Maybe offices are like gas station attendants

     If I see one more article on when and how office workers will return to the office, I think I'm going to hurl.
     Such essays always dwell  on three main points. First, that white collar employees are entirely happy working from home, if they can. Second, despite this, employers want them back an inevitable "two or three days a week" though I've never seen anyone try to figure out why those figures, and not one, or four.
     And finally, there is some hint at the bountiful benefits to be found going into the office, the hallway conversations that lead to breakthroughs, the energizing meetings, the eureka brainstorming sessions around the foosball table.
     While such articles sometime mention that there is no real data backing any of this up, they never take that extra step. Those who can work at home are obviously happy about the prospect of remaining there. Why? Maybe because going to the office is a bad idea for many, maybe most employees. What if the guilty secret of COVID is that a big swath of white collar workers never needed to come into work, not five days a week, not two or three, not ... gulp! ... ever. What if nothing that happens at the office can possibly counterbalance the time lost commuting, and the smartest thing any business could do is ditch their physical space entirely and distribute the savings to the staff as bonuses.
     I don't have a dog in this race. Since I began my column in 1996, I've worked at home far more than in the office—in fact, the first 10 months I was on paternity leave and never came in the office at all. Not once. 
     Don't get me wrong A newsroom is an exciting place, and I would occasionally go in to pick up my mail, to schmooze, to press the flesh, grab lunch somewhere. It was fun, and it helped that I went in when I wanted and stayed home when I didn't, which was most days.
     Going to the office always has risks, downsides. I remember a certain manager who rode the same Madison bus as I did. I'd notice her there, and fixedly look out the window, because I knew, if we made eye contact, she'd smile and try to draw me into whatever cracked project she was hatching at the paper, and I'd have to spend part of my limited face time at the office extracting myself from it. Luckily, she was only there a couple years, but any office is filled with such people. Bad idea generators. Martinet bosses. Treacherous colleagues. Bumbling subordinates. Time sink coworkers ready to snap their teeth into your ear and start chewing.
     I might be one of the latter, by the way. I'm a PWC, a person with chattiness. Many the time I'd slide over to a colleague's desk and start executing one of those meaningful personal interchanges that are the holy of holies to what passes for business journalism. And I'd notice, just as I was approaching my point, or the punchline, or nearing the midway point in my exegesis anyway, and my prey would toss the briefest of glances toward their computer screen, yearning to return to the story they had been working on when I barged in. At least I got the message, wrapped up, and moved on. Not everybody does.
     As someone who wrote a book on the death of men's hats, I know that society clings to the most ridiculous practices, essential right up to the point they are abandoned as pointless. Of course top hats would survive: how could there be weddings and funerals otherwise? I see a similar fate for the office. We needed workplaces the way we needed someone to pump our gas. It was nice, to have Jack say hello and ask what octane, clean the windshield and hand a stick of gum to the kids in the back seat. But it wasn't actually necessary, and we got rid of Jack, long ago, to save a nickel a gallon.

Culinary creativity keeps ill elderly eating

Chefs Adrian Arias, left, and Keyva S. Linton show off plates of pureed food that have been styled back into their original shapes at Northbrook Inn.

     Today’s lunch menu features beef stew, mashed potatoes and gravy, with green beans as a side dish, a watermelon amuse bouche and a peanut butter cookie for dessert.
     So chef Adrian Arias takes cooked green beans, puts them in a food processor and purees them, adding vegetable broth to boost flavor, a bit of starch for body and several drops of green food coloring. Pureeing with broth dulls the hue of the beans, so the green dye snaps it back. Then the mash goes into a pastry bag and is piped into a facsimile stack of green beans.
     By now you might be wondering what strange new haute cuisine this could be. The answer is, we’re not visiting any three star Lincoln Park scientific gastronomy hot spot but in the spotless kitchen of the Northbrook Inn Memory Care Community.
     Which brings us to the bad news.
     Most of you know that Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia rob a person of the ability to remember. The body endures, almost mockingly, while the personality recedes. It can be baffling and terrifying for sufferers and heartbreaking for their loved ones.
     As bad as that is, memory is only the first of a series of losses. Dementia is a hell with many levels. For instance.

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'Stay close to the orchestra'

 
      "Tonight of course is a very special occasion," conductor Riccardo Muti said Thursday night, standing on stage at Symphony Center, the assembled Chicago Symphony Orchestra behind him, the long absent audience in front. "After 19, 20 months of separation, of disaster in the world, so many people killed, we've almost forgotten: lack of culture can damage society."
     It can? I suppose so. Though with all the other harmful factors, the continuing plague and corrosive politics, the rising chorus of lies and entrenched delusion, with all the vigorous partisan structural vandalism being inflicted upon our country, I'm not sure how far down the list of harm the loss of classical concerts should be placed. Does it even register? I suppose it must. Music is in some ways the most essential thing, in that it offers us an abundance of harmony, grace and perfection in short supply anywhere else. Maybe music calls us to our highest selves.
     "Culture is not entertainment," Muti said. "You did not come tonight because you did not know how to spend your evening. You're here because you needed to hear music."
     I can hear music wherever and whenever I like, with a flick of the thumb. What I needed, very badly, was to go somewhere. A functioning orchestra has long been the hallmark of any great city. The CSO starting up again means something, if only a determined show of normality as we try to beat back this COVID epidemic that just will not go away.
     Muti asked the audience to consider the musicians, how they have endured and kept themselves in world class form over a year and a half of lockdown.
     "That is the reason I am playing 'Eroica'" he said, referring to the third piece on the program, Beethoven's "Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55." The Sinfonia Eroica, or "heroic symphony," supposedly named for Napoleon, then yanked back when the little corporal crowned himself emperor (something for us to look forward to, perhaps).
     "They have been heroic. .. they couldn't communicate the real reason of their life, to give the public beauty."
    Now they can.
     He pointed out that the first two composers on tonight's program—Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Florence Price—are both Black. Saint-Georges a contemporary of Mozart (the two lived together briefly). Price was a Chicagoan who work was featured at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair. In 2009, new music of hers was found in a run down house in Kankakee County. Quite the story, really.
     "It shows culture is open to everybody," Muti said. In theory, yes. Still an overwhelmingly white audience at Symphony Center. Neither Saint-Georges nor Price were geniuses—his "Overture to L'Amant anonyme," his only extant opera, was pleasant baroque fodder, Maybe his other five operas were better, but they were lost in the span of time. Price's "Andante moderato" struck me as something you'd hear on a 1940s movie soundtrack, vaguely Southern (she was born in Arkansas). But then I am not a classical music critic, and if you want the performance assessed by someone know knows what they're talking about, you can read the Sun-Times review.
     Muti's point is taken, about the desire for openness telegraphed by featuring those two composers (I'm tempted to lump in the third, Beethoven, just to be a wise-ass. There have been several attempts over the years to argue that the composer was Black, but those are more arguments made for rhetorical impact than anything based on empirical evidence)  Two out of three ain't bad, and it takes a long time to turn the ship of society. Before people feel welcome at a place, the place first has to welcome them. Sometimes for a long while. Across the street, the Art Institute is going large for textual artist Barbara Kruger, splaying her work across the building's facade, even on the walls outside. That doesn't make women suddenly well-represented at major museums, but is another step in the right direction. Her show is certainly engaging, and taken along with the recent exhibit of Bisa Butler's wildly colorful quilted portraits, you can't help but think that the two mainstays of Chicago's cultural life are hitting the ground running in the post George Floyd, post COVID (please God) era.
     Muti surprised me by pleading with the audience to spread the word about this orchestra thing.
      "Where most of the world will become more and more savage, I am asking you to stay close to the orchestra," he said.
     Okay, maestro, that sounds like a plan. 

Ravenswood Notes: Assuaging Fear

    So much is said about a city like Chicago, it's unusual to run into an entirely fresh take. But if anybody has ever postulated, as EGD Ravenswood Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey does today, the city as revered ancestor, I haven't encountered it. Her Saturday report:

     It’s 5 a.m. and I’m up writing from my Chicago apartment. The Brown Line and Metra rumble by repeatedly in the near distance, sounds that make me smile. I don't even mind the gentle shaking of the building. I am a die-hard Chicago fan who experiences this city as a living entity, a family member— perhaps one of my eldest ancestors. At once warm and fierce, she lays down the rules. Be strong. Don’t give up. Don’t complain, and if you do get over it soon. Be smart and savvy, and know your place. You might be privileged but don’t forget where you came from. Don’t look the other way when others need help. Stay on your toes, aware. Keep those car doors locked these days and stick to safe areas at safe times of day, but love and respect all of me. Do not live in fear. Be brave. Be tenacious.
     Since I am speaking of my particular family, Chicago has also guided us to grow things in her soil. Green beans under the skyway on the far south side. Roses wrapping around the Virgin Mary statuette in the Vet’s Park area of South Deering. Tomatoes and cucumbers, grown out of necessity by an immigrant railroad worker, to sustain the family, precariously (and often unsuccessfully) protected from rabbits, squirrels, and birds in the shadow of Senn High School. Eye popping, deep green leaves and happy, colorful flowers in a copious container garden on a back deck in Rogers Park. Rows of crops planted outside of the McCormick YMCA in Humboldt Park, where a Schwinn bike factory once stood. Palms rescued from the alley on a porch in Ravenswood. And always, always propagate.
     Avocado pits cracked open as roots break free, rambling vines spilling out onto window sills in glass jars filled with water. Jade and Tradescantia zebrina pups sprouting up from clippings that friends and neighbors shared. A baby rubber plant that’s at least 25 years old on an alley salvaged end table in a window on Wilson.
     I thought I’d be writing about fear today. Waking up at 4 a.m. after not enough sleep prompted me to take two hydroxyzine (not a regular habit since as an old school Polish/Irish/Lithuanian girl— who turned 52 this week— I am deathly afraid of prescribed medications even if they are needed). I have a feeling my Polish ancestors were the type who made tinctures from herbs and medicinal plants they grew themselves. While I am also drawn to natural remedies, I am out of practice and don’t have the intuitive sense of which plant medicine I need these days. Plus I don’t trust it enough not to die while forsaking pharmaceuticals like a Sri Lankan shaman tragically did this week. 
     In the past, I had tens of jars of dried flowers, roots, and leaves that I’d pull out in the wee hours when anxious thinking tried to take hold, preventing me from enjoying my zees. Chamomile and peppermint to relax, star anise to settle a tummy, sage for purifying and comfort, senna after eating too much cheese, St. John’s Wort to boost the mood.
     Today I reached for the prescribed meds and embarked upon a meditation. This combination usually works. Breathe deeply, choose a mantra. “Clear mind” on the inhale, “don’t know don’t know don’t know” on the exhale (as taught to me by Ana Forrest many moons ago), or simply “I am OK right now. It’s time to sleep.”
     But no. I’m wide awake and realized that fear woke me up in the first place. I’m having complications after round two of three of a dental procedure, and that scares me. Will my gums ever be the same? I’ve had a falling out with a childhood friend, which is unnerving even though our expiration date may have come. I’d like to be in a state of calm acceptance about this. I will get there, but have been ruminating about our last conversations and how angry I feel about being misunderstood. It will take some processing and active healing though, since one of the reasons I came back home was to reconnect with people. Since I got back in May, I’ve learned that I have some healthy friendships and familial ties, but I also have vestiges of a sometimes broken past to face.
     I could go on about what troubles me, but you get the drift. We all have things on our minds. I know that as I age, and those I love age, it behooves me to live a life that’s as present as possible, taking each challenge as it comes with as much grace and courage as I can muster. Good rest and healthy habits that contribute to the most balanced version of myself are the only recourse for the daunting task of being human.
     Off to water and prune. Wishing you a good day.

‘A cheap and easy way to save lives’

     Like most boys, I have an outsize interest in emergency gear. From road flares to safety goggles. It could be the most mundane thing. A fire extinguisher. A sewing kit. You name it. Certain devices practically vibrate with possibility. Even a flashlight is halfway to an adventure story: the rainy night, the dark cave, the unexpected bear.     

     Especially life rings. Beats there a human heart so dead as to be able to pass one of those, on a Chicago bridge, say, and not imagine the cry for help, the perfect toss to some unfortunate thrashing in the river below? The dripping rescued person. The stammered thanks. “Mister ... you saved my life!”
     That’s the fantasy. The reality is more complicated.
     The Chicago Park District announced it was going to start placing life rings along strategic spots on the waterfront, in the wake of the tragic drowning of Miguel Cisneros in Lake Michigan in August, less than six feet from the pier. His family felt that if there were a life ring, the 19-year-old could have been saved.
     Maybe. I don’t want to dispute with a grieving family. But the views of the bereaved and public pressure do not always lead to good policy. A question arose that cuts to the heart of this: Does anyone ever get saved by life rings?
     A quick check of the Sun-Times and Tribune archives found nothing, unless you count sailors plucked out of the Atlantic during World War II. Ditto for a century of the Daily News. The Red Cross deferred to the Coast Guard, which is mum. The Department of Transportation maintains 27 life rings on the Riverwalk, and 135 scattered around branches of the river. But they don’t keep track of how they’re used, other than to note that 20% vanish every year.

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Flashback 2012: The secret joys of piano tuning

 
     The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs tonight at Symphony Center after a COVID-induced hiatus of a year and a half. I've got my tickets and am looking forward to it. I don't write about the CSO as much as I should, perhaps because the cultural icon is already well-covered by others who know far more about classical music than I do. But a certain aspect of the operation just didn't get the attention it deserved, in my view, and in 2012, with a month-long piano festival going on, I saw my opportunity.

     The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a lot of pianos. At least 20 scattered throughout Symphony Center, including three concert grands, three baby grands plus uprights in rehearsal spaces and studios.
     And now, with its “Keys to the City” piano festival going on until mid-June, there are even more pianos, brought in for the occasion. Chicago Piano Day on Sunday, an afternoon of free performances and activities, culminates with a “monster finale” of eight Steinway concert grands on stage, thundering through “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
     No matter how talented the artists playing these pianos, however, none of them will sound good if the pianos are not in tune.
     Which makes this an ideal moment to examine a vital yet rarely considered aspect of music: piano tuning.
     A piano has hundreds of strings — 243 in a Steinway concert grand — plus hammers, dampers, pedals.
     “The piano is an intensely com­plicated instrument — 12,000 parts — and all of those parts have to work as one,” said Paul Revenko-Jones, director of the Chicago School for Piano Technology in the West Loop.
     Piano tuning is not a calling heard by many. A dozen students at any given time attend the Chi­cago School. The Piano Technicians Guild, based in Kansas City, Kansas, records 61 registered piano technicians in the Chicago area.
     This is one of the rare corners of commerce not overseen by the government.
     “It’s an unregulated profession,” said Revenko-Jones. “You don’t have to be licensed or certified to be a piano tuner. The way you become one is by saying, ‘I’m a piano tuner’ and no one would know the difference.”
     That’s how Jack Zimmerman got into the business in the early 1970s.
     “A guy thought I was a piano tuner and hired me to tune his piano,” said Zimmerman. “I needed money, desperately, so I ran out and got a set of tools, got a book, and tried to teach myself.”
     That first tuning was “a disaster,” but Zimmerman took a class and ended up working as a tuner for 15 years.
     “It’s a good profession,” said Zimmerman. “You can make a good living at it.”
     Contrary to expectations, you don’t have to play the piano in order to tune one.
     “Probably 75 percent of tuners including the really, really good tuners don’t play or don’t play much,” said Revenko-Jones. “We have to play something, we all have some tiny repertoire in order to hear what we’ve done. The skills are entirely separate.”
     The CSO has four part-time staff tuners, who rotate being on call, each taking a week a month; otherwise, they work at other venues. Charlie Terr, for instance, the day before Chinese superstar Lang Lang played at the Lyric earlier this month, headed over to the Civic Opera House after Steinway & Sons Chicago delivered a nearly 9-foot-long, Model D concert grand. Terr first let it sit for a few hours, to warm up — a change of temperature will throw a piano out of tune, as will changes in humidity. (Harpsichords are notoriously susceptible to humidity — the moisture in the breath of an audience can put the fragile baroque instruments out of tune, and they often must be retuned during intermissions.)
     Not only did this piano need to be tuned, but it had to be adjusted to suit a world class artist’s preferences. “I need to work on the tone of each note and brighten it up a little bit,” said Terr, who has been tuning for 41 years. “He likes a bright piano.”
     Terr first worked mutes — strips of grey felt — between the strings to isolate each string — some notes are actually three strings being struck. He hit one key, then stopped, got up and checked the brass wheels of the piano to make sure they were locked.
     Rolling into the orchestra pit will put a piano out of tune in a serious fashion.
     “It has happened before,” he said. “Just not to me.”
     The $148,000 piano secure, he took a tuning fork out of his tool box and hit it against his knee, sounding one of the most famous notes in music: A440, the “Concert A,” 440 standing for 440 hertz, or vibrations per second, a standard set in this country in 1926.
     From that A, Terr tunes by octaves, working his way down the piano to the bass notes.
     “I’m always playing two notes together,” he said. “I’m listening for how the harmonic series interacts with each other.”
     After Terr tuned the piano, he “voiced” it for Lang Lang, adding drops of liquid acetone to many of the felt hammer heads inside the mechanism, to give a brighter sound.
     “For me, it’s very important to have a piano that can do a lot of range of colors,” said Lang Lang. “Also, I need a very strong sustaining sound, ringing tone. A piano can be quite percussive sometimes. We need to make the piano more lyrical.”
     Piano tuners report a high degree of job satisfaction.
     “It’s all I’ve ever done for a career,” said Jim Houston, another CSO staff tuner, who started in the late 1960s. “You are entrusted with a lot of responsibility. You get to rub elbows with great artists. Tuning itself is a very enjoyable activity. ”
     “Getting three strings to make one note, that becomes a Zen moment,” said Zimmerman. “Sitting alone, trying to get three strings to sound as one, it can be quite remarkable.”
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 27, 2012

Should Illinois bring back parole?

Michael Simmons speaking at a convocation for North Park University’s School of Restorative Arts inside Stateville Correctional Center in 2019./Photo by Karl Clifton-Soderstrom

     There is no parole in Illinois. I did not know that until Katrina Burlet told me.
     “We got rid of our parole system in 1978,” said Burlet, campaign strategy director of Parole Illinois, a coalition committed to addressing the needs of prisoners.
     Along with Illinois, 15 other states have abolished parole. California, on the other hand, has mandatory parole and in August pushed the issue into the headlines when a parole board voted to free Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
     This is one of those debates where people of goodwill can have opposing views. You could argue that Sirhan’s crime is so vile, not only snuffing out the life of a father of 11 but a beloved leader who inspired millions, that he should never go free. I can see that.
     Or you could counter that 53 years in prison is punishment aplenty, that keeping Sirhan in jail until he dies won’t bring RFK back, that we are too punitive a nation already, with 1.8 million incarcerated at any time. I can see that too.
     Burlet is pushing Senate Bill 2333, which would allow convicted criminals in Illinois who have served 20 years in prison to be eligible for a parole hearing.
     “It restores parole for people serving the longest sentences,” she said.
     People like Michael Simmons. Burlet came to this issue after running a debate program at Stateville Correctional Center. I asked her to put me in touch with a prisoner who might be affected by changes in the law, and she offered Simmons, convicted of murder in 2001 for killing Kurt Landrum during a robbery and sentenced to 50 years.

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