not yet.
     All she has seen is one crumpled color photograph, nearly half a century old.
     The Greenville, South Carolina, woman, who’s the controller for a big construction company, was born in Memphis at a home for unwed mothers. Her mom was a Tennessee teenager who got in trouble with a boy from Chicago.
     It was 1970. Being pregnant without benefit of marriage back then, especially if you were Catholic, was shameful, something to be hidden. Her brother and sister wouldn't even learn about the baby until years later.
     The teenager named her newborn "Joan" — the baby's grandmother's name — in hopes her mother would soften and let her keep the girl. She didn't. Signing away her rights, weeping, she left her dark-haired daughter at an orphanage, saying goodbye to her forever, she thought.
     Five weeks later, on Oct. 12, 1970, the phone rang at the Nashville home of Dave and Pat Spilker. After several miscarriages over their five-year marriage, the couple had registered with Catholic Social Services. The caller said a baby was available. Pat Spilker, surprised, said the first thing that came to mind: They were supposed to go on vacation to Florida the next day.
     "Do you want this baby, or do you want to go on vacation?" the lady on the phone asked.
     They wanted a baby. They had only a few hours to prepare for the transition from childlessness to parenthood. Florida would wait.
     "I called my friend Carol and told her, 'We have to pick up our baby tomorrow I don't have one thing,' " Pat Spilker says. "She gave me some shirts and this box to bring the baby home in — a white, rectangular-shaped box with a little soft pad in it. Babies born in Madison, Tennessee, at that time came home in these boxes."

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The Ice Cream Truck Reflex

    Hapax legomenon is Greek -- well, the Latinized form of Greek, ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "thing once said."
    It's an obscure literary term referring to words that appear once in the whole swoop of literature, or once within an author's oeuvre. I learned it while reading Dante commentary -- scholars sometimes refer to words that appear just once in the 14,233 lines of The Divine Comedy as being "hapax."
    For example. In Robert and Jean Hollander's fine translation of Paradiso, the 97th line of the 32nd canto, Rispuose a la divina cantilena -- "From every side the blessed court all sang" — is explained by a lengthy note beginning, "The word cantilena, a hapax, would seem to refer specifically to Gabriel's song..." and going on to observe that Dante seems to have coined the word.
     I began writing yesterday's column about solar eclipse being a big deal in Carbondale—a city named for the coal found therein—with a digression explaining hapax, as a prelude to explaining a phenomenon I call the "Ice Cream Truck Reflex."
    The Ice Cream Truck Reflex is when you hear the distant tinkling of an ice cream truck, the grating melody of "Turkey in the Straw" or "Pop Goes the Weasel" or whatever, and feel an overwhelming impulse to grab change -- or I guess now, a few bills -- and run buy ice cream novelties. 
    The phenomenon has an especially powerful hold over children, transforming them from summer calm immediately into frantic, pleading panic by the approach of the truck. The moment to act is now! But even an adult who might draw back in horror at the prospect of paying $9 for a a half dozen Fudgicles at Sunset Foods, pulling their hand away as if the box were on fire, will eagerly shell out $1.50 for the same pop in front of a big white boxy truck. Better that than to lose your one chance.
     It is a term that I think of when people are driven to extremes by ephemeral situations -- those paying $500 a night to go to Carbondale, for instance, to see a solar eclipse. (Which I am a little reluctant to pooh-pooh, solar eclipses supposedly a superlative natural wonder. I'll know more in August).
    A better example was the Millennium, when people felt obligated to hie themselves to the Pyramids, or shell out some fortune to usher in the 21st century (setting aside the tiresome argument of when that actually began) because it only comes around once in life.
   Something fleeting, something happening once, or rarely. It mesmerizes us. Not realizing that every moment happens once, and many things occur rarely.
   Before using the term, I was curious as to where "Ice Cream Truck Reflex" came from, and plugged the term into Google. Up popped one hit, a kind of Google hapax. When does that happen? 
    Turns out I mentioned the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, in a column in 2010. The paper doesn't keep its columns up that long, but some news aggregator caught it. One reference. And that's it. 
    I decided that my comment on hapax legomenon and the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, though far shorter than this, was too much for a column of 669 words purportedly about solar eclipse opportunism in Carbondale.
    And besides, maybe it'll upset that annoying reader who keeps harping about the state budget.
    It's neat to coin a term as useful as the Ice Cream Truck Reflex, and odd to think that on Friday there was one result. I wonder how quickly it'll spread, or if it will spread. Anyway, a useful concept to keep in your intellectual tool box. When presented with a fleeting opportunity, you can ask: is this something I want, or something I feel compelled to do because the chance is here in front of me now? A lot of people don't ask that question, to their eventual misfortune. 

The twirling solar system pauses to focus on ... Carbondale

     The Train Inn has four rooms and two cabins. All of them are available for the highly coveted days around Aug. 21, when the twirling clockwork of the universe, no less, has placed humble Carbondale smack dab in the center of an event of cosmic magnificence: the total eclipse of the sun.
     No one has booked a room, though not for want of trying.
     "I've had 4,000 plus calls," said Paul Lewers, owner of the train-themed bed and breakfast. "I started getting requests five years ago: the first was an astronomy professor from Sweden."
     And why hasn't he booked any?
     "I'm not coming up with a price," he explained. "I didn't want to have them re-sold."
     Usually, rooms there start at $125, swelling to $245 for prime Southern Illinois University events. But the eclipse, reaching totality longer in Carbondale than any other place in the country, ah, eclipses any football game or graduation. Carbondale businesses are hoping to squeeze every dime out of pilgrim sky gazers. The Holiday Inn is asking $499 a night, paid in advance. SIU is renting out four-person dorm suites: $800 for three nights ("That's only $66 per person per night" an SIU representative helpfully pointed out).
     The university has an eclipse website with an end-of-the-world countdown clock. It's teaming with NASA, the Adler Planetarium and the Louisiana Space Consortium for a two-day celebration that is part tail-gate blowout, part science fair. Aug. 21 was also to be the first day of SIU classes, but those were canceled so as not to distract from the business at hand.

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Heaven, charred

     I can't remember a trip that settled as gently into memory as our April trek through Italy and France. The cities—Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris. The museums. The streets.
     And of course the food. While we ate at some fancy places—particular Astrance in Paris, one of the 50 best restaurants in the world, and enjoyed all sorts of exotic dishes, such as truffles, caviar, crepes, one surprising dish lingers as our hands-down favorite: a head of cauliflower.
    And the amazing thing is, I don't even like cauliflower.
    But we certainly liked this, served up the leaves charred on the outside, hot and moist and salty on the inside, fresh off the grill at Miznon, a packed restaurant in the Jewish quarter of Paris.
    That was our lunch. Cauliflower, artichokes and ... big eyes on my part ... broccoli.
    I'm writing this not in the hope that I can convey the savory joy of that vegetable. Nor because I really expect you to rush there and order it. But because we're tried to replicate it on our backyard grill and can't come close.  We assume you have to gently boil the cauliflower first. But we haven't achieved the tasty tenderness of Miznon. We should have quizzed them, but they were so busy, plus the language barrier.
     So ... readers ... any tips for grilling entire heads of cauliflower? We know it can be done to perfection. But how?

  

Reaction to 'Julius Caesar' truly a tragedy

     "Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges."
     That's Shakespeare, not me, I should mention, lest I be accused of plagiarism.
     I'm not even sure what a "whirligig" is — a spinning contraption, I imagine. (Bingo. "A toy that spins around," the dictionary tells us, "a top or a pinwheel.")
     As to what the sentence means, being literature, it's open to interpretation. I'd guess it's a fancy way of saying, "You get what you pay for."
     Do we ever. The initial pushback against Donald Trump — the mass protests, the investigations — are encouraging to Democrats eager to soften the throbbing sting of our country electing this guy.
     But being liberals, we are allowed — nay, required — to question our own assumptions. The idea that Trump's election awoke this slumbering liberal behemoth that somehow couldn't get out of bed Nov. 8 has to be, to some degree, a self-flattering narrative, a comforting illusion.
     There's a lot of that going around. There is pushback, sure. But the country is also becoming more Trumpian every day. It has to.
     For instance, The Public Theater production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in New York's Central Park just lost two sponsors...

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