Ravenswod Notes: Free Bird

"Lady Murasaki Sets a Bird Free from a Cage," by Yashima Gakutei (Met)

 

    

     It's probably telling that while Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey writes at the start of the day, as you will see, I do my most regular writing at night. Not the writing here, mind you—writing for public consumption benefits from the freshness of the morning. But my journaling comes, usually, in the evening, with few flights of fancy or deep thoughts, but a dull just-the-facts plod through what happened that day. I do that because in a year or five or 10, I might want to know some specific, and there it will be. 

     "You have lingered sweet, between our hearts, like an everlasting soul.” 
     I’m not sure where this came from; I found it written in the jacket of one of my hundreds of pages of journals and I like the ring of it. Over the years I’ve gone through periods of fastidious daily writing. I’ve also had times where I forget how important it is for the ink to meet the paper. Or I was too distracted, defeated, or exhausted to lift that pen and tend to my inner garden.
     Writing is a way we can get to know ourselves and the world. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, teaches a daily exercise she calls Morning Pages. Per her instruction, when I was disciplined enough to do so, I’d roll out of bed each morning (maybe after a quick run to the loo), sit up, and spill three full pages of stream-of-consciousness musings onto the blank 8x10 sheets of lined paper. When I took the time to do this, years ago, I found that my innermost fears and hopes revealed themselves. Dreams were recalled in vivid detail, the mind fresh from sleep. Realizations and epiphanies abounded. The practice is to write non-stop, even if a sentence or two reads “I have nothing to write.” The goal is not to create a quality product, it’s to unveil what is hidden in the corners and crevices of the psyche.
     I am not a fan of repression, nor of passive aggressive behaviors that stem from inner (often unrecognized) anger or pain that becomes a puppet master if not unsupervised.
     The father of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) Dr. Aaron Beck died earlier this month at the age of 100. He contributed an invaluable piece to the puzzle as far as helping sentient beings (who sometimes forget that we are sentient, as we numb ourselves through various means) learn to hear their inner voices. There is usually an element of criticism in these voices.      We judge ourselves and others, rather than focusing on our permanent values and goals. Once the messages are unveiled, we can learn to decipher the thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. Through CBT we can shut the mean person inside of us down when needed in order to move forward, take risks, and act courageously despite core beliefs that would prevent us from success and greater happiness. We can be our own worst enemies, or we can thrive by reparenting ourselves in gentle and loving ways that dispel the myths about ourselves that a patriarchal, shaming, unrealistically puritanical, capitalistic, materialistic society places upon us.
     I’m a nostalgic person who has a hard time letting go. I sometimes feel regretful about opportunities I’ve squandered, and other mistakes I have made. Through CBT I’ve learned to be more accepting of my decisions and of myself, warts and all. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always done the best I could with the tools I had, and I often fell short because the toolbox was near empty. I can also celebrate the many successes I've had, and I'm shedding the idea that I need to be better than I am while also striving to improve.
     A cool, middle aged white haired hippy-ish man, an Austinite who works at Book People, a two story mecca where one can get lost for days, turned me onto a book called Taming Your Gremlin. He said it helped him hear his inner critic and say adieu to some of it. Clients have experienced their inner critic to sound like their own sometimes; other times it’s their mother’s, father’s, or a punitive nun or another authoritarian, judgmental person. The voice is mean, not inspiring or helpful. It does not say “you are valuable. You are good enough the way you are. You are lovable. You are safe.” (Why is Stuart Smalley suddenly coming to mind?) It says “You are a disappointment,” or some variation. The voice is not true. It’s not even yours.

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

            —Maya Angelou

Don't be afraid; it's just history.

     There are two ways to be great.
     The first is by actually being great, doing great things, winning victories, achieving big goals.
     That’s the hard way.
     The second path is to be great by pretending to be great, insisting you’re great now and always have been, while ignoring or denying all the stuff about you that isn’t so great.
     The easy path.
     Look at Communist China.
     Much about China is truly great: a civilization nearly 5,000 years old. Culture. Cuisine. More than a billion citizens. Proud, strong, rising.
     Not great enough, apparently, for its totalitarian leadership. They demand that everything be considered great, and banish all that is controversial, complicated or embarrassing.
     In April, China’s cyber censors set up hotlines that allows citizens to denounce each other, turning in those who “defame national heroes.” Questioning the party’s version of the past is branded “historical nihilism.” People go to prison for quips about history.
     This is not great, but petty. Not strength, but weakness. There is a reason our nation’s First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
     The idea was that dictating what religion to practice, or what citizens can say or not say, is the work of tyrants. The reason we broke away from England is because we were sick of that. And because permitting all kinds of speech is like permitting free scientific inquiry: it allows ideas to compete, and the best to rise to the top. It fosters greatness.
     Or at least it did, before social media put its thumb on the scales, and encouraged Americans to isolate themselves in their own personal echo chambers.

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‘So much good came out of the bad’

Nate Moser

     Nate Moser stood in a Skokie courtroom and thanked those who helped him stay out of prison.
     “My defense — thank you,” the Navy vet said, adding, to laughter, “and the prosecution—thank you.”
     “You don’t hear that very often,” interjected Michael J. Hood, a District 2 associate judge.
     Then again, it is not often that the legal system goes to such effort to help those caught up in it. This was not a usual session in a typical courtroom, but graduation day in Veterans Court, one of Illinois’ 123 problem-solving courts. The idea is, rather than use justice as an indifferent conveyor of punishment, to turn it into an engine of compassion, resources, and attention, trying to address the problems that land military veterans in trouble.
     “This is the best form of justice, the most successful program we have,” said specialty court coordinator Kelly Gallivan-Ilarraza. “We have the team approach. The case manager, probation officer, public defender, state’s attorney, problem-solving court coordinator, sit around the table and talk about what the person needs. Whatever they need, we try to get them: housing, education, employment. If they had mental illness, if they need medication, if they need treatment, whatever it is, to get them the tools so they don’t come back.”
     While Veterans Day, which falls on Thursday this year, is a time to praise veterans and their heroism and sacrifice, the difficult realities facing many veterans often are overlooked. Of all military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, 9% have been arrested since their return, and veterans are at greater risk for substance abuse, suicide and problems related to PTSD and head trauma. Plus a trauma only now being recognized.
     “We’re seeing a lot more cases of military sexual trauma,” said Sherisa R. Benson, veteran’s justice outreach specialist at Captain James A. Lovell Health Care Center, the VA hospital in North Chicago. “It’s a fairly recent thing. People consider it a disorder now. It’s something that we screen for.”

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Flashback 1998: Paralyzed veteran shows different kind of heroism

Cart with Wounded Soldiers, by Théodore Gericault
                  (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The paper decided to run today's column tomorrow, so it appears on Veteran's Day, an occasion I've tried to mark when I could. This column stands out despite the years because I remember approaching the VA—I was looking for a veteran wounded in service whose injury affected his life today, and they offered up Maurice Valeriano.
     Then they tried to yank him back, as you will see, after discovering his injury wasn't combat-related. I said No, somehow that makes it even more apt. I hope you agree. I wish I could offer you an update, but I couldn't find anything recent on him. Perhaps a reader will.

   When children at the schools he visits ask Maurice Valeriano how he was wounded, the ex-Marine has no good battle story to tell. No shell fragment. No sniper's bullet. No land mine.
     Valeriano, a quadriplegic, wasn't wounded at all, in the technical sense. He was injured, his neck broken diving into the ocean in Okinawa.
     Which, if you think about it, for a soldier, is far worse than being wounded. Your body is just as damaged as it might have been in battle. But there is a pause; the respect automatically granted battle-injured vets, particularly at this time of year, with Veterans Day this Wednesday, gets yanked back, if only a bit. Talk about adding insult to injury.
     It's a fine distinction, but real. The Veterans Affairs official who referred me to Valeriano sang his praises over the telephone as a sterling individual, a grievously wounded Vietnam vet who overcame his injuries to go on to a career with Paralyzed Veterans of America.
     Then she called me back. Whoops. A mistake. It turned out he wasn't injured in battle at all. Never been to Vietnam. Perhaps, she said, I would like to be referred to somebody else.
     That second call said it all. I don't blame the VA official. She was only being sensitive to human nature. The public is stingy with its sympathy. A soldier injured at a depot in Kansas or, as in Valeriano's case, a diving tower in Japan, seems somehow fake, as if they were trying to pull a fast one.
     This is vastly unfair. No bullet gets fired in wartime that isn't loaded on a truck by one soldier and unloaded by another and inventoried by a third. The vast bulk of military personnel never see a battlefield.
     Yet the tales of sacrifice we think of—if we think of them at all—are all thrilling war stories, of smoky trenches and clattering helicopters. As if the guy who gets run over by a truck at Fort Bragg isn't serving his country, too. Aren't they casualties? Aren't they filling a role even more difficult than hero: the role of the uncelebrated fallen? Aren't their tales worth a passing thought?
     "I went into the Marine Corps when I was 17," said Valeriano, now 34. "I come from a family of Marines. My brother. My cousins. It's a family-type tradition to serve my country."
     Valeriano was a mechanic stationed in Okinawa. He was swimming with a bunch of buddies in the ocean. He dove off a diving tower.
     "I hit bottom, hitting my head," he said. "I became a quadriplegic. The funny thing about it is, I never passed out. The water was so crystal clear, I was laying face forward, looking at my arms and legs and wondering why I can't move them. There was no pain, no blackout."
     His buddies fished him out. He had fractured his C5/6 vertebrae. He was told he would never use his arms or legs again. He was 19.
     "You think your life's over," Valeriano said.
     He spent six months in the hospital, most of it at Hines, here in Chicago. It turned out he had some function in his arms—enough for him to battle his way into a manual wheelchair.
     "They wanted to stick me in an electric wheelchair," he said. "There was this World War II vet. He said, 'Whatever it is, don't let them put you in an electric wheelchair. Make the effort.' To this day I thank that man."
     It took him a while to re-enter life. "I stayed home for three years, watching soap operas, trying to deal with my disability," Valeriano said. An offer of a job from the Paralyzed Veterans of America got him working; he now counsels vets.
     Valeriano was married, now divorced, and has two twin sons, age 12. I had to ask: "Artificial insemination?"
     "It was natural," he said. "Most people think that if you're paralyzed you can't do that sort of thing. Everybody's disability is different, but I was blessed and fortunate not to lose that ability."
     Valeriano said not many fellow Marines give him trouble. "When a guy is having a bad day, he might say, 'What are you talking about? I was hurt in Vietnam. I stepped on a land mine. You were hurt in a diving accident.' "
     He agrees, in a way, calling his work with paralyzed veterans "a form of guilt" for being denied the chance to prove himself in war.
     "That's one of the main reasons I'm here," he said. "For me to make it here by 8:30 in the morning, I have to get up three hours early -- I can get up at 4, 5 o'clock in the morning. Why am I doing this when I can sit at home and collect $ 1,300 a month in Social Security? I wasn't injured in combat. The government is doing a good job taking care of me. I almost have to do it."
     It can take Valeriano an hour just to put his clothes on in the morning. He does it because he feels it's his duty. I find that heroic.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 8, 1998

Ducks of a feather

     I would never accuse the Chicago Botanic Garden of being ordinary.
     However.
     When it comes to ducks, the choices usually run to mallards, mallards, or more mallards, with their standard dull brown mallard females and bottle-green headed mallard males. Oh, there might be a few American black ducks, which look very similar, thrown in for non-variety's sake. At least they aren't geese, who are in such plague-level abundance that the Garden has had to commission a company with the spot-on name of Wild Goose Chase to encourage them to head south, and quickly.
     But my wife and I were padding over the bridge to Evening Island Sunday afternoon and noticed a knot of people at the rail, so of course joined them, and were treated with a breed of duck I don't recall ever seeing up close before: a hooded merganser, boldly striped, with distinctive black, white and caramel color scheme and yellow eye with its pinprick, I'm-on-drugs pupil.

     The male merganser was accompanied, not by a female merganser, but a standard mallard, and the odd couple was harried by several bulked up carp, who hang out like a street gang under the bridge, waiting for visitors to feed them bread crumbs, which visitors really shouldn't do. It's gotten so bad that all you have to do is wiggle your fingers over the water and the carp will gather, expectantly. These carp kept nosing the ducks away and, since the fish weigh considerable more than the fowl, the ducks moved off, but kept circling back. The rarest of the mergansers, the hooded variety, as you surely know, are among the few ducks that specialize in eating fish. But this lone outnumbered, outweighed merganser certainly wasn't going to try to eat these fish. 

      I'm not sure the two ducks were a couple. The merganser never ruffled his famous crest, but then, they breed in the summer, so maybe, as often with star-crossed love, the timing was just wrong.
      So as not to put on airs, prior to looking into it, I assumed "merganser" was a tribute to some obscure 19th century birder, Henry Merganser or some such thing. Pure ignorance. The name is very old. Pliny the Elder identified a particular duck—we can't be sure which kind—as a mergus, or "diver," and these ducks do completely submerge themselves hunting for fish smaller than carp.

     This usage might seem unconnected to the verb "merge," as in what ambitious corporations do, but it's the same root, as the Oxford explains: "To be extinguished by absorption in a greater title, estate, etc. Hence gen. to sink and disappear, to be swallowed up and lost to view, lose character or identity by absorption into something else."  A definition that, for the first time, gave me a frisson of concern about the Sun-Times' pending marriage with WBEZ. Should it happen, I hope we're still recognizable afterward, as our own distinctive journalistic breed. 
     My wife and I pulled ourselves away, eventually, and strolled for a good 45 minutes before circling back just in time to catch a possibly significant moment in this anatine courtship, if that's what it was. We spied the happy—or should it be unhappy?—couple, far off in the middle of the lake. The female flew away first. And drab though his lost companion was, the merganser, after perhaps contemplating the situation and weighing his chances, took off after her, displaying the merganser's distinctive running-across-water style of liftoff. Wild ducks will cross breed, or at least try to.

Hooray for infrastructure!

     Unlike you, I’ve been down the Deep Tunnel. Twice. A system unique in the world, more than 100 miles of tunnels, some 33 feet across, a network holding 17 billion gallons of water. Drilled over decades through solid rock by enormous machines at a cost of billions of dollars, all to keep your basement dry.
     Being there made me think of the pyramids of Egypt. I don’t want to speak for the shaven-headed subjects of pharaoh. But I imagine they felt a similar swelling of pride, to belong to a people who can do this kind of thing, who can crack the whip of our intelligence and engineering, social cohesion and wealth to make physical reality itself do these tricks.
     Many of my favorite stories are infrastructure stories. I’ve stood on the floor of the Thornton Quarry before it was flooded and turned into the Thornton Composite Reservoir, and marveled at giant earth movers that look like gnats, lost in the vastness.
     I’ve been through the Jardine Water Purification Plant. It began operation in the mid-1960s and is still the largest water treatment plant in the world.
     I’ve ridden in a cement truck with Tim Ozinga. Been conveyed on the trolley of a tower crane, far too quickly, 600 feet above Michigan Avenue, and watched water pipes placed into a trough on Harrison Street.
     I know more about Chicago’s 37 moveable bridges than is proper to know, having read “Chicago’s Bridges” by Nathan Holth. I wish I could say I watched rapt while one of the trunnion bascule drawbridges was balanced, using foot square cubes of concrete. Alas, my pleas to the city over years have been in vain. But hope springs eternal, and I’m not giving up yet.
     So yes, maybe I’m more attuned to the inestimable value of pipes and roads and bridges and train tracks and electrical grids than most guys. But I can’t let Congress’s passage of the $1 trillion national infrastructure bill over the weekend pass without letting out a whoop of joy. Hooray! About time. Took you idiots long enough.

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Botanic Garden repartee

     My wife and I never have to worry about what to do at the end of the day. If the weather is nice, we head over to the Chicago Botanic Garden to walk for an hour. Sometimes we walk in silence for quite a while. Other times we talk. The usual married couple conversation. Sometimes practical matters. Sometimes wit creeps in. I don't want to suggest we're Nick and Nora Charles in the "The Thin Man." But we have our moments.

     "Let's go look at those," my wife said as we walked in and noticed the enormous flowers set up for the pending light show.
     "They're not real," I said, dryly, slipping into my wisenheimer default mode.
     "Thanks for ruining it for me," she parried, a rejoinder I so admired that it made me wonder if I were now outgunned. It made me humble, and reflective.
     "Maybe I tease too much," I ventured. "Maybe I should dial it back a bit."
      There were standard lines that have been repeated for years, if not decades. My wife will say, "I'm cold," and I'll answer, "I like to think of you as 'aloof.'" And in case anyone detects a note of hostility in that, should she say, "I'm hot," the immediate response is an enthusiastic, "I'll say!" So it balances out.
     "No," she said. "That's how it is. You make the same old joke. I roll my eyes."
     Why tamper with success? Besides, you have to be the person you are. For good and ill.