In cucumber time.

   

     In Saturday's 10th anniversary post, I said this would run as a column Wednesday. But upon a second read, I decided it might be more apt as an EGD exclusive. If you want a post reflecting today's July 4 holiday, the first of many I've written ran 10 years ago today. You can read it here.

     Nature isn't entirely in revolt. Yes, the air stung our eyes last week due to massive Canadian wildfires and the sun looked like the second star in the desert sky in a "Star Wars" movie. Then it rained so hard over the weekend, it was as if the Lord God Almighty were saying, "NASCAR in Chicago? I don't think so..."

     But all is not End Times doom. I planted cucumbers this year, as a lark, and while my tomatoes are still trying to gather themselves and make an appearance, this bad boy was so big I decided to harvest him and try him out at lunch.
     Quite delicious, sliced thin, on a fresh bagel from Once Upon a Bagel in Highland Park, which really ought to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
     "Cucumber.' Now there's a word you don't think about much. I tried playing my guess-the-origins word game. Cucumber. It sounds British, doesn't it? Like "North Umberland." Maybe a Franco-Saxon mash-up: "que cumber"?
     Not close. French, "concombre," from the Latin, "cucumis" pronounced, "koo-koo mis."
     The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a "creeping plant ... native of southern Asia, from ancient times cultivated for its fruit..."
     Stop right there. Cucumbers are not the vegetables that we — okay, I — assumed them to be, but fruits, with more in common with cantaloupes and watermelons than salad denizens like lettuce or radishes. (I almost included tomatoes, but those I already accept, grudgingly, as fruits).
     Which leads to the difference between fruits and vegetables, which I should know, but don't, meaning some of you must not either. I hope. Fruits are ... checking ... from the flowering parts of the plant — those involved in reproduction. While vegetables ... are from the leaves, stems, roots, bulbs. So seeds are the giveaway — if it has seeds, the germs of reproduction, then it's fruit. Thus corn, peppers, zucchini, all fruits. Next time the subject comes up, you can say, with confidence, "Well, if it has seeds, then it must be a fruit." 

     Of course, using that definition, a loaf of rye bread with caraway seeds is a fruit. But you know what I mean...
     Returning to the subject at hand, the OED cites a line from Wyclif in 1382: "Where cumeris, that ben bitter herbis, waxen."
     When I sliced the cucumber and applied it to bread, I really didn't think about the fine tradition I was following, but there in the OED's second definition: "The long fleshy fruit of this plant, commonly eaten (cut into thin slices) as a cooling salad, and when young used for pickling."

     Eating a cucumber sandwich, I didn't think of it as "a cucumber sandwich," did not think of Algernon being unable to stop eating them in "The Importance of Being Earnest." In all candor, I'd never have thought of consuming them that way — to me, cucumbers are diced and scattered on salads. But my wife suggested it. 
     Speaking of grace under pressure, "cool as a cucumber" is almost 300 years old, tracing to Gay Poems of 1732. Though the OED overlooks "As cold as cucumbers" in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Cupid's Revenge" in 1615, it does note that, as slang, cucumber denotes, "some obscure reference to a tailor. Hence cucumber time." (The association having to do with once popular songs referring to early summer. "Tailors could not be expected to earn much money 'in cucumber season' ... Because when cucumbers are in, the gentry are out of town.'")
    Are they ever. My neighborhood feels emptied out when I walk the dog. Well, I'm not in Tucson or Tuscany or Tuscaloosa or one of the garden spots the we well-heeled have fled to. I'm right here. Doing this.

    There are no cucumbers in Shakespeare. But two references in the Old Testament, and both are metaphors. In Jeremiah, the gods of others are "like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk."

     Even more evocative is Isaiah 1:8, “And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.”
    Other translations call it "a hut in a field of cucumbers," referring to a shack that farmers would put in their fields and occupy at night to guard their crops against plunder. Aka, a very lonely place. So if you are, to pluck a random example from the air, quarantining due to COVID today instead of having holiday fun with friends, as you'd planned, you can say you feel like you're in a hut in a cucumber patch, in case that helps. Which it doesn't.
    We can't ignore "Gulliver's Travels." The first bearded, disheveled scholar that Gulliver encounters at the Grand Academy of Lagado "had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." The researcher predicts that in eight more years he might find success, observing that "this had been a very dear season for cucumbers" and — just to show you that nothing ever changes in academe — imploring Gulliver "to give him something as an encouragement to his ingenuity" and our intrepid traveler, provided with cash by his host for this very purpose, does so.
     To my surprise, Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang has a reference, not to the fruit's phallic shape, but to its color: "cucumber n. A dollar, 1935: '... It may be against the law to say that a doll whose pap has all these cucumbers is dumb.' Runyon."
     The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that "the food value of the cucumber is low," which initially struck me as unkind, but then I realized they were referring calories, and they recovered anyway by adding, "but its delicate flavour makes it popular for salads and relishes."
     The delicate flavor made me think of a usage learned from high end health clubs — as a garnish to water. So while most the literal first fruit of my garden this year went into sandwiches, the remnant was added to a glass of seltzer, then nibbled as a cool closing grace note to the beverage and the debut cuke of the season. More are on deck.

 Critters getting this fellow were only a slight concern, since he was raised in a large container. But I do wish I'd waited for that  extra half ounce, so he could weigh in at a full pound before being eaten.

Don’t scare pets to death

     This 4th of July won’t be the same for Margaret and Chuck Hagopian, longtime residents of Norwood Park.
     “We lost our cat Ranger, to a heart attack caused by people on the next block shooting off M-80’s on July 9, 2022,” Margaret wrote. “When an unexpected and sudden series of explosions rang out, our cat ran out of the room in overwhelming fear hiding under our bed only to die minutes later of a heart attack.”
     I’d never heard of a cat having a heart attack, never mind one induced by fireworks. But there is no question that pets can find the loud noises of firecrackers terrifying. 

Ranger

    

     “Some dogs and cats will have a fight-or-flight response to fireworks,” the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reports. “This is a very real adrenaline rush, causing their blood pressure and heart rate to rise.”
     That said, the risk of pets actually dying is “very unlikely — but not impossible,” according to one veterinary expert, who said an underlying condition, like damage from heartworm, is often a factor.
     The Hagopians’ Ranger was only 12.
     “Our cats notoriously lived to 20,” Margaret said.
     They also noted that while once fireworks were confined to the Fourth of July or, at most, the evening before, lately some neighborhoods seem to have weeklong pyrotechnic festivals.
     “Since when did July 4th become a season?” Margaret asked. “From late June throughout July, pet owners throughout the city deal with terrorized pets hiding in fear because of careless and thoughtless individuals launching these explosives well into the early hours of the morning. They’re loud and they go on forever.”

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‘The community stood behind us.'

     Ross Cosmetics was closed for Independence Day on July 4, 2022.
     But, as any business owner knows, being closed to the public doesn’t mean there still isn’t work to be done. So Earl Edelcup, who owned the Highland Park variety store with his wife, Arden, thought he’d go in to the small, windowless office tucked behind a gray curtain in the back of the store and get some paperwork done.
     About the same time that Edelcup was driving from his home in Highwood, authorities say Bobby Crimo, 22, later told them he was taking up his position on the roof of one-story Ross Cosmetics.
     News accounts described what Crimo went up as a fire-escape ladder. But it really is a sturdy, steel-and-concrete stairway to the second-floor apartments around the back of the buildings at Second Street and Central Avenue. The police say he was carrying a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semiautomatic rifle, one of five guns he owned, and three 30-round magazine clips.
     The Highland Park 4th of July parade began at 10 a.m., half an hour after the children’s and pet parade. The police say Crimo started shooting at parade goers from above Ross Cosmetics at 10:14 a.m., firing 83 shots in quick bursts, leaving five dead, two dying and dozens wounded.
     Just after the shooting stopped and the man who fired on the crowd descended the stairs, Earl Edelcup showed up.

Earl Edelcup

     Routine can put blinders on anybody, and Edelcup, 59, had worked at Ross since he was 12. He didn’t hear any shots or sirens or take note of the eerily empty street, cluttered with baby strollers. He didn’t see the bodies.
     He had no idea anything unusual had happened until he stood at the front door and began to insert his key.
     “What are you doing?” someone, running past him, shouted.
     “I’m just going in to work,” Edelcup replied, puzzled.
    The person kept running.
     That gave him pause. Edelcup turned, looked around and saw a police officer who asked him if he owned this business. Earl said he did.
     “Is this safe?” Edelcup asked. “Should I be here?”
     But the cop was gone.
     Edelcup didn’t go in. He got back in his car and called his wife.

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Ten years after

 

The Thompson Center and City Hall, July 1, 2013

    Friday morning was more eventful than is usual. But things quieted down about 5:30 a.m., and I had some time to myself. So I thought about my blog post for today, Saturday — I like to get them out of the way early, so I don't have to worry about them later — and looked at my camera roll, for inspiration, settling on a photo I took of a big cucumber from my garden.
     Soon I was lost in the etymology of the word "cucumber," reading the Oxford English Dictionary and various niche dictionaries, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the index in Mencken's "The American Language," plus "Gulliver's Travels" and the Bible. I learned a lot.
     When I was done, about 6:15 a.m., I realized that if the cucumber exegesis was posted today, it would run on the 10th anniversary of the creation of this blog. An idea I liked, to mark the day without comment beyond a dissection of cucumbers. No need to crow. "Self-praise is self-condemnation," as Cervantes writes. 
     But another consideration came to play — that's what writing is, weighing one factor against another. I really liked my cucumber reflection, so much that I thought it might make an out-of-left field early July treat in the newspaper. So I held it for ... not Monday, that's already written. Wednesday then. 
     Which leaves today open. And I am sort of glad. A man writes a blog every day for a decade,  3,652 days — the two extra days for the leap years of 2016 and 2020 — without fail, and he should ... what? 
     Take a bow? There is a desperate, Daffy Duck quality to that. Falling to one knee, spreading my arms at the Hollywood Bowl. Almost begging for the chorus of crickets. Most people don't read the blog and don't care. I read it. I write it. I care. What's there to say?
     Give thanks? That's better. I really, really enjoyed writing this blog these past 10 years. Sure, I'd have liked it to send shock waves through the media world. But it didn't. Everygoddamnday.com does not bestride the city like a colossus. I rarely ever meet anyone who reads it. Doesn't matter. As I once said, "and my garden isn't ConAgra either, but I plant tomatoes every spring." Why? I like doing it, and enjoy the result, especially the scenes from my family, preserved in amber, like this, about my older boy, or this, about the younger.  They're priceless to me. The boys don't seem to know or care.
     At five years, the anniversary was noted by media columnist Robert Feder. He's enjoying a well-deserved retirement, but our mutual friend, Eric Zorn, mentioned the 10 year anniversary on his fine Picayune Sentinel, mostly allowing me to reflect on the experience.

     I asked myself if there are any new features I'd like to add, and I've begun a box, "10 YEARS AGO ON EGD," tucked on the upper left side of my blog page. I don't plan to change the post every day — not every post is worth a second read, so once a week seems ideal — but it'll spotlight essays from a decade ago that I believe retain their currency. Today I feature the very first, explaining what I'm trying to do here.
     I want to thank my wife, Edie, who stopped urging me to just abandon the quotidian aspect of this blog several years ago, and doesn't mind my regular trips to the office to bat something out. She accepts it, and I appreciate that. Thanks as well to the owner of the superlative Chicago icon, Eli's Cheesecake, Marc Schulman — he has been my sole advertiser since the beginning, paying good money for the privilege — some of his cash is in my wallet now. I can't imagine it is a sound business strategy for him, though perhaps he values the unhinged panegyrics to cheesecake that I write every year to welcome his holiday advertisement. I sure do. 
     Eric Zorn has been a consistent booster of the blog, as has John Williams on WGN. Charlie Meyerson of Chicago Public Square convinced me to send out an email every morning with a link to today's post, and that seems to have goosed my numbers. The blog toted up more than 140,000 hits in June, which strikes me as a lot, even if a suspicious number of those occurred in Singapore. 

     Timothy Mennel, an executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, asked me to write a book based on this blog, "Every Goddamn Day: A Highly Selective, Definitely Opinionated, and Alternatingly Heartbreaking and Humorous Historical Tour of Chicago." Like the blog that inspired it, the book did not set the world on fire when it came out last October. But I loved doing it, and appreciate those on the Chicago scene who supported it, particularly Rich Melman, Shermann Dilla Thomas, Bill Savage, Don and Terese Schmidt, Christie Hefner, Joyce Winnecke, and everyone else who showed up at a signing or bought a copy. 

    Speaking of which, why don't you buy one now? You won't regret it.
     Who else? Thanks to all those who acted as copy editors and fact checkers, and who added their trenchant remarks afterward  — Tate and Grizz and Bitter Scribe and the rest.  I'm proud to have such thoughtful readers.

     Thanks to Caren Jeskey, who wrote on Saturdays for nearly three years, first from Austin, Texas, then here. I enjoyed sharing her unique perspectives, and was proud of myself that even though I didn't always agree with what she was saying, I was able to step back and let her speak. Thanks to the writer friends who gave it a try after she stepped away, such as Jonathan Eig and Gene Weingarten.

    Letting others have their say struck me as a step toward humility, which has been an elusive quarry in my life. "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility," T.S.Eliot writes in "East Coker." "Humility is endless."
     As is this blog. Oh, it'll end someday, through some circumstance — I'll be hit by a bus — but the blog will float onward down the lazy river of the Internet, I hope, forever. "A kind of rump immortality" is how I described it to Robert Feder. I like to think of it like one of those interactive computer game worlds, like Myst, where readers at some future point can find it and poke around and learn things and derive meaning and pleasure from life that otherwise might elude them. Long after I'm gone, somebody will read something and like it and be enriched and comforted. That's a lot.
     Or maybe some circuit will pop and the whole thing wink out. Just as well. Nothing lasts forever, and the key is to like what you're doing while you're doing it. Be glad while you are alive. I enjoyed the writing the thing, and am gratified that an undefined, constantly changing group of people enjoyed reading it. Thank you.

Colleges can still grab that trombonist

     The United States Supreme Court is wrong in its ruling Thursday that affirmative action is unconstitutional. The easiest way to understand why is to consider what, if not race, colleges can still consider when evaluating students for admission.
     Can they use athletic ability as a guide? Sure! How are the Big Ten supposed to field competitive football teams otherwise?
     Can they give special consideration to legacy applicants — the children of grateful alumni? Of course. If the college goes broke it can’t admit anybody, and multi-generational bonds bring home the bucks.
     Foreign students paying full freight? Check. Hollywood stars stepping back from the limelight? Double check.
     As anyone knows who has ever taken a prospective freshman tour, led by a perky sophomore fiercely proud of her ability to walk backwards while delivering paean of praise to alma mater, colleges consider all sorts of qualifications. If they need someone from Idaho so they can say they enroll students from all 50 states, the bar is nudged downward for an Idaho applicant. If the band is short on trombones, then this is the lucky day for rising seniors who list “trombone” as their passion.

     But being Black or Asian, apparently, doesn’t affect one’s life the way, oh, being captain of the high school chess team does. Not according to the Supreme Court. Ruling in two lawsuits, against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, it decreed that their efforts to ensure an integrated college violated the 14th Amendment guaranteeing “equal protection under the law.”
     Or in Chief Justice John Roberts’ words: “The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

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The air hurts

  

     Chicago had the worst air quality in the world on Tuesday. The sky was smokey grey. Wednesday didn't seem much better. I was downtown both days, attending to business at Navy Pier.
     "If you go outside, wear a mask," my wife texted. Considerate as always. I didn't mention that I had tucked a cigar in my briefcase to smoke if I had any downtime downtown. I sorta liked the image of sitting the middle of some global air quality emergency, puffing on a stogie. It smacked of defiance, if not common sense. When the sun blows up, the last human being on earth will be standing tall, giving the supernova the finger.

    Nah, will have vanished billions of years earlier. We're on that path.

    More people were wearing masks downtown. I didn't, because the air didn't affect me much — maybe a little extra watering around the eyes at the end of the day. My wife suffered more. I defrosted some matzo ball soup to combat the ill effects of toxic air, a folk remedy so inadequate it seemed almost poignant, like treating an infection by singing to it.

    Blame wildfires in Canada. The numbers were staggering. This sentence leapt out of one report: "The amount of land burned so far is 4,000 percent of the average amount." Forty times times the usual. But that story was from a few weeks ago. Now it's 50 times. Tommy Skilling, trying to put the situation into graspable terms, observed that an area as large as West Virginia has burned.

    In case it isn't staggeringly obvious, the cause should be pointed out:

    “Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed. "Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.”

     Is there hope? Probably not. But we can grasp at anything. I went to RL Restaurant for lunch Wednesday, hopped on a bus at Navy Pier, and was surprised to see it was an electric — the CTA has run them, experimentally, for two and half years now. It pulled up under a large square box and an orange connector dropped down so the bus could charge while it sat there, waiting for passengers. Very high tech.

     I chatted with the driver — he said that unlike electric cars, the electric buses are slower. "Even the doors open slower," he said. Still, given the air quality, it was comforting, if you didn't think about it much, to see this wan attempt to combat the global emissions problem though, as is typical of human response to gradual ruin, too little, too late.

Nikki Haley’s search for lost times

     I try not to use fancy words. OK, stop laughing; it’s true. I did it just now — my fingers itched to type “recondite words” — meaning “obscure.” But I held back. Flaunting your vocabulary is showy and pretentious, and what’s the point of writing something that nobody understands?
     But sometimes a word is too perfect, sitting there, waving its little lettery arm in the air, serifs flapping, straining, going “Ooo, ooo, me me.” Eventually, you relent and use it.
     Like “revanchism.”
     The dictionary defines revanchism as “a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory.” This can be figurative as well as literal. You want something back you once had, or think you had.
     Revanchism is the primary moving force today in the Republican Party, and understanding it explains much. The entire Trump monstrosity grew out of a promise to claw back what was lost. “Make America Great Again” implies it sure ain’t great now, not with all these immigrants and minorities strutting around as if they belong.
     To that end, the GOP is trying to grab the steering wheel and put the nation into a skidding U-turn. We hear that every time Ron DeSantis opens his mouth and wages his cruel two-front war on trans kids and Black history — we don’t want to see the people we once didn’t have to see.
     That includes even supposed moderates like Nikki Haley, who sent a three-sentence tweet that roiled Twitter like a cinder block tossed into a koi pond:
     “Do you remember when you were growing up? Do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.”

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