Spring Cleaning

This spring is different.  Not only are we busting out of darkness and cold, like all northerners who winter at home, we’re leaving behind the year-long isolation of a global pandemic.

I approach St. Patrick’s Day with relief and joy.   After shaving my beard and digging out my favorite green shirt I tell myself “I can do the rest of winter standing on my head.”

Let it snow, it’ll be gone in a day.  Screw the snowblower, the cosmos is taking care of us.  Every day our hemisphere tilts closer to the sun, lengthening the days at a rapid clip.  You can’t stop it.  Take that winter.

Every spring is a fresh start but this one is transformational.  I am deep into spring cleaning, approaching it with a vengeance.

After a year of hunkering down in the shack, with visitors numbering less than the fingers on one hand, I accumulated all kinds of things.  In the house, we threw away things we were trapped with for years, but in the shack, the piles grew. 

Most of it was articles clipped from newspapers that still show up on our driveway.   Others were digitally copied, pasted, and printed from the internet.  I’m trying to beat this addiction to ink and paper, to be satisfied with computer files pasted to my desktop, but it dies slowly.  Something about seeing words while holding them in my hands comforts me.  I laid them out on my futon and tried to organize them.  Lots defy categorization.  

Why are they there?  Each was a potential blog post.  One day, for a brief moment each was considered write worthy.  Now, I’m not so sure.  I set the wastebasket close, determined to ruthlessly toss them.  But I realize I can’t possibly let go of some without at least a mention.

An eight-word headline from the Chicago Tribune:

Survivors hanuted by loss of smell and taste

Hanuted?  The Chicago Tribune editors missed the misspelling of the word haunted in an article about the effects of coronavirus IN THE HEADLINE?  I quickly consulted my friend, a retired newspaper editor.

“That kind of mistake occurs more often than you think.  Miss a misspelled word once and you miss it every time.  And in fairness, the more important copy, the copy that contains the most errors, is typically in the body of the article.  Headlines tend to be overlooked.  Once upon a time, several technologies ago, the typesetters would catch those errors.  Not so now.  Expect more.  It happens.”

 

I found two pieces by Tribune columnist John Kass.  I don’t even like John Kass.  Let me rephrase that.  I don’t like his politics.  But as a writer, he still gets it done.  Connects with his reader.  One article from August 2018 was a review of a great movie called “The  Rider” by a Chinese director I’d never heard of named Chloe Zhao, who recently directed “Nomadland.”  Based on his recommendation I watched it.  It’s a simple story filmed in the Badlands of a young man changed forever by his experience as a rodeo rider.  Simplicity can be hard hitting and emotional, as this movie was for me.

The second Kass article was a March 5, 2021 tribute to a colleague who passed away, yet also somehow about fishing, lent and prayer, and the damned screens in front of our face (like this one ironically) that now dominate our lives.  It was a piece that wandered yet strangely came together in the end.  Both articles reminded me that when we stop thinking of our political differences and allow ourselves to be quiet, admitting what we feel, we create ways to find what we have in common.

 

I could not throw away a short 350-word article about Dion Callaway, the California man who lost his prosthetic leg while skydiving.  Ironically, he lost his God-given leg while skydiving also.  He shattered his heel attempting a high-speed parachute landing and after a year of rehab and complications opted to have the leg amputated below the knee.  He resumed skydiving as soon as possible.   

As luck would have it, he jumped from 10,000 feet without realizing there was a tear in the compression sleeve that keeps his stump and the prosthesis connected.  Air filled the sleeve, the artificial leg was torn away, and it sailed to earth who knows where.  Callaway tried to follow the falling leg but lost track.  He eventually landed, successfully, on one leg.  Immediately he launched a four-hour search on crutches through Russian River vineyards to find the missing leg. No luck.

Turns out his leg blew a half-mile south into a lumber yard.  It was discovered and turned over to the local sheriff, who asked around, and was connected to Callaway by the airport from where he jumped.  The artificial leg was in perfect condition. Dion Callaway resumed skydiving immediately, this time with his name and contact information plastered to the device.

I identified with the story because like Dion I have a bad leg due to an injury.  There was a time I considered having it taken off but was talked out of it by physical therapists and surgeons.  Mostly though I clipped the article because I liked Dion’s spunk, as represented by this quote about the sensation of jumping out of airplanes and falling to earth.

“It’s a sensation of floating, and it’s a lot of fun.  You’re up there with your friends, playing around two  miles up.  It’s like you’re Peter Pan.”

 

I saved no less than twelve pieces about America and its four year far-right policy shift against immigrants and refugees.  Included were stories featuring national actors who exploited the issue for political reasons; Jeff Sessions, Steve King of Iowa, White House speechwriter and policy advisor Stephen Miller, and his infamous boss.

I saved stories from good reporters who went to the border and recorded the awful results their policies created, including 450 migrant parents deported without their children.  Every time I tried to write about the story it changed.  It deserves to be a book, not a blog piece.  But what is most needed is comprehensive immigration reform and a conclusion to the mess we’ve created around immigration issues.  We need to write an ending to that story for which America can be proud.

 

I saved a bunch of articles about things I could, and may still, do (although I admit prospects appear dim some days.)  Imagining them got me through some of the worst pandemic days.  I’ll sum them up in bullet points.  Call it a fantasy To-Do list. 

·       Amtrak’s Writer Residency Program once offered free round-trip tickets on 15 long-distance routes to authors.  Unsold sleeper car spaces were given to writers in hopes they would share their experiences on social media and elsewhere.   

·       A Rick Steves European tour of artist’s residences, including that of composer Edward Grieg’s one-room studio on a Norwegian fiord, Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and Salvador Dali’s studio overlooking the port in Cadaques, Spain.

·       A scheme for making small homes out of cargo shipping containers.

·       The annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest at Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West.

·       Companies that hire retirees to shuttle cars to vacation destinations for senior citizens complete with paid one-way return airline tickets.

·       Abandoned railroad corridors turned into bike paths across Illinois.

·       The growing trends for more natural human burial and other alternatives to the traditional disposal of human remains, including composting.

 

Owing to my former life in social work, I save various articles on issues that affect young people and their families including the rise of suicide rates among not only young people but all of us during the pandemic, the looming housing crisis, food insecurity, how the sex offender registry negatively impacts young offenders for the remainder of their lives, and the condition of our juvenile detention and correction facilities.  These issues live in darkness as a forgotten world.  Any news item that claws its way into the media and our consciousness is notable. 

 

And I am always on the lookout for news about Marilyn Hartman.  For Chicago Tribune reporters, Marilyn Hartman is the gift that never ends.

I encountered Marilyn for the first time in a February 2018 Trib article titled “Serial stowaway grows agitated at court hearing.”  It was an account of her appearance the previous day after being arrested at O’Hare Airport twice in two weeks.  Her agitation stemmed from the way her court appointed lawyer was answering the judge’s questions.  When the judge asked if Marilyn had family the lawyer said yes.

“No, I don’t!” Marilyn protested loudly. 

When the judge later asked if Marilyn was under the care of a medical professional, the lawyer began to reply in the negative and Marilyn interjected “Yes!!”

Facts are often in dispute in matters regarding Marilyn Hartman.  Her career as a serial stowaway was first officially noticed in 2014 when she made it through the San Francisco Airport and onto a plane bound for Hawaii.  She was busted when the real ticketholder tried to claim her seat.  But according to Marilyn, she hopped her first plane in 2002.

“The first time I was able to make it through I made it to Copenhagen,” she said.  “The second time I flew into Paris.” 

Only Marilyn knows the true extent of her adventures.  And for the most part, she is not talking.

At that February 2018 court hearing in Chicago, her fourth in two weeks, the judge ordered her three separate times to stay away from O’Hare Airport.  And for good measure he ordered her not to go to Midway either.  Just a month earlier Marilyn managed to get by British Airways ticket agents and a Customs and Border protection officer to occupy an empty seat and fly to London’s Heathrow Airport where she was arrested and returned.  TSA began investigating how she was able to do so but came up with no clear answers. 

In a later hearing the judge ordered Hartman released on her own recognizance but ordered psychiatric treatment.  In the kind of statement journalists cannot possibly pass up it was reported that the same judge told Marilyn’s attorney the following for the court record.

“This is no pun intended for your client, but she is a flight risk given her number of offenses.”

The number of successful trips Marilyn has managed to take is unknown, but she has been arrested 22 times.  She has been involved with both the criminal justice and the mental health systems, placed on probation, labeled homeless, and housed in various residential settings.

Electronic monitoring has been especially useful.  Just Tuesday of this week while writing this blog post, Marilyn popped up again when she was reported missing from the group facility where she has lived without incident for the past year and a half.  Her ankle bracelet, serving as a tracking device, revealed a straight path to O’Hare airport.  They alerted authorities and she was apprehended near Terminal 1. She suffered yet another relapse in her obsession with airports and flying. 

Marilyn has given various reasons for her behavior to the press and calls herself no criminal mastermind.  She told CBS Channel 2 in Chicago that “I have never been able to board a plane by myself.  I was always let through.  I mean I was able to go through the security line without a boarding pass. 

She has claimed to be the victim of a worldwide conspiracy to harass her, and once stated she suffers from “whistle blower trauma syndrome that makes me feel the need to get on a plane and go away.”  At other times she has admitted she suffers from bipolar disorder, a diagnosis she resisted for a long time.  She says she was depressed when she made her stowaway attempts.    

Reporters who have followed her arrests attribute the success of her evasive maneuvers to her ability to blend into a crowd as a seemingly harmless, elderly white woman.  Whatever the case, neither law enforcement, the courts, or our mental health system have found a way to stop her behavior. 

It is too bad Marilyn Hartman is fascinated with airplanes.  We’ve grown twitchy about people sneaking onto our airplanes and cannot tolerate it.  If Marilyn was fond of trains and could write about her travels, perhaps Amtrack would give her a standing ticket to take an empty seat on those scenic routes they offer when she has the urge to travel.  But it is not ground travel that fills Marilyn’s fantasy, its being in the sky.

Maybe someone could introduce Marilyn Hartman to Dion Callaway, the one-legged skydiver.  Dion could teach Marilyn to skydive, acquaint her with the euphoria he feels while floating in the air two miles up, and they could both get what they so hunger for from life. 

 

As it is sometimes said in auction notices, my collection of clippings includes “other items too numerous to mention.”  Now that I’ve saved most of them in a blog, I feel better about throwing them away.  There will be more.  Always more.  Thoreau’s advice was “simplify, simplify, simplify.”  But you never know when an article will come in handy.  Heck, one day you could write about it.

 

 

 

Welcome June

 

In August we got a call on a Friday that Moe and Don wanted to come down and see us Sunday.  Nice surprise.  They had just been down on the 4^th of July.  We always take visits from them whenever we can get them, but they were rare during the pandemic.   They were very careful about the virus and insisted we be careful as well. 

We were sitting outside in the sun, getting the Weber going, when Moe went to her car and reappeared with a small gift bag.  She handed it to her mother.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing really.  Just something special for you.”

My wife reached in the bag and pulled out a fresh lime.  She looked at Maureen and reached in again.  Nothing.  She looked at her daughter with a quizzical face.

“What’s the deal?”

“That lime is about the size of your grandchild.”

Fast forward to Fat Tuesday, February 16.  The baby was due February 6.  Moe and Don had been in the hospital since noon Monday.  When we went to sleep that night, we were sure we would wake up to news of a birth.  At 5:26 a.m. on Ash Wednesday I woke up and immediately checked my phone.  Nothing.  I sent Don a text.

“Tell us something please.”

He texted back.

“We’re with the midwife.  Talk to you soon.”

Six months after that day in August when my wife looked curiously at a lime in her hand, at 2:15 p.m. on February 17^th, the world shifted to make room for a new soul.  Don and Moe became first-time parents, my wife and I became grandparents along with Don’s Mom and Dad, and scores of people assumed new roles and responsibilities.  Siblings of the new parents became aunts and uncles for the first time. Relatives in two families received the news and added a name to their list of cousins, great-nephews and nieces, and more.  On top of all that, a host of friends rejoiced.  Don and Moe’s new baby arrived not only to a family but also to a community.

Ultrasound images do babies no justice.  We had seen blurred black and white approximations of this infant, allegedly real and actual, several times during Moe’s pregnancy. Then suddenly the baby appeared in the flesh on the small screens of our smartphones.

Five days later we found both a snow-packed parking place and our Air B&B, stashed our belongings, and took an Uber in the dark to Don and Moe’s Humboldt Park apartment in Chicago.  As we made our way through mounds of snow and buried cars, we saw Don on his stoop standing under the porch light.  He led us up the stairs to an apartment we had visited over and over for ten years or more, now made new when the door opened on our daughter Moe holding our granddaughter, June Colleen McClure Palmer.  Our daughter Moe gave June to her mother to hold, and when Colleen was done she gave her to me.

That very fact that life includes such miraculous events as the moment one holds their first grandchild is a great gift.  But then life itself, both our own and the lives of those around us is equally miraculous.  How is it we forget?

Eleven months ago, I worked the primary election on St. Patrick’s Day, without a face mask, and the next day it seemed the entire planet was shut down. Since then, two and a half million souls worldwide were lost to Covid 19, more than a half-million of them in our country alone.  Our next-door neighbor died of Covid.  My wife and I lived alone and apart from family and friends for almost a year.

The day before June was born, my wife and I got our second injections of the Moderna vaccine and when we received the news of June’s arrival, I was huddled on my couch under a winter coat and an afghan.  Safe, I was assured, from the ill effects of a Covid infection, but plagued by chills and aches.  Eleven months of near isolation, spared from the pandemic by modern science, new grandparents, and though not out of the woods suddenly much less worried about harming our new granddaughter and those we love.  Sometimes life rushes at you like a river in flood.

l was telling June all about the past year as I held her on the couch at our Air B&B.  At just a week old, she wasn’t interested.  I tried singing “The Pony Man” by Gordon Lightfoot, having brushed up on the lyrics anticipating this rare chance to perform.  June was unimpressed.

June did a lot of yawning and seemed intent on determining how many ways she could move her mouth and tongue.  If she saw me or even heard me, she didn’t let on. I may have known this previously and forgotten, but I’ve concluded with certainty that it is hard to even guess what babies might be thinking.

Not that I let that stop me. I made a point of establishing for June her whereabouts, not knowing if she’d been told.

“In Chicago, where you and your parents live, it’s been snowing like hell and roofs have been caving in.  Some buildings have fallen down entirely.  But if I were you June, I wouldn’t worry about it.  Those are big old abandoned buildings, older than me, built when they were still using bow truss rafters.  Back then architects thought they could get away with wide spans of unsupported roofs by using those rafters, but it turns out when you get a lot of snow like this without a thaw, those old roofs can’t take the load anymore. Your apartment is OK though, and this place too.  Old carriage house we think.  Good stout beams tying the walls together.  Look up.  You can see them.  The hipsters exposed the wood.”

June turned her head but looked out the French doors instead.  I believe a streetlight caught her attention.

“I read about those trusses in the Tribune.  Good newspaper.  I hope it’s still around when you learn to read.”

I have my doubts about it lasting but hated to tell her.

June yawned.  She won’t read for another five years or so.  In five years, I’ll be 74.  When she graduates from high school, I’ll be 87.

“While your Mom was pregnant with you, our country had a really bad president.  Probably the worst ever.  But you live in the United States of America where we have free and fair elections.  So, we voted him out.  After he lost the election for his second term, he worked up his followers and they stormed the Capitol building in D.C., trying to stop the Senate from certifying the vote.  Didn’t work.  With any luck you’ll never have to deal with him or anyone like him again.  Joe Biden is in the White House now and the democrats control the house and senate too.  You were born at a good time.”

June hiccupped.  She seemed to be staring right at me as she made those little hiccup sounds, hardly caring about them at all.  Her chest puffed up when she hiccupped.  Tiny little chest.  Everything about babies is tiny.

“You know June when the weather gets better and you start getting out more, you can visit me down in Ottawa.  Your grandma and I have a big yard with tall trees.  I used to swing your Mom and your Uncle Dean on a tire swing there.  I still have the tire.  I can put it back up.  I know the branch.  It’s still there.”

She kept hiccupping but seemed intrigued at the same time. 

“At the edge of the yard, by a deep ravine, I have a little shack.  We can hang out there.  I’ve got a lot of good stuff in there to look at and play with.  Although I may have to clean it up some and do a little baby proofing.”

A whole lot of cleaning and massive baby proofing as I thought about it.  June was getting antsy.  Doing some squirming.  Her Mom came over to see us.

“I think it is time June eats her supper, Papa.”

My family thinks June should call me Papa.

“Ok.  Well, June and I had a nice talk.  I’ll guess you can have her.”

I’m happy to report that it all comes back, this being with a baby feeling.  I remember when June’s Mom was equally tiny, and my wife left her with me alone for the first time.  I put her on a blanket on the living room floor.  I had a play session planned where she and I would set up a winding pretend road and drive play trucks down the road making truck noises while a toy plane flew overhead.  A whole afternoon of action and entertainment. 

Turns out that day, thirty-five plus years ago, June’s Mom found her thumb, was fascinated with it, and before you know it fell asleep.  I learned quickly that when babies are tiny, they pretty much eat and sleep.  You can’t rush a baby’s development.  They’re in charge. 

That’s how my time with June ended that day in the carriage house.  We had a talk, fairly one-sided, she nursed, and then went to sleep.  It was both an uneventful and wonderful time.  I can’t wait to do it again.

In the days after June was born but before I met her, while thinking of good songs for kids, I asked Alexa, my faceless, always responsive, never failing voice of fact and reason in the kitchen, to play lullabies. As often happens, she responded with things I’d never considered.  One of them was a song by Christina Perri called “A Thousand Years” which I never thought of as a lullaby.  To me, it was always a tender love song for grownups.  Now it sounds different.  Especially these lyrics.

                                           I have died, every day, waiting for you.

                                           Darling don’t be afraid I have loved you

                                           For a thousand years.

                                           I love you for a thousand more.

                                           And all along I believed I would find you

                                           Time has brought your heart to me

                                           I have loved you for a thousand years

                                           I love you for a thousand more.

I remember the days I first held each of my kids, Maureen and Dean.  I was there when they were conceived, born, and all the days in between.  I was Moe’s Dad at age 31 and Dean’s Dad at 33.  I remember that guy, that new Dad, and how he felt. 

He was in the delivery room wearing a hospital gown.  Twice nurses put his wrapped-up babies in his arms and twice he was a little scared.  They were so small.  He had loved them since before they were born, and now they needed his and his wife’s help for everything.  He felt so responsible for their well-being but down deep he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.  “Thank God for my wife” was what that young guy kept thinking.

You would think holding a grandchild would feel the same.  It didn’t.  I know June’s parents so well that I’m not scared in the least for June’s future.  They may be worried, but I’m not.  My overwhelming wish now is that I will be here, with her Grandma, for as much of June’s future as possible.        

We assembled our nuclear family in Chicago for a home-cooked dinner.  When counting noses, I was somehow gobsmacked by the realization that we had grown from six to seven.  And after dinner, when I cut the cake we bought at an old Wicker Park bakery to celebrate June’s first week on earth,

I wondered silently just how much of a head start I had on my granddaughter.  I worked it out later on a calculator.  It comes out to this:

June                     1 week

Papa                    3,607 weeks

One of the great joys of my life has been watching my children’s lives unfold into adulthood.  I know it may not be the same with June.  Like all human beings, June and I will have only so many weeks in our lifetimes.  But she has a lot more in her future than her Papa.

Maybe lullabies are love songs after all, and vice versa.  And maybe somehow, they are inspired by grandparents hoping to pack the extravagant amount of love they feel for their grandchildren into however much time their lives overlap. Maybe even a thousand years. 

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyk2i8xNVow