Texas notes: Logger

     One of the pleasures of reading these Saturday reports from Caren Jeskey, EGD's Austin bureau chief, is you find yourself having thoughts so singular they're almost startling, realizations you've literally never had before. Such as, "I've never met a logger...."

     Vermonters know as much about snow as Chicagoans know about pizza. Twenty-odd years ago I found myself post-holing (one of many terms I learned on a winter vacation in the state of Freedom and Unity) through the woods. It’s when you try to move through hip-deep snow without snow shoes. Your legs create long deep cylindrical grooves—one exhausting step a time—as you progress, creating perfect impressions for fence posts. The thing is, I wasn’t building a fence but just trying to get back to civilization after a romance failed around a pot-bellied stove.
     It all started when I met a charming banjo player with stringy blond hair and a boyish smile. We were at a concert in a drafty old church in Burlington, Vermont. He invited me to join him on a vintage river boat for dinner the next night. My friend and host on that visit ixnayed the idea because we wouldn’t have much time together on this precious visit. She’d recently moved to Vermont to open a cooking school and learn to make artisan cheese. I told him that I couldn’t make it, and we exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch.
     I loved flying to that part of the world. The tiny plane on the last leg of the trip sent us through a portal to a more romantic era. It promised freshly roasted coffee with clotted cream, tawny liquids, bacon from the pigs next door, and fresh milks from various creatures. A land of stellar musicians who spent a lot of time honing their skills during long dark days. Vermont also offered hardy companions who helped me challenge my idea of what cold is, and the capabilities of my body in the winter.
    When we landed, a kind businessman I’d been chatting with on the plane offered to drive me to into town. I accepted because it was my birthday and I felt safe and ensconced in that happy feeling of a special day.
    When he left I picked up the local paper as I waited for my friend and host to come and get me. The front page headline read “Moose Loose In Winooski.” My urban brain was scrambled for a moment with that combination of consonants and concepts. The article instructed townsfolk to leave a wandering moose alone as he traversed their town, and trust that he’d eventually head back into the hinterlands where he lived. After all, humans had settled on his turf. There was no reason to drive him away. I found this deeply touching and humane and also hoped I would not run into him.
     My friend arrived in her Subaru wagon and whisked us away.  The rest of the visit was storybook stuff—brunch at Shelburne Farms housed around a Vanderbilt mansion on Lake Champlain and wood fired pizza at American Flatbread situated in the valley of the Mad River on a farm in Waitsfield. We sat on Adirondack chairs around a crackling fire pit in the crisp cold air, dodging embers and gazing at the brightly starlit sky.
    When the trip was over and I got back home, the banjo picker and I stayed in touch. We grew close during daily hours-long phone calls. He came to Chicago to visit me and we were smitten.
Soon after his visit I’d lined up a job interview in a town close to his, and not far from my Chicago chef friend. I headed back on a jumper plane with the possibility of a sultry life replete with cigars and sitting around fires full of hand-chopped wood from the always bountiful pile just outside the door.
     The story didn’t go as planned. Banjo strummer’s decidedly un-feminist ways rubbed me wrong. We found that the only thing we really had in common was a mutual desire to kiss each other a lot. We made the best of the trip but by the end it had fallen apart so badly that one night I just booked a flight to New York. In the morning I asked him to drive me to the local gas station where I had a cab pick me up. When I got to the warmth and comfort of real friends in NY the running joke was how I’d had to post-hole out of town.
     One night before things went south Banjo and I were at a restaurant with red checkered tablecloths and candles on each table. A live band played and Banjo’s friends packed into the round red vinyl booth with us. We were all hoping that this meal would christen a new member into their friend group. One of the guys was a dark haired logger. When he got up and said goodbye the table went nuts with whoops and hollers once he out of earshot. “Caren!” they said. “We have never seen him stay awake for so long! We need you here!” They explained that he has a serious case of narcolepsy and generally falls asleep several times when he’s out with them. I was so excited about my new friends I guess the animated stories I regaled him with kept him awake.
     All I could think was “a narcoleptic logger?” Did anyone else think his job might be a little dangerous? If so, no one mentioned it. Sometimes I wonder how he’s doing; how they are all doing. Many people have come and gone in my life on my journeys and we’ve made each other’s lives richer.
     How odd it is to think about what travel and meeting strangers will look like—or not look like—in my new reality. Lately I am realizing how stories of the past help me see and feel the meaning of my life as it was, and inform the direction I aim to go in my “one wild and precious life,” in the hopeful words of poet Mary Oliver.

Happiness is donating a kidney

   

Lisa and Ed Balcita

     Surging COVID-19 doesn’t mean other ailments take a holiday. People still cope with the usual range of illness, though the pandemic tends to add complications.
     Take Ed and Lisa Balcita, of Berwyn.
     Ed had kidney failure from decades of diabetes. In 2017, he went on the transplant list, where he did what people do on transplant lists. He waited.
     The average wait for a kidney is about four years. About 100,000 people are waiting, and each year, about 5,000 of them die waiting. Ed’s kidney function dropped to 10 percent of normal while he was on the list, waiting.
     Sometimes a spouse will donate a kidney. Ed’s wife certainly wanted to.
     “When the doctor told me, ‘Perhaps a living donor...’ I knew right away I was going to be tested,” said Lisa.
     But she wasn’t a match. Ed’s body would reject her kidney. Nor could Lisa be part of a chain donation — where one donor gives a kidney to a second recipient, paired with a donor who isn’t a match either, and that donor gives to a third recipient, whose donor gives to another, until they reach someone who can give to the original recipient in the first pair.
     Another problem: Lisa has AB blood. The rarest kind, found in just 4 percent of the population.

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Something to hope for

   
     Make no mistake.
     Even if Joe Biden wins Tuesday, there will still by a global COVID pandemic. Americans will still be dying, hospitals overwhelmed. California will still be on fire. Hurricanes will still slam into the Gulf coast with extraordinary force in unprecedented regularity. China will still be testing its strength, nationalism will still be on the rise, here and everywhere else. Russia will still be steadily working to undermine our nation in devious, unseen ways. The economy will still be in tatters, with many millions unemployed. Old industries will continue to totter while new ones grown enormous and unchecked. Deep institutional racism will still have its tendrils in every aspect of our national life, so longstanding and familiar that too many can't even see it. Too few Americans will have proper health care, or education. Drugs will be plentiful and treatment scarce.
     And Donald Trump will still have 10 weeks to make everything worse, by neglect and design.
     But what will happen, if Joe Biden wins Nov. 3, is that the clock will start counting down the days until we once again have someone in the White House who actually cares enough to try to effectively address all our nation's problems. And that would be something to celebrate.

Mikva could conjugate ‘democracy’

Abner Mikva, after having his South Side congressional district gerrymandered away, announced in 1973 he would run for Congress in the northern suburbs.

 (Sun-Times file photo)

     We’ve seen the damage one man can do. 

     To the national discourse. To our country’s health, institutions, honor. To the value of truth itself, and the freedom Americans enjoy, the latest threat being the installation on Monday of a rigid far-right fanatic onto the U.S. Supreme Court, who for a generation will steer the country in a direction most of its citizens do not wish to go.
     As the nation prepares to — maybe — spit out that one-man wrecking crew, Donald Trump, a timely reminder of the good one person can also do has its Chicago premiere on WTTW Thursday: “Mikva! Democracy is a Verb,” an hour-long documentary on the life of Abner Mikva.
     Mikva was the rare political figure to range across all three branches of government — legislative, judicial and executive. A liberal congressman from both the North and South sides. An appellate judge. And White House counsel for Bill Clinton.
     Mikva began his career as a lawyer, then cut his teeth for a decade in the Illinois House of Representatives, where he became expert at a quality that today has reached low ebb: the art of reaching across party lines to get things done.

     “People think, well, if you compromise, that means you don’t have any principles, you’re selling out,” Mikva explains in the film. “That’s not the way it works in a large society like ours. We ought to be able to find a way to compromise our differences, especially on the important issues.”

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German engineering? Great. German typography? Not so much.

     
     This doesn't happen often. You notice something done well then, taking a closer look, see that it is also done poorly.
     Look at the back of this Porsche I pulled up behind at red light the other day. My eye went, as it has before, to the word "PORSCHE" and I admired the font, the spacing, the neat elegance of the stylish typography. Very cool. You pay ... $97,000 for a sports car, the name of the maker should be nice. And it is.
     Now look underneath. At the figure under "PORSCHE." Kinda hard to read, right? I mean, not impossible. Not indecipherable. You squint, and you can eventually, as I did, see that it is "911," which makes sense, because that is an iconic, perhaps the iconic Porsche model number, used for decades. But the "9" is so compressed it looks like a rectangle. And the "11" almost looks like a lower case "n." You'd think at some point some German engineer, or designer, would look at the back of the car and say, "You know ..."

     But they didn't.

     Not the biggest deal in the world. We covered that yesterday. And will cover it again tomorrow. For today, I suppose there is almost a comfort, in knowing that even a huge German luxury carmaker like Porsche can fuck up the name of their own car in such a small yet noticeable way. Though it does make you wonder: if they get that wrong, what else did they get wrong? Oh well, join the club. If 2020 is remembered for anything, it will be the Year of Screw-ups, big and small. 

Will we escape from The Trump Zone?

 

      On Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, the Cubs won the World Series. The following Tuesday, Nov. 8, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
      Ever since, those two events have been paired in my mind.
      A Cubs championship was deferred for so long, it began to seem impossible. Maybe it was impossible. So it happening anyway, despite being impossible, somehow broke reality, ripping the fabric of space-time. We were all sucked through the tear, into an alternate universe, and have been trapped there ever since.
     That would explain a lot. Why we now stumble through this weird, 4th dimension. Like the child in that Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost,” who vanishes through the portal that opens up in her bedroom. Or rather, like her father, desperately trying to find her, plunging into that skewed world, everything distorted, spinning, wrong.
     Ditto for our plane of existence, where the president’s personal lawyer can appear in a Hollywood movie, sprawled on a bed with his hand down his pants, and not only does it fail to shock, but it makes perfect sense.
     Like in “Alice in Wonderland” — of course, there is a large contemptuous caterpillar on a toadstool — this is the place where the talking caterpillar shows up. And of course the caterpillar is smoking a hookah. What else would a caterpillar smoke?

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Flashback, 2010: Am I smarter than my 14-year-old? Don't bet on it

     Today is my older son's 25th birthday. Happy birthday, boy! Thank you for the past quarter century. It has been a blast, in the main, and I only wish I could do it all again. I considered writing something fresh, but a wise parent draws the veil as children reach adulthood.  So as proud as I am,  I thought today I would dig into the vault and find a column from years past. This is the first one I saw and, frankly, it encapsulates the experience of being his dad far better than anything I could possibly write now. 

Ross at 14, in the New York Public Library's
42nd Street Reading Room

  
     'Is Ross around?" I called weakly. "I'm cleaning the litter now, if he wants to gloat."
     Though my wife and I are typical indulgent parents, the boys do have chores; the younger one empties the dishwasher, the older one cleans the cat litter.
     But there was this bet.
     I'm not sure how the subject came up—we all talk constantly, so it's hard to keep track. We were having lunch, and my older boy used the phrase "tonic clonic."
     "Tonic clonic?" I asked. "That's a new one." I told him I know that "clonic" describes rhythmic muscle contraction, like a person rocking. But I had never heard this phrase before.
     "It's a grand mal seizure," he explained.
     "No, it's not," I answered, with sudden conviction. A writer encounters lots of words. I not only know what onchocerciasis is—river blindness—but can pronounce it correctly.
     "Yes, it is,'' Ross said. "Common vernacular."
     "Then, it must be a slang term," I said. "Something used in chat rooms. It's not an official term."
     "Yes, it is."
     "No, it's not."
     "Wanna bet?"
     Now, I'm the opposite of Richard Roeper when it comes to betting—well, I'm the opposite of Richard in many regards, alas, but particularly when it comes to betting. Betting is almost always a bad idea, because—unlike Richard—I almost always lose. But there is a certain activity that my son, being 14 and growing in contrariness every day, has lately refused to do, a chore I can't in good conscience force upon him.
     "If you lose, we play Scrabble," I said.
     "And if I win . . . ?"
     "I'll clean the cat litter."
     His grinning air of triumph as we shook hands concerned me. But "tonic clonic"? Rhyming couplets are invariably slang: "chick flick," "cheat sheet," "space case." The patients might call it the "pus bus," but the doctors will refer to it as the "Mobile Infection Control Vehicle."
     We got home, and he flew to the iMac. In five seconds, he had the Epilepsy Foundation Web site and an article titled "Generalized Tonic Clonic Seizures (also called Grand Mal or a Convulsion)."
     Geez. Not only is "tonic clonic" a real term, but it's the preferred term. As disappointed as I was to lose my shot at a Scrabble game (one by one, life's joys are plucked off the table, but I thought I could cling to Scrabble a bit longer), I couldn't help but wonder if this was political correctness—what was wrong with "grand mal?" Could it be because "mal" is "evil" in French? Have seizures now become a lifestyle, something to be celebrated? Have people with epilepsy taken a page from the deaf—or is it The Deaf Nation by now?—who have convinced themselves, if no one else, that deafness is a culture and a superior culture at that, and hearing aids are a genocide?
     In a word: yes.

The Big Evil

     "Grand mal means 'The Big Evil,' " said Kimberli Meadows, of the Epilepsy Foundation. "Just as we don't call people 'epileptics,' as we try to get rid of the stigma associated with epilepsy, we use more positive terms."
     I'm all for being positive, though "tonic clonic" still strikes me as an odd term, not just for its sing-song quality, but also from a etymological point of view, since "tonic" generally means something that restores health and vigor (though I see now that, in physiology, it means the opposite). "During the tonic phase, breathing may decrease or cease altogether, producing cyanosis (blueing) of the lips, nail beds and face," the Epilepsy Foundation explains. This leads to the clonic phase, where muscles rapidly contract and relax.
     I found a reference to "tonic clonic" in the Miami Herald in 1984, and a total of 278 citations in all national newspapers in the quarter century since—about 10 a year; I didn't feel so clueless for not having encountered it before. It isn't as if we're bombarded with the phrase.
     Irked epileptics—whoops, "people with epilepsy"—or the proudly deaf should take comfort that my punishment was already visited upon me. Kneeling over the cat box, shoveling scoopful after scoopful of congealed litter into a garbage bag while my eldest son taunted me.
     "If you're going to write books," he sneered, "you should really know what words mean. I mean, Dad, c'mon, 'animadversion?' "
     I stopped scooping, stunned. A month ago, at least, I had walked into the office—my own flippin' office, for Pete's sake! He was vegged out at the computer.
     "Do you need this?" he asked; sometimes I toss them off the computer.
     "No, I'm just looking up a word."
     "What word?" he asked.
     "Animadversion," I answered. "Boswell uses it in Life of Johnson.
     "It's a criticism."
     "What's a criticism?"
     " 'Animadversion,' " he said. "It means 'a criticism, or complaint.' "
     I gave him a cold stare and flipped open the Oxford.
     "Animadversion," I read.
     "Censure, reproof, blame, a criticism."
     I wheeled on him.
     "How did you know that?"
     "I don't know," he shrugged. "Kids talk."
     I will leave you with a word that is not in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: "contrapasso." An Italian word that literally means "counter-suffering" and refers to the way punishments in Dante's hell mirror the sins that damned souls committed in life. Adulterers are bound together for all eternity, fortunetellers are blinded by tears. A father who stresses the importance of words has them turned into darts and shot back at him. I am hoisted with my own petard.

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 5, 2010