"Plague? We don't need no stinkin' plague!" The State of the Blog, 2021

Clown with Drum, by Walter Kuhn
Art Institute of Chicago

     Credit where due: 2021 wasn't worse than 2020. We could be almost a year into Donald Trump's second term. Think about that.
     An infamy that might still be coming. Which is the tone that pretty much continued through the year. Bad, but not worse, unless that's on deck. Yes, the plague, surging with omicron yet not quite as lethal (unless that's coming). The orange traitor separated from his Twitter bullhorn. For now. Still, hundreds of thousands more dying of COVID. And the former Liar in Chief's followers baying for his return, while inveighing our current president, Joe Biden, who at times seems maddeningly inert.
     Honestly, I won't blame Republicans if they corrupt and subvert our electoral system and place Trump on the throne, I mean in the White House, in 2024. Because they certainly telegraphed their intentions. Clear. As. Day. And the Democrats are doing that Three Stooges thing they do, dragging their hands over their faces and hee-bee-bee-beeing and bumping into each other in a roiling ball of confusion.

      In some ways 2021 was worse, beginning as it did with the Jan. 6 insurrection, a rock nadir in American history (unless it's just the warm-up). One I came close to predicting in my column that day, "The South shall fall again. And again. And again." At least I set the stage:

The Lost Cause marches on, as we will see Wednesday, when Congress faces another ego-stoked rebellion: Donald Trump’s insistence that his clearly losing the 2020 presidential election in the chill world of fact can be set aside, since he won the race in the steamy delta swampland between his ears.

     Of course, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to see that coming. Then and now. January also saw my most well-read post, "In Defense of John Kass," which got nearly 10,000 hits. Again, not setting the internet on fire. But not bad, though I think it's more a reflection of just how many people fuckin' hate John Kass. The blog overall got almost a million hits in 2020, though I estimate that between a quarter and a third of that are robots. Bad? Good? Who knows? As the poet said, work is its own reward.
     In February, we bade farewell to Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. March began by joining the Night Ministry as they treated homeless 'L' riders. In April, we glimpsed one of the earliest movies in existence, police on parade in 1896, and saw how a newsreel caught them attacking protesters then lying about it in 1937.

     In May, EGD chowed down with a hockey billet family. June we said goodbye to our cat, Gizmo. July saw three columns, out of four, about picking up after dogs, including one on how blind people do it, which might be the archetypical Steinberg theme. I was proud of that.

     In August, we visited the S. Rosen hot dog bun factory. In September, it was two visits with top sound engineer Steve Albini. October marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.  In November, we marked autumn by pedaling around Elmwood Park, looking at trees. And December, heck, I don't know, the continuing time-suck that is the Jussie Smollett case stole a few more minutes from my life, and yours.

     What does it add up to? Hell if I know. 

     Thanks as always to our Saturday star, Caren Jeskey, who stuck 52 landings, every single week, without fail, without ever being late or making me sweat, even while moving to Chicago and enduring all sorts of adventures here. Deep gratitude to Marc Schulman, of Eli's cheesecake, who blessed me with cheesecake, with advertising, and the pleasure of his insights. Thank you for everyone who read, and who wrote in, particularly those with corrections. 

     On Wednesday, I turned in the final edited manuscript of the book I was asked to write, based on this blog, by the University of Chicago Press. It was enormously fun to write, and I can't wait for he book to come out in the fall. So something to look forward to. Which is about all anybody can ask nowadays. Stay safe. Thanks for reading. See you all every goddamn day in 2022. 

Talk about haunting melodies....

     In 1972, I was in sixth grade, in Miss Benson's class in Fairwood Elementary School in Berea, Ohio. She was a severe, short-haired woman with glasses. I couldn't tell you her first name; I don't think any of us kids ever suspected she had a first name. The same way we never paused to contemplate her living arrangement, with Miss Palmer, the enormous secretary in the school office. Not for decades anyway, until the moment when the truth would occur with a growing smile of understanding and an "ohhhhh!"
     Only one moment from her class survives in memory over the span of half a century. One day, Miss Benson invited her students to bring in a record, to share music we liked. I can still see the albums that other kids brought in. Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers," with its real zipper. Jethro Tull's "Aqualung." 
     And my album, Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," my parents bright red copy with a leaping Cossack. Of course I would bring that. I don't believe by then I had actually bought any music of my own. My allowance was 25 cents a week; I wouldn't consider buying a record any more than I would consider buying a car.      

       Besides, my parents had plenty of records, which we'd play on my father's Fischer turntable, a gorgeous thick metal turntable with a perfectly balanced tone arm we'd love to tap and watch float slowly upward. 

   I believe the day we brought in our own music is the only thing about 6th grade I remember, because my choice was not viewed with approval by my classmates. I don't remember anything more specific, whether kids laughed, or maybe one person said something. Some kind of veil of protective forgetfulness must be shielding me from the class reaction.

     Or maybe nobody had to say anything at all, and I, a perceptive boy, just took in their rock music, and my frenetic blast of Slavic gales, and realized all on my own just how out of the main current of American life I was swimming. Listening to it now, it must have been when the needle was set down and the music started playing and I cringed myself into a little ball.
     There was to be a lot of that.
     That moment resonated, nearly 20 years later, when I was getting married. The forced march to plan a big downtown wedding is far clearer than 6th grade. Picking a location—the Renaissance Room at the Intercontinental Hotel downtown, which had just re-opened after renovating. I liked the Babylonian bas reliefs. Choosing the menu, stepping around hanging slabs of beef in Fulton Market to try various meals at various caterers. The question of napkins: we were looking at green toile napkins that cost $600 to rent for an evening when my betrothed and I looked at each other and realized we had gone mad, and white would be fine.
     And a band. Much listening to inferior bands, much ratcheting the price, trying to find that sweet spot of something we could both afford and want to dance to. Up and up. I jokingly came up with what I called the "wedding unit," a play on the term "astronomical unit," a way to measure the vast costs of a wedding on par with a span to measure the enormous distances of the universe. An astronomical unit is the distance from the earth to the sun, roughly 93 million miles. A wedding unit was $2,000, since everything seemed to cost that or its multiple. Though sometimes a fraction: those napkins were 0.33 wedding units.
     The band we settled on, the Bradley Young Orchestra, was two wedding units. A 12-piece swing band. At some point, close to the big day, my beloved and I visited with Bradley Young at his home to pick music. He had a shiny enamel black baby grand piano, art deco furniture and bric a brac.
     Our song was "Feels like Old Times" from "Annie Hall," though that was a stand in for our actual song, the music that, dancing to at 950 Lucky Number on Wrightwood, changed us from two strangers dating to a couple that would be together for decades: "Bella Lugosi's Dead," by Bauhaus. A 12-piece swing band was not playing that, though we did ask them. We also had them play "Leave Your Hat On," the Randy Newman song that Joe Cocker sings in "9 1/2 Weeks."
     Toward the end, Young, sitting on the piano bench, asked us what music should be played when we entered the Renaissance Room to be married. Edie picked the haunting flute melody that every Jewish bride uses. 

    They turned to me. As a fan of cliche, under certain circumstances, I would have picked Wagner's wedding march from "Lohengrin."      

       But this was a Jewish wedding, and so no Wagner, just as I never got to say "I do" ("You say, 'anee l'dohdee v'dohdee LEE,'" explained Rabbi Paul Greenman. "You utter the syllable lee and you're married. If you say 'I do,' before you utter the syllable lee, it doesn't mean anything, because you're not married yet.' And if you say 'I do' after you utter the syllable lee, it doesn't mean anything, because you're already married.")

     Hard to argue with that logic.
     So when Bradley Young asked what music I wanted the band to play when my parents walked me into the Renaissance Room, I had a choice already, something meaningful, and personal, that would claw back a bit of a process that at times seemed to be unfolding without me. Not "Sabre Dance"—too frantic, even I knew that. But there was the march from "The Love of Three Oranges." I loved that, my whole life. It had a bouncy a whimsy to it. Something of a personal theme. Neil music.
     "You mean this?" said Bradley Young, playing it with, if memory serves, a Monty Python pianist leer, fingers bouncing high off the keyboard. "Brump-bump, brump-bump, bump—tah-bump. Bump, tah-bump. Bump-tah-bump, bumpt—tah-bump. Braddaa-dah bump...."
     It took about 10 seconds for me to realize just how wrong my inclinations were, how the song's ponderous March-of-the-Toy-Soldiers vibe would make me a figure of ridicule at my own wedding.
     No, I said, raising my hands defensively, Not that. I couldn't tell you what the music I walked into. Whatever the male version of the Jewish flute music that ushered my bride in. I thought about telling this story with my big "Love for Three Oranges" column yesterday, but obviously it wouldn't fit in. There's been a lot of that.

‘A musical lollypop’

 

Sergei Prokofiev, in the United States about 1919

     Farm machinery and opera.
     Not two realms that traditionally mix. You’ve got your threshers and combines over there, doing their business, and your sopranos and librettists in a completely different place, doing theirs. Never the twain shall meet.
     Yet perhaps the most famous piece of music that ever debuted in Chicago, 100 years ago Thursday, was first performed here and not New York or Paris or Moscow because Chicago was home to the International Harvester Co.
     Interested? Well tough, because that’s our topic for today.
     On Dec. 30, 1921, the opera “The Love for Three Oranges,” by Sergei Prokofiev, had its world premiere at the Auditorium Theatre.
     How did that happen?
     Four years earlier, after the overthrow of the czar, the U.S. State Department sent a delegation to Russia to check out the situation. The committee included Cyrus H. McCormick Jr., eldest son of the inventor of the mechanical reaper and president of International Harvester.
     In Petrograd, McCormick met the 26-year-old composer. Prokofiev’s name meant nothing to McCormick. But the ambitious musician certainly knew McCormick’s — Prokofiev’s late father had been a manager of large farms.
     McCormick was also a governing member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and quizzed Prokofiev about who he felt was most worthy of notice on the Russian music scene.
     Prokofiev, naturally enough, boosted the most promising young composer he knew: himself. McCormick sent Prokofiev’s published music back to Chicago (along with, to the Russian’s horror, music from lesser composers).
     ”To go to America!” Prokofiev confided in his diary. “Of course! Here was wretchedness; there life brimming over. Here, slaughter and barbaric rhetoric; there, cultivated life. Here, shabby concerts in Kislovodsk; there, New York, Chicago!”

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Chicago Botanic Garden Reflections

Chicago Botanic Garden, Dec. 24, 2020

     Christmas Eve was a good time to go to the Botanic Garden.
     Well, honestly, any time is a good time to go to the Botanic Garden. Mid-February. Late July. You name it.
     I mean extra good. Temperature nudging 50. Most people at home, busy ... oh, don't know, wassailing, whatever it is people who celebrate Christmas do. I have no idea, having never observed the holiday in any fashion, other than playing "O Holy Night" once on Christmas Eve. 

    Okay, Laura Vitez did invite me over her house in Berea about 1980. So I can report with authority that there is decorating a tree, and hot buttered rum on the stove, followed by caroling around the neighborhood. Quite fun. No wonder people like it.
     Anyway, so we're heading out the door Friday, and for some reason Edie noticed a light switch in what she still touchingly calls "The Toy Room" even though there are no longer any toys nor boys to play with them. As part of making out 115-year-old house a little livable now that we're not shelling out two tuitions, we had an electrician put in new light switches, even in places like the basement that never had them (we pulled a string on a light at the top of the stairs and then, when the string broke, twisted the bulb in and out. For about a decade).
     Anyway, she pointed out that this, too was a dimmer switch, demonstrating it.
     "It doesn't dim much," she observed, "But it does dim some."
     We froze. Have you stopped in your tracks, with a sudden sense of tingling possibility, like noticing a folded bill on the ground? Or a lepidopterist, seeing a colorful flash of wing on a honeysuckle bush? No? Well, good thing you're not married to me, because I did and my wife, being the mirror image of the pair, did too.
     "Dim sum?" one of us said. 
     Now punning is a low form of humor, that has been recognized as such for well over 250 years ("He that would pun would pick a pocket," Alexander Pope wrote). But those are intentional puns. An accidental pun, well, a rare and beautiful thing.    
     And something new. Now we would be challenged, when discussing dimmer switches, or passing them, or even out-of-the-blue, to invoke the dim sum pun.
     Otherwise, the puns are like well-worn pebbles, something to be caressed in passing. Normally, I take the lead in this department. Particularly on our walks at the Botanic Garden. Remember, we're already together, in the same house, pretty much 24 hours a day. On top of being together most of the past, ah, 38 years. So it's not like there's a lot to fill the other in about. Not much news. So occasionally I'll fill a silence by floating some lame wordplay, or a readily understood threadbare reference, not quite puns. Though on this day my wife, perhaps inspired by her dim some triumph, took the lead.
     "Should we go all the way to that bridge...?" she said, pointing out a span—the bridges at the Botanic garden are all unique and lovely in their own way, sinuous or straight, holding all sorts of vistas.
     I finished the thought, "...or is that a bridge too far?"
     Not funny, the usual sense of the word. But oddly satisfying. She was quoting, by the way, unknowingly, something Lt General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, a commander of British airborne forces in World War II, said when asked by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery if the 1st Airborne Division could take the bridge across the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem.
    They were planning Operation Market Garden, the September, 1944 attempt to flank the German defenses in the Netherlands by racing across a series of bridges and crossing the Rhine into Germany.
     “I think we might be going a bridge too far,” Browning observed. (He was right. The Germans happened to have a Panzer division there, and the British and American paratroopers, the largest airborne operation ever, had their asses handed to them. Operation Market Garden is generally considered a failure, though it did overrun the German V2 bases, and that was a relief to battered Londoners). 
     Though the phrase was doubtless planted in our consciousness by the 1974 best-seller by Cornelius Ryan, "A Bridge Too Far," or the later star-studded movie.
      Later, she suggested we take a spin through the Rose Garden, even though there are of course no roses this time of year.
     "Okay," I said, "But that isn't a binding commitment."
     I'll let you figure out what I'm referring to.

OK, I admit it: Books are heavy

     How was your Christmas? Was Santa good to you? I got something cool. Well, not for Christmas, which we don’t celebrate, being Jews, but for Hanukkah, almost a month ago, which seems part of a different era. The last gasp of pre-Omicron society. A dozen people over to the house for beer and brats, latkes and songs.
     My wife bought me a Kindle, in keeping with her ongoing scheme of pressing upon me electronics I would never buy for myself because I’m morally opposed to them. It started 20 years ago with my first cellphone (remember a world without cellphones? Me neither). Back then, I wondered whether I should keep the present. Now, if I leave the house without my phone, which never happens, I feel like I’ve walked outside without pants.
     A Kindle seemed contrary to my bookish personality. Named in a sly tribute to “Fahrenheit 451” and its book-burning firemen (kidding; some grandiose Jeff Bezos puffery about kindling a reading revolution), Kindles aren’t new, but introduced in 2007. My wife has had one for a few years (a present from me; give the lady what she wants).
     She’s been singing its praises. But I resisted. It would be another device that I would have to master and cart around and keep charged. But two years into COVID, I’ll take any distraction I can get. I gave the nod.
     I decided to start my e-reading adventure with Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” It seemed a visit to a more elegant era, when people gathered in rooms.
     This is where the gift aspect was important. Left to my own devices, I’d have given up halfway through the check-a-book-out-of-the-library-and-download process, which at times resembled filing taxes. But it was a gift from my wife.

     And here’s why I’m writing this. If you asked me beforehand to imagine what the benefits of the Kindle might be, I’d talk about forests saved, or carrying an entire library in one sliver of circuitry, that kind of thing. Plus they illuminate; you can read in the dark.
     Nowhere close. The great thing about a Kindle is you can look up words easily. Who knew? None of this closing the book, getting up, padding over to a dictionary, flipping pages.

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‘I’m overwhelmed with God’s goodness’

Sister Rosemary Connelly (Photo for the Sun-Times by Pat Nabong)

     “The day I walked into Misericordia, I really felt God’s presence, and wasn’t afraid,” said Sister Rosemary Connelly, 90, lunch untouched as we caught up at the venerable Chicago institution — 100 years old this year — where some 600 people with developmental challenges live and work.
     That was in 1969, when Misericordia was still on 47th Street. I wondered: why did the archdiocese pick her?
     “I don’t know,” Sister Rosemary said. “That’s been a mystery. They always had a nurse in charge. And I had a master’s degree in social work and one in sociology. Maybe that’s why.’”
     I’ve been visiting Misericordia since 1994, more than half her tenure. It’s a good story. When I read last week that Sister Rosemary is shifting her duties, now heading Misericordia’s new foundation, a role that “will likely involve public relations work,” I couldn’t help tamping down a smile and phoning her up to point out that PR involves taking media jackals to lunch. She could start with me. 

     Has COVID-19 been tough?
     “It has been,” she said. “Our kids have been wonderful. For a while they couldn’t go home, the ones able to go home. The staff just made it so pleasant for them. It’s been wonderful.”
     Notice that pivot Sister Rosemary does: always away from herself, toward others. Always grateful, never complaining, not that I didn’t try to draw complaint out.
     But how about her?
     ”l thought it wouldn’t last this long,” she began, deflecting the question like a matador. “They’re wonderful, the residents. Neil, they have been unbelievable. Because of the staff. They’ve stepped up. They’re extraordinary.”
     They’re also in short supply. Misericordia usually has 1,200 employees augmented by two dozen daily volunteers. Now they’re 100 staffers down, and the volunteers have to stay away.
     “It’s been hard on our kids, not having volunteers around,” she said.
     Projects have been on hold. Their 14th and 15th independent group homes — one on campus, one in Evanston — should have opened by now. By March, Misericordia will open a drive-thru bakery, and if you take away one thing from today, it should be the name “Hearts and Flour Bakery.” Started to impart vocational skills, it grew into a humming commercial establishment that’ll mail 10,000 packages this month. I’ve sent their products to my mother, my sister, friends. Fantastic. The heart-shaped brownies. I can’t recommend it enough.

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Ravenswood Note: Bryophytes

     As is common with newspaper editors, I seldom give instruction. I don't think I've ever offered ideas to Caren Jeskey for her Saturday posts. She doesn't need them, and I know whatever she comes up with will range further afield than anything I could suggest. Though when we had lunch earlier this week, I was tempted to observe, "Saturday is Christmas." But she can read the calendar just as easily as I can, and I assumed she'd come through, which she did. Her report:

I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.  
                             —Walt Whitman

     There is nothing more comfortable than a bed of moss in a damp forest, with the fragrance of soil and strange complicated mushrooms dancing and winding all around. I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about non vascular plants before, and I probably will again.
     For my beautiful godmother’s birthday (yes, this atheist was raised Catholic), I brought her a bit of moss in a terrarium. We named her Elvia Moss, after Mama Elvia, Vilma’s mother. Mama Elvia used to cook for hours in Vilma’s kitchen—crusty golden empanadas and arroz com pollo, while 3 year old me sat at the table watching, taste testing, and listening to her soothing Spanish voice. I did not understand the language per se, but always knew what she was saying. I’d babble back in English and she’d occasionally walk over and give me a loving pat with her soft, warm hands. Her eyes glistened with love.
     I cannot speak much about this past week without losing my holiday cheer, such as the people I know struggling with COVID brought home by their children and college students. Some are quite a bit younger than me, and it has them on their backs. They are scared and their holidays won't be the same. Others I know, and don’t know, are facing uphill battles that are scary just to think about. A musician friend who lost his home last year is facing another tough season as he watches his gigs fade away to safety measures.
     I feel extremely grateful for my life, and for the fact that I was able to have a lovely lunch with Neil (at Jerry’s Sandwich Shop, in a heated pod of our own, at a place that requires vax for all indoor diners, as well as masks (and yes, I know. Not the wisest this week, and I have decided no more of that for a while, damn you Corona). [Editor's note: funny that we both drew the same conclusion, though my post-lunch thinking could be described as, "Shit, am I insane? I just killed myself for a brisket sandwich...." NS]

     I enjoy my career greatly, and it feels like an extra special honor to be a therapist during the crises we are all living through. I spent Christmas Eve day with my beloved 8 year old niece who loves to rig up holiday lights and decorations (who I nannied for two and half years starting when she was 9 months old, thus we are forever bonded), and now my place is epically bedecked with lights and ornaments. She said she had a blast, and I sure did.
     The love I feel for and from my family and friends is palpable. We value each other more than ever before, and we are determined to practice right speech towards each other if it’s the last thing we ever do, and I hope that it is.
     I purchased Elvia Moss at Cultivate Urban Rainforest on Main Street in Evanston. She’ll just need three or four sprays from an aerator once a week to provide Vilma with a little bit of delight all winter long.
     My mother has been instructed not to read this blog until after gifts have been opened. I can’t wait to give her a precious Polynesian Ivy covered with a glass bell shaped cover that will keep her humid and happy. When we were kids we used to buy our Christmas trees from the front yard of the Chefas family on Devon. They now own what has become a refuge and an empire right in the city, Gethsemane Gardens, where Poly Ivy came from.
     I’ve known, as a long time nature lover and meditator, that growing things and savoring all that grow around us is a true form of medicine. These days, I look at the plants and propagating clippings that fill my home and I think “I am not long for this earth.” I marvel even more deeply at their beauty.