Mock trial parses contract conundrum

     “Any lane?” I asked the lifeguard last week, as I stood before the shimmering blue pool at the North Suburban YMCA.
     “Not many sign up this time of day,” she said, apologetically.
     The pool was completely empty. I felt like King Farouk.
     “It’s like a dream!” I gloated. “Except for the plague part.”
     It might say something about the mundane quality of my existence. But during months of lockdown, when I tried to look forward to the future, swimming laps at the Y was the first benchmark of the return of ordinary life.
     I kept paying dues, through April and May, even though the Y was closed. Because a) the Y rocks; b) I want the Y to survive — not all of them did; c) the dues aren’t that much — de minimis, as lawyers say; and d) I didn’t want to be what in legal circles is called “a jerk.”
     But let’s say I were a jerk. Let’s say I angrily demanded my dues back; only about 15% of members canceled, according to the Y. Would I get them? That would depend on the exact wording of the membership agreement, on what kind of force majeure clause it has.
     Force ma-what?
     “It’s a phrase that nobody knew about until three months ago, even among lawyers,” said Abbe Lowell, a top trial attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of Chicago’s Winston & Strawn.

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Flashback 2011: Genius lurks in the heart of every father

     Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's moving tribute to her father yesterday made me wonder what I had done to honor my own dear dad, this being Father's Day. I found this effort from 2011. I wouldn't call it a "moving tribute," necessarily. But like all sons, I did the best I could with the situation I found myself in.

     A father is far more important than his children, according to the Bible, someone worthy of automatic respect and complete obedience.
     My father, who turns 79 next month, is certainly more important than I, since I am a mere newspaper columnist, common as dirt, spouting our little opinions in every city and town, while he is an artistic genius who has created a radical new form of art which the world would have noticed long ago were the art community not in the thrall of charlatan dealers and flashy but untalented frauds.
     Today is Father’s Day, and since one should give his father the present that he really, truly wants, I thought I would pen a few paragraphs of recognition — or indulgence — that I’ve resisted writing for years.
     Is this perspective true? Heck, I don’t know. I have one of his paintings in my living room, and another in the dining room, and another in the hall. I don’t display them out of filial duty, entirely, but because they’re pretty and I like them and enjoy, when guests compliment them, saying, “My father painted that.”
     Whether that makes him the non plus ultra talent of the art world is another matter, one beyond my judging. I am biased and, as with most children, the bias cuts both ways. It isn’t always positive; like most children, I sometimes scoff. Perhaps this represents grudging acknowledgment of reality as I see it; perhaps it is my own mediocrity manifesting itself as jealousy of a greatness beyond my ken. I remember when my father wrote a paper on his art published in Leonardo, the journal of art and science — you can read the first page online by Googling “Robert Steinberg” and the title, “Self-Similar Structures that Amplify Natural Patterns within Paint, and the Feelings They Awaken in the Artist.”
     A mouthful, I know. But Leonardo is a prestigious journal — M.I.T Press publishes it. When that was printed, I turned to my brother and said, “Is it possible that we’re the idiot sons? That someday they’ll drag us in front of a camera for the NOVA special and we’ll have to admit that we sort of sniggered at him the whole time and never understood the important stuff he was trying to tell us?”
     So it is possible. Anyway, if my father taught me one thing in life, it is relentless pursuit of your goals. The man doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him. He was that way when he was 17 in the Bronx, writing certified letters to David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, trying to get himself aboard a ship as a radio operator, and he’s the same way now, hectoring the Museum of Modern Art to drop the scales from its eyes and stop obsessing over obvious fakes like Jeff Koons and turn its attention to the first dramatic advance in the art world since prehistoric men smeared images of bisons inside caves and urging his son to stop canoodling over meaningless drivel and focus on something significant, for a change.
     Credit where due. I could not be 51 years old and still rolling this stone uphill, still doing the shambling, groveling dance that a writer must do to get anything in print without having inherited his fierce, salmon-up-the-river-to-spawn ambition and stick-to-it-ness.
     So thanks Dad, and Happy Father’s Day. I hope this works. Though, as I told you previously, many times, I do not believe the doyens of the art world, whoever they are, read my column regularly, nor will they rush to elevate you to your rightful place in the pantheon of glory, wherever that is. But I didn’t want it to be because I didn’t give it my best shot, which is all a man can do in this life. You taught me that, Dad, and I appreciate it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times June 17, 2011

Texas Notes: Tony

     After kindly stepping aside last Saturday so I could honor my friend Kier, EGD Austin Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey returns with this tribute to her father.

     Anthony Charles Jeskey is a good guy. He grew up under the shadow of the skyway on 95th and Commercial on Chicago’s southeast side where acrid poofs of smoke from nearby steel mills hung heavily and permeated the air. Loose dogs ran wild and terrified him and his brothers when they were kids running around in the tall prairie grasses of abandoned lots. His mother, my Grandma Marie, was a devout Catholic. Attendance at St. Patrick’s Church was mandatory for my father not just on Sundays, but on Wednesdays and Saturdays too. He became a good little alter boy, yet somehow I imagine him sneaking cigarettes and sips of sacramental wine when no one was looking. He had slicked back hair, a wiry frame, a handsome chiseled face and a glint in his eye. Today he calls himself a recovered Catholic.
     My dad is the eldest of three sons and became the man of the house when he was in his early 20s and his father died. When he learned of his father’s untimely death, leaving behind a wife, two teen sons and my father, he became distraught. The story goes like this: my father took a drive, lost control of his car and hit a tree head-on. He would not still be with us but an off-duty fireman — or maybe it was a policeman — was fortuitously behind him on the road that dark night and witnessed the crash. This stranger saved my father’s life and got him to the hospital for the 99 stitches that have left a scar from one end of his forehead to the other.
     No wonder this good-hearted, former filterless Camel smoking, ruggedly good looking greaser type won my mother’s heart, and I am so glad he did. They met soon after his father’s death at what was then Sully’s (now called the Hangge-Uppe), which was once a classy bar on Elm Street where folks generally went before and after the theater. My then single folks were probably there just to hang out with friends, no theater involved. Once he got my mother’s attention he worked hard to keep it. He’d spend all his money to rent fancy cars to pick her on the north side and take her on dates, fully ready in his early 20s to do all he could to woo a single mother and her young son (my half-brother) into his life. He succeeded. He asked her parents for permission and proposed after 8 months of dating with a ring he bought at Chicago’s Last Department Store. She said yes and they got married. She’d been married before so was not allowed to wear a white dress to St. Patrick’s on their wedding day due to an antiquated Catholic rule, but she sure looked stunning in a classy pale blue number.
     My mother and father put each other through school working long hours in difficult working-class jobs. My father earned degrees at the Illinois Institute of Technology and then the University of Chicago Business School and my mother graduated with honors from Mundelein (all women’s) College and then the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (also my alma mater).
     Tony filled the lives of my sister, brother and me with a sense of endless possibility and adventure. When I think back to how he swam around in pools with us on his back I marvel at the strength he must have had. My folks made sure to outfit us with skateboards, bicycles, S’mores, stilts, Weebles, Easy Bake ovens, Jiffy Pop, Big Wheels, summer camp, and hilarious vacations on a shoe-string budget. My father was always up to tossing a ball around, playing any game we wanted, putting our new toys together and fixing them when they broke. He happily poked holes into the tops of jars for us to keep the fireflies we captured before letting them go into the night. He’s the type of man who can fix or build anything.
     We were no stranger to summer vacations no matter how tight money got. There was the time we rented a huge unwieldy RV and a giant flying shrimp bug flew in the window of the driver’s cab. My siblings and I giggled in glee while my parents swatted at this strange and unusual creature as we careened down a highway somewhere between Chicago and an ocean somewhere. In our travels around the country we saw both oceans and countless national parks. We took a sleeper car on the Amtrak from Chicago to California. We met kids from all over the country at the myriad Yogi Bear campgrounds where we spent summer vacations when the sun never went down and mosquito bites kept us up all night. My parents gave us so much fun even though they must have been under a great deal of pressure trying to keep our struggling middle-class household going.
     My father always managed to make us feel that life was magical. The red light on the top of the Sears Tower was Rudolph's nose each Christmas Eve as we headed down Lake Shore Drive back to our north side home from Grandma Marie’s house on the south side. Our home was wildly decorated for every single holiday — Christmas, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, birthdays, even Bastille Day (“what’s that?” we’d ask year after year) and Easter. We were positive that the Easter Bunny existed just to bring us baskets of Whoppers and Peeps and giant chocolate bunnies from Gayety’s Chocolate and Ice Cream Shop (now located in Lansing IL, owned by a distant relative and as good as ever).
     I know Tony’s a good guy because I doubt almost anybody has a bad word to say about him. He provided for my mother and her son to the best of his ability, and then for us when we came along. He is the epitome of loyal, a solid and responsible man. He has always been quick to place a large bill into the palm of anyone in need, regardless of where his own finances happened to be in that moment. He shows up in every way imaginable. He tells his family “I love you” every chance he gets. He showed us the importance of family by loading us into the car time and time again for long trips to the far southern reaches of the city to pick up great uncles and grandmas and schlep them to the north side for graduations and every other excuse for a party imaginable. He is quick to smile and laugh and give out an encouraging word. He is well read and cultured and loves to succinctly share his thoughts and observations with his loved ones. He is a man of few words other than on topics that he is truly passionate about, such as social justice and ethical humanism. He was recently named the volunteer of the year for his work as a mentor and buddy to a young man in need of guidance, and now this young man is excelling. If we were Jewish I’d say my dad’s a mensch.
     Sure, he’s not perfect and we have had our differences. I am grateful to have had some very good psychoanalysis as well as garden-variety therapies and mentorship that have helped me individuate and see him as a person other than simply selfishly only as my father. The stories of our ups and downs are best reserved for more private settings. Now that this beast of a virus is among us it is imminently clear that my only jobs in relation to this man are to let him know how much I love him (I love you Dad), how grateful I am that he has taught me so well, and to enjoy his company on Zoom (since we live several states apart) and then again in person the first chance I can get.
     I’d like to write a poem about him but the essence of the father daughter dyad has been captured so often and well that a new poem seems redundant. “On the beach at night stands a child with her father, watching the east, the autumn sky,” says Walt Whitman in On The Beach At Night. We don’t need to know more as this image lets us know that the child feels safe with her little hand in her dad’s hand, and nothing more needs to be done than to simply stand there together.

A proposal for reforming the Chicago police

Officer Ja’Lance Hunt poses for photos with a student from Southside Occupational Academy High School, 7342 S. Hoyne, in West Englewood in 2016.

     Lots in the paper lately about race, and protests, and police.
     Sometimes it seems that’s all there is. Seismic unrest rattling the country. Politicians frantically trying to respond. Corporations too, scrambling — a bus ticket jammed into poor old Aunt Jemima’s hand, booted off her pancake mix box and sent back to Chicago, whence she came.
     Cases of police misconduct swirl like leaves in a storm. It can be hard to track them all. Meanwhile, a pandemic is going on somewhere, whoops, make that everywhere, and it’s a sign of just how frenetic things are that sometimes it falls from mind. “Oh yeah! I can die from going to the grocery store. I forgot!”
     A jabber of voices. But anyone we don’t hear? Anyone missing?
     How about police? Here they are, public howling for their blood. Yet not a peep. Shy? That can’t be it.
     Being a journalist, of sorts, I thought I would fill that gap, to find their perspective. To discover what police officers think of all this. Futile, I know. But there is a ceremonial aspect to my job. So I ritualistically phoned CPD news affairs and, feeling ambitious, the Fraternal Order of Police, and explained what I want to do. Get police officers to talk about how these protests affect them, deep down in the little blue-flamed smithies of their souls.
     Neither wanted any part of it. Not that they said so. They didn’t say anything — echoes of the old Code of Silence that Eddie Johnson never noticed. Because the police aren’t part of Chicago. Oh, they live here, wink wink. And they work here. But really, police live in a separate Land of Blue, a dreamscape where everybody is a cop, and only cops understand other cops, and they’re all brother cops gazing in cop solidarity over the sharpened pine stockade of their Cop Alamo, blinking their cop eyes at the noisy mob of non-cops they’re supposed to keep safe — ”animals,” in police lingo — and the various idiot politicians like the mayor — ”Groot,” in racist police lingo (they sell derogatory t-shirts with Lightfoot as the Marvel Comics character, a talking tree) — issuing nonsensical directions based on naiveté, ignorance and malice.

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Say goodbye to Aunt Jemima

     My primary experience with Quaker Oats is writing about how thoroughly they screwed up Snapple, buying the brand and running it into the ground. Plus their oatmeal is way down the pantheon of beloved hot breakfast cereals, a distant third loping along after Cream of Wheat and Maypo.
     So my reaction to the company dumping Aunt Jemima Wednesday in the wake of the George Floyd protests, was a kind of gentle amazement.
     "Quaker did something right?!" I marveled. "Well good for them. Had to happen eventually."
    That for a century and a quarter pancake mix was hawked by an offensive racial stereotype goes without saying. The round jovial "mammy" was one of the happy faces that white folks put on the incomprehensible horror of slavery, which is why she was on the box, dutifully serving up her pancakes.  The name came from a song in a minstrel show, the "Aunt" a particularly direct relic of slavery. A white person couldn't call a Black woman, "Mrs." but "Aunt" was suitably familiar, diminutive with a sprinkling of affection and respect.
      The wonder is she lasted so long—130 years. To all those blinking bigots stepping out into the light of day to argue that this is all in the dim past, we can now point out that the last American receiving a Confederate Civil War pension died May 31 and that a major American corporation gave its racist totem retirement, ah, Wednesday. (Being late to the party is typical of Quaker, which finally let AJ take off her plantation do-rag all the way back in 1989).
      As a fan of brand mascots, I tend to be sorry to see them go, but Aunt Jemima won't be missed. First, because their products are so meh—their mascot could be Taylor Swift, or a snaked-headed gorgon and it wouldn't matter to me. I wouldn't buy that stuff, not while you can whip up your own pancakes and top them with real maple syrup.
      I might feel a pang of regret were Cream of Wheat to ditch their Rastus mascot. He's such a cheery presence. If you read the tale a few decades ago, he's a Chicago waiter given five bucks to pose in a chef's hat and never heard from again. But in recent years he became Frank L. White, a "master chef", which might show some strategists at corporate headquarters are finally thinking a little. That grounding in a real person, in theory, might be enough to get current owner B&G Foods off the hook—they say they are reviewing the situation—though don't bet on him sticking around. Uncle Ben is being called into human services as we speak and given the bad news about his future as a rice spokesman.
     But if our swirling times fling Rastus to the curb next, I'm certainly not going to be the guy braced in the doorway trying to stop them. The maiden on Land O' Lakes was nice, but it's still butter, and the Wisconsin landscape on the box is still quite pretty without her.
     Icons do have value. I revere the Big Boy character even though Big Boy Restaurants tend to be lousy and you couldn't prod my wife into one with a pitchfork, not after the series of awful meals we've endured there.
     But mascots aren't everything. McDonald's has perhaps the worst mascot ever—Ronald, a truly frightening clown, with his sex doll mouth, like an escapee from a John Wayne Gacy wet dream—and he didn't hold the company back too much.
     I hope Quaker replaces A.J. with somebody. They'd do well to take the Onion's sound advice, and find a real version of Sheila, the satiric site's "black female lawyer who enjoys pancakes sometimes." They could have a contest. People love contests. Trying to sell Nobody Offensive Pancakes just isn't going to fly.
    Let me tell you my concern about this type of thing. There is an argument that pulling down statues, exiling mascots, and the like create a world where the irrational bigotries of the past, which created these symbols, have no place. A racial version of the broken windows theory. Take care of the tiny stuff and the big stuff falls into place. Ditch Chief Wahoo and maybe not so many people in this country will be such narrow minded bigots. That is certainly possible.
     However.
     This process can also be seen as the ritual picking of the low-hanging fruit. We can't fix the police. Or jobs. Or education. Or the economy. We can't remove whatever gland—I think of it as being somewhere near the hypothalamus—secretes racial poison in so many people and sends it coursing their their veins. But we sure as heck can pull Aunt Jemima off the box, give her a bus ticket and send her on her way. It isn't progress so much as busywork, a distraction so maybe we don't notice that nothing substantive really happens. Again.
      I know extrapolating to ridiculous ends as a way to protect any given development is a Fox News trick, and I am not slyly defending Aunt Jemima. She's gone, good riddance, they can get rid of the Quaker Man next, for all I care. In fact, they should, because he's been a thumb in the eye of actual Quakers for 140 years. We wouldn't permit "Jew Oats," would we? A reminder of what this unrest is about: that African-Americans are fighting a special system of repression designed only for them. If you think slavery wasn't a huge boon to the America's economy, an unpaid debt, then, remember: its progeny was selling pancake mix up to this week.

Oh no! Cheated by Trump? What a SHOCK!

Chicago drag performer Jo Mama  to leads the “Drag March for Change”
in Boystown Sunday afternoon. (Photo by Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times)

     What’s this strange emotion? A sudden surge of ... what? Sympathy? Toward religious fanatics, home-grown haters and gimlet-eyed keyhole-peering revanchists. Is that it?
     Well, pity, anyway.
     I mean, man, that’s gotta hurt.
     You betray your country, handing control over to a notorious bully liar, fraud and buffoon in the casual way you’d toss your car keys to the village idiot, saying “Here, take ‘er for a spin.”
    You betray your faith, falling in line by a staggering majority — 81 percent of evangelicals — to cast your ballot for a thrice-married con man, casual bigot and serial ignoramus. You crowd auditoriums to shriek in rapture over this church-avoiding, lie-spewing, norm-shredding, sniffy abomination of all that is holy, a shambling, rambling, stumbling refutation of the very idea of grace, dignity or living a spiritual life.
     And for what?
     The idea was: you sign away your support to this Apprentice Archfiend, this strip-mall Satan, and he rewards you by picking Supreme Court justices who will sprinkle juridical fairy dust over the United States and magically transport it back to the Mayberry 1958 of your imaginings. The Court will protect the notional babies you claim to so adore, and drop-kick all those other — brrr, shudder — unacceptably different folks back in the far shadows where they belong.
     Ah, hahahahahahahahahaha.
     And then he ... and then he ... excuse me, inhaled a little coffee there, guffawing ... he turns around and betrays you, or his Supreme Court does anyway, on a cloudless Monday in June.
     C’mon, laugh along, hard though that may be drenched in soda water, pants yanked around your knees, the calliope wheezing away, derisively.
     No? Not laughing?

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Flashback 2000: Model in-laws come through again

     In a few days the boys will have been here for three months, studying and sheltering in place after their schools shut down. It has been, in a word, great. "A stolen season," is how I describe it, swiping the term from "Shakespeare in Love." While fully understanding just how massive is our good fortune—the world convulses, hundreds of thousands die, and we get to have a protracted family reunion. But this is the hand we were dealt, and there's no shame in looking down and seeing a flush. 

     At dinner the other night, I mentioned words to this effect, and my wife recalled a previous time, exactly 20 years ago, when another set of circumstances—trying to bring our newly-bought old house to livable condition—forced us all to spend nine weeks in a small bedroom at my in-laws house in Skokie. Another experience that was far more pleasant than we had any right to expect, as I documented in this column at the time.

     Since I often point out when columns are much longer than today, I should mention that this is from the period when my columns ran Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the latter two in the features section weighing in at a scant 600 words.

     For years, whenever I wanted to sing the praises of my in-laws—Irv and Dorothy Goldberg—I would cite the most amazing fact I knew about them: that in the seven years I dated their daughter before we got married, they never asked about my intentions. Never.
     Not one sly hint. Not one probing question. Not a murmur.
     Instead, they acted . . . (and this is so incredible I can hardly articulate it) . . . as if . . . it were . . . none of their business.
     How rare is that?
     But this summer, a new wonder eclipsed the Long Engagement Silence. I moved into their home in Skokie, with my wife and two young sons, while our new house was fixed.
     We moved in. And we stayed. And stayed.
     For nine weeks. Nine weeks and some change.
     Take a moment. Think about your in-laws. Or think about your adult children and their families. How would you get along? All packed into the same house. And not some big honking McMansion, either. A modest, two-bedroom ranch house with one full bathroom.
     How long until you were strangling each other?
     A few days, judging from my friends. I have enjoyed the sympathy of everyone I know this summer, just by letting slip "We've been staying with my in-laws for two . . ." then four, then eight -- "weeks."
     With this shock still washing over my listener, I really broke out the violins.
     "The four of us," I'd sigh, "all crowded together in one tiny bedroom."
     My friend would exude pity, and I would feel a pang of secret shame. Because though I had recited the cold facts correctly, mere facts can mislead.
     The truth is: It was great.
     My wife loved being with her parents. My kids loved being with their bubbie and zaydie. I loved living in a house crammed with people and home cooking.
     And my in-laws seemed to enjoy having us. They really did. I know that because I watched them like a hawk for nine weeks, waiting for any whisper of complaint or criticism.
     Here's what I came up with.
     My father-in-law once said: "There's more beer in the refrigerator downstairs."
     That's it. The comment struck me as a veiled criticism. A reply formed, and I almost growled: "I know. That's where I got this one."
     I kept quiet. Not that I've perfected restraint. I still have the tendency to open my mouth and let whatever thoughts are in my head pour out onto the floor.
     But I have also begun to admire discretion, and am learning at the feet of masters. I realized, very quickly, that my father-in-law was not saying, "Enough with the beer, Booze Boy." He wasn't being sarcastic. He was informing me that, if I wanted more beer, there was some. In the basement.
     Period.
     We all moved out Monday. It was a cool, cloudy day. My wife and I didn't feel the joy of liberation. We felt, as we silently packed, a certain melancholy, as if a special time in our lives was ending, something we hadn't planned, but that came about through the incredible slowness of our painters. An accident. A gift.
     I didn't thank my in-laws profusely. Just a few words, with a handshake for Irv and a hug and kiss for Dorothy. None of the speeches I like to make.
     Although there is one thing I'd like to say. Many times, over the summer, my mother-in-law would express concern over how we were faring at her house. Not an-invitation-to-leave-disguised-as-concern concern or control-your-damn-boys-masked-as-concern concern. Just concern. Real concern.
     And I would always look at her and say: "Dorothy, if I knew how much I was going to enjoy staying with you, I wouldn't have bothered to buy a house. We'd just have moved in here."
    We'd both laugh, as if it was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. I meant it.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 2000.