Can't wait for these "handymen" forever

      James Thurber was blind, nearly. His increasingly sightlessness gave him a very keen ear for language. He loved word games and odd accents, and had a wonderful smooth rhythm to his writing.
     Nowhere is this on greater display than in his short story, "The Black Magic of Barney Haller," a seemingly simple tale of a Swedish handyman. 
     "Barney is my hired man," Thurber explains. "He is strong and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent."
      So far, so good, the image of the capable helper that any ham-handed wordsmith would covet. 
    There's more, however.
    "But he is also eerie: he trafficks with the devil."
    As evidence of this, Thurber offers the obscure remarks Haller is always saying, starting, during a thunderstorm, "Once I see dis boat come down de rock."
     The phrase plays to Thurber's darker fears.
     "It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread," he writes. "Boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight."
     It is the beauty of the last part of that sentence—"old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight"—and others like it that lodge Thurber under your skin.
     Well, my skin anyway.
     In the story, which perfectly captures lazy summer evenings in an old country house, Thurber figures out what that particular phrase means—"a bolt coming down the lighting rod on the house; a commonplace, an utterly natural thing."
      I won't recapitulate the entire story. It isn't online, alas, but it's in The Thurber Carnival, which Amazon will sell you for two dollars, and you should own if you don't already.
     I think of Barney Haller whenever my wife, with occult powers of her own, tries to summon up a handyman. There will be some significant task around our 110-year-old house that needs doing, and she will muse idly that we should get a handyman to do it. 
    In years past I might snap, "Handyman? What handyman? Find him! There are no handymen."
     We have, in the past, hired skilled men to do various tasks. But they always do a bit of work then vanish, irretrievable. Part of my annoyance is based on that, part based on the fact that my wife is wishing for these supposed handy men because she is convinced that I am unable to do much of anything when it comes to home repair. Even though I can.
     I'll never forget her shock, almost anger, when she came home to find I had installed a pair of light fixtures in the boys' rooms—another task for the supposed handyman or the even-more elusive "electrician."
     "Well, mister, I hope you popped the circuit breakers first," she said, referring to the switches in the basement controlling power to the various parts of the house.
     "If I didn't pop the circuit breaker," I said, evenly. "I'd be dead."
      Anyway, after a decade or so of hearing my wife muse about someday getting a handyman to put in a linen closet in an old closet on our third floor, I girded my loins, took the first week of December off as vacation from work and tackled the job myself. 
     Now a week might seem like a lot for a closet, but I am, as my wife would point out, not accustomed to this kind of thing. I have to work slowly, methodically, to keep from screwing up, and then to fix the screw-ups I manage despite being careful.
     It took a day to clean the lathe and dust and to chip out obstructive strips of plaster with a hammer and cold chisel then clean some more. Then go to Home Depot and buy bead board, shelving, industrial glue and trim. Then I had to build an inner box to hold the bead board, the second day, and put the bead board up the third day, then paint it and glue the trim in. The whole thing actually took six days—I had to go downtown for a lunch one day—the same time it took God to create the world.
     But God has more experience with this sort of thing, supposedly.
     It came out fine; I wish I had thought to snap a photo of it beforehand, but setting forth on the project it did not strike me as being in the Realm of Endeavors One Writes Blog Posts About.
     My wife was suitably delighted—exclaiming "Perfect!" again and again. That was good. And I was oddly pleased to have spent a week's vacation building a linen closet. That said, I'd still have preferred a handyman do it while I relaxed. Were such people available outside of fiction, that is.

Gun control starts in your own house

     The 5th anniversary of the Sandy Hook slaughter caught me off guard Thursday. In recent years, I've pretty much stopped reacting to these ever-more-common tragedies. What's the point? Why bother? Nothing ever happens.

     But I was curious as to what I wrote in the wake of Sandy Hook, and came up with this. It stands up to the half decade test, and seems a concept seldom raised, and worth raising again. At least it's about something that can actually occur. 

     Enough, people are saying, again, this time in the wake of Friday's horrific school massacre in Connecticut.
     We have to DO something.
     Well yes, doing something would be nice. Though you have to pause a moment first to contemplate a belief system that requires 20 dead children before it snaps to attention.
     Give credit to advocates of gun rights. They know what they believe. They believed it Thursday. They believe it today.
     They put their money where their mouths are, their boots both on the ground and firmly on the necks of their representatives. They pull out their wallets and slap them on the table.
     Give them our grudging respect. No need of a slaughter to stir them to action. In fact, slaughter doesn't stir them at all, except to read aloud the script in their hand that says: "More guns."
     A few days before this happened, after the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanded that Illinois join the rest of the nation and craft a concealed carry law, I had an idea. My idea was: I gotta buy a gun. Not for protection - I live in Northbrook. I take Metra. The last time I felt myself physically threatened was . . . umm . . . never.
     But as a columnist, I thought it would be interesting to carry a gun around. As a stunt. Buy the gun, take the course, conceal and carry. See what happens.
     I floated this idea by my wife. Her eyes narrowed.
     "Not in my house," she said, severely. I explained what a sharp column it would be. Front-page stuff! It wouldn't be forever; I could sell the gun back. She didn't care a bleep what I had in mind: no gun. Period.
     Because guns are dangerous.
     To be honest, I felt thwarted. But I didn't push—we had months to figure this out. Then Friday happened. Twenty children shot down. As horrifying as it was, our fellow Americans buffed the horror to a hallucinatory sheen. The shootings are an Obama conspiracy to push gun control! This illustrates the urgent need to end gun-free zones! If only those teachers were armed . . .
     Shades of the offensive fantasy that — since I'm Jewish — gun nuts feel obligated to send to me, floating the notion that had only the Jews of Europe been armed before World War II then, golly, the Holocaust would never have happened.
     Pretty to think so.
     But the Polish Army was armed. The French Army was armed too. Didn't help them much. Guns have their uses, but if they were the magic totems of protection that gun advocates seem to believe they are, then we'd all live in a very, very safe country.
     And, obviously, we don't.
     There could have a been a police officers' convention at the Sandy Hook School and those kids would still be dead. Police officers, if you haven't noticed, are shot and killed too, despite their training, despite their guns.
     No, actually I think my wife nailed it, as she often does. "Not in my house." Is that not a manageable start? Before we talk about laws, before we fall to arguing over specifics, over magazine capacities and what makes an assault rifle, we need to address the panting American passion for weaponry and violence. Those zombies, you realize, are just a thin disguise to let you guiltlessly enjoy watching people shot.
      Until we address that, we'll do nothing — or, rather, continue doing nothing. The Connecticut killer got his guns from his mother, who owned them legally. And frankly I can't imagine a nation where any change could be embraced that might prevent that. There are many disturbed people. They all have mothers. If the blame rests anywhere — leaving forever open the question of whether insanity affects our right to hold this killer accountable — it has to lay with mom. She wasn't disturbed. She kept her guns — "for protection," natch — in such a manner that her troubled son could get hold of them. If she didn't know, who was supposed to know? If she couldn't stop him, how was the United States government supposed to stop him?
     I believe we have too many guns, yes. But I also believe that the National Rifle Association is a convenient bogeyman for lazy liberal consciences that need to see dozens of first-graders die before they rouse themselves, temporarily. Any one of a hundred Democratic plutocrats could match the NRA's spending tomorrow, and it wouldn't mean a thing. Not until we realize that most Americans don't want stricter gun laws — they want them to be more lax, or stay the same. We think all those Clint Eastwood movies are true, and we stockpile all these guns to keep us safe. Only they don't keep us safe. "Not in my house" — that's a start, a small but important step, and you don't need to hire lobbyists to make it work.
      —Originaly published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 17, 2012

Next WLS will be stocking Lake Michigan with zebra mussels

 

I explained the story behind this enigmatic tombstone a couple years back.

     

     I had never heard the name "Chris Plante" before Robert Feder tweeted news Thursday that the D.C.-based personality is replacing Bob Sirott and Marianne Murciano on WLS radio.
     The latest example of  huge and distant media companies—in this case, Georgia-based Cumulus Media, owners of WLS and 445 other radio stations—deciding that what is easiest and cheapest to offer is also best for listeners everywhere. One size fits all.
     That said, I like to keep an open mind. Off to The Chris Plante web site. There, the first thing I read was his most-recent tweet: "What do you think was the REAL lie of the year? Perhaps 'Russia, Russia, Russia'?"
     Ah, the Trumpian Fallacy in rampant splendor. Take a truth you don't like—like Bob Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged-for-now collusion with Russia—insist based on nothing that it's a lie. Then hold your breath and see how many buy it.
     Quite a few. Particularly in places like Georgia.
     In Chicago, not so much.
     Feeding lies to the deluded has been a growth industry, with Fox News and Breitbart growing in size, power and profitability as a whole segment of America seals itself off into an echo chamber of self-deception and hysterical faux victimhood.
     Chicago is not immune—you should see my email. But at the risk of provincial pride, we do still value independence.  The Sun-Times is run by a former alderman and a group of union heads. The Trib, for all its historical aspersions toward internationality, is run by a local tech whiz.
     Our radio gems stand out for their uniqueness—WBEZ, WFMT, WBBM—not because they're funnels for whatever sour pap they're fire hosing from the coasts.

To continue reading, click here.

Not forgotten

     Writers cheat death. Briefly. Sometimes. 
     That doesn't mean they don't die. They do. The writers themselves that is. But that their work echoes for a while. If they're good. And lucky. Not most writers. Most writing barely lives on the page the day it's published, never mind has any hope of lingering.
     But writers who are good enough and lucky enough ... like Studs Terkel, who died almost a decade ago—the 10 year anniversary will be this Halloween — but whose name came up twice Tuesday.
     The first was a reader, asking me to recommend Terkel books. That was easy: "Working." "Division Street America." "The Good War." That'll get you started.
     The second was at lunch, with my pal Tony Fitzpatrick, stopping back in Chicago between stints in Paris, shooting his excellent TV series, "Patriot." We talked about art and the French and acting and politics and food and Chicago. 
     Then conversation drifted to Studs. Tony was a particular friend and admirer—"Hope dies last," the title of Terkel's book on political action, is tattooed on his forearm. We talked about him, about his clash with the late Steve Neal.
     Our conversation made me want to hear Studs' voice. I knew him, casually, and was a guest on his radio program on WFMT. But I only interviewed him once for a column, after he was robbed in his home, and I suspected there was more to the crime than the witty tale making the rounds of the media.
       A pithy line will go halfway around the world while the complex truth is still pulling on its boots.
     The first couple of times I read Studs Terkel's brazen demand to a burglar who had broken into his home and stripped him of $250—"Hey, now I'm flat broke; give me 20 bucks!"—I smiled at the 87-year-old literary lion's quick-witted bravado. The crook gave Studs a $20 bill. Tough old bird. Nice little story.
     But by the third reading —and the line has, since Mike Sneed broke the story in her July 22 column, appeared in nearly two dozen newspapers and magazines all over North America —I began to wonder: Was it all really that simple, or could there be a less attractive crime story hidden behind the neat tale? A home invader rouses an elderly couple from their bed in the middle of the night. The husband is confronted by the crook, who robs him. Sure, he got $20 back. But did the event really have the fun, flip quality the quote suggests?
     "It had an amusing touch in retrospect, not during it," said Terkel, in his Uptown home. "It happened so quickly, I couldn't believe it. I had turned the lights out about 9 o'clock. I kept a little TV on, watching the Sox game—the Sox lost to the Brewers. Near midnight it was.
     "The hallway light goes on. I think it's my wife going to the bathroom. I reach out to say something, and I touch her. She's there. So it's not she. A figure is coming toward me, a figure in the shadows, coming toward me. A tall figure."
     Even at that point, Terkel—as most people would—clung to the hope of a benign explanation.
     "I think: It could be my son. He has the key. It turns out to be somebody else. A guy. I reach for the light. He rushes to me and turns out the light, his hand over his face. He was as surprised as I was."
     The burglar kept shouting, "Where's the money? Where's the money?" But Studs couldn't hear him.
     "I'm practically deaf," he said. "I have hearing aids, but I take them off at night. He's saying something, but I don't understand it. I keep saying, 'What is it you want? Keep cool. Take it easy.' "
     Was Terkel frightened?
     "I guess I was," he said. "It was too sudden, too dreamlike. I went to get my hearing aids in the bathroom. He follows me and turns the light off, his hand still over his face."
     Terkel worried about the safety of his wife, Ida, who has not been in the best of health lately.
     "I didn't know what was going to happen," Terkel said. "If he's desperate. . . . I told him, 'Wait, take it easy. This woman is not well.' "
     Criminals are sometimes placated by money. Terkel, who went to the currency exchange earlier that day, produced a roll of cash. He handed it over, realized he was busted and made his request for something back. He got a 20.
     Terkel nearly said something that, for him, is even more telling than the witticism that has been so widely quoted.
     "I almost said, 'Thank you,' " said Terkel. "He hands me money, and I feel grateful. I think I might have said, 'Thanks.' "
      Terkel, an old-school leftist, finds a certain irony in that.
     "That's the free market for you," he said. "It was my roll of bills a moment ago; now it's his roll of bills, and I'm asking him for a handout."
     (I should mention, in the slim chance that a reader or two might not be familiar with Terkel, that he is the nation's great chronicler of the common people. Even those who question his politics must admit that his classic and best-selling books, such as Division Street America and Working, placed ordinary people into the context of history long before it became fashionable. I think The Good War is among the best books ever written about World War II.)
     None of that mattered to the burglar. Unlike when Terkel was mugged in the 1980s—which also made the papers—the burglar didn't seem to recognize him before fleeing.
     Terkel, his anger up, followed the burglar, until he saw an accomplice downstairs in the kitchen.
     "I'm hollering, 'How did you get in? How did you get in?' " Terkel said.
    And then the moment came that I had suspected was there, obscured by the cool and satisfying brio of his oft-quoted request.
     "Then I got scared. Right after that," he said. "The fright comes later, when you think of what might have happened."
     Fear, and anger.
     "Of course you feel angry. I was mad I lost 250 bucks. It's an invasion of your privacy. For some reason I was cool, but maybe that was my protection, my masquerade."
      The burglars had pushed in a broken-down kitchen air-conditioning unit. There's a new one there now, securely bolted. And the Terkels keep a light on downstairs while they sleep.
     "Keep cool and keep the lights on," advised Terkel. "What's the old song: 'Let a little light shine'? The detective said (burglars) don't like any sign of life in a building. Keeping a radio on is great, too."
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 1, 1999

Whew.

     Whew!
     That's the short version.
     At least the country hasn't gone completely crazy. Any loss for Donald Trump is a win for America.
     Close, but enough. Thank you, God, Jesus and Alabama. Roll Tide!
     The long version is more complicated.
     Put it this way:
     Shame and pride had a wrestling match in Alabama on Tuesday.
     Shame won.
     Even in a solid Southern red state that hadn't elected a Democratic Senator in a quarter century, the idea of electing Roy S. Moore—a Republican, yes, but also credibly accused of groping several young women and girls—to the United States Senate was simply too much for voters to bear.
     Even Republican voters. Even Alabama voters. Even in the debased, tawdry Era of Trump.
     Or as NBA legend and Alabama native Charles Barkley succinctly put it, campaigning for the victor, Doug Jones: "At some point we got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
     That point is now.
     Okay, not now. It's not as if the state had a communal change of heart since November, 2016, when Alabamans voted for Trump almost 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton.
     They just didn't want to be embarrassed by electing an alleged child molester. It's a start.
     That Moore was a bad judge, is a bad man, and would certainly be a bad senator, assuming the Senate didn't expel him immediately upon being sworn in, was not so much a factor as that electing him would look bad. Few Alabama voters seemed to care that he was dismissed from the bench, twice, for refusing to obey the law. They liked that. They're proud of that defiant attachment to faith, a Dukes of Hazard flipping off of the man.
     Doug Jones won. Even though his good qualities were eclipsed by his being a Democrat, and on the wrong side of the only moral issue that matters down there: abortion. His victory is still a reflection of the polarized, poisonous political atmosphere that this election does not change so much as ratify. Almost half the state still voted for Moore.
     Jones won. But his election won't change anything, not yet. The Senate will still be in Republican hands. And there is no defeat that Trump can't spin into supposed victory.
     Is Jones' win a reason to be glad? Sure. But a cause for celebration? Not really.
     People in Chicago only care about who represents Alabama in the Senate because that the contest was seen as a bellwether for the 2018 mid-term elections, a test to see if the Trump Rebellion is played out.
     Does Jones' win mean that Trumpism has reached his high water mark and will now begin to recede? Or is Jones' victory just a pause in the rainstorm?
     Celebration feels premature. Trump has suffered setback after setback since being finessed into office with—I believe—a boost from his friends the Russians. Obamacare withstood his onslaught, the military recently shrugged off his attempt to ban transgender troops. Everything bothers Trump but nothing fazes him. He's like that metal man in Terminator 2.
     Jones' victory is important because it nibbles away at Trump's thin majority in the Senate. It also reminds us of the power of shame. Doing the right thing because people are watching you isn't the best reason, but it will do.
     This is not the beginning of the end. Maybe, to quote Winston Churchill, it's the end of the beginning.
     There is no question that the Trump Administration will eventually fall apart, because it is a house built on sand. You can only get by on lies and bluster so long. Facts are facts. Climate change is real. Muslims and Hispanics make good, hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding American citizens as well as anyone else. Gays make excellent partners, if you are so inclined and responsible parents.
     The question is when.
     The answer: not yet.
     The election of Doug Jones does not mean that the historic intolerance and fierce partisanship of the Southland has been overcome. They have an enormous burden still
     This is a first step. Change is possible, yes. But change hasn't happened yet or Roy S. Moore would never have been the Republican candidate. Jones' win is merely one dry day in a season of flooding. That said, it is a welcome relief.

Mike & me

   
     I would never say that I had a favorite reader. There are so many thoughtful voices and faithful followers, I'd hate to have to choose one.
     But Chris Wood is right up there, if only for his regular Facebook posts showing photos of himself, watching the Bears game, enjoying a cigar and an Old Style in his garage—living the life, I tell myself whenever I see him lofting a brew, denied to me by a cruel and vengeful Creator.
     So when he asked if I would tell a story I alluded to, about famed columnist Mike Royko threatening to break my legs, well, I gave it a shot. Then sat on it for a week. It was ... I don't know, nostalgic and slight and not up to my professional standards, such as they are.
    But it's 9 p.m. on a Monday, and nothing better has presented itself. So here it is, at his request. The blame, of course, is entirely mine.

     Tim Weigel invited me to dinner once. 
     I can't remember why. He drank at the Billy Goat, I drank at the Billy Goat, back in the days when you could still smoke in a bar, and we both did. Cigars. I hazily recall the cigars having something to do with our meeting. We asked each other about the cigars we were smoking, struck up a conversation, talked and drank and smoked cigars. 

Tim Weigel

     Now Weigel was a bright and affable man. He had gone to Yale, surprising for a journalist, never mind a TV sports personality. He had also been movie critic Gene Siskel's roommate. 
    Anyway, we chatted, and became friends. I remember him coming over to my apartment in East Lake View to attend a cocktail party, in between the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts. I admired the brio of that. 
     He returned the favor, inviting me and my wife to dinner over at his home. The appointed day and hour came, and we drove to Evanston, where Weigel lived. I had his address written on a piece of paper, but was confused when I arrived at the spot where his house should have been. 
    Across the street was an enormous baronial mansion. That couldn't be it. Tim read the sports on TV. He wore loud jackets. On the other side of the street, more modest homes. But none the right address. I gazed at the address in my hand, puzzled. 
      This was in the early 1990s. Before children. Before GPS on cell phones. It had to be summer, because there was a man across the street, mowing his lawn. I approached him. Did Tim Weigel live around here? I asked.
    Sure. He pointed at the baronial mansion. 

Mike Royko

    Oh. Right. Television. Sports. I can be so naive sometimes. 
     We were greeted at the massive door, and the evening melted away from there. I seem to remember a wife, a radio personality of some sort. Tim had a EuroCave in his dining room—a special refrigerator for wine—that impressed me. We made use of it. 
     At one point Tim asked me about a certain former colleague of mine who had gone to work for Mike Royko, the top columnist in the city, then and forevermore. The colleague, well, I had better draw the veil here. I gave my opinion, which was not kind. 
     The conversation would have dissolved into memory but, unbeknownst to me, Tim had hired one of the Billy Goat's part-time bartenders as a bottle washer and general lackey back in his kitchen—an expansive, near-industrial kitchen, I seem to recall—and the bottle washer/lackey overheard that part of the conversation, which I discovered Monday, when the phone in my office rang.
     It was Royko's employee. Not happy about my unkind assessment. I'd relate the direct language but, after 25 years, the specifics are lost. What is not is the sense that I had stuck my arm into a cage and it was now being chewed on. 
     The line went dead. The employee had hung up. I can still recall the oh-I-am-so-screwed feeling in my gut as I held the dead receiver. 
     I'll be frank; I don't tolerate bad blood well, but like to be at peace with everyone. Tranquility is the old man's milk, as Jefferson said, but certain young men like it too. Pour oil on the waters, I thought, and called back. I would apologize and placate the employee, so as not to hear my name called at the Goat one day, look up and get an ice pick in the eye.
     I dialed the number for Royko's office.
    Only the employee didn't answer the phone; Mike Royko did. Now he was yelling at me. I only recall two parts of the conversation. One was me pleading, "Aw, c'mon Mike, what has the world come to when a guy can't get tight with friends and bad-mouth the competition." Or words to that effect. And Royko saying that he would break my legs, probably break my fuckin' legs, if ... and I'm not sure what circumstances would trigger that. Maybe if I badmouthed his legman again. Maybe if he saw me again. I'm not sure.
     In years to come, I would retell the story anyway, to grab at a certain whiff of authenticity, a kind of contact high. Royko was the real Chicago deal and I crossed paths with him enough for him to threaten me, which had to count for something. It wasn't as good as getting socked, wasn't Bernie Judge throwing a typewriter in the newsroom, but it would have to do.
     To be honest, I never had the Royko-envy that so distorted other columnists' work. I would have liked to have had a decent exchange of words with him while he was alive, but quickly realized that it would never happen. After he died, when readers would write to me and tell me that I was no Mike Royko, I would write back and thank them, pointing out that Royko was a mean drunk—often, though he seemed to have his moments of warmth and decency with people who weren't me—and one of his sons ended up robbing a bank. It was an end that I worked quite hard to avoid, still do, and I'm glad someone noticed my success at it up to this point.
     That's it. As I said, not much of a story. 
     
     

The lady or the law?

      The photo to the right, of course, is the scrum of people crowded around the Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterwork on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. 
     I commented upon it after  visiting last spring. The crowd was so dense you could feel the humidity coming off their bodies—the gallery where the painting is displayed reminded me of a high school gym. 
     Now direct your attention to the photograph below, also at the Louvre. 
     Do you recognize the black basalt column? Don't feel bad if you don't. I imagine most people will draw a blank . 
    Take a second look.
   

     Any idea?
    It's the Code of Hammurabi. 
    Not the oldest set of laws—though the basalt stele is over 3,000 years old. But the "most complete and perfect extant collection of Babylonian laws" to come down to us, discovered in what is now Iran in 1901. 
    The code contains 282 laws, related to a range of areas: contracts, marriage, divorce, assault, theft, liability and punishments. 
     Parts are familiar to this day, such as No. 196, spelling out a classic concept of justice:
     "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay one gold mina. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price."
      This "eye for an eye" might at first blush seem ancient and brutal to us now, though not as much as we'd like. Known as "lex talionis"—the law of retaliation—to this day it's the justification we use to execute murderers. You took something away from someone, now we're taking the same thing. It's odd. If we merely plucked out an offender's eye, it would be considered barbaric. Yet snuffing out an entire life is somehow less so.

     Notice also that the punishment meted out depends not only on the crime, but the person upon whom the crime is committed. The status of the criminal was also significant. 

     In that way, the code is different than our current laws. In theory. We like to think that we've progressed from days of ancient tyrants, though in this way the code has us beat: status, both of victims and perpetrators, is in practice an important factor, still—maybe the important factor—even though our law pretends it isn't. A death in one part of town is not the same as a death in another. A rich man lawyers up while a poor man sits in jail because of some piddling bond he can't pay.

     Maybe we would be better off if we were honest about it and wrote this injustice into our laws. At least then it would be clear.
     Though my goal isn't to criticize law; it is the only thing, a thin wall of words, that stands between us an despotism. Even in ancient Babylon they knew that. Nowadays, we tend to forget. 

     I want you to notice one other thing about the Code of Hammurabi. Look at the photograph again. What's missing? Take a second. Anything not there? Glance back at the Mona Lisa for a hint.

     People. The room is completely empty. I sought it out because I knew it was there and wanted to show my wife, a lawyer. I knew she would enjoy seeing it, and she did. But the masses don't bother. They pack into a gallery to see a painting they are already vastly familiar with. And probably don't even know that one of the earliest examples of the framework of law that supports all of our lives is in another gallery, largely ignored. 

    It's a worrisome neglect, because our fidelity for the law is of the utmost importance, as we in the United States will find out, sooner than later. Do we really value what we have? Do we understand its magnificence? 

    Between the Mona Lisa and the code, which is the true wonder? Which is the greater example of genius? 

     

Captain Crunch, Defender of Christmas

     Captain Crunch loves Christmas. 
     The criminal conspiracy of Snap, Crackle and Pop, not so much. 
     Judging from this special Xmas-themed box of the Captain's tooth-murdering sugary cereal, noticed on the shelves of Target the other day, conveniently juxtaposed with the season-denying Kellogg's Krispy product ... well, let's just say the outraged Fox News diatribe writes itself: "'Who is Kellogg's trying to fool? 'Holiday colors?' Those are green and red, the traditional colors of Christmas as outlined in the Holy Bible..."
     The president of the United States lit a match under the traditional War on Christmas bonfire last week. "You don't see 'Merry Christmas' anymore," he whined. "You see 'Happy New Year.' You see red. And you see snow."
     Crunch good! Krispies bad! Need I point out that Crunch is based on corn, an American product, while Krispies contains rice, harvested in Southeast Asia? 
     My first instinct was to ignore this seasonal disorder as trivial compared to the true outrages and quasi-treasons Trump commits daily. Just another example of the why-are-you-hitting-yourself bully tactic so often used by the Right, of conjuring up some idiotic stance and then pretending someone you don't like embraces it. Nobody is offended by "Merry Christmas." There is no effort to dampen the holiday that pervades every corner of American society from the moment the Halloween candy is put away until the New Year's decorations are taken down. Barack Obama said "Merry Christmas" all the time—MSNBC put together a pointed highlights reel of him saying exactly that, again and again and again. What Obama didn't do is make a big deal of it, weaponizing Christmas, tainting it, as Trump does everything he touches. By the time he's done, "Merry Christmas" will carry an emotional wallop somewhere between "sieg heil" and "fuck you."
    Why pay attention at all? That's easy. Because there is a larger point here.
    The entire GOP worldview is based on false victimization. Their own victimization, conjured up to mask an ugly truth. In a world of true victims, Republicans sympathize with only themselves. Why? Because they can no longer traffic in the open language of hate, of supremacy—they can't simply despise specific groups as inferiors. It isn't done anymore, at least not openly. The next best thing is to imagine offenses that they are the victims of at the hands of those they hunger to condemn. Thus gay people are not simply people, trying to get married, raise families. No, they have an agenda, to destroy straight marriage, to corrupt children (I wonder if Republicans will be able to repeat that one with a straight face after Roy Moore wins on Tuesday. Sadly, they will. We live in the Golden Age of Hypocrisy). 
    That's why Mexicans have to be murderers and rapists, Muslims have to be terrorists. Otherwise Republicans would just be hating people for no reason, and even Donald Trump has enough dim self-awareness to realize that won't fly, thanks to a century of glacial progress.
     Remember where "Happy Holidays" came from. Fifty years ago it was merely assumed everyone was a white Christian. Trust me, it's true. I was there. Inclusion meant tucking in a grating Hanukkah carol into the Christmas Concert, sung condescendingly for the class Jew, who was expected to be grateful. 
    At some point, educators—and TV stations, and cereal makers, and anyone involved in interacting with the public—began to realize that their classroom, their audience, their customers, were actually quite diverse. They weren't all white. They weren't all straight. They weren't all Christian. It was odd to have a Christmas concert in a school where half the students didn't celebrate Christmas. So they began to nudge the net open a bit wider. A "holiday" concert. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas.
     Fox News grabbed it like a hungry dog and began shaking. This, like gay marriage, like a functioning immigration system, like anything that acknowledges the existence of people who make our nation's terrified third uncomfortable, is simply unacceptable. They lack the honesty to say, "I don't want them here. Their existence detracts from my fragile self-image. I wish they would go away." 
    Accommodating them is an insult. It is oppression, and implies these non-Merry-Christmas-saying creatures also belong. That it is their country too. Trump's Christmas posturing might seem trivial, and at one level it is. But at another it reflects an elemental part of his basic appeal: the illusion that American can be undone, the projector of time run backward, and the shrinking white Christian majority return to its lost Eden where their inferiors bowed their heads and stepped off the sidewalk, mumbling apologies, as the country's true owners strode by, masters of all they surveyed.

Being Jewish in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s

   

     The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opens in Jackson today. The president of the United States will not be attending the ceremony.
     For a while it looked he would. The man elected on a platform of naked bigotry, encouraging hatred against people based on their skin color, nationality, and religion, would actually show up and pretend to care about prejudice. As if he belonged at such a museum in any other capacity than a cautionary exhibit.
     But Donald Trump either doesn't know how he is rightly perceived, or doesn't care, and on Monday said he would be going. Only after civil rights icons like Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) and others refused to participate in the opening if Trump were present, did someone on Trump's staff with a capacity for shame decide that the president would not attend the public festivities, but would tour the museum privately, like the scorned pariah he is. 

     Jackson, Mississippi, if you don't know, has an astounding history of racial and religious oppression, as I mention in the column below, reviewing a book about growing up there Jewish in the 1950s. The book is filled with telling, touching details—one that I didn't put into the column, yet stays lodged in mind, is when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Jackson in the 1950s, Edward Cohen's father knew which neighbors were under those sheets because he had sold them their shoes.

     Jews don't believe in heaven. That isn't bandied about much. It seems almost rude. Sincere people are trying to embrace this incredible construct of harps and clouds and halos, and we're not playing along.

     I suppose some Jews believe. But heaven isn't part of the official program. I sure don't buy it, instead keeping the party line: Departed loved ones live in the memory of those who love them.
    For instance: To conjure up my grandfather, Irv, whom I adored, I don't have to speculate about angels. I can see him, in my mind, reclining in his green Barcalounger, sipping a Pabst, smelling of cigarettes and Luden's Cough Drops, watching "The Price Is Right." He loved "The Price Is Right."
     The problem with not having a heaven to safely dispatch departed relatives, like children shipped off to eternal summer camp, is that it places a deep responsibility on you. If they exist only in memory, then you have to remember them. It is your responsibility to rescue them from oblivion.
     Which is one reason I so admire Edward Cohen's new memoir, The Peddler's Grandson (University Press of Mississippi, $25). In fewer than 200 pages, he constructs an ark rescuing not only every relative he ever knew—with their quirks and foibles and eccentricities—but charting their improbable journey from Eastern Europe to Jackson, Miss., of all places, where they dwelled, outsiders, running a clothing shop.
     Jackson in the 1950s and 1960s is sketched through stunning details. When the P.A. system at Chastain Junior High school announces President Kennedy has been slain, the students cheer, wildly. Later, "Sesame Street" debuts nationwide, but not in Jackson, because it shows black and white children playing together.
     Still, Cohen never paints Mississippi in the grim hues we Northerners expect. Despite frequent bigotry, it's a great place for Cohen to grow up. That's perhaps the biggest surprise of the book. Jackson is nice; it's home. He loves it, then and now.
     Cohen's story is the story of anyone set apart for one reason or another. How much do you give up in order to fit in?
     The process began in the late 19th century, with grandfather Moise, fresh off the boat. After his new companions persuade him to take part in a snipe hunt, he reverses the humiliating joke by viewing the whole thing as bonding, certain "that he had undergone some redneck rite of passage."
     Poignance and humor jostle each other, as when the abrasive Rabbi Perry Nussbaum— outspoken enough on civil rights to get his house bombed by the Klu Klux Klan—sends young Cohen out on Halloween to collect, not the usual candy, but pennies for UNICEF.
     "The United Nations was regarded in Mississippi as, at best, a communist lesion on the country's independence, at worst as the nesting place of Satan," he writes. "I set out, wearing my mouse costume, into the heart of John Birch-era Mississippi." The results can be imagined.
     Cohen is at first desperate to fit in with his entirely gentile school. He lobbies his mother for a Christmas tree; she resists, then strikes a compromise—he can have a tree in his bedroom. The image of the little boy shutting his door after supper, plugging in the single strand of lights around this tiny, pathetic branch of a tree, was the most moving image for me in the whole book—a sad, funny encapsulation of yearning and denial.
     Southerness and Jewishness are not often juxtaposed. But, like chocolate and peanut butter, they go well together, especially in the hands of an author who has both love and a clear eye:
     "One can hardly hail from two more historically losing causes than the South and Judaism," he writes. "Both my cultures have long, tragic pasts, and not one jot of it has been forgotten."
     Strong words, and he argues them well in a beautiful book.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 28, 1999

Nine trucks

    Nine trucks. Mack trucks, mostly, with a couple Peterbilts thrown in for variety. Five parked on Center Avenue, four more around the corner. I counted. 
    Kitty and I were on the dawn patrol last week, making our eight block circuit of the neighborhood, when we turned a corner and were confronted with them. A sight that, in 17 years of stomping our quiet suburban streets, I had never seen. 
   A knot of drivers stood chatting with one another. 
    "Scheduling mishap?" I ventured—nine trucks seemed like a lot of trucks to park at 7 a.m. on a single block. I instantly imagined some computer snafu where nine trucks had been sent to do the job of one. It seemed the premise for a children's story: Nine Trucks. Kids love trucks. I know I do. 
     I couldn't imagine why so many were there. The drivers, holding their coffees, looked at me but didn't respond. A civilian. Or perhaps a language issue. Kitty and I moved on, admiring the brawny trucks, designed for hauling dirt.
     It didn't take long to realize they were there for the house that had been razed a few days earlier. It had seemed a not-particularly-decrepit house, new enough that I snapped a photo of it. But obviously not to contemporary standards of luxurious living. They've been building these lot-line crowding mansions lately. 
     Twenty years ago faux Norman chateaux were all the rage, with round towers and limestone details. I particularly scorned those. Now Burgundian behemoths are out and we are seeing what I think of as Little Sag Harbours, Atlantic coast edifices with wood shingles on the walls and lots of little windows scattered about, homes that should be on some sprawling estate in the Hamptons, not jammed into a suburban lot on the former prairie of Illinois. Their windows, instead of looking out on Oyster Bay, gaze through the windows of their neighbors. Some are six feet apart.
    The trucks obviously weren't bringing anything—the truck beds were empty. They were taking something away. The dirt from the foundation of the new house.
    Kitty and I came around again that afternoon—the afternoon walk. We are creatures of habit, the both of us. If I try to deflect from our routine she will stop in her tracks and stare at me, indignant. 
     The trucks were gone. But something new was there. A hole. And not just any hole. A foundation, the deepest basement I've seen on a new house--it looked 10 feet deep. For a moment I wondered if they could be building an apartment building in the middle of that residential block. It was that deep. And wide, it was as if they had dug up the entire lot; there would be no yard at all. I stopped to gawp at hole, and a guy in a hard hat wandered by, and I struck up a conversation—I'm good at that. 
     There had actually been 11 trucks, he said. Two more arrived after I left.  "That's all I could get," said the foreman. "I asked for 20."  He said deep, wide foundations are the new thing, all the rage.
    "It's even dug under the garage," he said. "We use re-enforced concrete for the garage floor."
    Maybe class envy is involved—the mere upper 10 percent gazing at the upper 5 percent. Whoever dug the basement of my house, 100 years ago, made it just tall enough for a man of medium height to stand, and then he has to dip his head to avoid heating ducts in a spot or two. I wish that farmer had gone for an extra six inches, but he was probably digging by hand, and having done that myself, I know how tempting it is to stop at Just Deep Enough and not an inch more.
    Now they dig to China, and span the lot. I can't imagine what kind of Hyde Park horror is going up, but I don't have to; we'll find out soon enough. A lot of money in the world, concentrated in an ever narrowing band atop our society, and they want every cubic inch of basement they have coming to them. It won't be pretty to look at, but that isn't much of a concern anymore. Maybe it never was.

Jews don't worship stones

     I'm actually on vacation this week, working on a long-delayed project around the house. 

     But I don't want to abandon you entirely, particularly as the news keeps coming, alas.

     Tired of tossing lit matches at the powder keg of the Korean peninsula, Donald Trump decided to shift Amateur Hour to the Middle East on Wednesday. He announced that the United States would be moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a reckless and destabilizing move, done against the counsel of his top advisers, one that pleases Trump's evangelical, let's-end-the-world-now-so-Jesus-comes-back Christians, and hard right Jews who support whatever folly Israel happens to be cooking up at the moment, and nobody else.

     Otherwise, it lights a fire under parties that need little provocation to unleash their basest instincts. Peace is now even more distant, hair-trigger tempers will flair, innocent people will die and nothing has been accomplished, except the kind of tough guy posturing that the right finds so appealing. 

     To be honest, there isn't much point to picking apart the folly of what Trump has done. All we have to do is step back and wait for the latest chapter of the half-century disaster to unfold.

    In the meantime, here's a visit I took to Jerusalem 13 years ago, as a guest of Magen David Adom, the Israeli emergency service. If you can, try to get to the end, because what the tour guide says reflects back on the whole situation. We're in love with land, but we used to stand for something, for justice. God has unleashed a number of his little jokes upon the Jewish people over their 5,000 year history. But if they've gone through all that only to end up as permanent jailers to an ever-increasing Palestinian captivity....well, the Big Guy wouldn't do that to us, or to them. Would he?

     JERUSALEM -- They don't call it the "Wailing Wall" anymore. For thousands of years Jews went there to lament the destruction of Solomon's Temple. But wailing is so, I don't know, negative, and Jews are trying to put a cheerier spin on life, where possible. So instead we call it the "Western Wall." Either way, it's an expanse of limestone blocks, the only remnant of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago.
     I took a cab to the Old City. We pulled up by crenelated ramparts. I strolled in the direction of the Wall, illuminated by floodlights. The sight stopped me in my tracks. Enormous limestone blocks, with tufts of greenery spilling out. Above it the golden Dome of the Rock. As I hurried forward, my dead relatives shuffled into mind. As if all those slaughtered Bramsons, sleeping in their slit trenches in Poland, stirred.
     What would it have meant to them, I wondered, to have gotten here? To do what I could do right now? My grandfather, Irwin Bramson, had been the only one of his large family to slip out of Poland before the charnel house doors clanged shut. I have a hundred letters from his relatives left behind, his brother Zalman, his mother -- my great-grandmother -- Devora. Letters describing the tough life in Poland in the 1930s, expressing joy over the birth of a baby—my mother—and asking if my grandfather might not send another bundle of warm clothing and, maybe, a little money.
     The tradition is that you write down prayers and tuck them into cracks in the Wall, so God has an easier time finding them. Several people gave me notes to put in, and I created my own note, a small triangle cut from paper from an envelope from one of the letters to my grandfather. I liked the idea of paper used by a doomed Jew in Bialystock ending its days stuck in the Western Wall, melting in the soft Jerusalem rain.
     What to write was a puzzle. You can't comfort the dead, can you? What could I ask God now to do for them? It's a little late.
     For being the holy focus of Judaism, the atmosphere at the Wall is surprisingly casual. People came and went, with no one in apparent charge. A Hasidic beggar cadged coins. A box of cardboard skullcaps stood unattended. Most of those praying at the Wall were from the ultra-Orthodox sects that populate Jerusalem, rocking back and forth. Some sat on the chairs scattered around or stood still at little lecterns. Others merely folded their arms against the Wall and laid their head down, almost as if resting.
     I slapped on a cardboard skullcap and walked slowly up to the Wall. I found an open spot, placing both palms flat against the stone. Then, leaning forward, I touched the Wall with my forehead and prayed.
     It seemed the thing to do.
     In 30 seconds I exhausted the store of Hebrew prayers I know by heart. So I prayed the standard pleas, for the health of my family, for the future of my boys, and—this is scary—to be a better person. Jet lag.
     Then, without forethought, I kissed the Wall—a big, full-lipped smack—lingered for a long moment, and then left. That kiss really surprised me. I hadn't planned to kiss the thing.
     Caught up in religious frenzy, I suppose.
     If I didn't quite find faith at the wall, I did experience a temporary suspension of cynicism, which might be about as close as I come. I didn't carefully observe the scene, as I should have. I didn't take notes. I forgot to estimate how high the wall is or how wide (nearly a city block, with the men comfortably praying at three-quarters of it and the women jammed in the rest. Islam isn't the only religion where women can get the short end of the stick).
     Reason quickly returned to me. Kissing the Wall, I later realized, was as hygienic as drinking a teaspoon of Ganges River water. The next day a wonderfully acerbic tour guide took us through the water tunnel running parallel to the Wall. He reminded us that the Wall is not actually part of the Second Temple. Rather, he explained happily, it is part of the retaining wall used to create the mount where the Temple stood. There was no religious reason for Jews to pray there.
     "The stones there are as holy as the stones in my backyard," he said. "A stone is a stone is a stone. Jews don't worship stones."
     He's right, I thought, feeling a little embarrassed about the kiss.
     But not about the note. The Jews weren't praying to the limestone Wall. They were praying at it. Which is a different matter. We don't worship stones, but we do venerate life, and remember those who came before us. This was the place that Jews all over the world hungered toward. They didn't want to come here because of the weather, or because of the Wall, necessarily, but because this was their place -- is their place -- the place where they can stand and pray and not be afraid (OK, the "not be afraid" part is still a work in progress).
     You can't comfort the dead. But you can do what you imagine, had they known, might have brought them comfort. Perhaps Zalman Bramson, trapped in Poland, tried to rationalize his fate by telling himself that at least his brother escaped and that maybe, just maybe, one of his descendants will someday find himself in Jerusalem. He will overcome his skepticism. He will take a 70-year-old scrap of paper, write on it a prayer asking God to bless the memory of a family he has never met, and place it reverently into the Western Wall.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 30, 2004

Bob Greene redux, this time as Trib triumph

    

Emil Jannings in "The Blue Angel"

     Puh-leeze.
     I suppose it's inevitable, with sexual harassment pinballing around what's left of the media, that the mouldering corpse of disgraced Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene would eventually be dug up. 

     And I suppose it's equally inevitable that former Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, would feel herself the person to do it.  Lipinski takes yet another victory lap for the Trib finally firing the guy in 2002, as if his predatory behavior were not an ... well..."open secret" was the phrase I was going to use, but that doesn't quite capture it. "Well-known, endlessly-discussed fact" is more apt, since you couldn't turn around in a newsroom without bumping into revolted female professionals with tales of staving off Greene's crude advances.
     It was no secret at all. I wrote a column mocking Greene's column in the Chicago Reader and, in 1995, seven, count 'em, seven years before the scales fell from Lipinski's eyes, mentioned in print Bob's proclivity for luring young interns to hotel rooms, or pathetically trying to. 

     Not that it did any good. And to be honest, I had never been accosted by Greene. In fact, I never met him. I was far more offended by Bob's writing and worldview; his deplorable personal conduct was an afterthought, a dig, though at least it was that. For his bosses it wasn't something they'd consider at all, not publicly, not when they could maintain a willful, profitable blindness. 
     It's bad enough to ignore a problem for years and years, but to then present it as some kind of triumph of personal integrity prompted me to grab a shovel myself and do a bit of  disinterring.
     Ecce homo. I found this, a timely year-end review of Bob's work, using primitive America Online archive technology. Which, alas, did not extend to movies, because, I should note, that, upon looking for images now, I mis-remembered the ending of "The Blue Angel"—Emil Jannings is in the classroom all right, but in street clothes, not a chicken suit. 

     A forgivable lapse, I hope. Not my only one, which does make me uncomfortable, occasionally, with this whole grab-a-sin-from-40-years-ago-and-smear-it-on-someone cultural moment. Because people do change. Not Bob Greene, of course, his tragedy, and ours. Nor Ann Marie Lipinski, who dislocated her shoulder patting herself on the back in 2002 and is still at it. 
     But it does happen, and I am concerned that nuance will be lost, that the Al Frankens will be lumped in with the Roy Moores, and we'll end up with a new way to defame people but little actual progress.
     Still, if cracking open the past and hunting down sexual harassers means our society is actually improving, that the often degraded position of women is advancing, it will have been worth it. Though Donald Trump was still president last time I checked, so let's not take our own victory lap quite yet. Bad enough to hear the ululations of self-praise echoing from the ivory towers of Harvard. 

     With New Year's approaching I can't help but think of the classic movie "The Blue Angel," in which hot young Marlene Dietrich lures doddering Emil Jannings away from academe and into burlesque. The last scene shows the old guy back at his deserted schoolroom, still in the chicken suit from their nightclub act. He clutches at his old desk, weeping, emitting pathetic little chicken noises, as the enormity of his squandered life comes crushing down on him.
     Now, I realize it's pointless to hope that Bob Greene will be suffering similar pangs of remorse this December 31. It's too late for that.
     But can't you just see him? Wandering gravely from room to room, lit only by candles, trailing his fingers over the flat surfaces?
     Perhaps Bob too would be wearing a ridiculous costume—the tattered rags from some forgotten Bexley High School play. And he too would weep, as memories from the wasted year just past assailed him. The bells on his costume would jingle derisively as he moved through the dim hallways.
     We need not rely upon such conjecture to delineate the enormity of Bob's failure this year, pleasurable as it may be. There's an engine now available that can outline Bob's offenses against thought and journalism with greater precision than mere subjective adjectives like "repetitive" or "infantile" or "dull" ever could.
     I'm referring to the Chicago Tribune computer archives, which recently became available — at the usurious fee of $1.25 per minute prime time — on America Online.
     A few keystrokes and we see that Bob had written 167 columns in 1995 as we went to press. And that 59 of those columns were about Baby Richard. A solid 35 percent of his entire output — with zero practical effect other than making certain people think that by focusing on one white boy who has two sets of parents fighting to love him, they were exercising supreme compassion.
     Another 20 columns — about 12 percent — were spent denouncing major league baseball and embracing the scab players.
     Scanning over his year's output, I find it difficult to pinpoint a nadir, though I would cast my vote for the pair of columns he devoted last month to reprinting old movie lines and old newspaper leads. It was a classic Bob straw-man tactic, in which the untrue premise (that the written word is no longer valued) is followed up by the canard reaction (let's have an "experiment" to see which medium, newspapers of 60 years ago or classic films, is better). Jesus, couldn't he have just used a sick day?
     But why limit ourselves to the past year? The Trib archives also have a 1985-1995 search mode. You can view the full scope and horror of Bob Greene's world, the sad spectacle of his near-autistic fixation, suffocating narrowness, and tedious, head-crushing repetition.
     I've just spent some time there, and boy, I'll tell you, it's like going down to hell and staring up Satan's ass.
     In those 11 years, Bob has written 1,923 columns. More than a third—723—involve children, a reminder that before Richard there were Joseph and Sara and all the other wee ones Bob has used to cynically fill his columns with pages of court transcripts and letters of reader outrage.
     A quarter of the columns—484—mention television. Bob's home state of Ohio pops up in 170 columns. Another 74 feature Elvis Presley in some capacity--often a starring role. Thirty-six columns dredge up Bob's pointless fictional character, Mike Holiday, the supermarket bagger last heard from, mercifully, in 1993.
     Woody Hayes shows up ten times. One hundred and twenty-four columns pass through an airport; 72 mention a hotel room (though, oddly, none of these include a young intern). In a decade's worth of ostensibly soul-baring columns, none contain the words "hairpiece," "smarmy," or "too many vodka gimlets." Yet there are four references to Barbie, and two columns—nearly identical in content and five years apart—devoted to his old high school principal, C.W. Jones.
     Michael Jordan appears in 67 columns, just three more times than the word "mall" appears. Spend enough hours working the archives, and weird parallels will start to pop out. In his column of June 6, 1994, the word "Elvis" is repeated 23 times; exactly two months later, a column repeats the word "mall" 23 times. Of the 32 columns containing the word "brave," each uses "brave" exactly three times, except for the November 13, 1991, column, "The U.S. Shrinks to the Size of a Mall," which uses it five times.
     The clock moves toward midnight. The year 1996 stretches ahead of us, filled with promise and mystery. Only two things are certain: Bob will continue to boldly explore the bedpan ocean of his soul. And the Tribune is going to make a fortune on-line.
     —Originally published in the Reader, Dec. 21, 1995

The Steinberg family Christmas dance

The Hatch Family, by Eastman Johnson (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     A good pun should be savored. You do not want to rush it. So after I opened my menu at Szechuan Kingdom the day before Thanksgiving, sitting in a booth with my wife and sons, I saw my opportunity, but took my time. I let them order first. Then the waitress looked at me. 
     "I'll have the 'Happy Family,'" I said, order a special of scallops, shrimp, chicken and vegetables, only then glancing over at my wife, who was genuinely surprised, almost shocked.
    "You always get the beef and broccoli," she said.
     It's true. I really like beef and broccoli. 
    "I thought I'd try something new," I explained. "Although I've sampled the 'Happy Family' at every Chinese restaurant I've been to. To compare them. And do you know what I've found?"
     I paused, savoring their puzzled faces.
     "All happy families are alike..."
     I don't think there was actually the sitcom groan that lives in my memory, but the triumph was mine. Nice one dad.
    Of course I missed my beef and broccoli during dinner—I always order it because I really, really, really like beef and broccoli—but it was worth it.
    The opening sentence of Anna Karinina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 
     A famous line, though, like many aphorisms, not necessarily true. The happiness in my family seems more idiosyncratic than general. We don't watch football, except sometimes the Super Bowl. But Tolstoy is not only bantered, but played a significant role in there being a family at all: years before I got married, I remember seeing Edie on the sofa, reading Anna Karinina, her face wet with tears, and thinking, for the first time, 'Can't let her go.'"
     We toted his-and-hers copies of War and Peace on our honeymoon, and while we didn't find time to read them, beyond a few symbolic minutes at the end, just because we had lugged the damn things, we did eventually. I later read the whole book, aloud, to my older son, finishing the night before he left for college, a high point of parenthood. Not only do I not believe the happiness of all dads involves reading War and Peace twice, I'm fairly certain it's just me.
     Not that reading, and punning about reading, is all we do. We attend or throw the same big family gatherings that most families have, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, the Jewish holidays and sometimes we assemble just for the heck of it, and bathe in the glow of relatives close and distant. 
     Though other families find happiness in other ways. The Orgill family of Utah, as I discovered on Facebook Monday, choreographs ecstatic Christmas dances, which they perform in their home, record on video then share online. I assume doing so makes them happy, though following in their footsteps would be the definition of misery for the Steinbergs (though I do smile imagining the result, no doubt something between "The Dance of the Hours" in "Fantasia" and "Long Day's Journey into Night.")
     Although we did have one quasi-Orgill family moment. We were on our way to Ohio, to visit old friends who have a place at Put-in-Bay. We stopped at a Wal-Mart for some reason—pick up supplies I imagine—and they had this deep sale on these grey and aqua striped t-shirts. They were practically free, $2 or some such thing. So we each bought one, and put them on. Dressed identically, we rolled up to our friends' house. There is a photograph, but I'll be damned if I'm going to put it online, not matter how many clicks it would get. Give those wholesome dancing families credit. It takes guts. I like to think my family has courage too, in our, very different way. So with apologies to Tolstoy, I'd suggest that all happy families are not alike. While unhappy families, well, all families are unhappy, at one point or another. The key is getting past the unhappiness and becoming happy again.