Where's Neil?

     I'm not the man in motion I sometimes pretend to be. In fact, fairly homebound and glad of it, partially because I can be bad about doing all the planning necessary for a trip. I'm out-of-town today, working on a story. But before I left, my wife and I had an exchange that made me smile: 

     She: Could you send me the address where you're staying?
     Me: I don't know where I'm staying.
     She: Well then, could you tell me what state you'll be in?
     Me: North Carolina.

Flashback 1998: Aunt leaves cache of trinkets—and mystery

   Occasionally, I'll reprint an old column and someone will ask me how I can remember something written so long ago. And the honest answer is, often I don't, but just blunder upon them, looking for something else.
     But this one I did remember, after 20 years, and went looking for. I'm posting it because I'm out of town, on assignment, and the 23rd anniversary of my column is Saturday, so I figured I would fill the gap with some of my favorites. This is one of my favorites, for reasons that I think will be obvious if you read it. If I had to write it again, I'd start with the the third paragraph, beginning "Alice-Lu Unthank lived alone..." and delete the first two as unnecessary.
     "Unthank"—what an odd name. Only now does its symbolism strike me. 

     Most people lead quiet lives, privately. Modest lives unseen, except by their families, if even then. Lives of love and loss and remembrance.
     But every once and a while, a life breaks open for all to see.
     Alice-Lu Unthank lived alone, in a single bed in a tiny room with file boxes of yarn, bolts of felt, knitting needles and embroidery supplies piled around her, up to the crumbling, cigarette-stained ceiling.
     The retired secretary lived in a two-bedroom flat on Addison Street. The second bedroom was as sparse as hers was cluttered, the beautiful mahogany furniture polished, the double bed made, a brush and comb set neatly on the dresser, as if she were expecting at any moment the room's former occupant, Unthank's father, John J. Joppeck, dead for 20 years.
     "She kept a room for him, as if he was here," said her niece, Penny Young, of Williamsburg, Va. "Like a shrine. I've seen photographs of his dresser when he was alive. It's the same now."
     Unthank, who died March 16 at age 83, left behind no children. Her husband died in 1949. She adored her niece, whom she last saw in 1985. Young was surprised to learn she had inherited her household possessions. She inherited, along with the engagement rings and the gold watches, the melancholy task of shutting down the apartment. She was here, doing that, all last week, and is stunned by the strangeness of what she found, the flotsam saved by her Aunt Alice, a woman she barely knew.
     Not just the huge amounts of handicraft supplies, the hundreds of pattern books, shelf after shelf. Not just the dozens of hand-knit afghans, all labeled and sealed in plastic bags. Not just the shock of seeing her own high school portrait, framed, or an urn containing ashes of a dog named Penny.
     Rather, what prompted Penny Young to call a newspaper were the ornaments—hundreds of them, all made by hand by Joppeck. Ducks and bunnies, hearts and butterflies, napkin racks and spoon racks, toast holders and note holders. Some on display, the bulk—and there may be 1,000—wrapped in brittle newspapers, decades old, stored in careful layers, in box after box after box.
     "I'm in shock," she said. "It's more than I can take."
     Each piece is signed on the back, "JJJ," dated and dedicated to "ALU"—Alice-Lu Unthank. Some have little notes of appreciation, or praise. Behind them all, as best Penny Young can figure out, is a sad tale of a broken family.
     Joppeck and his wife, Nell Kugelman, divorced on Feb. 5, 1927, after 16 years of marriage. Alice-Lu was 13. Young found the papers in her aunt's careful collection of documents. They list the grounds for divorce as "extreme and repeated cruelty," but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. You needed to list some sort of reason then.
     Joppeck disappeared and his oldest daughter did not see him again until March 22, 1966, when they met again at Nell's funeral at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside.
     Father and daughter got to talking. They had several lunches. Soon they were living together. And he started making the ornaments and tokens, almost every day, until his death about a decade later.
     "He made them for her to show love, because he left her," said Young.
     The tokens are not art. "You either like them or you don't," said Young. Many are imitations of cartoons—squirrels, deer, clowns, all vaguely Disneyesque. They are made from old apple crates and bits of wood that Joppeck, a painter and paper hanger, would scavenge. The hangers on the back are made from beer can pull-tabs.
     Young found a heart-shaped locket containing a picture of Alice and a man. At first Young thought it was the deceased husband, Wilson Unthank. "I went, 'Oh my God, this isn't Wilson,' " she said. It was John Joppeck.
     In light of his 40-year absence, the hundreds of tokens have a desperate, guilty quality. And there are indications that Unthank carried anger. Certain accusations in a letter in a strongbox, the details of which aren't to be mentioned.
     Young plans on keeping a curio cabinet Joppeck made, and some of the better wooden trinkets. The others—hundreds of them—she couldn't bring herself to throw away. As luck would have it, she doesn't have to. Her aunt, who left typed inventories of everything in the house, left the phone number of a yarn store. Young called, hoping they would take the yarn—hundreds of skeins and balls of it, ready for somebody to knit.
     Lynette Opolka, the owner of Midwest Discount Yarns, at 5723 W. Irving Park Road, agreed to take the yarn; she plans to donate it to the Veterans Hospital and other charities to use for patient projects.
     Opolka is also taking most of John Joppeck's trinkets. She'll give them away to anyone who stops by her store and asks for one. So you can share a bit of the mystery, if you like. I took a duck and a rabbit.
     I walked out of Alice-Lu Unthank's apartment, thinking about love and knitting and the temporary tyranny of things. No matter how well-ordered your world, no matter how neat the labels, your prized possessions are only a few decades away from the auction block or the resale shop or the dumpster.
     Many of us won't even get the benefit of a Penny Young—a decent, caring person who tries to dispose of our treasures with a little dignity.
     "It's killing me to look at this," she said.
     Balls of yarn. Bits of wood carved like ducks. Old legal documents and prayer cards from funerals. We leave behind so little, and so much.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 24, 1998

One hint a policy might not represent America at her best: Nazis love it.

     The past, the past, what do we do with it? Push it down and it bobs back up.
     I was cleaning my desk at home—a walnut roll-top, cubbyholes and odd drawers and secret compartments, bought when I was 14 with five years worth of paper route savings. It's big: the entire Oxford English Dictionary fits on top with room to spare. The thing tends to accumulate junk. I was re-arranging piles of files when I came across a creme colored envelope. Inside, an invitation to my high school commencement.
     "Wednesday evening, June fourteenth. Nineteen hundred and seventy-eight..."
     Where did that come from? It didn't sit there, unnoticed, for 40 years? Did it? I hope not.
     I tucked the invite away and pushed onward with my clean-up.
     Hanging from the bulletin board, a Congressional candidate's flyer. Nothing is more disposable than campaign literature after the election is over, but this, well, I just couldn't throw away. I took it down to admire anew.
     "A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO YOU FROM ARTHUR JONES" it blared. "YOUR CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESSMAN."
     The Nazi, if you recall, or alleged Nazi, if you're feeling charitable. The guy who throws birthday parties for Hitler.
     A flag, of course and a photo of the U.S. Capital.
     "WHERE I STAND:" and a dozen bullet points.
     Guess which is first? C'mon, guess!
      No, not "Make English the Official Language!" — because nothing imperils the greatness of a country like having more than one language spoken there. That's fifth. Though I would argue that propping up your native tongue and defending its supposed purity is worse than un-American, it's French. They're big on that.
     Not "No Amnesty for Illegal Aliens!" That's fourth. What a handy word, "illegal"—the bigot's friend, the open gate through which a truckload of fear and hate is driven. The fig leaf hiding—in the mind of the bigot—his obscene shame.
     Enough preface. Drumroll please. Arthur Jones' Numero Uno—whoops, where are my manners? That's Spanish. And Italian. The Number One reason he felt he should be elected:
     "Build The Wall!"
     Of course it is.  Both obvious and demanding explanation.
     Why would a Holocaust-denying, immigrant-hating, anti-Semitic wack job like Jones care about building Trump's Wall? Because he's concerned with stemming crime and the flow of drugs? That's what Trump has been tweet-blasting for days.

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Dogs at work

     Nothing beats going out on a story.
     Yes, the telephone is helpful: quick, often necessary, and usually you have to settle for that. Voices on a line. Email is easier and worse—harder = better in journalism, as in so much of life—because people writing emails tend to sound like minor functionaries crafting official statements.
     But visiting tops them all because being there answers questions you never think to ask.
     For instance. At the end of last year I was writing a big piece on manufacturing in Illinois, and I decided to focus, among several companies, on PBC Linear in Roscoe, Illinois. The PBC stands for "Pacific Bearing Corporation." Why them? Bearings seemed hard core industry. They just said "industrial" to me in a loud voice.
     So I drive out to Roscoe, find the company. The secretary summons Tom Schroeder, chief operating officer and son of the founder, and as we step into the office, dogs come running to check me out. They have a "dog-friendly" office and, true to promise, these are friendly dogs; well, indifferent anyway, mildly curious, which is friendly enough. Why? Basically because Schroeder wanted to bring his dog, and it only seemed fair to let anybody else who wanted to bring a dog as well. A fair boss, miribile dictu. The dogs give a warmth to what otherwise could have been a bland and starkly functional corporate place. They lend humanity, ironically enough. Had I done my business over the phone, I never would have thought to say, "And dogs ... do you have dogs in your office?" While their web site does say they are "dog-friendly" that wouldn't catch my attention the way seeing a pack of dogs loping around the headquarters did. 
     The practice is highly unusual. A small, but growing phenomenon: only 7 percent of employer allow pets in the workplace in 2016, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, up from 4 percent two years earlier. 
    That's it. That's all I have to say at the moment. Dogs in the office. But more, you know, tomorrow. I hope.

Worried that books are dying out? Naperville's Sourcebooks has good news

   

Dominique Raccah, far right, and her staff at Sourcebooks ponder new logos for their expanding children's division.

     Nine sheets of paper. Each bearing five logos, differing in color and font, arranged on the sand-colored carpet last Tuesday in the CEO's office in one the largest commercial book publishers in the United States, located not in New York, where the book trade traditionally congregates. But in Naperville.
     "Nikki, how do you feel about the light orange?" asks Dominique Raccah, publisher, CEO and founder of Sourcebooks, huddling in her office with seven top staffers, all gazing at the logos. "Because I'm not feeling it. I can be either the dark orange or the pink for Wonderland. But the light orange does not feel robust enough to me."
     "I definitely like the orange better than the pink at this point," says Nicky Benson, publishing manager, who will jointly run the new Wonderland imprint. "But I can see how you would think the light orange is harder to see."

Dominique Raccah was born in Paris. Her family moved
 to the U.S. when she was 9; she came to Chicago
to study at University of Illinois—Chicago Circle.

     "I think it's too similar to our logo orange," says Kelly Barrales-Saylor, editorial director, of kid's nonfiction
     "It is our logo orange," said Chris Bauerle, director of sales and marketing.
     The logos they're pondering didn't exist a few days ago, and in a few hours a few will be shared with the world and featured in a Publishers Weekly article on Sourcebooks' success—selling so many children's book, it is dividing the business into four imprints.
     If anyone is feeling pressure, it doesn't show: there is laughter and back-and-forth critique for 15 minutes.
     "What's really different about Sourcebooks is we're entrepreneurial and agile," Raccah explains.
     Raccah was a former Leo Burnett researcher who, in 1987, struck out on her own as a publisher of financial sourcebooks—hence the company name. By being nimble and collaborative—and at one low point taking a mortgage on Raccah's home—the company has managed to thrive during changing times. For the first two years, Raccah was Sourcebooks' only employee. Now the company employs 139 staffers—3/4 of them women—and parking at their headquarters can be tight. They've had yearly double-digit growth for a decade, thanks in part, to a course change a dozen years ago, when Sourcebooks published its first children's book.
     "Our children's business is now 53 percent of our business, our children's list was up 28 percent last year," says Raccah. "We are the 12th largest children's publisher in the country."
     Why kids books? Despite the impression that young people fixate on screens, and the narrowing of childhood that has been so devastating for toys companies, books are different.

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Sing to me, muse, of tears and the man

Achilles Removing Patroclus' Body From the Battle by Leon Davent (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     That Gillette commercial, clumsily challenging men to rise above traditional toxic patterns of masculinity... honestly, I'm loathe to set out over such well-trampled ground. But someone needs to point this out: Those supposedly rigid norms that men are held to, the clenched jaw stoicism, the anger, the violence, ... well, they aren't so rigid. 
     Ever read "The Iliad"? Epic Greek poem of male warfare? By Homer? Supposedly blind bard? The one whose very first word is "μῆνις"—rage. A male domain if ever there were, particularly compared to the more feminine "Odyssey."
     That wrath belongs to Achilles the great warrior, "murderous, doomed." The very first thing that happens to our hero, at the beginning of Book One, is he gets in a rather catty argument with his fellow warriors over women ("Desert, by all means—if the spirit drives you home!" King Agamemnon sneers, in Robert Fagles' fine translation). A priest has visited camp, bringing ransom for his daughter, who had been seized in a raid and given to Agamemnon. It gets complicated. But the priest is sent packing, then prays for the gods to back him up. They do, and the Greeks relent. Agamemnon is deprived his prize and so says to Achilles, in effect, "Fine, if I'm losing mine, then I'll take your girl" and claims Briseis, who had been snatched and handed over to Achilles, who is not happy with this development, considering the loss of weaving and other services. (This is starting to sound like the plot line for an episode of "As The World Turns.")
    So what does Achilles, the alpha male warrior hero, do? Stalk off, flop down on a beach and cry to his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, who helicopters in:

     So he wept and prayed and his noble mother heard him...Suddenly up she rose from the churning surf like mist and setting down beside him as he wept, stroked Achilles gently, whispering his name. "My child—why in tears?"

     Achilles sniffs, in essence: "Aw ma, the guys were mean to me, and took my toy and it's not fair!"
     I thought of this reading Saturday's New York Times, of all places, and the four, count 'em, four pages given over to Colin O'Brady and Louis Rudd's epic traverse of Antarctica in November and December, on skis, pulling their supplies on sleds.
     Specifically this, at the very beginning of their trek, a moment which, buried in the lionization of their manly accomplishment, might be missed by those who saw the article, deep in the paper, on the front page of the Sports section.
     On Nov. 3, a Twin Otter sea plane lands them on the Ronne Ice Shelf, on the western coast of the continent. 
     Let O'Brady, 33, pick up the tale, in classic, heigh-ho bluff manly style:
     "That first day I'd been pulling for about two hours. I could see Lou in the distance going a bit faster than me, but it wasn't about the race at that point. I didn't know if I could pull my sled across Antarctica. I didn't know if I could pull my sled for another hour."
    So he does what hardened adventurers since Achilles has done: seek female guidance, in this case whipping out his satellite phone and calling his wife, Jenna "in tears."
    O'Brady's narrative suddenly takes the tone of a 7th grader girl talking about her difficult day:
    "And she's like, 'Where are you?' I 'm like, 'I've only gone two miles since the plane. I'm half a mile from the first waypoint. Should I just camp here?' And what she said was really crucial: 'Get to the first waypoint. That will feel like a victory for today.'"
     There you have it. Few things are more manly than skiing to the South Pole and then across the subcontinent. You wouldn't think crying would be involved. As this story gets recounted, no doubt the part where he phones his wife two hours after the start, crying, and she has to say, in essence, "Pull yourself together bub and keep skiing," will get overlooked. 
     But like Achilles on the beach, it is a key moment, at least in my view, and as part of masculinity as anything else. Those focusing on the inevitable knee-jerk right reaction to the Gillette commercial are picking the easy, low-hanging fruit. Being a man, like being a woman, is difficult and complicated, and always has been. And I'm not downplaying the violent and aggressive parts that need toning down. Though part of doing so is realizing the sensitive parts, the crying and collaboration, have always been there, hiding in plain sight.  An important part of being a man, like being a woman, often  and always, is expressing your feelings, no matter what those are, and relying on your loved ones for help at crucial moments in your life—I know I have in the past, do continually now, and always will.  Masculinity was never the grunting cave man brutishness some consider it to be.

The Saturday Snapshot #23

 
     I don't know if I can rightly call myself a Thomas Pynchon fan anymore.
     Oh, in the day, I diligently worked my way up the Everest of "Gravity's Rainbow," with its dumb names and goofy songs and endless serpentine sentences coiling back on themselves. I marveled at his Cornell short stories in "Slow Learner." I did something while reading "V." that I've never done while reading a book, before or since: flung it away, with a flick of my fingers, revolted, with a "Yeech!" at its graphic descriptions of atrocities in the Congo.
     And the top, "The Crying of Lot 49." Brief, accessible, with funky Oedipa Maas and her husband Mucho. So hip, so ahead of its time—published in 1964, I believe— looking at the city below, thinking of printed circuits and computer code. And the hidden conspiracy, the post-office based Trystero system, back before too many ordinary Americans began embracing any cracked plot suggested to them as preferable to the messy truth. How I loved it, with their telltale scrawled Thurn und Taxis muted postal horn. The orange marks above look a little bit like it, and I stopped to admire them, and wonder if it might not be the hidden hand, finally revealed.
    I haven't read it, oh, in 20 years, easy. I'll have to give it another go. 
    But after that, I soured on Pynchon: "Mason & Dixon" didn't seem worth reading, not complicated, just obtuse, and I gave it up. Then he started doing cameos on "The Simpsons" and his famous privacy just became a kind of schtick. Finally, David Foster Wallace and "Infinite Jest" came along and ate Pynchon's lunch.
    So of course I paused to savor these scrawls—communication line markers, judging by their color. (I know this because of my secret journalist superpower of looking stuff up. The American Public Works Association distributes this handy key).
     Now that I've given the banal explanation, I feel I've let you down. I should have concocted a wild conspiracy to explain the marks: landing strips of alien spacecraft. Some portion of you would believe it, and your lives would be embroidered with wonder. Oh well, too late now.