Wilmette Notes: Wee Tim'rous Beastie

Netuske of a Mouse (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     In 1980, I lived above the Sherman Snack Shop in Evanston in an apartment dingy in the way only undergraduates can create. One evening I was watching our small portable black and white television when a mouse scurried past. I was on my feet and out the door so quick I neither put my shoes on nor took my key. The door locked behind me. That memory slumbered for decades until Caren Jeskey's essay today prodded it from its lair. I'm sure it'll raise murine memories in you too. Enjoy.

By Caren Jeskey

     A glass was knocked over in the kitchen very late the other night, clattering onto the counter top. The problem is I was home alone, and not in the kitchen. Instinct kicked in and I dashed into the dark room and flipped on the light. A tiny gray flash of fur flew across the counter at warp speed, and skillfully curved its little body around a sharp corner before it disappeared behind the stove. 

     It was too late to do anything about it so I went to sleep. I wore a skull cap and a huge silk eye mask, and wrapped the sheet around my head for protection. Still, I had nightmares of little mousey sniffing at my nostrils. I did not get much sleep that night.
    For such little guys, mice and other rodents possess an incredible ability to torment and otherwise engage the attention of humans. 
     The Three Blind Mice were a metaphor—betcha didn't know that—for Protestant loyalists accused of plotting against Queen Mary, called blind as an insult by their rivalrous religious persecutors, almost demanding kindly farmer’s wives resort to bloody violence with carving knives.
     In her 793rd poem, our isolated and astute Emily Dickinson pays homage to the power of these creatures. “Grief is a Mouse—And chooses Wainscot in the Breast For His Shy House.” They are hard to see, easily hidden, but can capture our hearts. Or freeze them, during night terrors, as we imagine them clawing our eyes out.    
     Poet Robert Browning shared a tale of woe from A.D. 1284 when their big cousins, the rat, overran the town of Hamelin Germany. The Pied Piper showed up to lead the dirty vermin to their deaths by drowning when they followed his hypnotic flute music to their demise in the local river. When Mr. Piper returned to the town for his exterminator’s fee, the mayor refused to hand it over. Mr. Piper retaliated by luring 130 local children into the mountains, never to be seen again. Pesky rats causing trouble once again.
     They also inspire pity and affection, most famously:

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle …
      — "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns (1785)

 

    This poet was also a farmer, and apparently unearthed a mouse family’s den while tilling his soil. He finds himself feeling badly, contemplating the unfortunate plight of these nervous little beasts.
     For my little problem, I decided to go the humane route. A friend lent me a metal mouse motel, which I baited with crunchy organic peanut butter from Trader Joe’s. Trap set, pest control arranged to come out in the morning, I went to sleep. Didn’t sleep well again.
     When I woke up the next day I peeked into the clear plastic top of the mouse house and saw a tail. Then another, and then one more. Three mice huddled together, taking a nap or maybe frozen in fear. I shuddered and ran out of the kitchen and around the house a bit, shaking off the heebie jeebies.
      Wesley the mouse guy arrived. He plugged up holes behind the stove and around the perimeter of the house with copper wool. Before he left, I asked him to walk with me to a hiking trail a couple blocks away to let la petit ménagerie loose. He kindly said he’d do it himself, and off he went. When Wesley got back he let me know that one of the three had refused to run free. It was hiding in the tunneled part of the trap and would not budge.
   I had a couple hours free before an early dinner date, and I had an idea. I placed the mousetrap into a paper shopping bag and walked over to the fire department.
     I put the trap down, wide open (hoping he’d run off) in a patch of grass, crossed the parking lot full of giant pick up trucks, and headed to the patio. I passed a picnic table and big gas grill, imagined the fatigued firefighters enjoying a well earned meal, and gave the station door a few loud knocks. 

     A tall, slim, balding firefighter pulled a curtain back and peeked out of the glass door. I smiled. He opened up. “Hi. I have a mouse stuck in a trap and I need help getting it out.” He looked surprised. “So you came to the fire department?” I explained the situation, and that I don’t know many people in the area yet. It was sounding a little silly to me even, but he stepped out to help. His name badge read "Tom."
     We approached the trap and Tom peered inside. The mouse’s long tail stuck out from one end of the tunnel, his teenie paws and nose peeking out the other side. It took a good ten minutes of prodding and pulling before our little friend was finally pried out. Mice are strong and agile, and he did not let go easily. I think we hurt his paw a bit because he limped a little, but once released he took just a moment to get his bearings. When he realized he was free he scampered away into the bushes.
     I thanked Tom, made a mental note to drop off some cookies and a thank you note and headed home, hoping not to have a repeat performance. Tom would have a story to tell.

Rotary aids Ukrainian refugees

John Hewko

     Ukraine is a democracy based on a constitution.
     The parts not brutally invaded and cruelly occupied by Russia, that is. The Ukrainian constitution was written in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. And if John Hewko needs to refer to it, he can check his personal copy. Not many people keep the Ukrainian constitution at home — but then, Hewko helped get it written.
     “My parents came to the United States after the Second World War,” he said. “My father in 1949, my mother in 1947. I grew up in a Ukrainian-American community in Detroit, and then Ohio.”
     Hewko became a lawyer, went to work at Baker McKenzie, which sent him to open their office in Moscow in 1989. He grew up speaking Ukrainian, so it was a natural for him to head to Ukraine with the rush of Western expertise helping get that fledgling nation off on the right foot.
     “I took a leave of absence from the firm, moved to Ukraine in the spring of ’91, working as an adviser to parliament, overseeing this group of Western experts,” he said. “We put together the first working group drafting the Ukrainian constitution. We brought in Western constitutional experts, holed up in a hotel room for five days and hammered out the first draft.”
     Hewko is again in a position to help his parents’ homeland, as general secretary and CEO of Rotary International, the 1.4-million-member service organization based in Evanston.
     My experiences at Rotary meetings created the impression of an organization whose primary purpose is to attend luncheons, exchange business cards, and endure speeches. Hewko disabused me of this view right away.
     “The more I’ve worked at Rotary, the more I’m in awe of what Rotarians do all over the world,” he said, citing their work to eradicate polio.

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Never mind.

 

   I hate technology sometimes.
   Hate, hate, hate.
   Even the simplest things...
   So last week a new reader in Washington, D.C. asked if he could receive notifications of new Every Goddamn Day posts by email. 
   I had tried setting that up a few months ago, under the tutelage of Chicago Public Square's Charlie Meyerson. Tried to figure this out through some kind of website. But it was beyond my skill set.
    Now, pressed anew, I dove into the settings section of Blogger and, lo and behold, there was a place where I could plug in emails to send post notifications. 
    So I plugged my email in. It seemed to work. 
    Not wanting to get beyond my skis, or ballyhoo a flawed system, I then put a small notice on the page, inviting emails. Those worked too. I waited a few days to see if the thing vanished, as sometimes happened. No, it seemed to work.
     Confident that I had a solution, I posted an invitation Thursday morning. Emails started to come in. I plugged them into the section in settings. Until the above notice appeared. Surprise!
    Ten? Why 10? Why not a thousand? So as not to jam the Internet? I have 50,000 photos in iPhoto up in the Cloud. And I only get to email the blog to 10 people? A joke, right?
    Anyway, I just pulled the post down—the second time in nine years that I've had to. No point in inviting people send me emails if I can't then send them the blog. I'm not giving up, yet. I'll continue to try to figure out how to solve this. But this is why I generally avoid the technological aspect of blogging. It's hard enough just to write the shit.

Drawing fun out of a hat

Joshua Messado performs with his namesake rings at the Chicago Magic Lounge.

     When the Chicago Shakespeare Theater opened on Navy Pier in 1999, I used to say it was worth going just to sit in a seat there — the fact that they also put on a show was an added bonus.
     I had that same sense of being somewhere special just entering the Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark St., on a recent Saturday night. You almost have to. The establishment is hidden behind a fake laundromat, complete with spinning dryers. Guests aren’t fooled per se — it’s all too pristine to be an actual laundromat. But you know something extraordinary is afoot, a feeling magnified by the black-walled bar to the left and a pristine little lobby decorated with museum-quality magic memorabilia to the right. This feels like someplace you’d find at Disney World instead of a North Clark Street cabaret. Not a raw cinder block in sight.
     “Somebody put a lot of money into this,” I said to my wife. That somebody was Don Clark and his partners, who opened the Lounge in 2018. Clark invited us to stop by, and while two years of COVID-19 hunkering has gotten us out of the habit of regularly going places and doing things, the Magic Lounge seemed worth risking a visit.
     It is. The room had a boisterous party atmosphere before a single card was turned over.
     That night’s show, like Gaul, can be divided into three parts. First, roving magicians performed close-in magic at various tables, engaging in friendly banter and showing off well-executed card tricks.
     Second, the main show, consisting of two acts, opener Jimmy Rock and headliner Paige Thompson.
     Both presented routines built around finding the chosen card and assembling a number that then appears in an unexpected place. Rock is an actual Florida cop who does magic. ”It’s never fun to encounter a police officer,” said Rock, accurately enough. Thompson’s act involved people in the hinterland thinking a woman with purple hair doing magic has to be a witch. While her twist of dancing upon cards blindfolded to find the right one was different, it didn’t rise to what I consider high-caliber magic. Both were competent. Maybe a few cocktails would have helped.

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Strange Worlds

 

"Strange Worlds" by Todros Geller (Art Institute of Chicago)

      Ukraine is never far from mind, as Russia redoubles its attack, hurling armies and missiles at the besieged nation, the second largest in Europe. I keep waiting for the world to shrug and look away—it's what the world does best. But we're still watching, horror-struck.
     At the same moment, we're also rediscovering the depth of our Ukrainian heritage here in Chicago, sometimes hidden in plain sight: "Oh wait, Ukrainian Village. Right..."
     Sometimes just hidden. I offer this little noticed oil in the possession of the Art Institute, "Strange Worlds," a 1928 oil painting by Todros Geller, a Ukrainian-born Jew.
     The news vendor stares boldly at the viewer, red-eyed, gaunt, intense, tight-lipped. He's a man who has seen much, endured much, to get to his perch at a newstand jammed under an 'L' girder. In the background, the faceless pedestrians swirl past. If you look closely at the newspapers he's offering, they're a blend of nationalities and politics, crying for attention .
Geller was not only involved in art, but politics, religion, education—he taught both art and Hebrew.
     Born in Ukraine in 1889, when it was still part of Russia, Geller recalled scarcely thinking of himself as Jewish, until the 1905 pogroms forced that understanding upon him. His family fled the next year, first to Montreal—where he met and became a proud friend of, "Red Queen" Emma Goldman—then Chicago, in 1918, where he studied at the School of the Art Institute.
     Geller was often quoted or featured in the Daily News, whose comprehensive coverage of the Chicago art scene is heartbreaking to contemplate today.
     "Todros Geller, who has been painting and studying in Europe and Palestine this summer has resumed his classes at the Jewish People's Institute," the paper noted in 1927. "Elementary 
and advanced classes in figure and cast drawing, modeling, pottery, etchings, wood block
cutting and printing are offered."
     During that trip he met with Marc Chagall in Paris—Geller was interested in what constituted "Jewish art," though it seems fairly plain nowadays. Later, the WPA sent him to the Southwest, where he did a series of sensitive portraits of Native-Americans.
     His "Black Venus," a woodblock print of a nude cabaret dancer, was the talk of an unjuried 1932 show, scandalizing what the Daily News called "certain nervous nellies who had no business being where they were." That might have included the Tribune critic, who declared the work, "most startling."
     In 1937, a Daily News reporter asked Geller how he squared the Biblical prohibitions against depicting the natural world with his career as an artist.
     "Well you know," he replied, with a smile, and, the paper noted, no trace of an accent, "what happens when a law is passed against something that everybody wants to do."
     "Strange Worlds" was taken as the title of a show of Geller's work that the Spertus Museum put on in 2018—you can see a brief WTTW segment on the artist and his work here.
     Spertus holds many of the oils, woodblock prints, and sketchbooks of Geller, which is fitting, because he worked, unsuccessfully, toward creating a museum of Jewish art in the 1930s. In that era, Jews were sort of the officially-designated cultural outsiders, a role of The Other now filled by different groups. It made me wonder if there is still the sort of contemporary Jewish artistic community that Geller represented, or was it wiped away by the one-two punch of World War II and assimilation?

Are we going to war with Russia?

Metropolitan Museum of Art

 “In Russian-occupied Kherson, satellite imagery that showed the digging of hundreds of fresh grave plots held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there.” — News item

     That about sums it up, doesn’t it? A humanity so advanced that we can detect and count 6-by-3-foot graves from outer space. But at the same time, a species so degraded that we’re also doing the random killing that requires the graves. Quite a range of behavior to wrap our heads around on the Monday after Easter.
     And I shouldn’t even address how the same news organization, The Washington Post, that can share such important news is also able, in doing so, to disgorge a phrase like “held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there.”
     Symbolism? A grave isn’t a symbol of their fate, it is their fate. (Let’s re-write that sentence into something less passive, shall we? “Satellite imagery showed hundreds of freshly-dug graves in Russian-occupied Kherson, an ominous indication of the fate of civilians there.” More accurate and four words shorter.)
     Having plucked out “haunting,” we can save that word to apply to the Russian demand that the United States stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. And even then, it’s premature. We’re not “haunted” yet by the formal diplomatic note — how 19th century of them! — the Russians sent last week warning the United States to stop giving the Ukrainians the weapons they are using to kick their ass. Not haunted, only worried.
     That Russian demand seems the most salient fact in the whole churning, confusing awful horror of the war in recent weeks. What to make of it?
     Empty threat? Given the ease with which Russians lie, we can take some reassurance that if they are saying they’re going to do some vague unwelcome thing — ”unpredictable consequences” is the term they actually brandished — there’s a good chance they won’t do anything.
     Or is it the sort of justification the Russians like to float prior to their awful acts? A kind of prior authorization they seem to think takes the sting out of unprovoked evil. Their thinking is: We can randomly kill thousands of civilians in the country next door if we first claim we’re liberating them from Nazis and they aren’t a real country anyway.
     Is the United States heading toward war? It seems a very real possibility. Some arms convoy in Poland will be hit, and the gears of general conflagration will start to turn. It’ll all seem inevitable, afterward. Then we can be haunted aplenty.

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Happy Easter, etc.

             "Happy Easter" by Urban Janke 
               (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
   For many years my column ran on Sundays, which means I have plenty of old Easter columns I can share, and thus avoiding the necessity of thinking of something new.     

     The column below does more than indulge my double Seder-stuffed torpor. It is from when the column filled a page, and the opening nod to Easter leads to a reflection on gay marriage that could be ripped from the headlines, applied to transgender teens. A considerable cross-section of Christians just aren't happy unless they're kicking somebody weaker, a neat inversion of their supposed faith that would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Speaking of which, the last part is evidence I was mocking Donald Trump seven years before our nation decided to make him president. For all the good it did.


OPENING SHOT . . .

     Happy Easter! After I wrote the item below, it struck me, "Oh. Right. Sunday is Easter. People are going to think this a deliberate anti-religious rant penned intentionally to blaspheme the most important holiday in Christendom, and it's not."
     To be honest, I never thought of Easter. The holiday isn't on my radar because I don't celebrate Easter. No eggs. No bunnies. No fancy hats. Nothing. For me, and people like me, it's just another Sunday.
     That might be a simple point, but I think it's one worth making because so many act as if their religion is the only belief in the world. That's natural, I suppose — if you think you possess the universal truth as set down by the Lord God Almighty, it can seem insulting to suggest that your truth might somehow be comparable to these grubby belief systems and overgrown cults that have the nerve to also exist, and manifest themselves in that uncomfortable period before their believers all die and go to hell.
     Frankly, just that recognition — there are other people living here, inexplicably permitted by God to exist and cling to their heresies — is a start, and enough for a fine spring Sunday. We've made progress; maybe even a breakthrough, and we'll work on accepting those other people as equal human beings in future sessions.

WEDDING BELL BLUES

     Opposing gay marriage is Bible-based bigotry. There's no other way to justify denying homosexuals the basic human rights non-gays enjoy.
     The argument that gays somehow undermine the sanctity of marriage is unsupported by any actual evidence. The divorce rate doesn't climb in nations where gays are allowed to wed. There is no data that suggest that gays make unfit parents or are bad neighbors.
     The sole objection to gay marriage is that God doesn't approve, and because gays are a small enough part of the population, they can be stepped on (God doesn't like fornicators, either, supposedly, but they're allowed to wed because there are so many).
     The whole wrecking-marriage argument really falls apart when we ask what other groups also undermine marriage — do murderers? No, society allows murderers to marry — even marry each other, in prison, if they like — without ruining marriage in some ineffable fashion.
     The very old? We find marriage among the elderly sweet — nobody starts talking about the ability to reproduce when grandma remarries the way they raise "nature" as an objection against gay unions.
     Atheists? Fine. Liberals. Ditto. No, these arguments were especially concocted for use against gays, and realizing that, it's hard to understand how they were given credence for so long in a supposedly free society.
     Habit, I guess.
     This subject arises because last week Vermont became the first state in the union whose legislature legalized gay marriage, as opposed to the dodge of civil unions being considered in Illinois. Allowing gays to have civil unions but not marriage is a step in the right direction but also a sop to bigots.
     Hiding behind civil unions is as if, in 1965, the nation didn't pass the Voting Rights Act because too many Southern racists felt the sanctity of the ballot box is corrupted if blacks use it. So instead we passed the "Registering Elective Choice Act," which allowed African Americans to participate in elections though not technically "vote."
     The only thing that keeps this subject from being thoroughly depressing is the certainty that someday we will get beyond it, the way they have in places like Spain (Spain!) where gay marriage is legal. Someday this will be just another inexplicable historic American prejudice, like hatred of the Irish. As with Tipperary, it's a long way to go, but we'll get there someday.

SPEAK SOFTLY . . .

     It was before 6 a.m. Wednesday when the e-mails began to arrive regarding my item on the inadequacy of the Trump Tower spire.
     "Every single woman will have this same response," wrote a prominent female Chicagoan whose identity I will take to the grave. "That's because over the years we have learned that the most bombastic guys are always hiding a 'dinky!!' "
     Thus the day went, with women insisting that my item on the little stick atop Trump Tower was some kind of clever commentary on the Donald's anatomy, or lack of which.
     I can't say this aspect didn't occur to me, fleetingly — while I was mentioning Trump's "mustard seed of a soul" I considered speculating upon a different kind of diminution.
     But this is a family paper, and I figured, "Don't go there." That was it, truly — those detecting a subtle dig are reading too much into it. I've only met Donald Trump once, and though completely unimpressed, I don't hold him in greater contempt than does any other thinking American.
     I didn't expect readers — men and women — to revel in what one called "the Freudian implications" of the spire expose.
     "I'm not buying it," wrote David Schmittgens. "I think this is your transparent way of getting back at The Donald. Don't deny it. I think what you are really saying is, 'Trump has a . . .' "
     Well, enough of that. And probably enough of this subject. I'm sorry I raised, umm, I'm sorry I brought it up — whoops — let's just forget the whole thing. Freud never actually said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but I'll say it: Sometimes a spire is just a spire.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 12, 2009