The blue jay, the president of birds

     Just when I thought the whole summer would be a waste, three blue jays showed up at my feeder Monday.  I lingered to admire them too long, and didn't get a shot of the trio as they flapped around, vying for position at the seed trough.  Not that an iPhone can shoot birds that aren't roasted and on a platter.

     John Jay Audubon did a much better job of capturing a trio of blue jays. 

     Of course he had the luxury of killing them so they'd sit still for their portraits.

      Mine spent about half a minute pecking at their lunch. Then they were gone, no doubt off to visit with their wide range of admirers, which are many for these handsome if vexing birds.

     "Their saucy, independent airs, sprightly manners, brilliant colors, and jaunty, plumed caps have gained them many friends," F.E.L. Beal notes in his 1897, The Blue Jay and its Food."

     I try not to find augury in birds, but I took a certain meaning from their arrival at this perilous point in time, knowing that blue jays are particularly American birds.
     "The blue jay, Cyanocitto cristato (from the Greek kyanos, "blue," and kitta, "jay"), is the very first bird in Alexander Wilson's famous nineteenth-century American Ornithology," Diana Wells writes in her essential book 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names. "And he surmised, correctly, that this 'beau among the feathered tenants of our woods' is uniquely American."  

    This is not necessarily a compliment. Audubon depicts his trio of blue jays gobbling another bird's eggs.

     "Who could imagine that a form so graceful, arrayed by nature in a garb so resplendent, should harbor so much mischief," Audubon writes. "That selfishness, duplicity, and malice should form the moral accompaniments of so much physical perfection." 

    Yeah, a lot of that going around...

    "Selfishness, duplicity, and malice." I sense a replacement for the eagle as our national symbol, depending of course on how the election goes this November.

      The blue jay's range does include most of the southern half of Canada, and in 1976 the otherwise anodyne city of Toronto appropriated the blue jay for the name of its expansion baseball team. "The Blue Jays" was picked among 4,000 entries by the majority owner, Labatt Breweries, though common wisdom is that the color won the day more than the bird itself: Labatt's Blue is their major brand of beer, so the team was always going to be the "Blue Somethings." Blue Bells, Blue Valentines, Blue Bayous—when you think of the alternates, it almost had to be Blue Jays. 

    The "blue" in the name doesn't need any commentary. The "jay" is obviously an onomatopoeia, as the things are always screaming "jaaayy, jaaayy!" The Oxford English Dictionary traces "jay" back 700 years in connection with "a common European bird, Garrullus glandarius, in structure and noisy clattering resembling the magpie, but in habits arboreal, and having a plumage of striking appearance, in which vivid tints of blue are heightened by bars of jet-black and patches of white."
     Wells points out that the word was often used to describe a silly person—hence "jaywalker"—but this is unfair, since "in fact, like all corvids, jays are very intelligent." ("Corvid" is a general term for large birds with clawed feet adapted for perching, including crows, ravens, magpies and jays). 

     A very stable bird genius, perhaps.

    "He is more tyrannical than brave," Aubudon writes, "and like most boasters, domineers over the feeble, dreads the strong, and flies even from his equals. In many cases he is a downright coward.

     Yup, we know the type.

     

Swampy's Revenge, or, "Hey, wait a minute...."

 

     People cling to stuff, and it accumulates.
     That was especially true for me. I had trouble getting rid of possessions, precious relics all, debris from my ruined palace of self. Maybe if I held onto it, I could build the past back up someday...
     Lately I've been better. Having seen my wife having to dispose of her parents' possessions—her mother had 11 roasters—I'm keen not to put our own kids through that. So stuck at home, and with a vacation last week, we went at the basement. It helps we have a grand-nephew now, crawling like nobody's business, to whom we can deliver plastic crates of toys and books.
     The old video games were pitched. Don't write in to tell me they were valuable and I could get as much as $3 a pop on eBay. Not worth the time. Not thrown away, but taken to Goodwill. Maybe someone else can use them.
     Except this one. It's going too, but it is infused with a tale, and I have to wring the story out before I discard the rind.
     Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge, the second version (I assume) of the vastly popular kiddie video game where bold-if-reckless amphibians are sent hopping across busy highways. The small print on the back says it was released in 2000, which sounds right. My boys would have been 3 and 5, freshly moved to this house.
    The game was brand new, and they really, really wanted it. I don't remember this part, but pleading was usually involved. Out-of-stock 0n Amazon (it's scary to think Amazon is 20 years old—it's actually 26, and started selling computer games in 1998). 

     It's hard for boys to wait, and I had an idea. Online might be overwhelmed, but there was still the living world. I swung by the Borders on Waukegan Road, made my way to their music and video games department, and sure enough, there was Frogger 2.
      An ordinary dad would have purchased the game, brought the thing home and delivered it to my jubilant lads. But I am not that dad; I had a kink in my programming that caused me to look for the more ... ah .. whimsical route.
     I deposited the game in our mailbox, then went upstairs.
     "Should we see if Amazon has Frogger 2 in?" I said, settling in before the computer, a boy on each arm. I scrolled quickly past the part saying it wasn't available.
     "It is!" I said. "Should I order it now?"
     "Yes yes!" the boys cried in chorus. "Now now!" 

     I pressed the order button with an exaggerated plunge of the finger.

     "There!" I said, ignoring all the other screens needed to settle credit cards and shipping before the order was actually placed.

    I waited a moment. 
    "Okay!" I said, hopping up. "Let's see if it's here!"
     We all ran downstairs and burst outside, and tore open the mailbox.
     "It is! It is!" the boys cried, faces aglow.  We headed upstairs in joy and triumph. 
     If that's all there were to the story, I would never tell it. But there is one more part, as we headed up to the computer to play, a moment occurred afterward I always cherished. Crossing our front room, heading up the stairs, our older boy paused.
    "Hey," he said, or words to that effect. "Wait a minute...."
     Something was amiss. The brief time that elapsed between clicking the button and the game arriving in our mailbox. That was ... awfully fast.
     That "something's wrong here" reflex is key to the intellectual development of any adult. Not every adult, sadly. Lots of people never acquire it, which is why Donald Trump is president of the United States. But the ability to grasp that something — even something that is good, something you want — just doesn't make sense is as precious as gold.  It serves me well, and I'm proud I've passed it on to my sons, who it will no doubt will continue to benefit.

     Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge goes to the Goodwill, eventually. Though I might keep it on my shelf for another couple decades first, as a token a of a father's small prank, and a flash of nascent skepticism in a 5-year-old.

Whimsy and good steak at Gene & Georgetti

     Early in the pandemic—April it was—the boys had been home a few weeks, we were enlivening up Friday nights and supporting our besieged restaurant community by ritualistically ordering takeout. The boys, both sent home from their schools, realized we could, by ordering out, put normally wildly-expensive Alinea chow in our mouths for a fraction of the price—1/10, by my estimation, with the duck confit cassoulet dinner costing $39.95, about a dime on the dollar of eating it in their Lincoln Park dining room.
    The food was fantastic. I did something I had never done before. In cleaning up afterward, I took the little round transparent plastic lid from the raspberry vinaigrette and, glancing around guiltily, licked it clean. That's good salad dressing.
     But something was missing. If you have eaten at Alinea, you know that, as great as the food is, there is also sense of drama. Small clever flourishes of conception and presentation. Dinner there is like watching a magic show. How, I wondered, would they translate this whimsy to the carry-out experience? I expected a rolled note tied with a ribbon. An enigmatic seashell. A clever token. Something fun.
     And the answer was, they weren't. Just excellent food, period. In regular aluminum containers with cardboard lids. Which was fine. But I had expected something more from one of the best restaurants in the world. Something was missing.
    That something was found when we pulled into Gene & Georgetti for our anniversary earlier this month, before I even sat down I smiled at the little clear "stash your mask" envelope. Score one for old school. Michelle Durpetti will never be featured on "Chef's Table." But she figured something out that Grant Achatz' couldn't (Actually, she tells me, she borrowed the idea from a restaurant in LA. That works too).
     The flourish couldn't have cost much. A nickel for the opaque envelope. A dime for the sticker. But somebody had to think of it, a mask holder which, I rush to observe, nobody really needs. I dutifully slipped my mask inside, taking it out when the waiter approached. They are very, very COVID conscious at Gene & Georgetti. We felt safe. And coddled.
     Our first dinner in a restaurant in six months was excellent. We sat for two hours, outside, enjoying the 'L' occasionally grinding by, the passersby on the street. Service was friendly and impeccable. Our opening course, shrimp dejonghe, came in a butter sauce of such excellence that my wife asked for some bread to sop up every last drop up. She ordered a brace of lamb chops that were first rate. Our older son—we weren't going to leave him at home—was interested in the aged steak. Aged steak is like aged blue cheese—a very distinctive taste. He liked it very much; let's leave it at that.

     I have a favorite meal at Gene's that I've been ordering for decades, which they call a "steak sandwich" which is actually a filet mignon on a piece of toast. But since this was our 30th anniversary, and we were not in Spain, where we had hoped to be, I threw caution to the wind, and ordered their top-of-the-line $78 t-bone steak, medium rare.
    Let me re-iterate. I adore Gene's, have been going there for 20 years and hope to go for 20 more. But I do have a fidelity to truth, and the truth is, while the steak looked fantastic, was perfectly grilled, and I finished every morsel, it was not indeed fantastic steak. At least not fantastic a way that I could comprehend. If it was superior from what could be picked up at Costco and slapped on the grill, I was blind to those superiorities. My guess is that it is a supply chain issue, due to the current crisis, and completely out of Gene's hands.  I trust they'll forgive me mentioning it; I couldn't write about the experience otherwise. In fact, I know they will; you don't stay in business for 79 years by getting upset over a little loving criticism from a regular customer.
     That mild disappointment—good, not great steak—did not detract from an unforgettable dinner, I hasten to add. With the steak was a fabulous dish of roasted Brussels sprouts with apples and chunks of thick bacon, and their trademark creamed spinach. For dessert, we had a first rate tiramisu and something new—an intensely rich chocolate cake. I tipped well and will return happily, assuming they'll still have me, and urge you to dine there soon.  Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their restaurants. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, and Gene & Georgetti is one of those special places that make Chicago Chicago.

Texas Notes: The Revolution Will Be Televised

           Austin  bureau chief Caren Jeskey reports in.

   Gil Scott-Heron disappeared at his own show. He was performing at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in October of 1998. We’d been bobbing our heads to his smooth and sultry partly spoken, partly sung poetry while the band played mesmerizing blues-jazz-funk tunes. We were transfixed by the visionary before us. This was our church—live, soul-enriching hypnotic music. Gradually we realized that we hadn’t heard his voice for a while as the band played on. It took many long minutes before the trance was broken and we opened our eyes to see what gave. He was no longer front and center at his microphone stand. As pleasantly lulling as the band was, we missed our superstar and had to know where he had gone. I made my way to the front of the stage and scanned for Mr. Scott-Heron.
     As though watching the fog lift during a film noir scene, I made out his impossibly thin frame crouched down against the wall alongside stage left. He must have leaned against it, and his tired legs slowly gave way, leaving his knees pointed sharply out towards the band, his bottom sagging almost to the floor. His bony back was deeply rounded into a C, and his head drooped heavily into his long-fingered palms. I had heard he’d battled a long history of drug addiction, but to actually see our hero taken down by drugs was heart wrenching. As I recall, he did not return to the mic that night.
     We had gotten all we had hoped for at the show—he’d delivered our favorite songs in perfect tune. His lyrics summarized each and every truth about social injustice that we were painfully and acutely aware of as young people from Chicago involved in social work. His lyrics were what we called next level—he “overstood” in our eyes. He was a wise sage for whom understanding was simply too banal. Yes, we took ourselves and semantics pretty seriously. He saw things crystal clearly and said them in a such a warm and inviting way that he could have melted an ice cap. His words predicted everything happening in the United States of America today. A Nostradamus of his time.

   His extraordinary talent made it easy to forgive his flaws. He modeled how to use one’s voice and speak the truth, and he did so with genius level lyricism and musical composition. We could chill out to his music droning on endlessly in the background of coffee shops as we played backgammon and philosophized about changing the world for the better. We could also dance to his songs as spun on vinyl records at the Muzic Box on lower Wacker or at C.O.D. on Devon.
     When we danced to this kind of music, it was a form of activism. We moved our bodies to thumping beats while contemplating lyrics to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, thus focusing on topics that mattered. We awakened more deeply to why we felt that things were just not right. We’d been with our black friends and harassed by cops, knowing that we were all good kids who did not deserve the tyranny and fearing deeply for our black friends’ lives—we knew many who did not make it. We closed our eyes and danced away our blues while singing and relating to The Bottle, a song about alcoholism and the destruction it wreaks upon families and children; or the incredibly sweet sounding Angel Dust he recorded in 1978. “He was groovin’ and that was when he coulda sworn the room was movin’—but that was only in his mind. He was sailin’, he never really seemed to notice vision failin’, ’cause that was all part of the high… He might not make it… down some dead end streets there ain't no turnin' back.”

     Prophetic lyrics from Winter in America: “The Constitution, a noble piece of paper with free society. Struggled but it died in vain, and now Democracy is ragtime on the corner hoping for some rain.” Since this blog is for the not-easily offended I feel comfortable sharing Whitey on the Moon: “A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon. I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon. Ten years from now I'll be paying still while Whitey's on the moon.” If he were alive and writing today it might say “I take the bus to and from work and Whitey works from home. I may die of CO19 while Whitey works from home.”
     Gil Scott-Heron did not know that Instagram and Facebook feeds and iPhones would be streaming our current revolution live when he wrote his famous song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “Because the revolution will not be televised, Brother. There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mae pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he has been saving for just the proper occasion.” Lo and behold, it is.  

     I will try to rest in knowing that what is happening today is a tragic yet inevitable piece of our history. Our current circumstances have been building for generations—both the uncorking of exploitation as well as the pandemic. Sociologists and common folks, as well as scientists, have been trying to warn the rest of the world. Conflict has and will always be present in civilizations. We can only hope that all of this unrest will yield true change, true democracy.
     I will take solace in the gestures of activism I am able to make, such as collecting donations and feeding, clothing and supplying my unhoused neighbors with essentials and taking good care of my clients in this global multi-layered crisis. I will also gratefully ask Gil Scott-Heron to continue to sooth and inspire my soul. In 2010, one year prior to his death, he gave us something sweet to ponder. “No matter how far gone you've gone you can always turn around… and I'm shedding plates like a snake. It may be crazy but I'm the closest thing I have to a voice of reason. Turn around, turn around, turn around and you may come full circle and be new here again.”

Correction: It was the Chinese

Gutenberg Bible: The Chinese beat us to moveable type by 400 years.

      When was the last time you learned something from a card on a museum wall? Not trivia, not a detail from a French Impressionist's sordid private life? But something important that you did not know before? Some new historical information that contradicted what you had always believed was true and changed the way you see the world?

Our reputation preceded us: America is the naked
lady holding the severed head in the foreground.

      I was working on the book at the Newberry Library Wednesday, when I took a break for lunch. I got downstairs a little ahead of schedule, and steered myself into their new exhibit, to kill 10 minutes. 
     While not on the usual stations-of-the-cross rotation of the Art Institute, Museum of Modern Art, Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, the Newberry still mounts some wonderful shows, if you recall our visits to "Creating Shakespeare" in 2016, "Religious Change in Print" in 2017, their marvelous Melville exhibit last year. 
    This new exhibit, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus's "Nova Reperta, based on a series of 16th century engravings about then cutting edge technology by Medici court artist Johannes Stradanus, is up there with the best of them.
     In the first room is a framed page from a Gutenberg bible, and as I went up to admire it, I glanced at the explanatory card. I didn't jot the text down—must have been sapped by my morning of professional-quality historical research—but it basically said, "While Gutenberg is credited with inventing moveable type in the West, Asian cultures had been using it since the year 1000." 
    Oh. So now you tell me.  I suppose we could hide behind the detail that Gutenberg's type was metal and the Chinese type porcelain, but really, what you make the type from isn't really the sticking point in the invention. Score one for the Chinese.
    Much in the show was truly beautiful—Abraham Orteleus' colorful 1570 "Theater of the World," the first modern world atlas (above).  Or the title page of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum.  

Galileo tried to hide his heresy by disguising it as a
friendly argument among three philosophers.
 The pope was not fooled

       As the afternoon wound down, I kicked off a half hour early so I could return to the show, and was amply rewarded. Next to a brass astrolabe—a device for finding the latitude of a ship—we are told that this one comes from the famed wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha which went down off the coast of Key West in 1622 and, incidentally, "Over half of the 100 surviving examples of mariner's astrolabes come from such shipwrecks."
     See? Treasure hunting is not all about gold doubloons and pieces of eight.
     There might be more. I ran out of time before I ran out of exhibit, and could only leave knowing I'll soon be back at the Newberry, doing more research. 
     Of what I could take in, my favorite object has to be a copy of Galileo's Dialogo. I knew he had published something supporting the Copernican system and got in trouble with the pope. But I had never seen the actual book that sent him kneeling on a rail, nor imagined it was such a lavish volume. 
      The exhibit is free and open to the public. The gallery was utterly empty while I was there: one other patron in the 40 minutes or so I was exploring. So if you're looking for a safe, convenient, interesting diversion—interesting if you are of a certain mind, that is—well, now you have a place to go.

Not crowded.

     


    

Flashback 2010: Palmer House marks 140th

Palmer House general manager Dean Lane speaks at a Palmer House event

     Friends on Facebook are mourning the Palmer House, a bit prematurely, I believe. Yes, the venerable Chicago hotel has been closed since mid-March, but there's a lot of that going around. Yes, its owners are being sued by creditors who claim it has defaulted on $333.2 million in mortgage payments, which is a lot. 

     But it isn't as if anybody is taking a wrecking ball to the place. Not yet anyway. The Palmer House has seen a lot of ups and downs: a Great Depression, a Great Recession, two World Wars and any number of plagues and panics. Remember, this is the third version—the first burned to the ground two weeks after it opened, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I like to think the current Palmer House will survive the current conflagration too.

      When I think of the Palmer House, I thought, not so much of the enormous, ornate rectangular box of a lobby, with its lush ceiling. Nor of its elegant restaurant, Lockwood, or the way-cool Mertz pharmacy. Nor stores of the past—there used to be a Church's shoes at the Palmer House, a Pendleton store. 

     No, I think of the people, the proud, longtime Palmer House workers I've met over the years, and spotlight in the 2010 column. Four out of 10 hotel employees are out-of-work, and I hope they know that they are being thought of with gratitude and hope that they'll be back, doing what they love to do, very soon, when the world finally wakes up from this endless nightmare.

    This column is in two parts, and I left on the second part, a riff on Restoration Hardware, for those who have time to kill today.  

     Luxury is in the details. It requires a certain genius, like an artist adding dabs of color to a canvas. Arriving at the ceremony marking the 140th anniversary of the Palmer House Hilton, I admired the gold and maroon bunting draped over the facade for the occasion—a nice touch.

     Of course they'd mix in Mayor Daley. Bill Kurtis as host is another easy call. And yes, add "Chicago" played by the Carl Sandburg High School Marching Band.
     Owner Joe Sitt offered a classic success story: How he started out with a dress shop in the Palmer House and ended up owning one of America's great hotels.
     General manager Dean Lane outlined historical highlights: presidents from Garfield to Obama and a fancy dinner for Ulysses S. Grant with master of ceremonies duties performed by Mark Twain.
     But that isn't what charmed me. What really charmed me—and I knew right away this was the handiwork of Ken Price, the Palmer House's longtime PR director, a Picasso at this kind of thing—were the three dozen hotel employees lined up on stage behind the dignitaries: chefs in their white toques, doormen with peaked caps and gold epaulets, electricians with their names embroidered on patches, maids and busboys, desk clerks and painters, bellmen and janitors. They had to stand there a while, waiting for the ceremony to start. Their expressions never wavered from beaming, bursting pride.
     Afterward, the staff scattered to go back to cooking and cleaning and carrying and computer-tapping. But I caught up with a man wearing an embroidered nametag with "Bill V.—Locksmith" on it.
     "I'm very proud," said Bill Vollmer, who has worked at the Palmer House for 31 years. "It's a terrific place to work, a lot of good and kind people to work for and with. To take care of the guests who come here—it's the difference between working at a job and having a career."
     Vollmer said his father, Augie, worked for the Palmer House as a carpenter.
     "I was just a little kid, but I remember coming downtown to pick him up from work," he said.
     By then we were near the lobby. People crowded around the huge cake shaped like the hotel. I did what I did the first day I arrived in Chicago at age 15: I dropped my head back and gazed in wonder at the Wedgewood ceiling. In a world of constant change, some things stay the same.

RESTORATION HARDWARE: PART TWO

     You enter the cave, the flashlight beam falls upon the glittering treasure, and the tendency is to fall to your knees and begin scooping rubies and gold doubloons into your pockets with both hands.
     The idea of stopping, standing up and pushing on to see what the caverns beyond might hold doesn't cross your mind.
     Thus Wednesday, when I shared the fortune in sun-bleached pomposity harvested from the Restoration Hardware store and catalog, my central challenge was cramming all the bounty to fit into limited space. I never considered something readers leapt to point out.
     "I went to their website," wrote Doug Criner. "If anything, you understated the situation."
     Jason Moran drew attention to Item 40400524 and sent me a link, and I must admit, when I clicked on it, I was sure this had to be parody. This couldn't be real.
     The item, "Handwoven Rope—$89," and to the right, a coil sitting on a table.
     "The humble rope," the catalog copy begins. "Both utilitarian and artistic in its own right—dates back to antiquity and the ancient Egyptians."
     So does snot, but let's keep going.
     "Our hand-twisted, 2"-thick jute rope makes a simple, textural statement, whether hanging in a coil or unfurled over a mantel."
     And what kind of simple statement would that be? I believe it is a bold declaration of: I paid 90 bucks for a length of rope. Not only that, a length of rope that I can't even use. For there, in small print, "For decorative use only."
     Here, though, I want to change course a bit. Because the Restoration Hardware rope, well, it looks like a really nice rope. I do understand decorative objects. In my office at home, there's my dad's Vibroplex telegraph key. An old globe with lion's paw feet. A Haitian rum bottle, covered in black sequins, with a skull and crossbones in silver sequins. Three busts of Dante.
     But these are items from MY life, not something expensively purchased and set out to suggest a life I might have led.
     Yes, beautiful things can cost money. Mounted on the office wall is an antique catcher's mitt—it wasn't my catcher's mitt, but from the 1940s, big and round and perfect, the color of caramel. I was trolling eBay for catcher's mitts for my son, and saw this, and thought it would look great and for $25, why not?
     Is there a big difference between $25 for a catcher's mitt you don't use and $89 for some rope you can't use? I don't know.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 17, 2010

Flashback 2011: Those in want out, those out want in

  

     Have you ever gone to visit a relative in the Cook County Jail?
     I have. It isn't easy.
     It wasn't MY relative, I should rush to add, but a reader's, who invited me along. I went because I tend to go where I'm asked.
     I'm on vacation this week, taking a break from work at the paper to work on the next book. If you're at the Newberry Library today and you see someone who looks like me, drift over and say hello. Quietly. 
    
     Every Thursday since the arrest of his son July 30, Neal Tarshis rolls his wheelchair to a bus stop to begin a trek to Cook County Jail.
     "I see him as much as they let me," says Tarshis, over the rumble of the #93 bus. "I want him to know someone cares."
     Tarshis, 63, in a wheelchair because of severe arthritis, lives in Astoria Place, a nursing home at 6300 N. California. It is a two-hour, four-bus commute—the #93 to the #82 to the #126 to the #94—to get to the jail at 3000 S. California. Once, he says, he made the trip only to find he couldn't get in to see his son.
     "I went with Neal," said a friend. "They changed visiting hours without notice. They didn't treat him nice. It was a nightmare."
     Tarshis wrote to me to complain, and since I couldn't go back in time and observe how he was handled or mishandled at the jail, the thing to do was to go with him and watch.
     Some 11,000 prisoners live at the jail, giving it the population of Edison Park. The mayor of the jail, so to speak, is Sheriff Tom Dart, and if you expect him to be defensive about mistreated visitors, you'd be wrong.
     "I detest apologists rationalizing bad behavior," Dart said. "Sometimes there's elements of truth in both sides. There are times when I scratch my head why we're not treating someone with more respect who comes to visit." Dart sympathizes with the 1,000 or so daily visitors, who must pass through tight security for their 15-minute visit.
     "These are decent people and we're not treating them with a red carpet," the sheriff said. "They've gone through hell enough as it is, lives turned upside down by a grandson or a nephew. These are grandparents coming in, aunts and uncles. They've done nothing wrong. How does it work for our office to treat people like trash?"
     But he also sympathizes with his officers.
     "Objectively, I challenge someone to find a more difficult job than being a correctional officer," he said. "It's a very, very difficult job. Can the public be unreasonable? Yes. Can the correctional officer? Yes. But we've tried to be much more customer-friendly."
     Two hours is a long time on buses, and Tarshis reminisces about his son, a Navy vet.
     "I have so many memories of when he was little," said Tarshis. "He was very intelligent, very responsible. He got A's in all his subjects. He's not a bad child, he's sweet."
     His son, 36, has too many problems to summarize here. Suffice it to say this is his third time in jail, not for a grave crime—he didn't kill anybody—and I'm not using his name to make it easier if he pulls himself together.
     Tarshis and I join a long line outside the tall concertina wire-topped fence around the jail. The guards take us five at a time, ordering us to have our IDs ready, reminding us that we cannot bring in cell phones or pens.
     Once, visitors were told to bury their contraband in the bushes outside. Now Dart has been installing vending machine lockers.
     We go through metal detectors and are frisked by guards; their manner is severe but not rude and I get the impression that so long as you immediately do exactly what they say it goes smoothly, but that any hesitation or resistance might invite rougher treatment.
      We give our names, wait more, then are ushered into a long room, 15 at a time, with stools bolted to the floor. Fifteen prisoners in sand-colored jail garb emerge on the other side of the Plexiglas. It's loud and hard to hear. The jail used to use phones, but those were destroyed by angry inmates and visitors. Now there is a round red metal plate, the holes staggered to keep drinking straws filled with cocaine from being pushed through.
     His son, gaunt, his head closely sheared, is all jangly intensity—I expected to watch him and his dad talk, but he wants to talk to me, a compressed stream of complaint and indignation about the jail. Next to us, a mother puts a toddler on the counter and the girl presses her hands flat against the glass.
     That's another issue Dart grapples with—there can be a child at one spot, a profanity-laced tirade at the next, and a woman holding up her shirt to flash her breasts at a third.
     "There are loads of kids there," said Dart, proud father of five kids. "And a strong part of me says that's not a good environment for any child. I don't want kids seeing this stuff. The other side is, if they're connecting with their father, that's a good thing, too. We can't do it any other way because we have so many visitors, so many prisoners. You want to make it better. I'm struggling how to pull that off."
     Dart would like remote video visits, to save families the trip, but "there's no money."
     The next court date for Neal Tarshis's son is Nov. 2, which means one thing. "I get to make four more visits," he said.
     —Originally published in the SunTimes, Oct. 9, 2011