Thursday, December 14, 2017

Not forgotten


     Writers cheat death. Briefly. Sometimes. 
     That doesn't mean they don't die. They do. The writers themselves that is. But that their work echoes for a while. If they're good. And lucky. Not most writers. Most writing barely lives on the page the day it's published, never mind has any hope of lingering.
     But writers who are good enough and lucky enough ... like Studs Terkel, who died almost a decade ago—the 10 year anniversary will be this Halloween — but whose name came up twice Tuesday.
     The first was a reader, asking me to recommend Terkel books. That was easy: "Working." "Division Street America." "The Good War." That'll get you started.
     The second was at lunch, with my pal Tony Fitzpatrick, stopping back in Chicago between stints in Paris, shooting his excellent TV series, "Patriot." We talked about art and the French and acting and politics and food and Chicago. 
     Then conversation drifted to Studs. Tony was a particular friend and admirer—"Hope dies last," the title of Terkel's book on political action, is tattooed on his forearm. We talked about him, about his clash with the late Steve Neal.
     Our conversation made me want to hear Studs' voice. I knew him, casually, and was a guest on his radio program on WFMT. But I only interviewed him once for a column, after he was robbed in his home, and I suspected there was more to the crime than the witty tale making the rounds of the media.
 
     A pithy line will go halfway around the world while the complex truth is still pulling on its boots.
     The first couple of times I read Studs Terkel's brazen demand to a burglar who had broken into his home and stripped him of $250—"Hey, now I'm flat broke; give me 20 bucks!"—I smiled at the 87-year-old literary lion's quick-witted bravado. The crook gave Studs a $20 bill. Tough old bird. Nice little story.
     But by the third reading —and the line has, since Mike Sneed broke the story in her July 22 column, appeared in nearly two dozen newspapers and magazines all over North America —I began to wonder: Was it all really that simple, or could there be a less attractive crime story hidden behind the neat tale? A home invader rouses an elderly couple from their bed in the middle of the night. The husband is confronted by the crook, who robs him. Sure, he got $20 back. But did the event really have the fun, flip quality the quote suggests?
     "It had an amusing touch in retrospect, not during it," said Terkel, in his Uptown home. "It happened so quickly, I couldn't believe it. I had turned the lights out about 9 o'clock. I kept a little TV on, watching the Sox game—the Sox lost to the Brewers. Near midnight it was.
     "The hallway light goes on. I think it's my wife going to the bathroom. I reach out to say something, and I touch her. She's there. So it's not she. A figure is coming toward me, a figure in the shadows, coming toward me. A tall figure."
     Even at that point, Terkel—as most people would—clung to the hope of a benign explanation.
     "I think: It could be my son. He has the key. It turns out to be somebody else. A guy. I reach for the light. He rushes to me and turns out the light, his hand over his face. He was as surprised as I was."
     The burglar kept shouting, "Where's the money? Where's the money?" But Studs couldn't hear him.
     "I'm practically deaf," he said. "I have hearing aids, but I take them off at night. He's saying something, but I don't understand it. I keep saying, 'What is it you want? Keep cool. Take it easy.' "
     Was Terkel frightened?
     "I guess I was," he said. "It was too sudden, too dreamlike. I went to get my hearing aids in the bathroom. He follows me and turns the light off, his hand still over his face."
     Terkel worried about the safety of his wife, Ida, who has not been in the best of health lately.
     "I didn't know what was going to happen," Terkel said. "If he's desperate. . . . I told him, 'Wait, take it easy. This woman is not well.' "
     Criminals are sometimes placated by money. Terkel, who went to the currency exchange earlier that day, produced a roll of cash. He handed it over, realized he was busted and made his request for something back. He got a 20.
     Terkel nearly said something that, for him, is even more telling than the witticism that has been so widely quoted.
     "I almost said, 'Thank you,' " said Terkel. "He hands me money, and I feel grateful. I think I might have said, 'Thanks.' "
      Terkel, an old-school leftist, finds a certain irony in that.
     "That's the free market for you," he said. "It was my roll of bills a moment ago; now it's his roll of bills, and I'm asking him for a handout."
     (I should mention, in the slim chance that a reader or two might not be familiar with Terkel, that he is the nation's great chronicler of the common people. Even those who question his politics must admit that his classic and best-selling books, such as Division Street America and Working, placed ordinary people into the context of history long before it became fashionable. I think The Good War is among the best books ever written about World War II.)
     None of that mattered to the burglar. Unlike when Terkel was mugged in the 1980s—which also made the papers—the burglar didn't seem to recognize him before fleeing.
     Terkel, his anger up, followed the burglar, until he saw an accomplice downstairs in the kitchen.
     "I'm hollering, 'How did you get in? How did you get in?' " Terkel said.
    And then the moment came that I had suspected was there, obscured by the cool and satisfying brio of his oft-quoted request.
     "Then I got scared. Right after that," he said. "The fright comes later, when you think of what might have happened."
     Fear, and anger.
     "Of course you feel angry. I was mad I lost 250 bucks. It's an invasion of your privacy. For some reason I was cool, but maybe that was my protection, my masquerade."
      The burglars had pushed in a broken-down kitchen air-conditioning unit. There's a new one there now, securely bolted. And the Terkels keep a light on downstairs while they sleep.
     "Keep cool and keep the lights on," advised Terkel. "What's the old song: 'Let a little light shine'? The detective said (burglars) don't like any sign of life in a building. Keeping a radio on is great, too."
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 1, 1999

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Whew.



     Whew!
     That's the short version.
     At least the country hasn't gone completely crazy. Any loss for Donald Trump is a win for America.
     Close, but enough. Thank you, God, Jesus and Alabama. Roll Tide!
     The long version is more complicated.
     Put it this way:
     Shame and pride had a wrestling match in Alabama on Tuesday.
     Shame won.
     Even in a solid Southern red state that hadn't elected a Democratic Senator in a quarter century, the idea of electing Roy S. Moore—a Republican, yes, but also credibly accused of groping several young women and girls—to the United States Senate was simply too much for voters to bear.
     Even Republican voters. Even Alabama voters. Even in the debased, tawdry Era of Trump.
     Or as NBA legend and Alabama native Charles Barkley succinctly put it, campaigning for the victor, Doug Jones: "At some point we got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
     That point is now.
     Okay, not now. It's not as if the state had a communal change of heart since November, 2016, when Alabamans voted for Trump almost 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton.
     They just didn't want to be embarrassed by electing an alleged child molester. It's a start.
     That Moore was a bad judge, is a bad man, and would certainly be a bad senator, assuming the Senate didn't expel him immediately upon being sworn in, was not so much a factor as that electing him would look bad. Few Alabama voters seemed to care that he was dismissed from the bench, twice, for refusing to obey the law. They liked that. They're proud of that defiant attachment to faith, a Dukes of Hazard flipping off of the man.
     Doug Jones won. 
Even though his good qualities were eclipsed by his being a Democrat, and on the wrong side of the only moral issue that matters down there: abortion. His victory is still a reflection of the polarized, poisonous political atmosphere that this election does not change so much as ratify. Almost half the state still voted for Moore.
     Jones won. But his election won't change anything, not yet. The Senate will still be in Republican hands. And there is no defeat that Trump can't spin into supposed victory.
     Is Jones' win a reason to be glad? Sure. But a cause for celebration? Not really.
     People in Chicago only care about who represents Alabama in the Senate because that the contest was seen as a bellwether for the 2018 mid-term elections, a test to see if the Trump Rebellion is played out.
     Does Jones' win mean that Trumpism has reached his high water mark and will now begin to recede? Or is Jones' victory just a pause in the rainstorm?
     Celebration feels premature. Trump has suffered setback after setback since being finessed into office with—I believe—a boost from his friends the Russians. Obamacare withstood his onslaught, the military recently shrugged off his attempt to ban transgender troops. Everything bothers Trump but nothing fazes him. He's like that metal man in Terminator 2.
     Jones' victory is important because it nibbles away at Trump's thin majority in the Senate. It also reminds us of the power of shame. Doing the right thing because people are watching you isn't the best reason, but it will do.
     This is not the beginning of the end. Maybe, to quote Winston Churchill, it's the end of the beginning.
     There is no question that the Trump Administration will eventually fall apart, because it is a house built on sand. You can only get by on lies and bluster so long. Facts are facts. Climate change is real. Muslims and Hispanics make good, hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding American citizens as well as anyone else. Gays make excellent partners, if you are so inclined and responsible parents.
     The question is when.
     The answer: not yet.
     The election of Doug Jones does not mean that the historic intolerance and fierce partisanship of the Southland has been overcome. They have an enormous burden still
     This is a first step. Change is possible, yes. But change hasn't happened yet or Roy S. Moore would never have been the Republican candidate. Jones' win is merely one dry day in a season of flooding. That said, it is a welcome relief.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Mike & me

   
     I would never say that I had a favorite reader. There are so many thoughtful voices and faithful followers, I'd hate to have to choose one.
     But Chris Wood is right up there, if only for his regular Facebook posts showing photos of himself, watching the Bears game, enjoying a cigar and an Old Style in his garage—living the life, I tell myself whenever I see him lofting a brew, denied to me by a cruel and vengeful Creator.
     So when he asked if I would tell a story I alluded to, about famed columnist Mike Royko threatening to break my legs, well, I gave it a shot. Then sat on it for a week. It was ... I don't know, nostalgic and slight and not up to my professional standards, such as they are.
    But it's 9 p.m. on a Monday, and nothing better has presented itself. So here it is, at his request. The blame, of course, is entirely mine.

     Tim Weigel invited me to dinner once. 
     I can't remember why. He drank at the Billy Goat, I drank at the Billy Goat, back in the days when you could still smoke in a bar, and we both did. Cigars. I hazily recall the cigars having something to do with our meeting. We asked each other about the cigars we were smoking, struck up a conversation, talked and drank and smoked cigars. 
Tim Weigel
     Now Weigel was a bright and affable man. He had gone to Yale, surprising for a journalist, never mind a TV sports personality. He had also been movie critic Gene Siskel's roommate. 
    Anyway, we chatted, and became friends. I remember him coming over to my apartment in East Lake View to attend a cocktail party, in between the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts. I admired the brio of that. 
     He returned the favor, inviting me and my wife to dinner over at his home. The appointed day and hour came, and we drove to Evanston, where Weigel lived. I had his address written on a piece of paper, but was confused when I arrived at the spot where his house should have been. 
    Across the street was an enormous baronial mansion. That couldn't be it. Tim read the sports on TV. He wore loud jackets. On the other side of the street, more modest homes. But none the right address. I gazed at the address in my hand, puzzled. 
      This was in the early 1990s. Before children. Before GPS on cell phones. It had to be summer, because there was a man across the street, mowing his lawn. I approached him. Did Tim Weigel live around here? I asked.
    Sure. He pointed at the baronial mansion. 
Mike Royko
    Oh. Right. Television. Sports. I can be so naive sometimes. 
     We were greeted at the massive door, and the evening melted away from there. I seem to remember a wife, a radio personality of some sort. Tim had a EuroCave in his dining room—a special refrigerator for wine—that impressed me. We made use of it. 
     At one point Tim asked me about a certain former colleague of mine who had gone to work for Mike Royko, the top columnist in the city, then and forevermore. The colleague, well, I had better draw the veil here. I gave my opinion, which was not kind. 
     The conversation would have dissolved into memory but, unbeknownst to me, Tim had hired one of the Billy Goat's part-time bartenders as a bottle washer and general lackey back in his kitchen—an expansive, near-industrial kitchen, I seem to recall—and the bottle washer/lackey overheard that part of the conversation, which I discovered Monday, when the phone in my office rang.
     It was Royko's employee. Not happy about my unkind assessment. I'd relate the direct language but, after 25 years, the specifics are lost. What is not is the sense that I had stuck my arm into a cage and it was now being chewed on. 
     The line went dead. The employee had hung up. I can still recall the oh-I-am-so-screwed feeling in my gut as I held the dead receiver. 
     I'll be frank; I don't tolerate bad blood well, but like to be at peace with everyone. Tranquility is the old man's milk, as Jefferson said, but certain young men like it too. Pour oil on the waters, I thought, and called back. I would apologize and placate the employee, so as not to hear my name called at the Goat one day, look up and get an ice pick in the eye.
     I dialed the number for Royko's office.
    Only the employee didn't answer the phone; Mike Royko did. Now he was yelling at me. I only recall two parts of the conversation. One was me pleading, "Aw, c'mon Mike, what has the world come to when a guy can't get tight with friends and bad-mouth the competition." Or words to that effect. And Royko saying that he would break my legs, probably break my fuckin' legs, if ... and I'm not sure what circumstances would trigger that. Maybe if I badmouthed his legman again. Maybe if he saw me again. I'm not sure.
     In years to come, I would retell the story anyway, to grab at a certain whiff of authenticity, a kind of contact high. Royko was the real Chicago deal and I crossed paths with him enough for him to threaten me, which had to count for something. It wasn't as good as getting socked, wasn't Bernie Judge throwing a typewriter in the newsroom, but it would have to do.
     To be honest, I never had the Royko-envy that so distorted other columnists' work. I would have liked to have had a decent exchange of words with him while he was alive, but quickly realized that it would never happen. After he died, when readers would write to me and tell me that I was no Mike Royko, I would write back and thank them, pointing out that Royko was a mean drunk—often, though he seemed to have his moments of warmth and decency with people who weren't me—and one of his sons ended up robbing a bank. It was an end that I worked quite hard to avoid, still do, and I'm glad someone noticed my success at it up to this point.
     That's it. As I said, not much of a story. 
     
     

Monday, December 11, 2017

The lady or the law?

      The photo to the right, of course, is the scrum of people crowded around the Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterwork on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. 
     I commented upon it after  visiting last spring. The crowd was so dense you could feel the humidity coming off their bodies—the gallery where the painting is displayed reminded me of a high school gym. 
     Now direct your attention to the photograph below, also at the Louvre. 
     Do you recognize the black basalt column? Don't feel bad if you don't. I imagine most people will draw a blank . 
    Take a second look.
   
     Any idea?
    It's the Code of Hammurabi. 
    Not the oldest set of laws—though the basalt stele is over 3,000 years old. But the "most complete and perfect extant collection of Babylonian laws" to come down to us, discovered in what is now Iran in 1901. 
    The code contains 282 laws, related to a range of areas: contracts, marriage, divorce, assault, theft, liability and punishments. 
     Parts are familiar to this day, such as No. 196, spelling out a classic concept of justice:
     "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay one gold mina. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price."
      This "eye for an eye" might at first blush seem ancient and brutal to us now, though not as much as we'd like. Known as "lex talionis"—the law of retaliation—to this day it's the justification we use to execute murderers. You took something away from someone, now we're taking the same thing. It's odd. If we merely plucked out an offender's eye, it would be considered barbaric. Yet snuffing out an entire life is somehow less so.
     Notice also that the punishment meted out depends not only on the crime, but the person upon whom the crime is committed. The status of the criminal was also significant. 
     In that way, the code is different than our current laws. In theory. We like to think that we've progressed from days of ancient tyrants, though in this way the code has us beat: status, both of victims and perpetrators, is in practice an important factor, still—maybe the important factor—even though our law pretends it isn't. A death in one part of town is not the same as a death in another. A rich man lawyers up while a poor man sits in jail because of some piddling bond he can't pay.
     Maybe we would be better off if we were honest about it and wrote this injustice into our laws. At least then it would be clear.
     Though my goal isn't to criticize law; it is the only thing, a thin wall of words, that stands between us an despotism. Even in ancient Babylon they knew that. Nowadays, we tend to forget. 
     I want you to notice one other thing about the Code of Hammurabi. Look at the photograph again. What's missing? Take a second. Anything not there? Glance back at the Mona Lisa for a hint.
     People. The room is completely empty. I sought it out because I knew it was there and wanted to show my wife, a lawyer. I knew she would enjoy seeing it, and she did. But the masses don't bother. They pack into a gallery to see a painting they are already vastly familiar with. And probably don't even know that one of the earliest examples of the framework of law that supports all of our lives is in another gallery, largely ignored. 
    It's a worrisome neglect, because our fidelity for the law is of the utmost importance, as we in the United States will find out, sooner than later. Do we really value what we have? Do we understand its magnificence? 
    Between the Mona Lisa and the code, which is the true wonder? Which is the greater example of genius? 
     

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Captain Crunch, Defender of Christmas



     Captain Crunch loves Christmas. 
     The criminal conspiracy of Snap, Crackle and Pop, not so much. 
     Judging from this special Xmas-themed box of the Captain's tooth-murdering sugary cereal, noticed on the shelves of Target the other day, conveniently juxtaposed with the season-denying Kellogg's Krispy product ... well, let's just say the outraged Fox News diatribe writes itself: "'Who is Kellogg's trying to fool? 'Holiday colors?' Those are green and red, the traditional colors of Christmas as outlined in the Holy Bible..."
     The president of the United States lit a match under the traditional War on Christmas bonfire last week. "You don't see 'Merry Christmas' anymore," he whined. "You see 'Happy New Year.' You see red. And you see snow."
     Crunch good! Krispies bad! Need I point out that Crunch is based on corn, an American product, while Krispies contains rice, harvested in Southeast Asia? 
     My first instinct was to ignore this seasonal disorder as trivial compared to the true outrages and quasi-treasons Trump commits daily. Just another example of the why-are-you-hitting-yourself bully tactic so often used by the Right, of conjuring up some idiotic stance and then pretending someone you don't like embraces it. Nobody is offended by "Merry Christmas." There is no effort to dampen the holiday that pervades every corner of American society from the moment the Halloween candy is put away until the New Year's decorations are taken down. Barack Obama said "Merry Christmas" all the time—MSNBC put together a pointed highlights reel of him saying exactly that, again and again and again. What Obama didn't do is make a big deal of it, weaponizing Christmas, tainting it, as Trump does everything he touches. By the time he's done, "Merry Christmas" will carry an emotional wallop somewhere between "sieg heil" and "fuck you."
    Why pay attention at all? That's easy. Because there is a larger point here.
    The entire GOP worldview is based on false victimization. Their own victimization, conjured up to mask an ugly truth. In a world of true victims, Republicans sympathize with only themselves. Why? Because they can no longer traffic in the open language of hate, of supremacy—they can't simply despise specific groups as inferiors. It isn't done anymore, at least not openly. The next best thing is to imagine offenses that they are the victims of at the hands of those they hunger to condemn. Thus gay people are not simply people, trying to get married, raise families. No, they have an agenda, to destroy straight marriage, to corrupt children (I wonder if Republicans will be able to repeat that one with a straight face after Roy Moore wins on Tuesday. Sadly, they will. We live in the Golden Age of Hypocrisy). 
    That's why Mexicans have to be murderers and rapists, Muslims have to be terrorists. Otherwise Republicans would just be hating people for no reason, and even Donald Trump has enough dim self-awareness to realize that won't fly, thanks to a century of glacial progress.
     Remember where "Happy Holidays" came from. Fifty years ago it was merely assumed everyone was a white Christian. Trust me, it's true. I was there. Inclusion meant tucking in a grating Hanukkah carol into the Christmas Concert, sung condescendingly for the class Jew, who was expected to be grateful. 
    At some point, educators—and TV stations, and cereal makers, and anyone involved in interacting with the public—began to realize that their classroom, their audience, their customers, were actually quite diverse. They weren't all white. They weren't all straight. They weren't all Christian. It was odd to have a Christmas concert in a school where half the students didn't celebrate Christmas. So they began to nudge the net open a bit wider. A "holiday" concert. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas.
     Fox News grabbed it like a hungry dog and began shaking. This, like gay marriage, like a functioning immigration system, like anything that acknowledges the existence of people who make our nation's terrified third uncomfortable, is simply unacceptable. They lack the honesty to say, "I don't want them here. Their existence detracts from my fragile self-image. I wish they would go away." 
    Accommodating them is an insult. It is oppression, and implies these non-Merry-Christmas-saying creatures also belong. That it is their country too. Trump's Christmas posturing might seem trivial, and at one level it is. But at another it reflects an elemental part of his basic appeal: the illusion that American can be undone, the projector of time run backward, and the shrinking white Christian majority return to its lost Eden where their inferiors bowed their heads and stepped off the sidewalk, mumbling apologies, as the country's true owners strode by, masters of all they surveyed.

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Being Jewish in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s

   



     The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opens in Jackson today. The president of the United States will not be attending the ceremony.
     For a while it looked he would. The man elected on a platform of naked bigotry, encouraging hatred against people based on their skin color, nationality, and religion, would actually show up and pretend to care about prejudice. As if he belonged at such a museum in any other capacity than a cautionary exhibit.
     But Donald Trump either doesn't know how he is rightly perceived, or doesn't care, and on Monday said he would be going. Only after civil rights icons like Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) and others refused to participate in the opening if Trump were present, did someone on Trump's staff with a capacity for shame decide that the president would not attend the public festivities, but would tour the museum privately, like the scorned pariah he is. 
     Jackson, Mississippi, if you don't know, has an astounding history of racial and religious oppression, as I mention in the column below, reviewing a book about growing up there Jewish in the 1950s. The book is filled with telling, touching details—one that I didn't put into the column, yet stays lodged in mind, is when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Jackson in the 1950s, Edward Cohen's father knew which neighbors were under those sheets because he had sold them their shoes.

     Jews don't believe in heaven. That isn't bandied about much. It seems almost rude. Sincere people are trying to embrace this incredible construct of harps and clouds and halos, and we're not playing along.
     I suppose some Jews believe. But heaven isn't part of the official program. I sure don't buy it, instead keeping the party line: Departed loved ones live in the memory of those who love them.
    For instance: To conjure up my grandfather, Irv, whom I adored, I don't have to speculate about angels. I can see him, in my mind, reclining in his green Barcalounger, sipping a Pabst, smelling of cigarettes and Luden's Cough Drops, watching "The Price Is Right." He loved "The Price Is Right."
     The problem with not having a heaven to safely dispatch departed relatives, like children shipped off to eternal summer camp, is that it places a deep responsibility on you. If they exist only in memory, then you have to remember them. It is your responsibility to rescue them from oblivion.
     Which is one reason I so admire Edward Cohen's new memoir, The Peddler's Grandson (University Press of Mississippi, $25). In fewer than 200 pages, he constructs an ark rescuing not only every relative he ever knew—with their quirks and foibles and eccentricities—but charting their improbable journey from Eastern Europe to Jackson, Miss., of all places, where they dwelled, outsiders, running a clothing shop.
     Jackson in the 1950s and 1960s is sketched through stunning details. When the P.A. system at Chastain Junior High school announces President Kennedy has been slain, the students cheer, wildly. Later, "Sesame Street" debuts nationwide, but not in Jackson, because it shows black and white children playing together.
     Still, Cohen never paints Mississippi in the grim hues we Northerners expect. Despite frequent bigotry, it's a great place for Cohen to grow up. That's perhaps the biggest surprise of the book. Jackson is nice; it's home. He loves it, then and now.
     Cohen's story is the story of anyone set apart for one reason or another. How much do you give up in order to fit in?
     The process began in the late 19th century, with grandfather Moise, fresh off the boat. After his new companions persuade him to take part in a snipe hunt, he reverses the humiliating joke by viewing the whole thing as bonding, certain "that he had undergone some redneck rite of passage."
     Poignance and humor jostle each other, as when the abrasive Rabbi Perry Nussbaum— outspoken enough on civil rights to get his house bombed by the Klu Klux Klan—sends young Cohen out on Halloween to collect, not the usual candy, but pennies for UNICEF.
     "The United Nations was regarded in Mississippi as, at best, a communist lesion on the country's independence, at worst as the nesting place of Satan," he writes. "I set out, wearing my mouse costume, into the heart of John Birch-era Mississippi." The results can be imagined.
     Cohen is at first desperate to fit in with his entirely gentile school. He lobbies his mother for a Christmas tree; she resists, then strikes a compromise—he can have a tree in his bedroom. The image of the little boy shutting his door after supper, plugging in the single strand of lights around this tiny, pathetic branch of a tree, was the most moving image for me in the whole book—a sad, funny encapsulation of yearning and denial.
     Southerness and Jewishness are not often juxtaposed. But, like chocolate and peanut butter, they go well together, especially in the hands of an author who has both love and a clear eye:
     "One can hardly hail from two more historically losing causes than the South and Judaism," he writes. "Both my cultures have long, tragic pasts, and not one jot of it has been forgotten."
     Strong words, and he argues them well in a beautiful book.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 28, 1999

Friday, December 8, 2017

Nine trucks



    Nine trucks. Mack trucks, mostly, with a couple Peterbilts thrown in for variety. Five parked on Center Avenue, four more around the corner. I counted. 
    Kitty and I were on the dawn patrol last week, making our eight block circuit of the neighborhood, when we turned a corner and were confronted with them. A sight that, in 17 years of stomping our quiet suburban streets, I had never seen. 
   A knot of drivers stood chatting with one another. 
    "Scheduling mishap?" I ventured—nine trucks seemed like a lot of trucks to park at 7 a.m. on a single block. I instantly imagined some computer snafu where nine trucks had been sent to do the job of one. It seemed the premise for a children's story: Nine Trucks. Kids love trucks. I know I do. 
     I couldn't imagine why so many were there. The drivers, holding their coffees, looked at me but didn't respond. A civilian. Or perhaps a language issue. Kitty and I moved on, admiring the brawny trucks, designed for hauling dirt.
     It didn't take long to realize they were there for the house that had been razed a few days earlier. It had seemed a not-particularly-decrepit house, new enough that I snapped a photo of it. But obviously not to contemporary standards of luxurious living. They've been building these lot-line crowding mansions lately. 
     Twenty years ago faux Norman chateaux were all the rage, with round towers and limestone details. I particularly scorned those. Now Burgundian behemoths are out and we are seeing what I think of as Little Sag Harbours, Atlantic coast edifices with wood shingles on the walls and lots of little windows scattered about, homes that should be on some sprawling estate in the Hamptons, not jammed into a suburban lot on the former prairie of Illinois. Their windows, instead of looking out on Oyster Bay, gaze through the windows of their neighbors. Some are six feet apart.
    The trucks obviously weren't bringing anything—the truck beds were empty. They were taking something away. The dirt from the foundation of the new house.
    Kitty and I came around again that afternoon—the afternoon walk. We are creatures of habit, the both of us. If I try to deflect from our routine she will stop in her tracks and stare at me, indignant. 
     The trucks were gone. But something new was there. A hole. And not just any hole. A foundation, the deepest basement I've seen on a new house--it looked 10 feet deep. For a moment I wondered if they could be building an apartment building in the middle of that residential block. It was that deep. And wide, it was as if they had dug up the entire lot; there would be no yard at all. I stopped to gawp at hole, and a guy in a hard hat wandered by, and I struck up a conversation—I'm good at that. 
     There had actually been 11 trucks, he said. Two more arrived after I left.  "That's all I could get," said the foreman. "I asked for 20."  He said deep, wide foundations are the new thing, all the rage.
    "It's even dug under the garage," he said. "We use re-enforced concrete for the garage floor."
    Maybe class envy is involved—the mere upper 10 percent gazing at the upper 5 percent. Whoever dug the basement of my house, 100 years ago, made it just tall enough for a man of medium height to stand, and then he has to dip his head to avoid heating ducts in a spot or two. I wish that farmer had gone for an extra six inches, but he was probably digging by hand, and having done that myself, I know how tempting it is to stop at Just Deep Enough and not an inch more.
    Now they dig to China, and span the lot. I can't imagine what kind of Hyde Park horror is going up, but I don't have to; we'll find out soon enough. A lot of money in the world, concentrated in an ever narrowing band atop our society, and they want every cubic inch of basement they have coming to them. It won't be pretty to look at, but that isn't much of a concern anymore. Maybe it never was.