Flashback 2000: Prayer needs a 'private' sign

 

     The Uptown Poetry Slam returned to the Green Mill on Sunday after its long COVID hiatus. The most fun I've had in a while. The open-mike poets were funny and true and passionate and heartbreaking. The jazz was cool. And Marc Kelly Smith was the perfect MC, energetic and raw, reciting his own powerful poetry. There was tap dancing, and one poet proposed to his girlfriend from the stage. I was honored to be allowed to say a few words, and considered talking about Miss Eve, then didn't. I can't believe I haven't shared the following before, but here it is.

     The Green Mill is a wonderful old bar in Uptown. If you've never gone, you really should—dark, cozy, comfortable. I used to stop by whenever I could, back in the days when it had a regular pianist named Miss Eve.
     Miss Eve played at the Green Mill for nearly 50 years. She was a big, fleshy woman, and she would sit perched at the small piano behind the bar and sing, her voice rough and low. She took requests, and I'd try to stump her. My mother had been a singer in the USO, so I was familiar with a wide range of obscure old chestnuts. I'd request "Goody, Goody," and "Embraceable You" and "There's No Tomorrow."

Miss Eve

     "Do you know `Avalon' ?" I'd ask. "Do you know `Come Rain or Come Shine' ?" Invariably, she did. But I kept trying. One day she interrupted me in mid-question. "Honey," she rasped. "I know 'em all."
      A flash of insight swept over me. She knows them all. She is omnipotent. Divine. A god. Of course! God is a sweaty fat woman in a dark bar, playing out the tune of the world.
     Right, I know: drunk. But it seemed profound, then. I mention it to illustrate why I don't pray much. If you are the sort of person who can entertain a thought as blasphemous as "God is a sweaty fat woman . . ." then you lack the sincerity needed for prayer.
     While I don't pray much, I do appreciate prayer. It is an amazingly efficient endeavor. Prayer doesn't require batteries. You can do it aloud, but you don't have to. You can pray silently. Nobody will stop you. There is no need to clasp your hands in front of you or to kneel. You can choose to turn your eyes heavenward or not.
     This subtle, flexible quality of prayer comes to mind when I hear of people trying to make it into a public spectacle, either by forcing it into public schools or, as we keep hearing from the Southland, shouting it out at high school football games.
     Ever since the courts struck down leading prayers over the PA system as unconstitutional, rabid ministers have been encouraging their charges to stand up before games and pray.
     What is the purpose of this? Down South, they argue that they are merely continuing a tradition—God and football. The argument that a person should be able to attend a high school football game without being forced to choose whether to stand for a public display of adherence to Christianity never seems to affect anybody south of Missouri.
     What they don't realize is that this only works so long as most people think alike. As we learned this year in Palos Heights, the face of America is changing, and as our country becomes more diverse, the bullying represented by those football game prayers will become more intolerable. How would they react if, after the spontaneous Lord's Prayer died away, a smaller contingent stood up to recite the Hebrew schma as a third group went down to the field to unroll their prayer rugs facing Mecca.
     They wouldn't like it.
     You can pray all you want—in school, at football games, in a bar. You just shouldn't make a show of it. The reason is that if you recite the Lord's Prayer—your Lord's Prayer—then I should be able to shake a palm branch, and little Haji should get a chance to light incense to the six-armed elephant-head god.
     This is only fair. Yet so many people just can't get it. Maybe I should pray for them. Miss Eve, do you know "As Time Goes By"?
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 5, 2000.

‘Let’s reduce the misery’

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Before we consider the issue that U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., phoned me to talk about last week — shipping fighting birds through the United States Postal Service — we need to wrap our heads around the general idea of animals being sent through the mail.
     It is a common practice.
     “They sent me a list of things you can legally mail,” Quigley said. “Poultry, honeybees, scorpions, live adult birds, which is depressing. Baby alligators, frogs, chameleons, lizards, etc.”
     Which makes sense. Animals need to get to farms and pet stores. It isn’t like they can take a bus. Posting them doesn’t strike me as particularly cruel. Given the amount of time a frog spends hibernating at the bottom of a frigid lake, four days in a dark container doesn’t seem a crime against nature.
     But that isn’t the problem Quigley is trying to address.
     “Today we’re focused on buying, selling, possessing or receiving any animals for purposes of the animal participating in a fighting venture,” Quigley said.
     Cockfights — putting two birds in a ring, with razor talons attached to their claws, and goading them to maul each other — is one of the more obscure sub-hells of sport. Illegal in all 50 states, it is still permitted in territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.
     Maybe I’ve been softened up by COVID isolation, But I was happy just to be approached by somebody about something. Quigley could have been exercised about the Oxford comma, and I’d give him my ear.
     Earlier this month, Quigley sent a letter to Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale, asking the USPS to develop a strategy to start better enforcing the 2002 federal law against shipping animals for fighting purposes.
     “There have been 500 shipments of fighting birds, mostly from state-based farms in the Carolinas, some 10,000 fighting animals sent to Guam,” Quigley said. The birds are also being sent to Puerto Rico.

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'Better I should know'

    Reality is a stern taskmaster. That's why so many people are so loose with their facts. Not that they are averse to factuality, per se. They never fudge random fact, never claim the moon is made of chalk.

    Rather, they want a pass, want to coast, want to ignore the costs baked into their behaviors. Nobody lies to make themselves look worse, or to emphasize the gravity of their misdeeds. Rather, they attempt to deform the truth—always in vain—to bend it out of shape rather than admit that it is they themselves who need adjusting. They try to pretend their wishes were horses, mounting air and riding away, in their minds if not in actuality. 

     That's why I keep an electronic scale in the kitchen. Because when the issue is as significant as what you put in your mouth, a person tends to err on the side of more. I've eaten a salad in a chain restaurant and figured it had to be 500 calories, then later checked the establishment's website and found it was really 1,200. Just as primitive cultures lacked words for large numbers, and could 1,2,3 and "many," so I have a hard time adjusting the upper limit of what I imagine certain foodstuffs contain, difficulty adjusting to just how fattening they are. It seems to defy possibility. I used to like a good blueberry muffin, until Jewel started posting they are 600 calories. I never ate one again.

     Still, even with the best, most accurate intentions, mistakes happen. 
     The other day. I cut myself a slice of my wife's delicious homemade cranberry bread. It was a thick slice, and I figured it had to be 1.5 ounces. Then I tossed it on the scale. More than twice that: 3.3. To my credit, I did not then announce that the scale was broken. Or suspect a problem with gravity. A lot of people seem to take that route. But the cranberry bread was 330 calories whether I recognized it or not. As Sarah McLachlan sang, "Better I should know."

Ravenswood Notes: Oromo

     Damn! I read the Saturday post from our Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey and berated myself with: "Why didn't I think of that?" The only thing to do is to wait a respectful period of time—weeks? months?—and then dive into my own complicated relationship with the piping hot brown nectar of the gods. Until then, her report:

Dedicated, in gratitude, to my parents.

     Coffee has been a constant companion throughout my life and I know just why it's sometimes called "the poor man's gold." From before I was born, our house welcomed each day with the sound of a percolator, which was later replaced by the wheezes and gurgles of a good old drip machine.
     For some of us, there are few things as satisfying as the sound of coffee brewing. Well, maybe the pleasure of pouring hot water from the tip of a gooseneck kettle in concentric circles over fresh grounds, and letting them bloom as they release their heavenly aroma. When I grind my beans each morning, carefully reassemble the clean parts of the vessel I’m using to brew that day, heat up water, and add it to the grounds, I am immersed in the ritual and it's comforting.
     From my toddler to my teenage years, my mother kept a giant green thermos full of the pungent dark liquid by her side. This was necessary and justified, considering that she was raising three young children during the day and working all night long until the sun came up. She also went through another period of working full time while raising two of us, co-running the household, and getting various degrees of higher education that she did not have time for in her 20s. My dad was around too, but my mom had to fly solo when he was miles away working long days, and later when he traveled for work. She simply had to stay tanked up.
    In the early 70's it must have taken my dad hours on the bus to get from our white wooden farm-style house on Ridge and Lunt all the way to the Campbell’s Soup factory on 35th and Western where he worked. Legend has it that he took the bumpy CTA trip, day after day, while holding a piping hot cup of the brown stuff. Of course the cup was not covered with a lid — this tough, handsome, south-side greaser of a man was not soft enough for that. I am quite sure he never spilled a drop of the java, gracefully maneuvering his cup as the bus lurched over potholes, as he headed off to support his family with his strong, capable, and steady hands.
     I’m right there with my folks in our love for those roasted little beans. As a young kid I’d pour coffee out of the percolator into a cup, add milk and sugar, and drink away. I've liked the taste of java from the very first time it’s bitterness — not quite concealed in the condiments — hit my taste buds.
     When I was 17 and working the sunrise shift at Granny’s Waffle and Pancake House on Pine Grove and Diversey, my regulars were relieved to see that I knew how many creamers and sugars it took to make a proper Boston. I’d make sure it was well stirred, collect my tip, hand them their prize, and they’d head out to face their days, feeling bolstered by liquid energy. I was a dealer. Speaking of that town, a 2015 study found Coffee Drinking 'Not Uncommon' Among Boston Toddlers. In this upside down world we are living in it’s probably all of them by now. On this holiday weekend let’s not get too dreary by focusing on the dangers of caffeine or the fact that South Korea may be the only place that’s getting it right.
     Fortunately I am down to one or two cups of joe a day, with the rare third cup some afternoons. Rather than chugging the battery acid like I used to, and never being able to get enough of it (I once worked at a coffee shop where fellow baristas asked the owner to do an intervention since they were worried that I might achieve caffeine toxicity in my enthusiasm to taste all the drinks), I am able to enjoy a safe amount of homemade deliciousness. There are even days I don’t have any, and I don’t miss it.

Molly & Macallan

    Then there are days like this past Wednesday. I was on a long walk and decided to treat myself to a special coffee at Oromo in Lincoln Square. While I waited in the short line I noticed two young women in front of me. I admired the kicks on one of them; white lace up booties with goldish stripes reminiscent of bowling shoes. I also liked their color palettes— the rusts, browns, creams, and blues fit right in with the simple wood and Turkish tile ambience of the shop. I took a chance and complimented the shoes. Turns out the two are a couple visiting from the St. Louis area, Molly and Macallan, and they had the happy vibe of vacation.
     The little chat — one of very few human interactions off of a Zoom screen I had that day — put me in a brighter mood. I ordered a Pistachio + Rose Latte comprised of fresh pistachio milk, rose syrup, espresso, and rose petals. I sipped my fancy gem as I walked back home under sunny skies in the warmish fall air and I was grateful for the day.

Back from the dead

     During a very long day Thanksgiving Day of cutting, toasting, measuring, mixing, baking, covering, washing, sweeping, driving, greeting, chatting, serving—I could add another dozen gerunds, but you get the picture—I had plenty to time to reflect on the dynamics of family.       

     Yes, it's a lot of bother. Throwing a big party for crowds of people, some of whom you see once a year. But as with so much in life, you get out what you put in. When finally everything was ready, and it came time when we normally go around the table and give thanks, I suggested to my wife, sotto voce, that perhaps we jettison that part. There were so many of us—28. The feast had been delayed—complications with the mashed potatoes. Maybe we should just cut to the chase. 

     No, my wife said: tradition. So we began.
     Another value of hanging around other people: because you are not always right. Sometimes they are right.
     In this case, my wife was correct. The thanks that I was ready to ditch turned out to be the best part of the day, for me anyway, certainly better than merely eating. A poem of thanks by a 6-year-old was read. People were grateful to have survived COVID, to be alive, to be together. Nobody talked about material stuff. Few even mentioned the food. It was the family, us, here, now.
     A few brought up other things. When it was my turn, I stipulated what everybody had said, thanked my parents for coming from Colorado and my sister from Dallas, mentioned our own distant ancestors, who made their escapes so we could end up here, alive, then gave thanks for Joe Biden being elected president. That was well-received in our crowd. Though the thanks that will stay with me came from my niece Rachel, studying to be a rabbi in Jerusalem, who flew in. 

      She said there is a blessing for when you haven't seen anybody in over a year, and she gave the blessing, in Hebrew and in English: "Blessed art thou, our Lord our God, King of the Universe, who gives life to the dead."
     It's part of the Amida, the daily prayers that religious Jews say. Some say it upon waking in the morning, which, when you think about it, it a kind of arising from the dead. During the inevitable discussion that followed, my brother-in-law Alan pointed out that it wasn't so much physical resurrection that is being referred to, but the awakening of "dead souls." Or in this case, when someone you love is gone so long, a part of yourself become dead, or dormant, a part that reanimates should that person return.
     That is certainly true. The house rang in a way it hasn't rung for two years, with raucous laughter and a babble of voices and racing children. Say what you will about the family, it is life, in our case from a toddling almost 2-year-old, who pointed to a broken banister and said, "Uncle Neil will fix that," to a nearly 90-year-old, who marveled at the technology behind my large screen TV. All in the same place at the same time, basking in a warmth that goes back to the first protozoan cells clumping together deep within an ancient sea.
     I could go on, but about 11 p.m., after the last care packages of turkey—we had three, roasted, fried and smoked—stuffing and pie—we had six, pumpkin, pecan, sour cherry, mixed berry, and a couple I'm forgetting—were carted away, my wife and I ran out of steam and went to bed. Which means there's more washing, wiping, scrubbing, drying, unloading, sweeping, loading, stacking, disposing, climbing, sorting, storing and more waiting downstairs to be done. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving yesterday with all the loved ones you could gather together, and a quiet and restful day after today.

Giving Thanksgiving thanks.

     We call the room downstairs "the Toy Room," even though it has been many years since the boys sprawled on the linoleum floor, playing with their toys. Late last year, during the wave of COVID home remodeling that swept the nation, we finally threw away the sofa they had battered to a wreck, painted the walls a pleasing au courant blue, and put down a gorgeous new maple floor from Chicago Hardwood Flooring. It looked perfect.

     Until the spring when it didn't, the center buckling up, a hump that compressed a half inch when you stepped on it. Which could have signaled the onset of arguments and entreaties, delays and lawsuits. But the installer Chicago Hardwood had recommended, Arild Farkvam of A & K Floor Company of Oak Park, stood by his work, came over, assessed the situation, then returned as promised, with an assistant, and spent a very long day fixing the problem. Now it's back to looking perfect.

       I was grateful for that—new wood floors sometimes buckle, and I don't fault any lack of skill for it happening in the first place—and meant to thank Arild, and to toss his name out there in case readers are looking for a flooring guy who stands behind his work. But time hurries on, months pass, and sometimes important things, like thanking those to whom you owe thanks, get overlooked.

     Even today, on Thanksgiving. Ever notice how much of Thanksgiving is about the giving part—food, that is—and how little is about the thanks?

     Maybe because as massive an undertaking as the feast can be—we're expecting 28 today—attempting to give thanks is even more involved. There's always enough food to go around. You never finish the meal and realize you've missed someone.
     But gratitude? Trying to give thanks is an invitation to failure, to oversights and slights, and hurt feelings, the opposite of what you intend. Plus it's, well, personal. You can't give thanks without opening a door into your life and letting everyone look in.
     Which is kinda what I do. In that light, I almost have to try, with apologies ahead of time for anybody missed. There are a lot of you. So let's get to it.
     Thanks, first and foremost, to my wife Edie, for being the only person I'd want to endure a pandemic with. "I'll be with you 24 hours a day," as Randy Newman sings. "A lot of people couldn't stand it, but you can."
     Thanks to the boys, for working so hard and making us so proud. For being menschs. For always coming home, of their own volition.
     Thanks to my mother, for talking to me every day, for taking care of my father, for the both of them, though well into their 80s, braving two of the worst airports in the country, Stapleton and O'Hare, to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. And my sister Debbie, for coming in from Dallas.
     Thanks to the entire Goldberg clan, especially Janice, for the pies, and Jay, for the frying, and the tile. Not to forget the new moms, Sarah and Julia, for starting the next generation off right. To Esther, for coming in from California, where Don Goldberg is still sheltering in place. We'll miss him at the table. Thanks to Alan Goldberg, for being the new patriarch, and to Cookie, for helping him, and Rachel, for coming in from Israel. To my brother Sam, and his family, and my cousin Harrison, the gutsiest guy I know, and Yi and Gabrielle and Arianna. To Evie and Mark Levine, Carole Roberts, and all our kin, everywhere, including our long-ago houseguest, Valerie Levine, all the way in Germany, sussing out the secrets of the universe.
     On the professional front, thanks to publisher Nykia Wright, for charting an exciting course for the Sun-Times to move into the future, and to editor-in-chief Steve Warmbir, for his steadiness, and my editors, John O'Neill and Suzanne McBride, for their care and hard work, and to my colleagues, everyone on the staff of the paper, for creating something that we can all be proud to be associated with. Thanks to Erin Wheeler and Jeff Kleinhenz, for keeping the computers running.
     Thanks to Timothy Mennel, for tossing me the challenge of the latest book, whatever we call it, and for everybody else at the University of Chicago Press. Thanks to Lauren Nassef, for her drawings, which really enliven the effort. Thanks to Cari and Michael J. Sacks, for their generous and timely support.
     Thanks to Caren Jeskey for putting her shoulder to this blog, and making each Saturday sparkle and shine. Thanks to Marc Schulman for his holiday ads, this year being the ninth year in a row. Thanks to all my blog readers, for Jakash and Coey and Grizz and Tate and everybody who reads and writes in and everybody who reads and doesn't write in. Thanks to Chris Wood and all my actual friends on Facebook, and to my old pal Ted Allen, and everybody else who puts an actual human spirit in Twitter. Thanks to Molly Jong-Fast and everyone firing darts at the Trump enormity, trying to destroy the beast.

    Thanks to my friend and agent for many years, Susan Raihofer, and everybody at the David Black Literary Agency. 
    Thanks to Rick Telander, and all the guys at the Lake Superior Philosophical Society, particularly Rory Fanning, who was right about everything. Thanks to S.E. Cupp, for being a moral Republican, and to Thomas Dyja, Jonathan Eig, Marc Kelly Smith, and all the fellow writers I know.

     Thanks to all my colleagues, from longtime friends like Eric Zorn, to new ones, like Daniel Knowles, the new Midwestern Correspondent for The Economist. Thanks to Rick Kogan and Esther J. Cepeda, Robert Feder and Jim Kirk, too many to name. You know who you are. Thanks to Robert Leighton, for drawing up my ideas and submitting them to The New Yorker, and to the magazine for publishing another one a few weeks back.

     Thanks for all the Chicago friends who keep in touch: Paul Biebel, Lori Cannon, Robert Falls, Justine Fedak, Tony Fitzpatrick, Mark Konkol, Ron Magers, Bill Savage, Karen Teitelbaum. Thanks to my West End Avenue pals, Carol Weston and Robert Ackerman, and my Berea friends, Jim and Laura Sayler. Thanks to childhood friends Mark Paine and Gordon Gregg, who reconnected with me this year, particularly to Gordon, who showed the world how to bear unbearable loss with faith and courage.

      Thanks to all those friends who are more like family, to Larry and Ilene and Lane Lubell, for just hanging out, and to Cate Plys and Ron Garzotto, to Sandi and Lise Schleicher, plus Joel and Alex. Thanks to Kier Strejcek and Cathleen Cregier.

     Thanks to Dr. Kevin D Hardt, for the hip—everything should work so well—and Dr. Alpesh Patel, for the spine, and Dr. Steve Frisch, for the insight. And to all hospital workers, doctors and emergency responders everywhere. Not to forget all the medical researchers who developed the COVID vaccines that allowed those in the fact-based world to enjoy a sorta return to a semblance of regular life.

     Thanks to all the professionals, service people and tradesmen who've done such good work this year, to Village Plumbing and Yemi at Meinecke. Thanks to Tom Mulcrone. See you Tuesday.

      Thanks to all our great neighbors on Center Avenue—the Martens and the Harts and the Kesmodels and the Garcias and the Steins, the Rosenbergs and everybody else. Thanks to Northbrook forester Terry Cichocki, for all the tree advice, and to the Northbrook Department of Public Works, for doing everything they said they would and not being too noisy.
      Thanks to my friends at the Newberry Library, and the staffs at the Chicago Public Library and the Northbrook library and all libraries everywhere. Thanks to the Chicago Botanical Garden, and to Sarah Stegner at Prairie Grass, Frank Gallo at Francesco's Hole in the Wall, and to Blufish and Tong's and Basu and Smoque and Georgie V's and Sunset Foods. Thanks to Audible and Google and, yes, Amazon. 

     Who I have missed? I've barely begun.  Thanks to good fortune, which can be so hard on others, but smiles upon us, so far. Thanks to Joe Biden, for winning, and showing America what a president should look like. Well, the part of America that can see things in front of them, anyway. 

     There's still more, but this will have to do for now. I've got the stuffing to make, and all those guests arriving in a few hours. This isn't everybody. But it's a start, surely. And if I missed you, well, thanks for understanding. It can't be the first time. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all. Remember to thank those people who enrich and enliven your life.

Flashback 2000: In the best poetry, there is love, horror — and truth

     Robert Bly died Sunday. My generation remembers him as the author of "Iron John," the book about mythical archetypes that suggest men somehow aren't self-absorbed enough, and need to go out into the woods together and beat drums and howl. Some did that, while the rest of us hooted in ridicule. 

     I was looking for some reference to Bly in the vault, and found this, which sets the stage for the Uptown Poetry Slam, which starts back up this Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Green Mill after its forced COVID hiatus. I plan to be there, and may even be enticed to say a few words.

     My mother writes poetry sometimes. Perhaps all mothers do. Since she is almost certainly reading this, courtesy of the Internet, it would be prudent for me to say that she writes "wonderful poetry." But that would be pandering to my audience, or at least one member of it.
     The fact is—and I must be delicate here—her poetry is not the sort of writing that echoes in one's head forever. I dutifully read the neatly penned pieces that she occasionally tucks in her letters, praise them modestly in our next telephone conversation and forget them.
     Except for one line, a single sentence, written maybe 10 years ago. My mother began a tribute to her own mother this way:

     "She achieved the fame we all seek."
     I love that line, because it is the perfect, pithy encapsulation of who my grandma Sarah was: the star of her world of poker-playing department store clerks, the cynosure of the Jewish Singing Society.
     I never forgot the line because it is true, and truth is the entire point of poetry. To say true things, briefly.
     I don't believe many people understand this. They feel that, rather than being about truth, poetry is just a flowery nothing, an embarrassing waste. Men feel this particularly. Poetry is in the queasy realm of tea shoppes and dance recitals and all the ruffled stuff that a guy just naturally keeps a big distance from because he won't enjoy them. Poetry is not only lousy, it's feminine.
     There's a point in there, somewhere. Most poetry is lousy, just as most books and movies are. But that doesn't mean that it all is, and it doesn't explain why you get all sorts of junk in your e-mail—jokes and urban legends and lists of trivia—but never a poem.
     People just don't think about poetry. The occasional poetry popularizer—such as smarmy Robert Bly with his stupid drumming seminars in the woods—just end up presenting verse as maudlin, syrupy slop for fools.
     It doesn't have to be. Take Robert Frost. The most famous poet of the 20th century and—the way we're going—the 21st century, too. "The Road Not Taken" is the script of a Monster.com commercial gaining attention recently, for the creepy way pedestrians loom out of a busy downtown street to say a line of the poem, one of Frost's most well-known, the one that ends: 

       Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

        I took the one less traveled by

       And that has made all the difference.

     Of course pairing the poem with a commercial venture turns it into something of a lie, by suggesting that we, too, can be independent spirits, if only we follow everybody else to Monster.com, the career Web site.
     That particular poem also feeds the common image of Frost's work—assuming people have an image —as being all about yellow woods in Vermont covered in maple syrup and cool stone walls.
     But Frost is not the Currier and Ives print that people think of him as. Just as fans of Norman Rockwell -- during his recent revival -- tried to give him hip legitimacy by pointing to his stark civil rights canvases, so I will sally to Frost's defense, in honor of today's anniversary of his birth in 1874, by pointing out there is much more to him than scenic postcards of Stowe.
     The day Frost was born, his father—a journalist—brandished a pistol at the attending doctor and told him that if anything went wrong, he was a dead man. And death looms over the best of Frost's poetry.
     In my favorite, "The Death of the Hired Man," a weary farm couple sit on a stoop, discussing the old farmhand who has suddenly returned.
     "What good is he?" the farmer asks. "Who else will harbor him; At his age for the little he can do?; What help he is there's no depending on ; Off he goes always when I need him most."
     Casually, the man or the wife—it's hard to tell which—tosses off one of those stark, universal truths that make poetry worth reading:

     "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

      They have to take you in."

     Frost broke with all the giddy, Emersonian naturalists of the past and presented a world grimmer than people were used to reading about in verse, but no grimmer than the world actually is.
     While I had my anthology out, I tried, once again, to read "Out, Out -- " without choking up and, again, just couldn't do it.
     In the brief poem, Frost recounts the scene of a boy sawing firewood with a buzz saw in the yard. The boy's sister calls him to supper and the buzz saw:

     As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, 

     Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap— 

     He must have given the hand. However it was,

      Neither refused the meeting. . . .

     The poem has the matter-of-fact horror of a Stephen King novel and, at 34 lines, tells a tale as well as one of King's bulked-up tomes.
     It ends without a whiff of sentiment, illustrating the gulf between the lucky living, like us, and those like Frost, or the boy, whose death only fleetingly alarms those around him. "And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

We remember Frost's half century of celebrity but, on his birthday, we should also recall both his words and his struggle to express those words. Robert Frost was 39 years old when he published his first book.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 26, 2000