"Nasty things"

 

     I don't like orchids, I thought, but did not say aloud, when Edie suggested we go to The Orchid Show: Untamed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. We already had four tickets, a benefit of our annual membership. They'd been on the magnetic board in the kitchen for months. I never suggested we go, not being an orchid fan. The show had been running since Feb. 12—last time we went to the Botanic Garden my wife suggested we go, but forgot the tickets at home. The show was closing Sunday. It was now or never; well, now or not for almost a year anyway.
     The weather was rainy and drippy and cold, mid-30s, perfect day to go to the show, which of course is indoors. We got in the car.
     "At least there won't be many people there," I predicted. Sometimes, perhaps because of the pandemic, the Botanic Garden seemed positively packed, at least when you first arrived. Once you get into the garden, toward the prairie and the greenhouses and such, the population thins out. Most people don't want to toddle too far past the entrance.

     I was certain the rain would keep everyone away. But the parking lot had plenty of cars, and obviously a good number of folks braved the showers to see the show. As we looked for a space, I remembered, for some odd reason, going to see the band Bread at Blossom Music Center in Cleveland in the mid-1970s. I'd never go of my own accord—as with orchids, I didn't like Bread—but was tagging along with others, and joked beforehand that no one would be there, that it would be us, alone with the band, playing forlornly on the stage, heads down, ashamed. Maybe they'd give up doing even that, set aside their instruments, come over, sit on the edge of the stage, and explain how they came up with lyrics like, "Baby I'm-a want you...." It didn't even make grammatical sense.

    I was shocked to see the venue jammed with Bread fans. Who could have imagined?
     The Orchid Show: Untamed was quite lovey, with orchids hanging from the ceilings high above the entrance room, and in the smaller greenhouses all manner of shapes and sizes and colors—purples and orchers, yellows and whites. Speckled, and banded and striped. The signage was on-point and interesting. I didn't not know that orchids are hearty survivors—the slogan for the show is "Nature Finds a Way"—and thrive around the globe, practically from pole to pole. After the eruption of Krakatoa, the first plants to sprout in the volcanic ash were orchids, and they're spring up in the most inhospitable places. 
    That isn't a reason not to like them; I didn't know that aspect about them, and lent them a grudging respect. They're the most beautiful weeds ever.

     I wondered if it might be anthropomorphic. There is a certain screaming face aspect to some orchids. Look at the orchid on the top of the page: eyes squinched, kind a bonnet. Something monstrous.
     No, that's not it. I gazed some more. Some are certainly very, ah, vulvic. Maybe not liking orchids is some kind of unconscious hostility toward women. No, that can't be it either—if it were, the idea would never come to me and, besides, I think women are just swell, in general.

     Then what?
     When I was growing up in Berea, the father of one of my sister's friends raised orchids, and I remember, once, visiting his home, with the large greenhouse off one side, which of course we had to admire. Maybe that was it. There was a strangeness to it, with its heat and humidity and its special lights and the hovering father pointing out this prize and that. He was an odd duck.
     So orchids are an oddity, the realm of eccentrics, the crazy aunt of the flower world, with her purple hair and batik. That felt closer.

      Is there an air of weirdness and marginality to orchids? The only product that comes from orchids is vanilla, from one type of orchid, vanilla planifolia. (Vanilla doesn't come from vanilla beans—that's a misnomer—they're actually pods). Vanilla isn't eccentric. Returning to sex, vanilla is the very definition of mainstream and ordinary, though that seems unfair: in ice cream preference vanilla runs neck-and-neck with chocolate in popularity. And everybody thinks chocolate is great. Maybe chocolate has a better PR firm).

     Edie didn't know I was puzzling through this, but she offered an observation closer to the mark. We were reading about the omnipresence of orchids, who they have been on earth for 110 million years, live in every clime and zone: above the Arctic circle, in deserts, on bare rocks—particularly surprising since their tiny seeds lack endosperm, and thus need to form symbiotic relationships with various fungi in order to germinate. (One locale where orchids are relatively scarce, I was surprised to learn in the Britannica, are rain forests).
     "How can they grow everywhere when I can't keep one alive?"
     Could that be it? I vague recall getting an orchid as a present from an admirer, taking it home and trying to keep the thing alive. Which I was unable to do. That seems a mean and petty reasons not to like such a varied and colorful realm of flowers. Because I killed one. Though people do generally have an easier time forgiving the wrongs that others have done then they do forgiving others for the wrongs they themselves have done against them. If that makes any sense. I was close to vowing to do better, and give orchids another chance.

     Then I put the question to my cousin Harry—we talk frequently about diverse topics. He reminded me of the opening of Raymond Chandler's mystery classic, "The Big Sleep," where  Philip Marlowe meets the invalid General in his greenhouse.  You can see the scene from the 1946 Howard Hawks noir film version with Humphrey Bogart here. In the book, the old man complains of his ailments and explains "the orchids are an excuse for the heat." Leading to this passage where the General asks:

     "Do you like orchids?"
     "Not particularly," I said.
     The General half-closed his eyes. "They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute."

     So there it is. At least it's not just me.

North Shore Notes: Rose-Colored Glasses

     Saturday. Whew. Busy week. Interviews, paperwork, heading downtown midweek with the Thresholds homeless outreach team for Friday's column, all the usual obligations. It's a relief to sit slumped in the dugout with my left arm wrapped in ice and watch Caren Jeskey confidently trot to the mound to pitch relief. Her report: 

Design for the cover of "The Raven," by Edouard Manet (Met)

  

By Caren Jeskey

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
            — from The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

 

   My sister’s 8 year old child was buckled into her carseat with me last weekend and asked “what do you know about that raven play?” After a bit of frustration on her part when I was not quite sure what she was talking about—adolescence seems to happen earlier and earlier, doesn’t it?—we settled on talking about the only theater-related black bird thing that came to my mind, the Raven Theatre on Clark and Granville. Improv classes teach us to pick up whatever our partner throws at us verbally, and run with it. This seemed to do the trick and my niece was on board with the conversation.
    From contemplating a world where live theater safely exists, I moved our bird talk on to Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" to see if that rang a bell for her. She hadn't heard of it.
     A little later, at my house, she soaked in a warm tub—does winter ever end in Chicago?—and I read her a redacted (for maturity) version of the poem. She listened raptly, and mostly had no idea what Poe’s words meant. Just as the adults in my life did for me when I was learning Shakespeare at her age (I recall seeing Othello when I was 8, in Loyola University’s library on the lakefront) I gave her the words in modern English.
     I let her know that the person in the poem had lost the love of their life, Lenore. They thought, at the time of the writing of the poem, that they would never recover from the grief. We talked about how hard things happen in life that bring us down. Feelings sometimes change, and ideally people heal— even just a bit— from difficulties they thought they’d never get past.
     It’s hard to be chipper these days. Being artificially cheerful is exhausting. It seems inauthentic to be a Pollyanna, ignoring the strife of the world and always looking at the bright side of life. At the same time, Polyanna author Eleanor Porter might have been onto something when she cautioned against being “too busy wishing things were different to find much time to enjoy things as they were.” Just as my elders gave me hope in a world that was surely hard for them many times along the way, perhaps even unbearable, it’s important to keep some degree of hopefulness and positivity in my heart and mind when I can, especially for the children in my life.
     The raven episode had me thinking about the magnificence of birds. A client recently told me that eagles cast huge shadows on the ground, so if one is out hiking in an eagle rich area, a momentary cloud that washes over us might be a visit from one of our national birds. I took a brief hike in Harms woods recently, and such a shadow darkened my car as I was getting in. I looked up and all around but it was elusive, and had disappeared.
     On my North Shore walkabouts I often keep my head to the sky. A hawk darted past and perched on a tree the other day. I stalked it and waited until I was able to capture a mid-flight photo. One such dude pulled shoppers at Da Jewel out of their early COVID funks in fall of 2020 when he posted up on a bike rack outside of the store. He gave them something cool to talk about at an otherwise undeniably uncool time.
     I was once dive-bombed by a redwing blackbird in San Francisco while others captured it on a recording— they were camped out in the financial district enjoying watching passers-by anger the two winged creature as we innocently walked too close to his family’s nest.
     Another time, I was at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas, I was with a small group getting a tour of the grounds. All of a sudden I felt a firm hand on the top of my head, squeezing. The group stared in shock. I did not know what was happening. I crouched down laughing, thinking someone I knew must be pulling a prank by coming up from behind and palming my head. Suddenly the hand was gone and I swung around to see who was messing with me. No one was there. The group animatedly explained that a dove had landed on my head. I felt lucky somehow, though it was probably just trying to kill me.
     Pollyanna was an 11-year-old who lost her parents and was sent to live with her unhappy aunt just before World War I. She played the “glad game” and found the good in everything. Even though each of us knows that justice along with the power found in numbers can move mountains. So why don’t we rise up, en masse, and use this power to defeat the evils of the world?

Mending the frayed social safety net

     “Angels don’t speak English, they speak emotion,” Edgar, a gaunt 24-year-old, tells Ryann Billitteri as she approaches him outside the Taco Bell at Dearborn and Van Buren Wednesday afternoon. “The translation is through your life....”
     He continues, blending near-poetry and conspiracy theories, wild claims and philosophical riffing, as Billitteri, a caseworker at Thresholds, gently steers him out of the rain and into the restaurant, where she buys him a Taco Supreme (“If you could bless me with extra sour cream on the side,” he says) and tries to get Edgar to sign a form to help him get off the street and into housing. Where he sleeps now, he says, is “classified.”
     Edgar sits and talks. Billitteri, team lead of Thresholds’ homeless outreach program, listens, silently proffering a pen. But he doesn’t sign. She’s been trying for months.
     Only about a third of Illinoisans who need treatment for mental illness get it; social services in the state are perennially underfunded, trimmed to the bone after years of sweeping budget cuts.
     “Since time immemorial,” said Heather O’Donnell, senior vice president of public policy and advocacy at Thresholds, which provides a range of mental health, addiction and housing support for the disadvantaged, plus guiding the formerly incarcerated as they transition back into society. “This has been happening for decades; it’s just snowballing because of the pandemic.”

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QAnon garbage bobs up in Senate committee room

     The shit that the Republican Party tolerates in its lowest depths has a way of floating to the top.
     We saw the latest example this week in the septic circus of the Senate confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, dominated by two days of accusations that she was soft on child pornography spouting from half a dozen Republicans senators.

     Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, said, "I also see a record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that goes back decades," regarding the 14, count 'em, 14 cases of the 1,000 Jackson has decided that relate to child porn or pedophilia. He had his own little chart of cases and worked out the percentages of the reductions in the sentences she gave as opposed to what prosecutors asked for.

    What he never pointed out was the sentences that Judge Jackson handed out put her smack in the middle of the average way judges handle these cases.  It's like condemning a judge for driving 27 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone.

      Other topics came up. Cruz also launched into her about critical race theory, because she sits on the board of a Georgetown school that has certain books in its library and, of course, the idea being that, being Black, she would be a scourge on those unfortunate victims of history, American whites. Jackson was attacked for representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and writing a brief suggesting buffer zones be used to keep hostile protesters away from women trying to have abortions.

      But those were passing feints; child pornography was the leitmotif, the theme, the dirty scab that GOP senators picked at for three days straight.

     Sen. Josh Hawley, senator from QAnon and also of Missouri, had his attack ready long before the hearing began.

     “I’ve been researching the record of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, reading her opinions, articles, interviews & speeches. I’ve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children," he tweeted March 16. "Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker.”

     In the hearings, Hawley intentionally misquoted Jackson, such as when she was repeating a witnesses' statements back to them, as if the thoughts she was expressing were her own. 

     This is the same serious social issue that was first weaponized in the obscene 4Chan free-fire zone and emerged into the public eye as the 2016 conspiracy theory of a child sex ring that Hillary Clinton was running out of the non-existent basement in Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C. pizzeria.

     It was taken up by smirking QAnon advocates, who latched onto the issue as a meta joke and way to pretend they were committed to an unimpeachable cause. And then, now, by Republican lawmakers because, as one academic put it, it's "the worst thing you can say about somebody."
     Who buys this? A surprising number of people: nearly a quarter of all Republicans and 15 percent of Americans generally told pollsters last year that they agree with the delusional notion that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.”

      Of course this has roots older than 2016. The whole kidnapping children trope is just the old blood libel retooled for the 21st century, with Democrats and liberals standing in for Jews, and child sex abuse an update for their draining the blood of their young victims to make Passover wine.

      Jackson will probably be confirmed because Democrats have the numbers, barely. But the future is laid out before us, clear: fact-free, performative delusion with no guard rails, no boundaries, no shame, no consequences. Anyone listening to these hearings for any period of time has to come away with the growing understanding that there is no hard bottom here anymore. Only the thinnest fraying strand of tradition stands between us and a true plunge into even more unimaginable depths. 

How to honor the COVID dead?

Stephen Blackwelder, conductor of the DePaul Community Chorus. Also onstage is the       
                    Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which plays with the chorus.

     Should we honor the COVID dead?
     The current tally for the United States is 972,000 and climbing by 1,200 a day. At this rate, we’ll hit 1 million Americans dead of COVID-19 sometime in mid-April.
     Do we memorialize the fallen? And if so, how?
     Uncomfortable questions. Americans are used to solemnizing those who die in wars. They have their own day. (Sigh. It’s Memorial Day.) And while some Americans visit graves, in general the holiday is marked with ball games, blowout sales and potato salad.
     Some countries have national moments of silence. I’ve been in Israel during their Memorial Day, Yom HaZikaron, and at the appointed moment people stop driving and stand outside their cars, heads bowed, for a two-minute moment of silence.
     Silence is not a very American concept. We’re more into physical monuments. My hometown had a statue to a Union soldier on a plinth in its downtown triangle, a silent sentinel that I never associated with anyone dying until now.
     The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a sprawl of low walls and stumpy columns and burbling pools that I would be hard-pressed to envision in my mind’s eye, and I was there. More a fancy marble skatepark than a memorial.
     The gold standard for war memorials is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite gash in the earth with the names of the 58,000 American military who died in that brutal, grinding war.
     Should we try to do something similar for the COVID million, victims of another conflict that divided our country? Hard to imagine. Maybe there is an artist or architect who can put the plague years into meaningful shape and mold public perceptions as Maya Lin did.

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Flashback 1987: Stress Test - One man's fitness odyssey

     The 35th anniversary of my joining the staff of the Sun-Times is Wednesday. I browsed my 1987 clips, looking for something to share in celebration, and was struck by a few things. First, I forgot how uncomfortable I was with the whole asking-people-stuff aspect of the job. The stories are peppered with quotes from college pals, plus my future wife and her friends. I obviously turned to them to get their opinions. Both oblivious AND lazy. In my defense, before the internet, tapping random strangers on diverse subjects wasn't quite so easy. Still, I was lucky not to be fired.
     Second, and this came as a real surprise, is how personal some of the pieces were. I had no trouble writing about my first date, my childhood memories, or this story, about measuring my heart and body. The usual way to do it would be to observe another person going through this process. The future columnist way—and I am obligated to point out, the easier way—was to simply do it myself.

     Notice the voice of this: confident, slightly humorous, exactly as I would sound now. So either points for consistency, or demerits for failure to change. One difference is that I never say how much I weighed, my attempt to draw the veil and give myself a bit of privacy. 

     I asked my girlfriend if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you're fat," she said. "A little extra, but you're not fat. You're not skinny, but I don't like skinny men."
     I asked my mother if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you look fat," she said. "You are very well shaped."
     I asked Dr. George Lesmes of Northeastern Illinois University's Human Performance Laboratory if he thought I was fat.
     He said nothing, but arranged for me to take a series of fitness evaluation tests that would answer the question, not with opinions, but with cold, unlying numbers.
     "The thing that is important for people who are looking to change their lifestyles is feedback," Lesmes said. "There's no better feedback than numbers. If I can say to you in May your oxygen capacity is 3, and show in July it's up to 3 1/2, that shows progress and is good for motivation."
     The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that individuals over 35 take a fitness evaluation test, not only to gauge any improvement that might come from an exercise and diet regimen, but to make sure they don't have any cardiac problems that might be aggravated by strenuous exercise.
     Before the test, a lab assistant went over a lengthy form that stated, in essence, that I realized I might drop dead at any time during testing and, should that happen, there would be no hard feelings between us. I signed, changed into sweats, and soon found myself sitting on an examination table.
     The first test, a stretching test, was simple. Sitting with my legs on the table, I stretched forward and, arms straining, reached as far as I could past my toes. Piece of cake. I scored a 12 and, not knowing that meant I had the flexibility of uncooked spaghetti, felt quite good about it.
     Next, electrodes—plastic discs with small metal nubs in the middle—were attached to my chest. Hairy men, such as myself, might be a bit surprised to realize that the spots where the electrodes are to be attached must first be shaved. I certainly was surprised, if not horrified. I picked forlornly at the clumps of hair as they fell over the table.
     "Do you want me to save it?" the lab assistant asked. She told me that Evanston firemen, who take the test each year, say it grows back and, at worst, itches for a while. I comforted myself with the thought that if burly firemen allow themselves to go through this, so could I.
     She handed me what looked like a sock made out of netting and told me to slip it on to hold the wires in place. I took the sock and examined it dubiously.
     "This fit people much, much larger than you," she said and, after a bit of struggle, I slipped the netting over my torso.
     Electrodes now held in place by the netting sock, I shuffled over to a treadmill, dragging an electrocardiogram machine behind me.
     Running on the treadmill is the part where, if you're going to have a heart attack, you do. I don't know why, but I had pictured a leisurely jog, trotting along to the bips and bleeps of heart machines.
     What I got was a mad, exhausting dash. Every three minutes they increased the speed and the angle of the treadmill. After seven minutes or so my personality shrank away and I was reduced to an unthinking bundle of flailing muscles and gasping lungs, staggering instinctively forward as the white coat on my right took my pulse, the white coat on my left jacked up the treadmill, the third white coat watched the monitor and the fourth coat, a man—the same man who told me not to lean so heavily on the railings— added insult to injury by jamming a nose clip over my nose and having me breathe through what looked like a hair dryer hose.
    The purpose of the test is to put as much strain as possible on the heart, to see how it reacts. Later, I learned my heart redlined at 188 beats per minute. My first question, after I had given up, been helped off the treadmill and lay in a panting, sweating heap on an examination table, was: If people are in bad shape, why put them through this? Isn't having a heart attack on the treadmill under close scrutiny just as bad as having a heart attack running around a track somewhere?
     "Sure, but running real hard on the treadmill, we'll be able to monitor you with the best equipment possible," Lesmes said. "We'll also be able to identify at what point in your exercise problems occur. Then we can sit down with you and make sure we design an exercise program that will benefit you without putting you at risk, or getting to that point where problems occur."
     Lesmes went on to explain that, for instance, if the EKG showed that my heart started to do the tango at 160 beats per minute, they would design an exercise program where I would be able to approach my limit without overstraining my heart.
     The body fat analysis started simply enough. I sat next to a machine called a spirometer and expelled as much air as I could into a tube. My efforts were displayed by a large, Plexiglas cylinder and recorded on a cylindrical graph. Urged on by the cheerleading of the lab assistant, it was rather fun, like a game one might find at a state fair.
     The purpose of this test was to find out how much air was in my lungs so that in the next test, the hydrostatic weighing, the reading would not be thrown off by excess air.
     Hydrostatic weighing was not so much physically taxing as it is psychologically icky. I had to climb into a square metal tank filled with warm water, and sit on a harnesslike thing attached to a scale. Once on the harness I had to dip my head below the water, blow all the air out of my lungs, and wait until the assistant took a reading.
     While I was showering and getting back into my street clothes, the data was compiled into a small booklet, which we then reviewed. The good news was that my heart was "strong," which meant that it was quick to recover its "resting" rate after exercise and did not change rates in rapid jumps, but gradually.
     The news quickly got worse. My oxygen consumption was average, flexibility fair, lung flexibility good. The real knife-twister was body fat: 23 percent. According to their table titled "Normal Values of Percentage Body Fat for the Average American Population," I had the body fat of a 47-year-old man, which I suppose would be fine if I were 47, and not 26.
     They calculated my ideal weight (170 pounds) and—perhaps on the assumption that I was stupid as well as fat and couldn't do the math myself, perhaps just to grind my face in it—they calculated how many pounds I would need to lose to get to that ideal weight.
      Then we then went over the mysteries of calorie intake, types of exercise and importance of warm-ups.
     "We don't want to just tell you you're fat," said Diane Reynolds, a graduate assistant. "We want to work with you to reach a goal."
     My goal at that point was lunch, and, after going on a tour of the gym that people who pay $65 for the test are free to use, I conducted a test of my own, which involved measuring my response to a big bowl of teriyaki chicken. I passed.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 7, 1987

Friendship in the plague years

    COVID doesn’t just kill people — 1,200 Americans a day, quite a lot really — but it kills friendships, too. Or at least makes them even harder to navigate.
     Especially that middle zone of business associations — those quasi-friends whom you become closer to than merely doing your job requires. People you like, when you run into them. But not anybody you’d hang out with in a pandemic.
     I liked Ken Price, the director of public relations at the Palmer House. We had things in common. We both thought that being in the newspaper was really important. We both liked eating lunch at the Palmer House, though he’d nibble something dietetic while ordering plate after plate of whatever was new and fattening on the menu and jamming the plates in front of me. He’d send me off with gift brownies — invented at the Palmer House! — and, leaving the hotel, I’d hand them to the first homeless person I passed on State Street.
     Ken was such as booster of the hotel that he was baffled, almost hurt when I declined a pitch. Three years ago we had lunch, not in the restaurant, but in the gorgeous lobby, next to a scaffold where work was going on restoring the ceiling. I talked with a restorer, admired the work. But somehow ... the topic just didn’t ... gel. Maybe next time.

     That happens. Uncle Ken — I called him “Uncle Ken” — was still interesting and flamboyant, with his elaborate eyeglasses and his beloved dogs. And warm. He always asked about Edie and the boys. He was one of the few to whom, when COVID struck, I sent an inquisitive email now and then, asking how he was. Rattling the doorknob. He never replied. Which bugged me. I took his silence personally: Of course not. The Palmer House is shut down. No need for publicity. No need to talk to me.

     In this business, you don’t want to be so cynical to assume people interact with you only because they want something. I know a popular chef who once confessed that she worried people were her friends only for the free food. I felt sorry for her but also understood. I have old friends who only contact me when they have new books to promote. I try not to think about about them in between, try to tell myself that friends are like comets, close for a time, then suddenly a dot dwindling against the black cosmos. You can’t go chasing after them. They’ll be back.

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