We got off light ... maybe

     If I want to shock people about the Israel-Gaza war — and there is so much shocking already  — I might mention that I don't blame Hamas so much as I do Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, if I have a chance to get words in before they go off on me, I point out that while Hamas was merely doing what terrorist groups do — cause terror — Netanyahu, as prime minister of Israel, was supposed to stop them. He dropped the ball or, more accurately, took his eyes, and the nation's, off it.
     And this was before evidence was revealed that Israel had direct knowledge of the specific Hamas plans and did nothing. When they merely had a year when Netanyahu tore the country apart, trying to keep his ass out of stir by skewing the judicial system in his favor. Reservists were threatening to resign rather than serve a dictatorship; there was constant talk of how military preparedness would be compromised. Then, surprise surprise, military preparedness was compromised, with horrific results.
     Destroying Hamas is important. But if I had to choose whether to sink the top leader of Hamas into the Dead Sea, or Netanyahu, well, that would be an easy choice. I'd chose the guy who did the most harm to Israel, and is doing it still.
     I bring this up because Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican, announced Tuesday he was ending his farce. In case you haven't been paying attention — lucky you — Tuberville has been blocking military promotions for nearly a year, to register his opposition to the military policy of paying for women service members to go to states where abortion is legal to get the procedure, if need be. Because military personnel can be assigned anywhere, and they can't have their rights as citizens depend on which base they get assigned to, whether in a freedom loving blue state or a women-oppressing red. Tuberville didn't like that, and being a powerful senator, threw the legislative equivalent of holding his breath until the military turned blue. On Tuesday, he let it breathe again. The Senate approved of 440 delayed appointments.
     Mere politics? No harm done? We'll see. Who knows what hidden damage was caused, that'll be flushed out after some unseen disaster. What those key jobs going unfilled for nearly a year did. Gumming up the works of America's military in order to win a victory for your army of imaginary babies was cheap theater, and we're just lucky some adversary didn't take advantage of the disorder it caused within the ranks. As far as we know.  

     Republicans used to be so rah-rah pro-military, it's astounding to see them, under the influence of Trump, to be willing to kneecap the capacity of our armed forces. Expect more to come — Tuberville, in yielding, said he'll still block the appointment of top generals until the military decides to revoke the right of its female personnel to have reproductive medical care. And we should never forget Trump calling for the death of Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for standing up for the constitution instead of supporting Trump's coup. Milley was a hero — he saved our country — and Trump should be in prison.
     One message of Oct. 7 is that vigilance needs to be constant when enemies are resourceful, relentless and creative. Ours are. Like Israel, we're lulled into complacency, so much so that Tuberville's stunt was accepted as business as usual. And Donald Trump is allowed to run again, even as he promises to be a dictator. Even though, we can't know what kind of long term damage Tuberville caused to our military. We do know that the Republican Party will stop at nothing — undercutting our nation's safety, tearing up our democracy, voiding the constitution — to promote its smug fantasy of religious morality. Some things are too important to toy with lightly. Like the military. Or voting. Or health care. Our country's health care system is already feeling the ripple effects of reversing Roe v. Wade. Women who never considered an abortion will die as doctors do contortions trying to follow medical guidelines written by politicians. No terrorist could have accomplished that. No one can hurt us the way we hurt ourselves.

‘Their resilience is unbelievable’

Sarai Jimenez

   Sarai Jimenez and her family escaped the chaos of Venezuela in 2021, sought refuge in Colombia then, when things got bad there too, fled north, trekking through Central American rainforests, across mountain passes, clinging to ropes at the edge of cliffs, crossing rivers, wading through mud up to their knees.
     They were captured by guerrillas, held hostage, robbed. Then Sarai, now 17, had to wait for months in Mexico before crossing the border, legally as an applicant for asylum, arriving here in July only to confront a prospect that really frightened her: going to a Chicago high school.
     “I thought it was dangerous,” she said, in Spanish. “I’ve seen the movies, and I was scared. I would think, ‘I’m going to get bullied in school.’”
     Instead she found herself in the warm embrace of Sullivan High School in Rogers Park, where some 40 languages are spoken by the most diverse student body in the city, a school with a track record of absorbing every immigrant group arriving in Chicago.

     “Afghans, Syrians, Nepalese ... no one is special at this school because everyone is unique,” said Sarah Quintenz, whose formal title is English language learners leader, but really is just “Ms. Q” or “mom,” the omnipresent source of comfort and rebuke for Sullivan’s 360 or so foreign-born students — about half the school population.
     I ran into Quintenz at Sullivan’s seventh annual Thanksgiving dinner last week and saw a chance to talk about the latest group of newcomers to roil the city.

     “Immigrants plan to come here. They apply for a visa, save money, say goodbye to everybody,” said Quintenz. “Refugees flee. They don’t have any of their stuff. They leave everything behind. They flee to another country, so they take their anger and hostility and sadness to that country.”
     Emotions that complicate the usual teenage angst.
     “They walked. They rode buses,” said Quintenz. “That’s a long time to be thinking, ‘I just left home. I have only the clothes on my back. I hate this. I’m hot. I’m getting eaten by mosquitoes.’ Then they get here, and they’re sleeping in the airport or a police station, or the Leone Park Field House — that’s where most of ours were for the longest time. The kids ask: ‘Is this any better? We’re safer here, but we still don’t have anything. We still don’t have any opportunities. My parents can’t get a job.’”

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Flashback 2002: Sad day when trip to toy store turns sour

    What did you think of my ballet review yesterday? Honestly, while no one complained, I felt it sort of sagged. I just couldn't get my head around saying something interesting about the experience. I fudged, and dragged in Tchaikovsky's history with Chicago and the Columbian Exposition, trying to smokescreen the fact that I had very little of worth to say about the dance itself.

     I began to wonder if I've EVER written anything worthwhile about the ballet, and in searching came up with this. It isn't about the ballet either, though it mentions the word. But it was so unexpected, and a reminder that not only did people once regularly go downtown to work, but there were toy stores waiting there. That's reason enough to share it. My vacation is officially over today, and I'll have something fresh — in theory — in the paper on Wednesday.

     "A simple 'No' would suffice."

      It was the end of a long day this week. I was rumpled, tired, just another business guy in a creased raincoat, stopping by the Toys R Us on State Street to buy marbles for his kids. My kids like marbles.
     I waited in line, handed the clerk the metal box of marbles. "Phone number area code first," she ordered, in that robotic voice clerks use.
     "Do I have to?" I asked, imagining Toys R Us calling at dinner to hector us about Barbie. "Can't I just buy the marbles?"
     She gazed hard at me. 

     "A simple 'No' would suffice," she snapped.
     I looked at her for the first time. Young. Maybe 19. Black. Eyeglasses. For the next second, I pondered my reaction. The thought bouncing in its seat, waving its arm and going "oh, oh, oh" was a sharp, "A lot of attitude to be coming from the clerk at the Toys R Us."
     But I didn't say that. I took out my money, silently, because I had a feeling of . . . well, it's hard to describe. The Germans call it weltschmerz. A sadness at the world. I obviously wasn't the first customer this young lady had to face. She probably had it up to here with whining white guys in raincoats. She'd probably been itching to zing one of them, and it was my turn. Sure, I could vent at her, and she would either vent back or, realizing that her $5 an hour job might be in the balance, would click into her polite mode, which would be worse.
     I said nothing. That she was black was significant. "She probably hates these raincoated white guys, tramping through here, buying their metal boxes of marbles for their pampered kids at home, refusing to give their phone numbers lest their white suburban idylls be interrupted by other black teenagers in basements, selling magazine subscriptions."
     That's certainly some kind of white guilt. Maybe I should have called the manager over and ratted her out and felt good about it. But the guilt is what I felt. Guilt and a desperate longing for civility. She could have said, "Fork over the phone number, Mr. Potato Head," and, after the initial shock, I would have felt the same urge not to get into an ugly argument with the clerk at the Toys R Us. I paid my money.
     "Would you like a receipt?" she said. This was my chance. I smiled, seizing on a reply. "I suppose I should limit myself to a simple 'Yes,' " I said. She seemed to get my point. She gave a little laugh, and we made eye contact for a second before I grabbed my marbles and rushed away.
     For 100,000 years of human history we clung to our families and our tribes. It's premature, and foolish, to imagine that the past 50 years of enlightenment are enough for us to cast all those things aside.
     In every encounter I have with another person, I coolly note and calculate their race and age and class — in every single one — and as far as I'm concerned anyone who says they don't is a saint or lying.
     Lying or spouting the party line. We tell ourselves we live in a colorblind society — white people do, anyway. That's why we have random checks at airports. What they're really doing is frisking people who might be Islamic terrorists — we seem to be having a problem with the Muslim world; I hope I'm not the one to break this to you.
     But pulling aside every Arab-looking traveler and checking their shoes offends our sense of fairness, so we toss periodic 3-year-olds and grandmothers and congressmen into the mix, as a smoke screen.
     Is it really necessary? My first instinct was that stopping Arab-looking people at airports is not racial profiling. Racial profiling is pulling over a black motorist for driving a Cadillac through Lake Forest and having him spread-eagle on the car until he's found to be the owner.
     I was about to say that's wrong because most blacks driving their Cadillacs through Lake Forest didn't steal them. But then, most Arabs moving through airports aren't terrorists or would-be terrorists or even cousins of terrorists, but assistant managers on their way to Toledo, Ohio, for a button convention.
     This is complex, but of one thing I am certain: better to acknowledge the burden of our prejudices and try to overcome them than to pretend to have a colorblind society that doesn't exist.
     The morning after I bought the marbles, I was hoofing up Wabash on my way to work, still thinking about the Toys R Us clerk, and marvelling at the little ballet of racial antinomy that I, and maybe she, engaged in. A short, swarthy man stepped up to me at Wabash and Wacker and asked, "Can you tell me how to get to Michigan Avenue?"
     I pointed at the Tribune Tower. "You see that building?" I said, resisting the urge to add, "that nightmarish monstrosity of arches and rocks scavenged from the garbage bins of old European cathedrals?"
     Instead I said: "That's Michigan Avenue."
     He thanked me, but before he moved away, I considered adding, "You're looking for the Mexican Consulate, right?" But I stopped myself. Just because the man was 5-foot-1, with a dark complexion and a Pancho Villa mustache didn't mean anything. That was the language of hate. So instead I asked, "What are you looking for on Michigan?"
     "The consulate," he said.
     "In that case," I said, "you want to take a right at Michigan. It's on the west side of the street." I walked off. Two seconds later, I realized he never said which consulate he was looking for.
           — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 15, 2002

The Nutcracker

Anabella de la Nuez and Jose Pablo Castro Cuevas in "The Nutcracker" (Photo by Katie Miller)

 

 

      Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky never visited Chicago. The Russian composer was invited here, to attend the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in May of 1893. But he begged off, observing that he had just been in America in 1891, when he went to New York, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Baltimore. That would have to do, as he would die that November.

Tchaikovsky's contribution

     Tchaikovsky did, however, heed Bertha Palmer's request of famous people to provide something that could be auctioned off to raise money to build the Children's Pavilion (as did Rudyard Kipling, Henry James and a range of 19th century notables). Tchaikovsky penned seven bars of “Andante cantabile,” then a new composition.
     So it is perhaps apt that his last masterpiece, "The Nutcracker," be sent to the fair in his stead in the Joffrey Ballet's production of the Christmas favorite. This fair-themed version debuted in 2016, and with the city plagued with a variety of problems and dysfunction, barely able to raise some tents to shelter immigrants, it's comforting to recall a time when Chicago built a White City in Hyde Park and welcomed the world to an enormous party.

     The  production opened Saturday night at the Civic Opera House. While being a dance critic ain't beanbag, and I would never presume to bring skill or experience to the endeavor, I thought it might be worthwhile, as a vacation diversion, to marshall a few words about it here. 

     But really, what's there to say about the Joffrey favorite? The audience, being packed with finely-dressed, super-excited families, was itself a holiday entertainment. It was fun just watching the proud attendees take pictures of each other in front of the big tree of gift packages set up in the lobby. The fact that someone also put on a dance afterward was an added bonus. 

     The Joffrey production transports the ballet from an upper class German household to a hardscrabble Chicago family on the eve of the World's Fair, I assume to mirror society's general rejection of all things well-to-do. There is a magic moment early on when the children, given an assemblage of unpromising objects — a bike wheel, a glass sphere, and such — set them on a table, and they become a silhouette of the fair, with its towers and Ferris Wheel.
     The dancers were flawless, as far as I could tell, the costumes lavish. Of course I've seen "The Nutcracker" a number of times, and perhaps familiarity took a bit of the oomph away. There's a moment when the family's paltry, Charlie Brown Christmas tree expands into a wondrous, stage filling marvel I looked forward to and, sorry, but that moment just didn't pop Saturday night the way I remember it doing in productions past. Nor was the battle against the mice as frightening as I would have liked.
     But that's the reaction of someone more skilled at criticism than praise, particularly when it comes to ballet, which I don't attend much. Overall the production is two hours of Christmas magic, lovely to behold, particularly one moment when the stage is filled with falling snow and dancing sugar plum fairies, or whatever they were. Simply marvelous, and a welcome distraction from everything going on in the world.  If you've got your tickets — it runs through Dec. 27 — you're in for a treat.

Zackery Manske, Yumi Kanazawa and Hyuma Kiyosawa (Photo by Katie Miller).

Flashback 2009: Logic on Israel's side

Metropolitan Museum

     While the scope of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack was unprecedented, the concept — let's kill our way out of this bind — is nothing new, as this column from 2009 testifies. Back then the column filled a page, complete with a joke. It isn't a particularly funny joke, granted, but it has the benefit of touching upon a grim truth. I've kept the original subheads, but cut a bit about a speech appearance, since some readers are easily confused, and might show up at the event, which occurred 14 years ago.

Opening shot ...

     Most people don't question their own beliefs. If you worship a pineapple as God, it isn't because your mom and dad worshiped a pineapple as God, but simply because divine authority rests in the spiky tropical fruit. Others may disagree, but dismissing conflicting beliefs as folly is part of the drill.
     It is useful, however, to try to recognize your own biases, difficult as that is, if only as a test. For instance: I support Israel. Why? Perhaps being Jewish has something to do with it, perhaps being spoon-fed the glory, the miracle of that nation's founding along with my Cream of Rice was a factor.
     But what would the impartial view of Israel, in its current struggle with Hamas, be? Let me see if I can state the Hamas view plainly, without bias. They would like the Jews in Israel to vanish, somehow, or at least to hand their country, which is a year older than modern China and a year younger than modern India, over to the Palestinians, most of whom have never lived there. A dwindling number resided there, once, and lost their homes under difficult circumstances, so now the entire group deserves the whole country.
     Is that it?
     What is the Israeli position? Basically, that their nation is here, now, a country like any other, despite the novelty of being run by Jews, and the Palestinians should go form their own nation on the land they have instead of always trying to take theirs.
     Do you really need to be Jewish to embrace the latter idea?
     

'What do we want?'

     "Free, free Palestine," the protesters chanted. "End the occupation now!"
     About 500 people had gathered Friday in Pioneer Court, the plaza just south of Tribune Tower, when I stopped by for a look.
     "What do we want?" someone with a megaphone cried. "Justice!" the crowd answered. "When do we want it?" he asked. "Now!" they replied.
     Justice is good. We're on the same page here, though I suppose our definitions of justice might differ. To me, embracing justice is accepting the consequences of your actions. For instance, electing a terror group like Hamas as your legitimate government and then standing idly by while it attacks a neighboring nation seems to call for some pretty stern justice, which is what is going on in Gaza now.
     The protesters, naturally, would disagree.
     "Free, free Palestine," they chanted. In their mind the crime — the "nakba," the "catastrophe" — was the founding of the State of Israel, and justice demands . . . what exactly? They don't come out and say it, but "Free Palestine" implies the following prepositional phrase, ". . . of Jews." That usually gets left off. Good manners, I suppose.
     This is nothing new, but is instead the standard, timeless racist fantasy — get rid of the people we don't like and then we'll be happy. "Juden raus" — "Jews out" -- the Germans said, despite the fact that Jews had lived in Germany for 500 years. That didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter that Jews have been in Israel for thousands of years. Flip open your Bible; they're there. "The children of Israel were fruitful," it says in Exodus, "and the land was filled with them." The land the Bible is talking about isn't Europe.
     The rally kept growing, women in scarves, men in beards. I couldn't help but view these sincere, impassioned people sympathetically, as victims of history who were tragically taught to pin their hopes for future happiness on the destruction of another country.

Today's Chuckle

     One little-known aspect of the current crisis in Gaza is that, just before starting their attack, Israel annexed the strip of land, officially designating Gaza as part of its own country and unilaterally converting its occupants to Judaism.
     "We figured" explained the minister responsible for the change, "if it were Israel we were shooting missiles at, and Jews who were dying, then nobody would care."

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 5, 2009

Lying liars and the lies they lie

   

     A lot of writers who win the Pulitzer Prize let it go to their heads. They preen and strut. But I've always managed to stay the same humble scribe that I was when I joined the newspaper. Similarly, being a big New York Times best-seller author can inflate an author's ego until it pops. Though I try to keep myself grounded in solid Midwestern values of family, decency and hard work that are my guiding stars.
     Do you see what I've done above? It's not a lie, as such. I never say I won the Pulitzer Prize — I didn't. Nor have any of my books gotten anywhere near best sellers. 
     Rather, the opening graph is the kind of deceptive self-puffery that a lot of people seem compelled to indulge in, that is when they just don't flat out invent stuff. Originally, I was going to just outright lie — claim to have won a Pulitzer, to being a best-selling author. But my fingers wouldn't do it.
     Just as well. I wouldn't be good at it; honestly, I'm confused by liars. I just don't get it. It's obvious why they commit their fabrications. To puff up their shriveled little souls. To impress others. They feel the truth about themselves, whatever it is, is not sufficient — even when that truth is that they're a former president of the United States, rich and famous, with a good chance of returning to office. Obviously they need more. Constantly more. More than any version of reality can provide. They're trying to fill a bottomless pit — some gaping wound in their soul — and rather than do the hard work to close the hole, repair the void, be satisfied with what they've got, they keep shoveling stuff in. It's never enough, which is why the lies keep increasing: more and more, bigger and bigger. Because the hole keeps getting bigger.
      Now that I think of it, maybe I'm not confused by liars. Maybe it's their supporters who I really don't get. How do they not perceive the deceit? It's so obvious. Why are they not disgusted? It's so pathetic. To me, even a few small lies are enough to turn me off on a person. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup. I read a recent New Yorker profile of NYC's new mayor, "Eric Adams Administration of Bluster." The story wasn't only about his lies, though they kept popping up, and stood out. Everything else fell away. Adams claimed to be a vegan, but when called out for eating fish, he first denied he had eaten any, then denied he had ever said he was a vegan. He claimed to have been a boxer; then denied having claimed to be a boxer.
     Small shit. But the pivot of the piece was this:

     "The Mayor apparently reserves the right to mix incidents from his own life with material from his quantum lives: things that could have happened, or almost happened, or happened to someone he once met. All potentials exist simultaneously. An Adams untruth will not be outrageously grandiose and grifty, like those told by Representative George Santos. But Adams doesn’t just polish anecdotes. He is unusually ready to repeat things that are confirmably untrue, or that — in their internal contradictions, or avoidance of specifics, or mutability from one telling to the next — seem very likely to be untrue."

     I finished the profile with one thought: the man's a liar.
     Period, full stop, end of story. I don't know what kind of tangled end is waiting for Adams, but when it shows up in its screeching, slo-mo train wreck glory, I'll be there muttering "So what did you expect?"

      Although, when that end comes, it isn't very satisfying either. Yes, watching the George Santos  finally get the heave-ho from Congress Friday — only the sixth man in the history of the United States to be ejected from the House, and three of those were for supporting the Confederacy — carried with it a faint note of satisfaction. About time. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

    But only a muffled note. A gentle "ping." As much as I wish I could spin Santos being hocked into a handkerchief as some kind of turning point, I really can't. It wasn't his continual, ridiculous prevarication that did him in, but actual crimes, albeit unproven ones. The man is accused of stealing his own campaign funds to pay for porn. Roll that sentence around in your mind. He didn't deny it, just conjured up some imaginary rush to judgment while the more shameless Republicans, who had voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, talked about the risk denying the voters their sacred mandate. A shame that hypocrisy isn't poison; they'd keel over dead on the spot.

     No, I think Santos was so insanely over the top that even as lame an organization as Congress was prompted to finally get rid of him — plus he isn't particularly popular. That's key. If only he had created a strong base for himself before his lies came to light, we'd probably be stuck with him. 

      Heck, maybe Santos isn't through yet. All he has to do is show up at the Capitol Monday morning, declaring nothing unusual happened Friday and he is still in office. A certain percentage of people would buy that. The same slice who will buy anything. There are so many of them. I get the upside for the liar — he basks in undeserved praise. But what benefit do the dupes derive? The right to admire an undeserving hero? How satisfying could that be?

Remembering Michael F.

     I'm on vacation this week. Which means of course that I'm working — another Rotary magazine article to finish, my fourth over the past year. But I can't let my EGD responsibility slide, so I'm looking over pieces that I wrote but decided for some reason not to post. This was written four years ago — I know why I held it back; because I didn't want to poke a stick into a wound that was still fresh. But four years is a while, and I think I can post this now with a minimum risk of upsetting anybody. With time comes perspective, ideally, and an ability to see the saddest situations in a positive light.

     "To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck." 

                                                           —Tennessee Williams, Memoirs

      Only one friend came over the house that first horrible week, after I was allowed to come home. Then again, Michael didn't have very far to come: out his front door, turn left, walk a few steps, up five stairs, knock on my door. Bearing two cans of raspberry soda water and a bag of potato chips.
     We sat on the porch and talked. Which is what you most want to do when you first go into recovery: talk and talk and talk, trying to sort out how the greatest thing in your life has suddenly become the worst. How it somehow snuck up on your from behind and bit you, hard, in the ass. How to pry its jaws off you.
    It was October, 2005, so I don't remember anything we said. But I do remember, when we were done, we stood up and Michael hugged me. He was much taller than me, a good four inches, and I had a face full of plaid flannel.  Geez, I thought, not only do I have to give up booze, but now I gotta hug guys too?
      Afterward, we would go to meetings for more talk. Sometimes walking to the church around the corner. Sometimes he would pick me up in a big old car, some 1970s Cadillac he inherited. It was like an inverted echo of high school, but instead of one of my buddies who had a car coming to get me so we could hang out and delight in the combination of beer and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, we were two newly sober adults on our way to AA meetings in the Northwest suburbs.
     Meetings, meetings, meetings. How I hated them. Michael liked them. He believed. He had a sponsor, and diligently climbed the 12 Steps, and was an avatar of How It Works.
     Only it didn't work. Not for him. Not long term. For some unfathomable reason, sobriety didn't stick with Michael, while it worked for me. Who knows why? Maybe it was simply professional pride: I had a recovery memoir coming out and didn't want to make it into a lie. "I don't want to fuck up my memoir," was how I put it, along with not wanting to be another Kitty Dukakis (an editor at Simon & Schuster, in rejecting my book, said I hadn't been sober long enough to write a memoir, saying that they'd published Kitty Dukakis's recovery memory, and she rewarded them by drinking nail polish remover on her book tour). 

     Maybe it was luck, some combination of neurons and random chance. Or some other aspect of my circumstance.
     Maybe it was mere necessity. Michael came from money. That could be what did him in. Because I had no choice but to pull myself together and get back to work, while he could retreat from life and climb into the bottle and the bills would still get paid.
    When the news came that Michael was in the hospital, I only thought of the good stuff. He was our neighbor for, geez, 17 years. We'd sit on the porch and talk and smoke cigars, hour after hour. Of course he had his quirks. 
    "You know, I sometimes sneak into your yard at night and shoot your rabbits," he once said.
    I chewed on that, weighing my reply.
    "Just don't shoot the boys," I finally muttered.
    He had taste, humor, integrity. Qualities that fluttered back to mind when I heard about the failing liver and kidneys.
      "Maybe this will be a wake up call," I said to my wife, half-heartedly.
      "The divorce was the wake-up call," my wife replied, grimly.
      A wake up call that he let ring and ring. Michael died a few days later. A few days after his twin boys had left for college.
     So what do you say? The important thing is, to me, to remember that he was like before: a good man, considerate, methodical, a runner, who took care of himself and adored his children. He was the sort of neighbor who would hurry over to your house during a flood and help pump out your basement. Who helped you clean your dryer vents. His bad end didn't come because he was a bad person, but because he was a person, period, a person who fell in a hole and couldn't get out. The thing about alcoholism is, it's a disease that looks like a decision. To the uninitiated it can seem that Michael pondered his options — hmm, should I stay with my beautiful wife and three great kids and see them off to college? Or should I go drink myself to death at my mother's house? — and made the wrong choice. 

     But that isn't a choice at all, not one that any rational man makes. Addiction is another word for diseased thinking. When I heard the bad news, I thought really of all the happy times, and what a good, decent man he was, and not what happened later, toward the end. I hope his wife and kids do the same. I hope the kids realize that how well they turned out is a reflection of the man he was, at heart, before the disease took him. And if his memory has to be a scar as well as a comfort, well, then it should be a scar worn with pride. Because he certainly fought the thing, hard, for years, before it overwhelmed him. I was there, I saw him fight. He fought hard but he lost, that's all. Sometimes people lose. A difficult truth, but one worth remembering.