Category: Chicago

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Flying Home

Thunderheads_1

Airline travel has become endlessly irritating and uncomfortable most of the time. The snack boxes they used to give away as consolation that those bad hot meals weren’t served anymore? Now you have to pay five bucks for one, and various combinations of chips, jerky, whizzed cheese, pretzels and cookies have been given cute names like QuickPick, JumpStart, Biafra, and Moe. But now I’m wandering.
I always take a window seat if one’s available. I can deal with the confinement as long as I have a chance to look out the window. I’ve always found the view of the world outside and below full of a beauty so singular and surprising I don’t feel fit to express it. So, Monday evening on United Flight 863 from O’Hare to San Francisco: Somewhere over Iowa we flew past this wall of storm clouds growing into the summer sky to the north. Even though I was pretty sure a picture would only hint at the play of light and texture and shadow, I pulled out my little digital camera and took a couple of shots. Glad I did.

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Gone Cycling, and Back

I flew to Chicago over the weekend to ride in a 600-kilometer (375-mile) event I needed to qualify for next month’s Gold Rush Randonee here in California. The ride actually started in Wisconsin, from the little town of Delavan (a little northeast of Rockford, Illinois) and wandered around several of the state’s southern and central counties.

Beautiful riding, but cutting to the chase: I didn’t manage to finish. The first half of the ride went just fine, I was on pace to finish the first 400k in about 20 hours, get a couple of hours of sleep, and head back out to finish before the heat of the following day. I really had no doubts I would make it. Just at that point, though, a big storm hit and I got held up for several hours at a gas station in a little town called New Glarus. The ride never got back on track for me after that, though I had a memorable ride through a rainy night across some hilly and seemingly deserted back roads. After finishing the 400, I felt completely used up and wound up quitting the ride. There’s a little more to it than that, and I’ll write more later, because most of the part I did was exceptionally fun and challenging and the country beautiful. But that’s the bottom line.

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Pneumothorax

The phone rang early this morning; not super early, but about 7 a.m., earlier than we usually get calls on a Sunday. It was Sakura, our daughter-in-law, calling from Tokyo. The combination — early morning, and the fact it was Sakura, not Eamon, on the phone, had an instantly alarming effect; that only increased as I listened to Kate’s end of the conversation — something had happened with Eamon, and he was in the hospital.

After a minute, I groggily got on the phone. The story is this: Eamon apparently woke up Sunday morning and found it extremely difficult to breathe. Sakura called an ambulance, and he was taken to a hospital. Once there, doctors determined Eamon had suffered a collapsed lung (also known as "pneumothorax").

That’s easy enough to treat, apparently, though the process doesn’t sound pleasant. Here’s the way one option is described: "Definitive treatment involves placing a plastic tube within the chest cavity, through a small incision near the armpit, under suction and water seal. This chest tube may need to stay in place for a few days before it can be removed."

In terms of what causes a spontaneous pneumothorax, smokers are at higher risk than most people. But Eamon’s not a smoker. It turns out he falls into another risk group — tall, thin people, among whom this condition occurs more frequently than among us somewhat shorter and wider folk. The doctor who saw him after he was admitted said surgery might be necessary to prevent a recurrence.

So what do we do now? Just wait to hear from Eamon. Under normal circumstances, it’s so easy to communicate back and forth that the 5,000-plus miles between us doesn’t seem like a big deal. Suddenly, we have a situation where there’s no substitute for physical presence in terms of being able to give comfort (and get it) and really size up the situation. Having the impulse (or the need) to go is one thing, and going is another:  I actually just found a round-trip United flight to Tokyo from San Francisco that’s priced at … $9,555.24. Seriously. (I also found a flight on a non-household-name airline, Asiana, for something like $1,400).

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The Things I Think About

Here’s a pointless exercise I spend time on nearly every morning. The Chronicle has a weather page. Not up to the standard of the Chicago Tribune’s page, which is the best I’ve seen; its overseer, Tom Skilling of WGN, has apparently worked with people at the paper to give the page real dimension and depth; they actually make an effort to tell readers something meaningful about the science of weather, they pore over the record books to put the current weather in some sort of meaningful context, and they highlight interesting weather happenings outside the Chicago metro area.

But back to the Chronicle’s weather page. It’s full of numbers, and it features a giant Bay Area map. But it’s really narrow and dull when you get down to it. One feature it has presented presented since I started reading the paper regularly, back in 1976, is a list of a dozen California cities and their current seasonal rainfall. From Crescent City in the north to San Diego in the south, the list reports precipitation in the last 24 hours, how much rain has fallen since the start of the current season (which runs from July 1 through June 30), how much fell in the same period last year, the “normal” seasonal rainfall to date (an average taken over the last 30 years), and the “normal” total for the entire season. Doesn’t that all sound interesting?

I have a daily habit of checking the precipitation numbers if it’s been raining. I have a minor, ongoing fixation about one particular fact: how Oakland’s rainfall stacks up against San Francisco’s. As a resident of the East Bay, it’s a source of pride that humble Oakland has been, on average, a little more rainy than its vainglorious cousin across the Bay Bridge — Oakland’s season normal is 22.94 inches versus San Francisco’s 22.28. But a worrying trend has developed: In several recent years, San Francisco has wound up ahead in the rain race; this year, Oakland is nearly two full inches behind, 25.22 to 27.21.

It makes you wonder whether the fix is in — maybe West Bay meteorologists are doctoring the results to claim Bay Area Rain Capital honors. It makes you wonder what the penalty is for tampering with an Official Government Rain-Measuring Instrument.

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Family Business

It’s Ann’s birthday. That’s significant because she’s my sister, and the only one of my four siblings whose day of birth I clearly remember. The one recollection I’ve shared in the family to the point of bored weeping is seeing the family car, a red-and-white 1958 Ford station wagon, going around the corner of Monee Road and Indianwood in Park Forest as my brothers and I walked home from school at St. Mary’s.

We’d been home for lunch, and I remember what might have been a routine for my mom and dad, who were waiting for their fifth kid. Dad did accounting-type work at Spiegel’s, and I think he’s always had the habit of recording numbers that might be significant. At lunch, Mom was having contractions; when she had one, she’d tell Dad, who would look at his watch and write down the time on the back of an envelope. He’d been writing the times down since after we left for St. Mary’s earlier in the day, seeing how close the contractions were getting. I remember seeing the times and thinking something exciting was happened, though I wasn’t entirely sure what it involved beyond the expectation we’d have a new brother or sister at the end of it.

Dad drove Mom to Ingalls Hospital in Harvey. Chris, John, and I were having dinner with our neighbors, the Lehmanns, when Dad called about 5:30 to say we had a sister. Boy, did she have a treat in store. Somehow, she survived.

Happy Birthday, Ann. I won’t mention the exact year you were born, only that according to Popstrology, you were born in the Year of the Four Seasons, and your birth star is Connie Francis.

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Al and the Ides

March 14th is Albert Einstein’s birthday. Since I’m unconversant with mathematics — though I can show off every once in a while with arithmetic — I can’t pretend to understand much about his theories of relativity except some of the changes they’ve brought. Lots of us leave a world completely changed from the one we were born into; he’s one of the very few who left a world his ideas had transformed.

And then there’s the 15th. The Ides of March, and if you want to know why it was called that — well, check here. All the historical and literary interest in the date stems from Julius Caesar getting knifed (44 B.C.) by pals. More personal interest attaches to the date because it begins a run of March and April dates that were birthdays of close friends growing up (and my sister’s birthday, too) — on the 15th, 21st, 22nd, 26th, 30th, 31st, and the 6th of April. Not dates I’ve written down — they just happened to stick in my memory, maybe because of the proximity of my own birthday. Whether I’ve been in touch with any of these people or not, I still think about each of them, if only briefly, as the days come each year.

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Our Past for Sale, Again

Oakhilldrive

My sister Ann sent me (and my brothers and dad) an email today that she had gotten from a friend she grew up with. The message said, "Is this your former home?" and included a link. The link (which includes the picture above) goes to a real-estate listing for a "contemporary, raised ranch" home near the town of Crete (about 30 miles or so south of Chicago); it’s got four bedrooms, two baths, a hot tub, two-car garage with an upstairs studio, a wraparound porch, and an acre lot in the woods. Ann’s friend is right — it’s the house my mom and dad had built in 1965-66 (we moved in June 10, 1966) after we had lived in Park Forest, just a mile away, from 1956 on. The hot tub, wraparound porch, and garage have all been installed since our time.

The first thing I looked for in the listing was the asking price: $300,000. Not much by San Francisco Bay Area standards or compared to what similar places are going for in the New York area or Chicago’s northern and western suburbs, but a lot by the standards of the ’60s. Mom and Dad had the house built for something like $35,000; I remember hearing them talk about the lot, which now has undeveloped public land on two sides and is relatively secluded on the other two, and I think they bought it for $10,000 from a family we knew, the Fitzgeralds, who lived a couple blocks from us in Park Forest. The sale listing reduces the house to a series of dimensions. Strange to see, knowing what went on in some of those rooms (which have been inhabited by others for a long time and have a completely new set of experiences and memories imprinted on them). I noticed the listing has the building date wrong, putting it at 1970.

Just out of curiosity, I searched for the property address on Google and got a single hit (with the picture below). It was an online listing for the house last August. The asking price then, six months ago, was $219,900. The jump in price made me curious: Is a new owner trying to flip the property for a big profit? Or, unlikely as it seems, had the old owners put it back on the market for a higher price? An agent’s phone number was included in the old listing, a guy apparently working out of Park Forest. I called. It turned he’s the husband of the house’s last owner, the one who put it on the market last year. He said it sold for a little under their asking price.

When I told him the house was listed again and the current price, he said, "No way that house sells for $300,000." So it looks like the quick-profit scenario is what’s actually going on. I think this is the third or fourth time the house has been up for sale since my parents sold in early 1986 (for a fraction of last year’s sale price) to move back into the city.

I have to say the old owners had the right idea, picturing the house during the summer, when everything in the woods is intensely green. The current listing’s snowy landscape doesn’t look nearly so inviting.

Oakhill2

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I Dichotimize

Some matters of pressing importance:

Patriots-Eagles: Eagles. Dad points out that the Eagles’ quarterback, Donovan McNabb, went to Mount Carmel High School — the team is nicknamed “The Caravan” — with which my mom’s family has a long association. That’s enough for me. Go Eagles.

Sunni-Shiite: Tossup. You got to like the Shiites’ numbers. But the Sunnis know how to put the hurt on infidel and co-religionist alike, especially with their patented triangle offense. This one could go into OT.

Social Security (old)-Social Security (new): Old, for the moment, because at least we know what it is and what the problems with it are. Bush’s “new” deal has got the stink of Enron to it — a hustle that will make a few people rich

Schwarzenegger (actor)-Schwarzenegger (politician): He sucked as an actor, but I liked him better then because you could walk out of the movie theater or turn off the TV and be done with him.

To be continued … or not.

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Pleats for Fun and Profit

I’ve written news stories, editorials, op-ed columns, magazine features, TV news segments, obituaries, educational copy for a financial services firm, poems (yes, a few), journals, more blog entries and emails than the world needs and too few letters when I should have, personal essays, something approaching a short story, checks, job applications, resumes, letters of reference, explanations of firings, layoff speeches, and likely many things it’s good I don’t remember.

But there’s always something new. For instance, writing about draperies, fans, desks, and storage lockers for a retail catalog that will remain nameless. About the “polished artistry” of a curtain’s inverted pleats. About the “thrilling textile art” that is Belgian linen. About “the multifaceted refinement” of a beveled-glass mirror made in China.

If nothing else (but there is something else — money), the writing’s instructive. You actually need to find a story in every product. If you grew up in the “Seinfeld”/J. Peterman era, naturally you think of the absurd tales invented around items like 10-gallon hats or duster coats. Sitting at a desk, looking at bad black-and-white pictures of drapes made of Thai silk and wondering what little slice of reality and fantasy might make a readable short paragraph that would lead someone to think of buying, I was reminded of my dad’s career at Spiegel’s.

It was a mail-order house that grew from a family dry-goods business founded in the 1860s. Dad used to be one of the guys responsible for merchandise control, as I understood it, which essentially meant keeping track of everything Spiegel’s bought and sold. So that meant having a line on all the goods the buyers were contracting for in current and future catalogs and everything that the company shipped out to customers. It was a big operation, at one time rivaling Sears and Montgomery Wards when those places were retailing giants.

The Spiegel’s catalog was a fixture in our house every season. I’d pore over it when it Dad brought it home. I had no interest in a lot of the stuff — the clothing, for instance, which mostly seemed pretty square. But mostly I was taken with a muted sense of amazement at all the different kinds of things in the book. The tools and shoes and sports equipment and camping gear and tires and automotive supplies. I think there was even a whole car you could buy. What a job to write all the copy for all that merchandise.

One year, we got Dad a birthday present out of the catalog: gaucho boots. I’m pretty sure the catalog actually described them as “Brazilian gaucho boots.” Made in Brazil, used in Argentina, I guess. There was a gimmick: The boots had a pleat above the ankle to afford flexibility. A boon to all hard-riding gauchos. The item in the catalog — probably written by the Spiegel’s shoe buyer at the time, a guy Dad often talked about named Sig Mach (correct me on the spelling or any other details, Dad, if I got them wrong) — really sold me. The way I remember it, I wouldn’t be satisfied until we got those boots. We ordered. They came. They were black leather pull-ons that came about halfway up the calf. They had little leather tassels that I didn’t remember being prominent in the catalog picture. I think Dad actually liked them. Or at least he was a good sport. I remember him wearing them a few times, anyway.

Back to today. Writing about the wonders of a retro government-style metal desk, priced at close to $2,000, makes you think about the sort of catalog stories you’d really like to write.

“Exclusive to us, these no-nonsense hardwood cudgels were hand-turned on trusty steam-driven lathes by faceless factory drones deep in North Korea — a testament to beloved leader Kim Jong-Il. Sold in sets of two; buy more for family fun!”