Giving thanks in scary times

     “Do you think 28 pounds of turkey is enough?” asked my wife, as we stood by a freezer case in Trader Joe’s.
     She had just muscled two Kosher birds, one 15 pound, one 13, into the cart, waving away my offer to do the lifting, the “as if I haven’t been flinging these things around a kitchen myself for years” being unvoiced.
     “Well,” I ventured. “Twenty five guests, about a pound per person should ..."
     “A lot of it is bone,” she interjected. Not to inform me, I hope. I don’t think she really feared I’m so culinarily clueless as to imagine whole turkeys are solid chunks of meat — I do sometimes carve them, though invariably am body-checked away by a relative capable of more finesse with a blade.
     Last year we had three turkeys — one roasted, one deep-fried, one smoked. That was deemed “too much turkey,” though not by me. I want to spend the next few days assembling plates of cold leftovers, turkey and stuffing, and eating them standing in the kitchen, and assume every guest does too.
     “You are making five pounds of salmon,” I observed. For the pescatarians — those who shun meat, but whose moral code nevertheless allows them to eat fish: sentient creatures, innocently plying the waters, nuzzling their young with human-like affection, at one with nature and the divine until a cruel hook yanks them into the suffocating air.

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Hawk v. squirrel

 

     I did write a column for the paper for today, but it got held for content, in a good way. Since the column is about Thanksgiving, my editors felt it should run on the day itself, and I agreed. So this episode, not the most pressing for certain, was called in, as an understudy topic. 

     So I look out the kitchen window and — damn! — there is this bad boy, a Cooper's hawk, Accipiter cooperii. I've seen one in that exact spot before, but they usually fly away before I can snap a photo. This one didn't. He — or she — just stood there, passing the time, gazing around. I'm standing in the kitchen, marveling, and suddenly, enter stage left, a squirrel. Not oblivious. Steven Squirrel clearly sees the hawk, but looks like he's going straight for him. Up the porch stairs, to the base of the post the hawk is standing on.

     Which strikes me as odd. Would not the prudent squirrel be stealthily fleeing in the opposite direction, away from the hawk. What gives?
     The hawk meanwhile is ... oblivious. I'm figuring it's snack time for him. I'm waiting for the hawk to notice the squirrel, while trying to suss out the squirrel's strategy. Maybe he figures the closer he is, the less of a dive the hawk can go into. Maybe hawks just don't notice prey literally at their feet. 

     The squirrel is practically going on its hind legs, turning up toward the hawk, as if trying to catch its attention. As if to say, "Hey stupid! I'm here! Right here!"

      Then the squirrel passes, under the hawk, and keeps going across the porch. I see the hawk finally notice the squirrel. I see him — or her — see the squirrel. The hawk spreads its wings. Here it comes, I think. And flies away. A few flaps and it's gone.

     The truth, as least as gleaned from minutes of research on online nature sites, is that Cooper's hawks are not that into squirrels. Oh, they'll eat them in a pinch. But all things being equal, hawks prefer small birds to squirrels, which are too big and put up too much of a struggle. Sometimes it seems the hawks taunt the squirrels, even sort of play with them, before flying off to pick on someone not quite as close to their size. 

     So there you have it. The hawk sighed and flew away. The squirrel moved off without so much as a backward glance.  Though I did notice its tail was puffed up like a bottle brush — trying to look bigger to scare off the predator. It worked.

Spoiled

     "Would you mind bringing the apples up for me?"
      Of course not. Anything to facilitate the creation of my wife's sublime chunky cinnamon applesauce, which enlivens lamb chops and other meals throughout the year. 

      The apple tree by our garden was extra bountiful this year, and the squirrels were so busy eating the seed that fell from our bird feeder, they left them pretty much alone. Over several days back in September my wife and I had plucked the yellow apples off the branches, depositing them in our downstairs refrigerator, where they filled two bins. 

     I trotted down to the basement, where we had stashed the apples.  It took three trips to ferry them upstairs in big bowls.

     Apples will stay a long time in cool conditions. But one had gone bad — it must have been bad going in and we didn't notice. A big soft brown circle the size of a half dollar. I left that one for last, tucking it on top of the third bowlful. Fun must be seized where one finds it.

     My wife was in the kitchen. I set the last bowl down, and took up the rotten apple.
     "There was one bad apple..." I began.
     She immediately launched into song.

     "One bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch, girl!" she warbled. The 1970s Osmonds song — I would have sworn it was the Jackson 5, but memory is faulty. Though honestly, listening to it now, I realized, for the first time: the Osmonds were a white bread ripoff of the Jackson. Ah. Of course. It never occurred to me before. Slow on the uptake.
     I froze, my eyes narrowing. She caught my hard expression.
     "What?" she said.
     "Really?" I said, hard-edged. "Are you going to deny me this?"
     It took her a second to understand — not slow on the uptake — and then readjust. 
     "Oh there was?" she began, feigning innocence. "That's too bad."
    "No it's okay," I countered, recovering, with not quite the joy I would have before, but getting the most I could out of my chance. "Fortunately ...  one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, girl."
     I hated to make a fuss. But really, how often do you get the chance? It was now or never. While I avoid cliches in writing, I seek them out in life. Once, visiting New York City, I made a point of detouring into Grand Central Station, strode into the center of a vast terminal just so I could look around, spread my arms, and inquire, of no one in particular: "What is this, Grand Central Station?"
     Still, I was shaken that she knew where I was going with this, even before I got there. I think she's hanging around me too much. I'm starting to wear off on her. The poor woman.

C’mon guys, read the ethics code

“No official or employee shall make or participate in the making of any governmental decision with respect to any matter in which he has any financial interest distinguishable from that of the general public ...”

     The city of Chicago has an ethics code — a quite extensive one, 50 pages long. It makes for interesting reading. Public officials are forbidden from using the city seal in photos on their personal Christmas cards, since they mustn’t include its weird symbolism — why is that naked baby on a clamshell? — in snapshots “not related to official City business.”
     Given its excruciating detail, you’d think we must have the most upright officials anywhere. Government officials can’t have any financial involvement with those having business with the city, as quoted above, in section 2-156-080, “Conflicts of interest; appearance of impropriety.”
And yet they do. In 2019, when then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot suggested perhaps Chicago City Council members should be banned from “side hustles” and just do their flippin’ jobs, full time, a WTTW survey found that 10 alderfolk — 20% of the City Council — derived significant income from second gigs, the king being Ed Burke, now on trial for allegedly connecting patronage of his law firm with performing his official duties.
     Follow the ethics ordinance, guys. You’ll save us all a lot of time and bother.
     I, of course, cannot comment on the guilt or innocence of Burke. He’s charged with extortion — not merely violating the local code by profiting from those having business before the city but demanding a quid pro quo — patronize my law firm or I’ll block your zoning.
     This is not a victimless crime. The city itself suffers in a real and significant way. Here Chicago is behind the eight ball, reeling from the double hammer blows of spiking fear of crime and COVID-stoked downtown depletion, struggling to create a strong business environment so the whole place doesn’t crater. Meanwhile, in the 14th Ward, a Burger King can’t get a permit to move a driveway, allegedly, unless they do business at Burke’s law firm?

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Goodbye to the Rookery

The Rookery in summer

     Hiding in plain sight amongst the profusion of the bountiful life and colorful beauty of nature is a message about death. Flowers bloom in soil made from last year's blossoms. They fade as the seasons cycle round, one after another. The fallen trees rot and provides mulch for a new crop of mushrooms. Each individual begins and ends, but life goes on unbroken. We are not forever, but we are part of something that is.
     This is seen most clearly in a national park, an expanse of forest the same now as it was a thousand years ago or, one hopes, a thousand years from now. Our petty squabbles and concerns dim, then vanish.
     But even a well-curated expanse like the Chicago Botanic Garden states this truth clearly, if you pay attention. My wife and I visit year round, enjoying the budding flowers in spring, the brilliant displays in summer, the muted browns in fall, the evergreen boughs heavy with snow in winter.
     In summer 2022, for the "Flourish: The Garden at 50" celebration, large artworks were installed all over. Most were clever and creative and enhanced the splendor around them. One clunked. "HEAR NATURE CLEANSING," barked big white block letters at the entrance, as if nature were having a high colonic. "It would be better if you snipped off that last word," I said, editing.
     And one installation was simply outstanding, Patrick Dougherty's "The Rookery," a six tower fairy castle made of willow boughs, some of them living. Kids loved to explore its little rooms, gaze out the windows. It was a surprise and delight when, at the end of last summer, when all the other anniversary artworks were removed, the Rookery stayed put. Long enough for us to get used to it, though we'd still drift in its direction, to see if from new angles and perspectives.

     Alas, even an artwork grounded in nature must take nature's cue, and this week a reader informed me that the Rookery will be taken down soon.
      "I just learned the Chicago Botanic Garden plans to remove The Rookery in early December," she wrote. "As you’ve written about it I thought you might want to know it will soon be gone. What a shame. It seems like it’s still in great shape and not a danger to visitors."

     Then she urged me to action. 

     "My daughter-in-law said I should handcuff myself to the sculpture. That seems a bit drastic, especially if they aren’t taking it down for a couple of weeks," she wrote. "Maybe you can use your voice, which is much more powerful than mine, to ask the Garden management to reconsider—maybe leave it up for another year."
     That sounds possible. But first I had to find out if her report was true. I inquired.
     "You are correct, we plan to take down the installation in early December," wrote Erin Benassi, director of public relations at the Chicago Botanic Garden. "The Rookery, which is created entirely out of willow saplings, was always meant to be a temporary installation, and the artist, Patrick Dougherty, said we’d get one great year and one pretty good year before it would reach the end of its natural life. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed this fall that it’s coming apart as it dries out with individual sticks poking out and falling to the ground. We feel now is the right time for it to be taken down before the blustery weather of winter hits."

     Even though the installation won't be there much longer, I can't see rallying to keep it, and for a reason that might surprise you. I've been going to the Garden so often for so long, I've come to admire the intelligence and stewardship behind it. Even when it means doing something unpopular, like cutting down mature black alders which were also invasive species.
     Not every change has to be battled. Isn't that the lesson of nature? Embrace and celebrate change. Good things sprout, wax then inevitably wane. Which is not something to be mourned, because new life is on the way, waiting, gathering energy, under the snow. Who knows what fresh delight could someday occupy the clearing where the Rookery once stood? The same organization that brought us the Rookery is now taking it away. I'm going to assume they know what they're doing. Sometimes you have to trust people, and trust is meaningless if it's only extended in situations where you agree with what's going on. It's when something happens that rubs you the wrong way that you have to sometimes take a step back and defer.
      Besides, honestly, when we were there a week or so ago, we paused in front of the Rookery. "Does that left tower seem like it's leaning a bit?" I asked. Hard to tell. Maybe a tiny bit. They can't afford to wait until the thing topples over and crushes a child.
     I'll certainly miss The Rookery when it's gone,the way I miss the huge sugar maple in my front yard. But I planted a tulip tree nearby, and it's going gangbusters. The world isn't ours; we're just borrowing it for a little. A brief span — in this case, a few weeks, before the Rookery is gone. If you haven't been to the Chicago Botanic Garden, this is a perfect excuse to go — the sprout of possibility unfurling from the mulch of loss. That seems fitting.

Where is your cheesecake?

 

    "Do you have cheesecake?"
    Asked my older boy, over the telephone from New York.
    Thanksgiving approaches. The nuclear family, scattered across the continent, is primed for their transit back home, like comets, trailing stardust, sweeping back toward their ancestral planet. A son working in Phoenix. Another in Washington, D.C. Bolstered by a fiancé in New York. A second fiancé in Hyde Park (for the younger boy; can't have you thinking the older boy has two). Packing bags, calling taxis, boarding airplanes. While my wife and I scrub and fret and fill the freezer with hors d'oeuvres. Their last Thanksgiving as single men. 

     "Do you have cheesecake?"

     Starting at ... 12 midnight Tuesday, when a certain individual, aka me, will be at O'Hare International Airport for the final leg of the ferrying home process. Sure, I could ask him to take an Uber. Just as we could serve frozen turkey TV dinners on Thursday. ("The frozen is just as g-g-good as good as the real" stutters one of Woody Allen's guests at the mournful end of "Broadway Danny Rose." "And the frozens are much cheaper than the real ones," he agrees.)

     "Do you have cheesecake?" 

     Asked only once. But a question that resonated, being posed, not by a child, any longer. Not by the radiant boy curled up in my lap, being read Harry Potter. But by an adult, a professional, a lawyer, who might appear in court someday, an assistant U.S. attorney, zeroing in for the kill, leaning over the mahogany rail, staring intently at the cringing witness, another malefactor. "Please answer the question with a simple 'yes' or 'no.' Do you ... have ... cheesecake?"

     We will not be serving frozen turkey dinners. There will be a fresh roasted turkey and a deep fried turkey. Mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, challah stuffing and green bean casserole. Homemade cranberry relish and canned jellied relish, because some people prefer the canned, like the little rounded rings the can leaves on the relish. Countless cookies and pies and flans and brownies and what have you. Sweets galore.

     You would think, with all that high quality homemade grub barrelling down the pike, that store-bought cheesecake would be the last thing on his mind. 

     "Do you have cheesecake?"   

     A question demands an answer. 

     "Umm...no," I muttered, guiltily reflecting on the fate of the once considerable amount of cheesecake in the freezer. The boys ... they weren't there. But rather, far away, out in the real world. Making their own lives, separate and apart from us. Gone gone gone. "Gone like yesterday." But the cheesecake ... it was there. Not gone. Here. Available. Delicious Eli's cheesecake. Right here. What would you do?

     "Umm, no," I said quietly. "I ate it." Not all at once. Not even a slice at a time, necessarily. A half here. A big forkful there. The whirligig of time takes its revenges.

     My son did not growl, "Then you better frickin' get some, huh?" He did not say, "Then what the hell am I coming home for? You? Bah!" 

     We raised them to be better than that, kinder than that. He did not say it, aloud. Only thought it. Of that I am certain. I could almost feel the thoughts, fluttering around his head like luna moths. You mean I have to put up with days of you, you stupid old coot and your endless self-agrandizing stories and your off-point garbled quotations and your decaying, cluttered, dusty old house and I don't even get a slice of CHEESECAKE out of the deal? Fuck you, I wish you were dead!

     No, he didn't say that. What he did do — his beloved was also on the line; they often call together, which is so sweet — was reflect on a visit to Eli's Cheesecake World about a dozen years ago. He and his brother toured the plant, met the great Marc Schulman, who showed them the gold wristwatch that Frank Sinatra gave his father, Eli, the man whose trademark "The Place for Steaks" (on the site of what is now the Lurie Children's Hospital on Chicago Avenue) lives on in the cheesecake company his son created. (And, I should point out, has advertised on EGD since its inception, not that my impartial high calibre journalism would ever be affected by something so trivial as a boatload of money, and cheesecake, passing from one party to another).

     My boy explained how he and his brother donned white coats and hairnets, like scientists, and were permitted to decorate their own cheesecakes.

     It was immediately decided that, during their Thanksgiving visit, a trip to Eli's Cheesecake World is in order. Nor do you have to be related to a plugged-in, big-ass newspaper columnist to get a look behind the scenes. Anyone can arrange a tour. Or just stop by — Eli's Super Sweet Thanksgiving Sale, the biggest of the year, ends today, if you're reading this on the 18th.

     The only difficulty was finding a free morning, which in our case was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Which led to a problem — what to do about any cheesecake needs that should arise among our houseguests beforehand? Luckily, Eli's delivers, and an Original Favorites Sampler — four slices each of plain, chocolate chip, strawberry and Heath Bar — arrived last Thursday, packed in dry ice. I thought I should take the plastic off, to make a better picture, and then realized if I tore open the plastic, purely for aesthetic reasons, in the service of professional photojournalism, the cheesecake within might not make it to midweek, certainly not in its pristine, complete condition ("Hey kids, welcome home! Who feels like sharing a slice and a half of strawberry cheesecake? Wait, where are you going?")
     I carefully slid the cheesecake, unopened, into the freezer to await their arrival. Our home is now ready for guests. Is yours?

The teachers who started a museum

 

   Oh, you’ve got to tell the story.
     Not to take anything away from my colleague Ambarcq Colón, whose excellent article in Wednesday’s paper shared the news that Carlos Tortolero, founder of the National Museum of Mexican Art, is retiring. There was a lot of real estate to cover — quotes from the ever-effusive Tortolero, the search for a new museum president, the honors and accolades rightly laden on the Pilsen landmark.
     But three simple words, “opened in 1987,” just don’t do justice to the reality, and spur me to blow the dust of decades off them. Opened why? Opened how? How did a history teacher at Bowen High School — as Tortolero was — start what became the preeminent institution in the country showcasing Mexican, Latino and Chicano art?
     It should be part of Chicago lore, alongside Uno’s inventing deep dish pizza in 1943. But it isn’t. The only reason I know is from interviewing Tortolero for my recent book, “Every Goddamn Day.” But since every Sun-Times reader hasn’t read that book, alas, I should lay the tale out here, briefly.
     Wander back in time, not to 1987, but to September 1982. Tortolero was disgusted with a Chicago Public Schools system that would treat Spanish-speaking students as if they were learning-disabled. Where Mexican culture was pretty much limited to the bad guys at the Alamo. Inclusivity is such a mantra today, we forget the headlock that white culture had on education not so long ago, and what did show up in classrooms about Mexican history echoed the joke about food at a Catskills resort: lousy, and in such small portions.
     “Beyond bad,” Tortolero said. “The misinformation was unbelievable. No one knew about Mexican culture. The students, young people, don’t know the impact of Mexico. These kids were not getting any of their history, all the great things. They knew nothing about it.”
     So he met with five other CPS staffers on Sept. 15, 1982, at Benito Juarez High School. That date was picked deliberately: the evening before Mexican Independence Day. “El Grito” the anniversary of Father Miguel Hidalgo ringing his church bell and calling for the Spanish oppressors to be driven out. “The Cry of Dolores” — a perfect day to start a revolution.

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