Chicago Notes: Great Lake

     Former Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey casts her eye upon our inland sea:

     Lake is too small a word for the great body of water east of Chicago. That’s why I’ve started telling friends “I’m down at the ocean” during my regular sojourns to its shore. One friend responds in kind. She recently texted me “heading down to the ocean now,” putting a big smile on my face. It just makes life seem more exciting.
     The other night while at the oceanfront near Foster, a man in a kayak floated a few hundred feet off the beach after the lifeguards left. He was there for an hour or so, and I thought “what a kind soul,” thinking he was acting as the evening lifeguard once the city guards had cleared out for the evening. His presence was reassuring.
     Meanwhile my family and I struck up a conversation with a nice lady and her 7 year old daughter Sara. Sara and my 8 year old nephew Anthony struck up quite the beach friendship and before too long had dug a hole nearly as deep as they were tall. They were very proud and Anthony kept calling out “Peaches!”—my favorite nickname—“Come over here! Look!” with an ear-to-ear grin.
     A perfect summer evening.
     Sara’s mother told us that the man on the kayak is her husband. He was not actually lifeguarding at all— he just likes to float around out there to decompress. Still cool, and I am sure he’d have sprung into action if any of the night swimmers got into trouble. When he came back to shore we swapped stories about “Lake” Michigan.
     As you probably know, the Great Lakes (ok, fine. I guess I’ll have to call them what they are and not what they seem) comprise the largest fresh water body in the world. You also may know that Michigan has tidal waves called seiches (https://isgs.illinois.edu/seiches-sudden-large-waves-lake-michigan-danger) and is regaled with meteotsunamis on a regular basis (https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2738/NOAA-research-shows-promise-of-forecasting-weather-driven-tsunamis).
     Sara’s father shared stories of people getting caught in whirlpools of water that form in areas of the lake disrupted with concrete docks. He told us that Foster beach is quite safe because the open space creates a climate of calm.
     Nearly 20 years ago I was out on the water with friends and an experienced sailor who docks his boat at Montrose Harbor. We had a lovely day and headed back to shore. Several people got off of the boat, including a friend and her infant son. El Capitán decided we’d head back out for round two, though the weather appeared foreboding. In fact, other sailors who had also headed back cautioned us against going back out. The captain would have none of it for we were hardy sailors.
     With trepidation I joined the group of fifteen or so—most of us landlubbers and the rest the small crew who’d keep us safe. Sure enough, what seemed to be out of the blue, a storm blew in. I have never been on a body of water so choppy. The crew flew into action while my friends and I sat in a circle above deck, holding hands and crouching together. We did not have life jackets on. There was no time. I heard the faithful praying fervently.
     At one point our 39.1 foot craft could not stand up to the waves. The boat was on its side, perpendicular to the water, and while we clutched each other we watched the crew work furiously to right the ship. They succeeded with much effort and what felt to be an eternity. We were able to make it back to land. Needless to say this was one of the most terrifying things I’ve lived through, and since then I have mostly shied away from invitations to sail on private boats in Chicago.
     Lake Michigan is no joke. Nothing to trifle with.
     I was once watching a surfing documentary with my brother John who lives in California and has always been a huge (real) ocean lover. I was surprised and delighted to see brat-eating, beer-drinking South Siders catching huge waves somewhere near the Illinois Indiana border. I can’t quite think of the name of the movie, but will share if and when I do. Dees, dems and dosers with bellies drinking Hamm’s and catching waves is too good to miss. (As a half South-Sider I am allowed to say these things).
      I can’t talk about the lake without talking about my maternal grandparents, Olive and Carl. They met at Oak Street Beach almost 100 years ago. Olive was adorable and young, and I can picture her in my mind’s eye, standing on a concrete post in her swimming costume. Carl must have taken that photo. Carl used to fish off of Navy Pier before it became a fortress, and we’d share fried fish at the little shack at the end of the pier.
     It’s so very good to be home.

Columbus fans could learn from Cleveland

 

   Someone named Natalie at something called “SeatGeek” sent me an email offering White Sox tickets for Friday’s game against the Cleveland Indians. I blinked at it.
     “Didn’t they change their name to the ‘Guardians?’” I wondered. Yes they did, but only after this season. Ah.
     Sure, I could get all sentimental about a century of baseball tradition being scrapped. Weep how I loved Chief Wahoo as a child and, to be honest, still do. How my mother was an Indians fan, my grandfather before her.
     But you know what? Truth is, I’m an adult now, and understand the world is not all about me. I have my own sense of self-worth, one not dependent on the icons of my youth being carried into perpetuity on the shoulders of the public, like plaster saints borne aloft in some dusty village procession. Times change. Certain stereotypes fly in 2021 while others do not. I can’t explain why the Fighting Irish Leprechaun is OK while Chief Wahoo isn’t.
     Though I can try: It has something to do with the Irish coming here and doing pretty well, eventually, while the Native Americans already were here and didn’t do well at all, not once the white newcomers were done with them. I bet if no Irish Catholics actually attended the University of Notre Dame, its pugnacious mascot would be seen in a very different light.
     Still, when I heard Cleveland is changing the name to “Guardians,” I winced. Leave it to Cleveland to pick a dud. I had been pulling for “Spiders.” It’s such a cool name, with roots — Cleveland was the Spiders before it was the Indians. And I’d been to the University of Richmond, and was so impressed with its way-cool Spiders mascot I almost bought a Spiders t-shirt.

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Neil Steinberg's Day off

 

St. Regis Tower viewed from Maggie Daley Park's Cancer Survivors' Garden

     Left to my own devices, I'd rather be working. And between the column and the book and the blog, God knows there's plenty of work to do. So when my wife suggested we chuck our obligations Wednesday and go downtown for a "vacation day," to ensure we wouldn't make noise and bother our oldest while he's downstairs taking the New York State Bar Exam, I went along, batting away qualms.
     Such as the moment, early in the morning, when I was at my desk, pulling reference art for the artist illustrating my book to base drawings upon. "Why am I going anywhere when I need to get this done?" I thought, grimly. I shook that off.
     We boarded the 7:56 Metra downtown. "Smiling faces under those masks!" the conductor urged. "Let's have those masks on please." People complied. Arriving downtown, we walked across the Loop. Normally we'd have gone to the Art Institute—it's been a year and a half since we've been inside. But it's closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, due to COVID crisis scheduling, so we picked up tickets for the 10 a.m. Chicago Architecture Center river tour on the Emerald Lady. I'll admit that my enjoyment of the tour was tempered by already knowing just about everything the docent said, and more. I had to retrain myself to keep from shouting out what I thought were salient details she sidestepped. But Edie loved it, and it was fun to spend 90 minutes on the river on a gorgeous warm summer day, first up the north branch to the Freedom Center, then down to River City, and back along the main branch, out to the lock. She didn't make a single factual error, and that might have riled me too, because I was primed and waiting for the joy of correcting others. 

     After, we headed to Ming Hin for a dim sum lunch, then crossed Randolph and wandered Millennium Park. Neither of us had actually been in Maggie Daley Park—we always pull up at the Bean—and it was fun to explore the place, with its clunky climbing walls and Cancer Survivors' Garden, which has a great view of Jeanne Gang's St. Regis, née Vista, Tower. There are a series of metal plaques offering advice to those facing cancer, including the dubious proposition that you can beat it if you really set your mind to the task, and that a good doctor will be a man. But I still managed to enjoy the place, despite, or perhaps because, of that.
     We swung over to the Chicago Yacht Club and walked down the lakefront, passing Segway tours and women in hijabs learning to kayak. We ended up relaxing in the lobby of the newly open Palmer House, enjoying a cold beverage and sharing a brownie, which the Palmer House claims to have invented and may very well have. There definitely were more people downtown, and it's good to be among them and see the city opening up, if only briefly before the next crisis arrives.

How do blind people pick up after their dogs?

     Four times a day, Leslie takes her black Lab for a walk outside her home in the northwest suburbs. “Get busy,” she commands.
     If you’re wondering why you’re reading a third column in a week about picking up after dogs, well, stick with me, and you’ll see there is no choice here. Some threads simply must be pulled.
     If you recall, Monday’s column quotes the Cook County animal law, Sec. 10.8 (r): “No person shall fail to remove feces deposited by the person’s cat or dog, except service animals...”
     This drew an email from former Sun-Times book editor, Henry Kisor.
     “Your column today, with all the poop about designer poo bags ... was interesting — and shocking,” he wrote. “Shocking in your citation of the Cook County law about cleaning up after your dog. Why should handlers of service dogs be exempt from that? I use a service dog, and like all other service dog handlers I have ever known, I clean up after my dog.”
     I replied that perhaps the clause is meant not for people who are deaf, like Henry, but for the blind. How could a blind person pick up after a dog?
     “The way I pick up after my dog, first of all, feel for her movement,” said Leslie, who asked me not to use her last name. “I can tell she’s moving around in circles, or sniffing, through the leash.”
     She also didn’t want me to use her dog’s name, lest someone read the article, see her on the street, and shout “Rover!” or whatever, and come over and pet the dog. You’re not supposed to do that. Service dogs are working.
     “You don’t want to give someone a chance to distract the dog, for safety reasons,” she said.

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Flashback 1987: " Lawyer test `worst,' bar none - It's agony--but you can't practice without passing it"

    The bar exam begins Tuesday. Both my sons are taking the two-day, 12 hour test remotely, because of COVID. My older son will take the New York state bar exam, my younger, the Illinois. This is the second generation of my being in proximity to the test: 34 years ago, I nervously hovered in the background while my wife-to-be took the bar. The memory is clear: we stayed at a hotel downtown, the Westin, as those taking the bar did, to be near to the examination site, and eliminate any risk of traffic tie-ups. The night before we wandered Rush Street, looking for a restaurant that appealed to her. At 1 a.m., after we had gone to sleep, workers started ripping up Michigan Avenue under our window. That was a surprise. We coped. At lunchtime, I hurried over to the hotel from work and ordered room service—cling peaches, cottage cheese and a baked potato, comfort food—so it would ready when she got there, and awaited her arrival. That moment of expectation is what lingers: the covered plate on a little cart, the silent room, gazing out the window at the street, waiting. After she returned to the exam, I went down to the front desk and demanded they change our room to one not facing the street. I also wrote this story. 

     

     On Tuesday, 2,236 people will sit down and face perhaps the most difficult and important test of their lives: the Illinois bar exam.
     For weeks, in some cases months, these would-be lawyers have hibernated with their lawbooks, shunning friends and family. They have enrolled in expensive cram courses, gnawed their fingernails, downed gallons of antacid and, above all, studied, studied, studied.
     While much controversy surrounds the two-day, 12-hour, 216-question exam, most of it centering on whether the time-consuming exam should be given at all, there are two things that cannot be disputed: It is a grueling, difficult, maddening test, and you cannot practice law without passing it.
     "I still have nightmares, awful memories. I don't even like to think about it," said Anne Burke, a Southwest Side attorney and wife of Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th).
     "It's absolutely one of the worst experiences you can go through," said William H. Wise, an attorney and part-time law instructor at DePaul University. "If it was up to me, they would get rid of all the bar exams. The questions they ask are so obscure and minuscule, things that in my 22 years of practice have never come up."
     How obscure? Past bar exams have asked questions about property law from 1670.
     "That's what's so crazy about the bar exam," said Nisha Kumar, who is taking the bar on Tuesday, hoping to join the ranks of the approximately 40,000 lawyers practicing in Illinois. "They're testing us on law that no state has been following for decades, yet we have to know that to practice law in Illinois."
     About 90 percent of the students taking the bar pay $795 for an intensive review course called BAR-BRI, designed to reacquaint them in seven weeks with the information it took three years of law school to learn.
     "Think of how you would like to take a final examination on something you studied in school three years ago," said Richard J. Conviser, an Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law professor who began BAR-BRI 20 years ago. "Nobody enjoys the experience - it's a lot of hard work under pressure."
     The exam is given in February and July. It consists of two parts. The first, an essay section, asks 16 questions relating to Illinois law. The second, known as the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), is the same in 49 of the 50 states and asks 200 multiple-choice questions relating to nationally applicable law.
     Just the act of responding to so many questions in so short a period of time makes taking the bar almost an act of physical endurance.
     "By the second afternoon, I was so emotionally and physically exhausted it was an effort just to finish it," said Jo Ellen Bursinger, who took the exam in February. "Afterward, we went out to dinner, and I was so exhausted that I couldn't even eat or drink."
     Despite elaborate preparation, some people are not able even to finish the test, never mind pass it.

   "In the morning of the first day the room was filled," said Burke, who took the exam in 1983. "After the lunch break on the first day, some people were missing and never came back. The same thing happened every day. They just couldn't handle it."
     Frank Morrissey, one of the five state bar examiners who write and oversee the test, said they often try to keep people from leaving.
     "Sometimes we can talk them into going back in," he said. "I remember one young man—his wife had served him with divorce papers the morning of the exam. He walked out about 10:15 a.m., saying, `I just can't think.' I said, `What are you going to do for the next two days, just sit in your apartment? You've got this time set aside, why don't you reconsider and go back in?' The guy went back in and passed the bar exam."
     To take the bar, a person needs to have done four things: graduated from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (there are nine in Illinois), passed a brief morals test, paid a $150 fee (the entire bar exam procedure is funded solely by entry fees) and submitted five character references and three notarized affidavits attesting to his moral character.
     There is a long wait to get test results back—as much as two months. The examiners are reluctant to discuss exactly how the passing cutoff point is determined, but in general 70 percent correct will earn a passing mark. Test scores are not released; the new lawyers simply are informed that they have passed, the others that they failed and must try again.
     Although Illinois has one of the highest passage rates in the country, about 15 percent of the applicants who take the test fail. Those who fail can request an audience with an examiner, who will discuss their essay answers.
     Everyone who has endured the bar exam has a tale to tell: the student who had a nervous breakdown and had to be taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital's emergency room for observation. The armless student who, two years ago, went in and took the exam with her feet, even though she could have requested a scribe.
     Perhaps the greatest bar exam story of all is the famed Marsha Spak episode, which took place the second day of the exam in February, 1979.
     It was noon. Having finished the morning session, Spak, a January graduate of Chicago-Kent, headed toward the Ritz-Carlton, where she had taken a room to rest during the two-hour break. Her husband, Michael Spak, saw her crossing the street from the hotel window.
     "I had lunch ready for her," he said. "An $18 sandwich, sent up by room service. But I kept waiting and waiting."
     Spak was kept waiting because his wife was trapped in the elevator, between the 12th and 13th floors, in complete darkness.
     "I was all alone," she said. "My first thought was: I'm going to miss the exam. I was not at all concerned about falling or being killed, only that I was going to have to take the exam all over again."
     The hotel manager refused to pry open the doors, fearing damage to the expensive wood finish. Half an hour passed. An hour passed.
     After almost 1 1/2 hours, the elevator finally was unjammed, and with minutes to spare, Marsha Spak—too terrified to get back in the elevator—raced down 13 flights of stairs and back to the exam room. She arrived just as the test booklets were being handed out.
     She passed.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 26, 1987

Poop fairies won’t help, but this bag might

     Myble is a rescue and a sweetie, according to her owner, Barbara Radner. But like all dogs, the Chihuahua mix has her needs. When nature calls, the retired DePaul administrator escorts Myble from their home on the 33rd floor of a lakefront condo and down to the street to do her business.

     Heading out, Radner snags a WoofPack Dog Walking Accessory Bag. I learned of the product’s existence after my July 15 column about the non-reality of poop monitoring drones. Cook County is not searching for pet waste from the sky, but an Ohio company is selling a tote bag to put it in.
     “I just got tired of stuffing things into my pockets,” said Lisa Bast, who started her company, Waggin’ Trails, in 2017. “At times I was walking and didn’t have enough bags. Carrying bagged waste, cellphone, keys, treats. I wanted something all-in-one.”
     The bag is sold online and at dog shows.
     "When I saw it, I said, ‘Huh, that would solve several problems,’” said Radner, 76. “I’m going to get it.”
     I’ve been walking a dog for 11 years, and the plastic sheath from newspapers makes a perfect collection bag (try that, Apple News) which, knotted, I hold in one hand and do not think about until reaching the nearest trash receptacle.
     Why buy a $30 purse to put poo bags into?
     “It’s just designed perfectly,” Radner said. “There’s a little pocket for my cellphone and other stuff. A well-protected pocket for the poo bag, so your phone doesn’t smell like poop.”
     Bast had help perfecting the bag from the company manufacturing them.
     “It is very, very, very expensive to manufacture in the United States,” she said. “But I wanted it made here. I had it manufactured in Amish country, but the quality wasn’t there.”

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Flying jewels

     Hummingbirds are special. Most birds fly, which is incredible enough. Hummingbirds, alone among birds, hover, their wings beating so fast—50 times a second—there is no need for forward motion to keep them airborne. The wonders of this bird are so many they defy brief listing, though chief among them has to be that unique figure-8 method of flapping that allows hummingbirds to stay aloft by alternating between beating the bottom then the top of their wings against the air. Talk about efficiency.
     To that, add the marvel of smallness, the first thing that Europeans noticed when they encountered this species of bird only found in the Western hemisphere.

      "There is a curious bird to see to, called a humming bird, no bigger than a great Beetle," Thomas Morton wrote 1637 in New England Canaan, a furious critique of Puritanism that became the first book banned in the New World.

     "Much less than a Wren, not much bigger than an humble Bee," Richard Ligon wrote in A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados in 1657.

    More recently, Kenn Kaufman perfectly dubs them "flying jewels" in Birds of North America. Harriette Wilbur, in her priceless 1920 Bird Gossip refers to the hummingbird she spends hours and hours watching as a "tiny elf," its "thimble-nest" concealing translucent, pea-sized eggs. 

      Hummingbirds weigh about 3 grams—a little more than a penny—and at that size, certain design sacrifices are required. Their feet, for instance. The birds cannot walk, or even hop, but must shuffle awkwardly if need be. If you've wondered how they suck nectar through those long thin beaks (you haven't, but it's nice to pretend) the truth is, they don't. They wet their beaks in nectar then lick it off with their long clear tongues, a process that they must do well, because they can consume half their body weight in a day.

   D.H. Lawrence finds wonder anew by inverting the size situation in his delightful poem about hummingbirds, imagining them as the first creatures at the dawn of time:

     Before anything had a soul,

     While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate

     This little bit chipped off in brilliance

     And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

     He imagined a time of giant hummingbirds.

     Probably he was big

     As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.

     Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

     We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

     Luckily for us.

     Expert that I am, I can tell at a glance that the bird in this series of photos, shot in Marcellus, Michigan by reader Nikki Dobrowolski, is a Ruby-throated Hummingbird.

     I'm joking. They all are, mostly. The Ruby-throated is the only hummingbird that breeds in the Eastern half of the United States. Though occasional stray Rufous hummingbird and other varieties do stray over here from the West. 

     To get a sense of the impoverishment this limitation represents, there are 150 species of hummingbird in Ecuador alone and 320 or so in the Americas. 

     Being American, they of course are warlike, despite their size. Like our country, they have an excuse for their aggression, though theirs is a better one: needing to feed so often and fly so far—some hummingbirds spend half their lives migrating, and can cover 20 miles a day—they can't indulge other birds that might be interested in the flowers they need to power up on. So hummingbirds are famous for fiercely driving off birds three times their size to literally eat their lunches.  

     Despite all this, hummingbirds, like people, can become bolloxed by our artificial world, and sometimes need a helping hand, as Nikki explained when she sent me these photos. "It’s not often you get to touch a hummingbird," she writes. "One flew into my garage today and kept trying to get out through the window. I put my hand out to guide it toward the door, and it did buzz my hand for a moment. I was able to get these shots on my iPhone, not bad pics of a live bird. Hope you enjoy them."
     I would say we all have. Thank you Nikki.