Seeing the World As It Is

Waking up one morning in 1975 I saw my roommate’s dog Casey, an Irish Setter, sitting against my bedroom wall.

“Casey.  Good morning.  Come here girl.”

I made that smooching kissing kind of sound we make to call dogs to us.  She didn’t move.

I was in the smallest bedroom of a country house I shared with two other guys.  I was there temporarily.  Well, we all were there temporarily as it turned out but I was the most temporary of the three.  I planned to leave in the spring for South America, a plan I carried out.

In my little bedroom was a twin bed mattress and box spring, a wooden barrel, some books on the floor, and a backpack with very few clothes on top of it in the corner.  I was covered by a sleeping bag.

“Casey, don’t be silly. Come here.”

I stretched out my arm and wiggled my fingers, promising to scratch her behind her ears which she liked so much.  She was about three feet beyond my outstretched hand.  Still she didn’t move.  I pushed out from under the sleeping bag, closing the gap between us and touched her.

When my fingers touched her I realized it wasn’t Casey but my brown wool sweater.  I had mistaken my sweater for a dog, and was reminded how bad my vision was without correction.  It’s sobering, but you learn to live with it.

I first got glasses, for myopia, in 1960 when I was in third grade.  When I left the eye clinic in Bloomington wearing them I looked down the street and said to my Mom

“I can see every leaf on those trees.”

I loved wearing glasses.   I never took them off.  As I got older my glasses got thicker.  I got contact lenses in 1968 because my coach thought contact lenses would improve my peripheral vision.  He was right.  With them I could see if the base runner leading off first was leaning towards second when I pitched.  When basketball season came I became more aware of the whole court.  I experienced little discomfort, and wore those contacts as much as I possibly could, which was probably a mistake.

 

My vision became more of a problem in 1972.  After spring finals at ISU I went to my eye doctor because I thought I had scratches on my contact lenses.  My vision was annoyingly blurry, both near and far, as if I was looking through something.  I cleaned the contacts, the old hard kind, little pieces of blue plastic, several times but could see nothing on them.  Turned out it wasn’t my contacts but my eyes.  I was looking through scars on my corneas, like stretch marks.  My corneas had become cone shaped.  I had developed an eye disease called kerataconus. When corneas lose their uniform curve and shape they not only scar but they distort your vision.  There’s no getting around that.

I was fit with special contacts that held back the cone but at the same time irritated my eyes more.  I learned to live with that.   As the years went on with the help of excellent eye doctors I made use of every new technology available.  I was fitted with gas permeable contact lenses which allowed more oxygen onto the surface of my eye and lengthened my wearing time.  But my eyes continued to change.

 

I flunked the vision portion of my driver’s test in 1990 and went to my trusted eye doctor for a more extensive exam.  He passed me, allowing me to drive, but only after exacting a promise that I would visit an ophthalmologist who specialized in cornea transplants.  Turned out I was a prime candidate for such surgery.

My corneas were replaced a year apart in 1990 and 1991.  After each surgery I snapped that eye’s hard contact between my fingers, the little bastards that caused me so much discomfort, and vowed to never wear contacts again.  The transplants gave me not only a clear surface to look through but reduced my astigmatism as well.  After it was all done my new glasses, rather than being coke bottle thick, resembled those of a normal person.  I thought the transplants would eliminate my eye disease.  But I was wrong.

It crept back.  Astigmatism became the problem.  While my corneas remained clear something about my eye caused them to again lose their shape.  My prescription crept up again, and not uniformly in each eye.  My eyes became very different one from another.  The eye doctors worked so hard to help me see.

I would attempt to explain to my eye doctor, now the son of the man who insisted I see the surgeon, what it was like to see through my eyes, so he could understand what was happening.

“Don’t try,” he said.  “Vision is a hard thing to put into words, especially the vision of people with kerataconus.  Looking through non uniform corneas, each eye different from the other, and each patient’s eyes different from the next, causes unique individual distortion.  It’s distorted in an infinite number of ways.  Your brain can accommodate many of those differences.  But convincing me what it looks like for you is not really helpful to me.  It’s interesting, but not important.  My job is to produce vision for you as good as possible given your eyes, and when I can no longer do that get to someone who can make your eyes better.”

He gave me a prism in one lens after I complained that my eyes watered at night while reading.  Even with it I reported that occasionally the vision of one eye or another suddenly wildly diverged, the print on one side of a sentence jumping way higher than the other side making it impossible to read.

 

“That is your brain taking a break.  The difference is too great and your eyes go out of focus temporarily.  Your brain can’t hold it together any longer.”

If I stood in front of a wide banner with print trying to read it across, one side of the banner, usually the left, would be clear while the right side blurred out.  I found it better to close the right eye and move my head to scan the entire width with the left.

 

Occasionally things that I knew were concentric, say targets with equally spaced rings, the kind you shoot arrows at, would not be so.  On one side the rings would scrunch together.  On the other side they would bow out.  But the worst part of living with so much astigmatism, which requires such a strong prescription, is the lack of depth perception.  There was a time before I flunked the driver’s test that I desperately relied on “stop ahead” signs.  Without them I would slam on my brakes at a rapidly approaching stop sign believing I had plenty of time.  No one has told me this but I think corrective prescriptions with high minus make everything appear smaller, yet in relative proportion.  It allows you to see the world more clearly, but not as it really is.

A few years ago my young cutting edge optometrist introduced me to an innovation called Synergize (brand name) contacts.  It’s a gas permeable lens surrounded by a soft contact skirt.  That skirt allows your eye to push the lens out to the curve it needs while the rigid lens stays in place over your pupil.  They fit tightly so extended wearing time is not recommended.  With them I saw amazingly well.  But as time went on I could wear them less and less.  And when I took the contacts out and used my glasses they didn’t function well because of something called corneal molding.  Even when that subsided glasses could not replicate the vision afforded by those advanced contacts.  Finally I had to abandon the contacts because blood vessels began to grow onto the iris in an attempt to bring needed oxygen to the surface of the cornea.   When that happened I was once again referred to a young and respected ophthalmologist.

Beginning this summer he performed a series of procedures to both eyes, incisions which relaxed my cornea and allowed it to take a more normal shape.  He risked cutting into my transplanted cornea, a risk not all professionals of his kind will do.  He was relaxed and confident.  I like him a lot.  I think his confidence comes from not only his skill and experience but because he has the best equipment available, all the latest technology, and a team of people around him who supply him with very accurate information and take no shortcuts.  I felt immediately comfortable in his office, believing I had arrived at a good place.

This past week he concluded his work, performing two cataract removals and replacing my God given lenses with corrected Alcon Toric lenses.  Each of those lenses has six diopters of correction for my astigmatism.  That puts correction inside my eye, in the small lens in front of my retina, rather than on or directly in front of my cornea.  It’s an outpatient procedure done while you are awake.  For the second eye I turned down the pre op offer of Valium so I could pay better attention to what was going on.  I was at the Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery in Mokena, a nice unassuming place by a warehouse off Route 80.  My doctor asked where I wanted the surgery done.  I replied that I wanted to be where he most liked to be.  Totally his call.  He picked CMIC.

In preparation I needed only to strip to the waist before putting on the funky gown.  I even kept my shoes on. They put little booties over them.  A nurse writes something on my forehead above the eye I’m having done, most likely “Cut this one!” and puts both dilating and numbing drops in that eye.  Another asks me to look straight ahead and puts a dot on my eyeball for the doctor to use as a reference when placing the Toric lens.

“Is that a Sharpie?”

She smiled.  “I don’t know.  Sort of.  It’s a felt tip marker of some kind. Special though you know.”

Bianca, a nursing student, was my transporter each time, wheeling me from the staging area to the hallway outside the operating room.  She wrapped a warm blanket around me while I waited.  I was operated on early last Saturday so we talked about the snowstorm and snow removal as we waited.  I was lucky to have made it to Mokena from Ottawa.  Bianca and her family lived in a nearby unincorporated area notoriously bad at plowing snow.  She felt lucky to be there too.

Inside the operating room they tilted my head so the eye being worked on was properly positioned and clamped into something of a soft vice before forcing my eye open with a speculum.  Before I was clamped in I looked at the equipment instruments, big overhead lights, and a giant machine on a massive arm that looked like a movie camera.  On the side of it was the word “Leica.”

“Hey,” I said to no one in particular.  “It’s a Leica.”

“You familiar with the microscope industry?” A nurse asked.

“Not at all.  But Leica used to make very good cameras.  Professionals used their stuff.  I hadn’t heard of them in years.”

While travelling in the 70’s with a Minolta I would run into  world travelers with money carrying Leicas.  They were proud on the verge of snobby about them.

“Well that is a spanking new digital Leica microscope that makes all this work possible.”

“Good to know they’re still around.”

My doctor came in and shook my hand.  He looked different.  We were both wearing hair nets for one thing, and he sported orange crocs on his feet.   He asked the nurse to put the music on.  It was mindless pop.  He sang along to “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC-DC as he got ready to work.

“Doc, how about telling me what you’re doing as it goes along today?  I didn’t take the Valium.”

“I’d be glad to.  Let me get this instrument in position.  We’re about ready to go.”

He put an extremely bright light directly above my fully dilated eye.  Inside the brightness were three rectangular brighter lights.  It was so bright everything seemed to be turning red.  Nothing I could do about it.  Above me the doctor pulled the camera into position and looked through two eyepieces.

“I have a great view of the interior of your eye thanks to this machine.  Your eye is fully dilated and I can see your lens very clearly.”

“OK, I’m making a 2 millimeter incision on the side of your eye, and inserting my probe through that incision.  Your lens has a diameter of about 6 millimeters.  First I dissect it, then I apply radio waves that break  up those large pieces into bits small enough to be sucked out by the probe.  It’s called phacoemulsification.”

I felt nothing.

"This is going well.  Now I’m beginning to clean this out.  I’m vacuuming out your old lens in a sort of sac it rests in while leaving the snug place it fit into intact.  I’ll insert the new lens in that same place and in time it will incorporate itself into that same place.  The eye will grow around it somewhat.”

As he did this a sound like a video game came from my right side.  Bloops and bings of various length and tones  burbled along.

“What’s that funny noise?”

“The machine gives me some audio feedback on material entering and going through the probe. Along with what I’m seeing it helps me know when I’ve gotten all the loose material.”

“OK.  I’m done with that part.  Now I’m putting your new lens into my probe.  I’ll put it near the site and then release it.  When I do it unrolls and takes shape.  It has a diameter of about 6 mm like your natural lens with arms of another 7 mm that are used to hold it in place .  So in total its 13 mm.”

“And you get that thing all rolled up into a cylinder that fits through a 2 mm incision?”

“Yep.”

“That sounds like magic.”

“I know it sounds like magic but it is actually wonderful material and great science.”

“I forget about great science sometimes.”

“It’s easy to do that.  But in my work I see firsthand what a difference it makes.”

“OK your new lens in nicely situated.  Now I’m going to rotate it to the proper axis.”

“Is this where the dot on my eyeball comes in?”

“Yeah.  Not high tech at all but very effective.”

“OK.  One more look around.  Like leaving a hotel room and making sure you didn’t forget something.  OK we’re done.  That went well Mr. McClure.  I think you’ll have a good result.”

“Do you glue the incision shut?”  I knew I didn't have a stitch the previous time.

“None needed.  It’s so small.  It should close and heal nicely on its own.”

“So that’s it?”

“Well, your careful compliance with the follow up regimen of drops is important. But other than that I’ll see you tomorrow, and in a week, and then my job is done.  You do know to call me if you have any kind of emergency at all, right?”

“Yes.  What would that emergency be?”

“Anything you think is a problem is an emergency.  Call if you have any concern but especially in the event of pain.  You should experience little if any pain.  Perhaps some discomfort for a while after the numbing drops wear off, like a speck of something in your eye, but nothing serious.  Just call if you have a worry.  See you tomorrow in my office.”

And with that he was gone, off to take care of the next person in the hall.  Bianca wheeled me out, gave me coffee and snacks.  Another nurse went over discharge instructions, and before you knew it I was back on Route 80 headed home.  I was there just over an hour.

That was a week ago today.  I’m writing this now with no glasses, no correction at all.  I’ve been driving in town.  On Thanksgiving I drove the Buick to pick up my son at the train station in Joliet.  Hell I used to drive to Springfield and Chicago with corrected vision much worse than this.  I’m pretty confident I could pass the test at the Driver’s License place right now.  I think I’ll need a slight correction in the end, but it’s evident that I am seeing better than I have seen since before I was nine, and maybe ever.  I’m amazed.

Given that I will need these eyes for only twenty more years, give or take five or so, this could be my last big fix.  (Knock wood.)  Even if my eyes deteriorate and my prescription changes I’m starting at such a good place I may never need the kind of correction I needed just four months ago.

 

And so this Thanksgiving I am glad to be living in these times when such technology is available.  I’m thankful for these caring doctors:

              Dr. Tim Ortiz, Optometrist - Ortiz Eye and Hearing Center

              Dr. David Lubeck, Ophthamologist - Arbor Eye Care

And I’m thankful for the staff that support these doctors.  Like many who lead or have led organizations, they may in the end be only as good as their staff.  Those two doctors are surrounded by good people.

And while I’m at it let me express my thanks to the Alcon company, and Leica, and all the producers of the equipment and materials that go into these amazing new technologies and procedures that have been developed.  I can and do criticize our health system for many things: high costs and profits, lack of access, and other shortcomings, but when I realize all it has done to enhance my life and the lives of others it shuts me up some.

So yes I’m thankful for the insurance company and the structure they work within.  I had fallen into a gap between my wife’s teachers insurance and Medicare.  She qualified for Medicare while I did not, and I was no longer eligible to ride along on her policy.  So I took out a Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy to get me by.  Thanks to Obamacare it covered all my preexisting conditions.  This deal cost me some, but given the outcome that cost is ridiculously low.  How do you put a value on clear sight really?

At this time last year I was on a solo road trip to Florida via two lane roads through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.  This year, to celebrate these new eyes, I’m going to take a similar trip, in a new used Buick with a gas gauge that works, going further east before heading south.  I hope to catch West Virginia, North Carolina, all of Georgia, and central Florida.  The Blue Ridge Mountains are out there somewhere as are the Appalachians.  I’ll leave January 4^th and blog along the way, reporting on what I see.  If you are familiar at all with that route and have suggestions for places to visit by all means let me know.

Trust me, I am very grateful to be able to make such a trip again.       

An Escape into Food

Last weekend I wore myself out along with my family and many of my friends by preparing and serving a seven course dinner which was auctioned off this spring at YSB’s Blue Tie Event.  The successful bidders opted to have the dinner for 12 in the upstairs dining hall of Reddick Mansion, an old Italianate Mansion in Ottawa on the town square.  It’s the default dinner site, although we’ll prepare and serve a meal anywhere the bidder chooses (within reason) providing there’s a suitable kitchen.

Sadly we’ve lost track of how many years we’ve done this, but it’s gone on for a while now.  I started out doing it mostly myself, but quickly I recruited help.  It’s pretty clear now I couldn’t pull it this meal off without the help of my family and friends.  Here’s a description of the courses and a few other random thoughts about the ingredients and all.  Eating is one of the real pleasures in life, and eating well is a bonus. The only thing better than eating fine food is writing about it.  I hope you like it.  Who knows?  Maybe you’ll buy it at YSB’s fundraiser next year.

Dinner at the Mansion November 7, 2015

• ·       Fancy cheeses with crackers, olives, hummus with warm pita bread
• ·       Fresh greens with handmade dressing
• ·       Smoked Pork Belly with Apple Chutney and carrots
• ·       Jumbo Shrimp in Cajun sauce with Polenta Cake
• ·       Sour cream Gnocchi with red sauce (grated cheese?)
• ·       Prime Rib with horseradish sauce, green beans, and carrots
• ·       Pumpkin crème brulee, espresso, and liquers

We have prepared some new and old dishes for you Saturday night.  Let me tell you a little about them.

The appetizers are uncomplicated finger foods to get you started.  My son Dean makes the hummus from scratch soaking good dry garbanzos and adding the best tahini and olive oil he can find.  He won’t tell you all the spices he uses.  We offer some cheeses you might not usually buy for yourself, and fresh olives to go with them along with warm pita bread.  Enjoy the appetizers as you have a glass of wine, meet the other guests, and get ready for a serious meal.

The salad is made from seasonal greens and is simple, topped with goat cheese and hot pear slices sautéed in butter.  My daughter Moe makes a vinaigrette dressing by hand with Champagne vinegar and other good stuff which is served on the salad.  If you would like an alternative, or would prefer to have it on the side please let us know.  Again, pretty straightforward up to this point.

Your group will be the first to experience our seared pork belly.  This idea comes from Moe’s friend Don and has been fun to do.  I bought a local pork belly from the Wyanet Locker, which keeps them on hand to make their own bacon.  Pork Belly is just what it suggests, the belly or bottom cut, between the front and rear legs of a mature hog.  It is uncured, and includes a layer of rich fat.  We brined that belly overnight in a mixture of water, kosher salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, peppercorns, and garlic.   The next day Tom Gardner smoked it for about four hours on the South Side of Ottawa using applewood chips for flavor.  Prior to serving we seared it in a hot iron skillet, plated it on a bed of homemade apple chutney, and drizzled it with a bourbon and brown sugar syrup.  We think you’ll like it.

 

On the chance that he might know, I inquired to the butcher at Wyanet Locker about the pig from whence the belly originated.  Wyanet is a small farm town west of Princeton and the locker plant there not only does its own butchering but arranges its own slaughtering, often buying local pigs from area farmers.  He was unfamiliar with that particular pig but knew the farmer who sold it and promised to talk to him.  I gave him my cell phone number.

 

The next day the farmer called.  He remembered that particular hog he recently sold to the people at Wyanet and told me a little about him.  Actually he told me a lot about him.  I had the feeling he missed him.

 

He recalled that as a young pig he was rambunctious, full of life, and a vigorous eater.  He came from a big litter and enjoyed his time with his litter mates.  He was, if not the biggest, certainly one of the biggest of all the shoats on the farm, and could always be found cavorting around the pig pen.

“Happy as a pig in shit,” the farmer recalled.

He was castrated at a young age, which mellowed him.  As a barrow he settled into a life of solitude, often seen standing alone at the edge of the sty gazing beyond the horizon.

“Dreamy like, you know?” the farmer said.

I know full well.  Contemplative, meditative, content with life.

His life was short.  He was slaughtered at eighteen months, his body cut to pieces with his best parts on sale in the Wyanet display case.  Miscellaneously, he can be found in their sausage.

 

His belly will be on your plate, soon to be a part of you.  Enjoy.

The next dish, Jumbo Shrimp, is a McClure variation on shrimp and grits.  The polenta, the Italian version of corn meal, is fashioned into something of a soft cornbread slab.

Over that are lightly cooked jumbo shrimp topped with a bayou inspired Cajun sauce.  The shrimp are local from the Fox River.  No they’re not.  I’m putting you on.  We have no idea where the shrimp came from.  Whole Foods.  Wild caught somewhere in the Pacific.

 

We sneak in a new vegetarian course next, simple gnocchi with a red sauce.  We were going to put them on the next plate but we thought the plate, and your palate, would be crowded with too many tastes.  Gnocchi are a little dumpling cooked like pasta, popular again in Italy and places crawling with Italians, like Argentina.  These are a variation, made with sour cream added to flour, which makes them light and delightful.  Don’t you delight in light food?  Hence delightful.

We serve them with Caton Road marinara sauce, not enough to overpower them but enough to give you that nice tomatoey garlicky taste.  That’s Caton Road garlic too by the way.  We might give you fresh grated Parmesean Reggiano cheese on top of that dish, and then we might not.  We don’t know if we can line up enough graters.  We’ll surprise you with that.

We finish the entrees with an old standard, prime rib of beef served with homemade horseradish sauce (made from horseradish root dug from my garden in Field’s Hill).  The prime rib, bone in, is I think the best cut of beef from our friends the McGrogans at Handy Foods in Ottawa.  We serve it with freshly steamed and sautéd green beans and roasted organic carrots.  The carrots were grown in Sharon Loudon’s raised bed backyard garden just across the river. Sharon is one of your servers and her garden is only, I’d say, a good drive, a solid three wood, and a five iron (maybe an easy four) from where you’ll be sitting.  The carrots were in the ground till yesterday.  This dish is not fancy, but it is damn good.  You can screw up good food trying to be sophisticated.  We keep it simple and hope you appreciate it.

We finish with an old favorite, crème brulee.  Owing to the season we will add some pumpkin and pie spice.  We make this ahead and burn the sugar on top just before serving it to you.  It is rich and sinfully good, if I do say so myself.  We like serving this to our dinner guests, because they like it so much.  With it you get, if you wish, espresso coffee in teeny cups and saucers with tiny spoons (NO  DECAF-DON’T ASK) and assorted shots of three after dinner liquers, take your pick, in fancy ass little glasses.

 

And that’s it.  We hope you like the food, the surroundings, the wine and the company.  Enjoy yourselves.  Drink plenty but not so much that you don’t remember the meal.  Be kind to your server, they’re both volunteers and our friends.  And feel free to tip them.  All gratuities go to YSB.

Thank you for supporting the kids and families Youth Service Bureau of Illinois Valley works so hard to help.  They’re not eating as well as you are tonight, I guarantee.

Bon appétit,

Dave McClure

P.S.-That farmer didn’t really call me.

Photos by Wynn Venard

Farewell 2015 Cubs and Thank You

So much has been written about the Cubs, but now with the World Series over and the time changed, all the hype fades till February when pitchers and catchers report to spring training.  The baseball news gets skinny in the regular press; confined to trades, acquisitions, and the business side of baseball.  I took down the Tribune full page player photos and the W towel from the shack. 

I’ll miss the games, the radio and TV broadcasts, the slow unfolding of division races in the standings, and the individual achievements of the players.  They’re out there somewhere, the Cub players, relaxing I hope.  It was quite a run for them in 2015.

Monday I watched the Kansas City Royals finish off the Mets in New York.  I appreciated the camera shots of the Met fans at the conclusion of the TV broadcast.  Grim, dejected, downcast, and mournful faces were rife in the home stands.  It’s awful to lose, especially after achieving so much.  I knew how they felt.

 

I was in Wrigley Field for the last game of the National League Championship Series.  I had barely taken my seat in the left field bleachers when the Mets went ahead in the top of the first inning.  They stayed there, stomping my young Cub team, making them look bad, exposing their weaknesses.  After the Mets had scored six I left for a half inning, roaming Wrigley’s refurbished back bleacher area and finding Hot Doug’s (I had the tasty Rick Reuschel sausage.). It wasn’t supposed to end like that.  It had been a story book season, the story was drawing to a close, and it was not a happy ending.  There would be no miracle finish.  Unlike the previous game I attended, the first of the Division Series at Wrigley, when they hit six home runs against the Cardinals, the Cubs lost soundly and decisively to the Mets.  I felt like that sad Paul Simon baseball song from “Crazy After All These Years.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILGsLlS7stw&index=5&list=PLLtQvkTqKXThUDFb3UaXygDC5s38fJeiJ

But wait.  They Cubs lost while playing for the championship of the National League.  It suddenly came to me.  This is a victory. 

I wrote about the 2014 Cub season last fall in a blog post called “You Are Where You Are.”  If you scroll down through the posts it’s still there.  I tried as best I could then to put a positive spin on what was a losing season.  They finished last in their division you know.  Here’s an excerpt from that piece written at the end of September.

Did Cub fans have high hopes for their 2014 team in spring training?  No.  We expected them to have a losing season.  It was called a rebuilding year from the start, which is a misnomer.  For the Cubs it was simply a building year.  They had nothing to rebuild from.  Rebuilding implies you once had a solid structure to restore.  The Cubs have been in shambles, as far as their won-loss record, since their last winning season in 2008.  They lost 101 games in 2012.  Winning seasons have been few and far between since 1908.  It’s a very sad history to own.  But such is the history of the Chicago Cubs.  They are where they are.

The Cubs finished in the cellar in 2014 with a record of 73 wins and 89 losses.  They were in last place of the National League’s Central Division for the fifth year in a row.  Thirty teams make up Major League Baseball in America, fifteen teams in both the American and National League.  The best team in baseball, Numero Uno during the regular season, were the Los Angeles Angels with a record of 98 wins and 64 losses.  The Cubs, looking purely at wins and losses now and not beer sales at home games, tied with the Philadelphia Phillies as 23^rd best team in baseball with a winning percentage of .451.  But then, everybody has to be somewhere.

Though few recognize it there is each year a king of the cellar dwellers, the team that happens to find themselves last in their division but with the best record of the worst losers.  It happens this year that the Cubs tied the Phillies as being “Best of the Worst.”  You won’t find this kind of analysis on ESPN folks.  It’s a shame to allow the title of “Best of the Worst” to end as a tie.  I personally believe it should be decided by a one game playoff.

Never, when I wrote that sentence about a “Best of the Worst” playoff last fall, did I envision the Cubs involved in a one game playoff to make the playoffs at the conclusion of the 2015 regular season.  But there they were.  I am still amazed.  Here’s what the Chicago Cubs accomplished in the regular season.

The Cubs won their last eight games, ending the season with a record of 97 wins and 65 losses, and finished third in their division.  Their record was third best in Major League Baseball, behind the Cardinals with 100 wins and the Pirates with 98.  Had they played in any other division in either league they would have finished first.  The division winning Mets won 90, the Royals 95, the Texas Rangers 88.  They did with a lineup that started as many as four rookies at times.

They won by scoring early and staying ahead.  They scored late and won by coming from behind.  They won close games with good pitching.  They won by hitting home runs.  They led the league in walks and strikeouts.  They made mistakes.  But they won.  They played small ball when they needed, executed double steals, rubbed their helmets when they got on base, laughed, dumped water on each other, rushed the field and mobbed the player with the walk off hit, and had so much fun.   It was raucous inside the clubhouse.  They danced after victories, accompanied by a smoke machine and a disco ball.   They ignored curses (what goat?) and dismal history.   They weren’t born when that stuff happened.  Some of their parents weren’t even born then.  They didn’t care.  And they drove the entrenched pessimism right out of the hearts of old and jaded Cub fans like me.  As the season went on and they grew braver and more confident I could feel the fear of collapse, misery, and my own personal baseball squalor leaving me.  It was wonderful.

 

Both the players and the fans fell in love with new manager Joe Maddon.  He played a new kind of baseball in Chicago, moved players in and out of the lineup, up and down the batting order, from one position to another.  He took charge and showed both the rookies and the veterans what it took to win.  And win they did, over and over.  Success was infectious.  You could see it grow.  The summer grew hot.  July came and they were still winning.  August was even better.  Then they had a simply magnificent September.  Joe made pre-game batting practice optional. And, miracle of miracles, the Cubs kept playing into October.  Wrigley Field was resplendent in October, the ivy just starting to yellow.  I know it was true because I was there.  Who would have thought?  Not me.

The Cubs didn’t win the World Series.  They fell short.  They were on fire at the end of the regular season, winning their last eight, winning their ninth against the Pirates to earn the right to play the Cardinals.  They lost their first game in St. Louis, only to win the next three.   Before they were swept by the Mets they went on a 12-1 tear.  But in the end it was the Mets who were hot, until they played the Royals.  It may be the team puts themselves in a position to win and gets hot at the finish.  The Cubs are very close to being that team.

    

As the young talented Kansas City Royal players celebrated in New York I imagined the Cubs in their place.  Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo putting on the victor’s tee shirts, Addison Russell and Jake Arrieta donning World Series Champs hats, Kyle Schwarber in catcher’s gear (get him out of left field for God sake) lifting Hector Rondon off the ground.  World Series champs.  I could actually imagine it.  A once unimaginable scene is now possible.  What a difference a year can make.  The Cubs are transformed as I am along with them.

That young Kansas City team, essentially the same line up this year as last, lost the series in 2014, leaving a runner ninety feet away on third base as the Giants took them down.  They paid their dues, learning the hard way what it takes to win it all.  The Royals built their team as the Cubs have, with patience, developing young talent.  It’s a winning strategy, and it’s the path the Cubs are on.  Unlike 2008, when the Cubs paid too much for players at the end of their career, essentially taking an unsustainable shot at post season glory, this team has legs.  We have these great young kids for years into the future.

      

Now I really mean it when I say “Wait until next year.”  The sarcasm is gone and the next year filled with promise.  The Cubs are in a different place, and I like where they are.  I can’t wait till spring 2016.  Go Cubs.  Thank you for giving us hope.  

Hallelujah! Robots Milk Cows!

Graniteville, Vt. (AP)- (Excerpt) Robots have taken up residence at some small and medium sized dairy farms across the country, providing reliable and more efficient labor and helping businesses remain viable.

All praise to technology and computer geeks.  I take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about you.  You’ve transformed the life of the dairy farmer, the most oppressed, confined, and tethered of all farmers in history bar none.  This is the best thing since sliced bread.  Who am I kidding, its way better than sliced bread.  It’s freedom.  Pure unadulterated freedom.  God bless you programmers locked in rooms unable to speak intelligibly because of the code running through your heads.  You wonderful geeks may not even know what you’ve done.

My family and their predecessors milked Jersey cows on a small farm between Danvers and Mackinaw for God knows how long, probably 100 years.  They delivered raw whole milk, coffee cream, and whipping cream to the people who lived in town until pasteurization requirements put such small dairies out of business.  They made their own butter and fed the skim milk to the cats.  In 1941 they invested in the future as they saw it and built a modern state of the art dairy barn and milk house that complied with looming health laws.  They closed the Danvers delivery operation and shipped Grade A milk to Prairie Farms Dairy until my Mom and Dad retired and sold the cows in 1979.  Let’s just take a stab at quantifying how much work that represents.

If the Sloanes or those before them began milking cows in 1879 (that’s possible) and the McClures took up that task after them not stopping until 1979, they milked cows for 36,500 days not screwing around with leap years and the like.  Dairy farmers milk cows twice a day rain or shine, sickness or health, weather so bad you can hardly get to the barn.  That’s 73,000 milkings.  Spouses and children die, wars break out, calamities occur, tornadoes threaten, ice storms force you to chip open the milk house door, but twice a day you quietly go to the dairy barn, open the door, feed the cows, and relieve them of their milk.  Their milk is both your food and your livelihood.  Selling milk is a steady year round source of revenue.  Your labor is rewarded, but oh my how it affects your life.  Morning and night, morning and night, milking cows with no end in sight.  Committing yourself to dairy farming is like a sentencing yourself to a lifetime of hard labor.  Until now, the dawning of a new age, when cows milk themselves with the aid of robots.

In the past if you milked cows you could of course go anywhere you wanted.  It’s still a free country.  You can go anywhere, after you milk the cows in the morning that is, and as long as you can get home by 4:30 to milk them again.

Want to look at that more closely?  You get up, often in the dark, put on your chore clothes and make your way to the kitchen.  Mom has made coffee.  You may have some, with conversation, or you may just sit there under the dim kitchen light and listen to AM radio; ads, jingles (still in my head), and bouncy announcers.  You go to the basement and put on your coveralls and boots, hat and gloves.  Outside you make your way to the barn.  In winter the cows are kept inside, two rows of twelve facing outside windows.  When you open the door an entire row of twelve cows facing you, twenty four big black eyes, look at your expectantly.  You are their keeper.  You know them each by name.  The first thing you do is feed them.

In summer when the cows are on night pasture the cows are outside the barn, waiting at the door.  You put scoops of feed in the manger in front of each cow’s place, knowing which stall each cow goes to, adjusting the amount of feed, more for the heavy milkers, less for the lightweights, only half for cows gone dry, a month or so away from delivering their next calf. You slide the barn door open a foot or so.  The cows look up at you expectantly; docile, patient, and hungry.  You slide the doors completely open and they file in, step across the gutter, put their necks through the steel stanchions, always the same stall, and begin to eat.  When they are all in you close the stanchions, locking them in, turn on the pump (an electric motor creating a vacuum line up and down the rows of cows), bring in the milkers, pails, and wash water and begin.

24 cows, 12 petcocks providing vacuum to three Surge milking machines, which are suspended under the cow’s udder on straps called surcingles over the cows back by their hip bones.  Eight changes at the most if all 24 cows are being milked, five minutes or so per change, forty minutes for the milking itself.  Chores, the generic word for our morning and evening tending to the cows, took longer.  Hour and fifteen minutes.  Less if you hurried.  Twice a day, every day, for what seemed like the rest of your life.  You could do it yourself if you had to, but it was best done with two.

 

The invention that was most revolutionary for dairy farmers, after electricity, was the milking machine.  Prior to that you sat beside every cow and milked them individually by hand.  I cannot imagine.   From time to time a cow with an injury or mastitis required one or more quarters be milked by hand and I would do it, unless Dad beat me to it.  Hand milking connects you with the cow in an almost meditative way.  It not only takes longer it allows you to do nothing else.  Two teats at a time, alternate squeezes until dry, repeat.  Milking machines introduced speed and freedom to the dairy barn.  While the machine manipulates the cow’s teats four at a time and extracts the milk, rubber sleeves automatically inflating and collapsing in stainless steel cups, you could carry milk to the milk house, wash the teats of the next cows to be milked, feed hay, any number of things.  Besides your mind going far away during hand milking your hands tire.

“Makes your grip strong,” my Dad would say.  Dad was a positive guy.

Positivity helped dairy farmers survive I think.

The dairy invention that revolutionized milking in my lifetime was the barn cleaner.  The Badger Company out of Wisconsin made them popular.  Investing in a barn cleaner relieved the dairy farmer from a very important but unpleasant task.  Shoveling shit.

To accommodate bigger herds dairy technology went to barns with milking parlors and lounging sheds sometime in the sixties and the cows shit in large areas that could be cleaned with tractors and loaders.  Our barn with stanchions became the cow’s winter home.  A good dairy cow eats alfalfa hay and ground feed voraciously, drinks a lot of water, stays skinny, and turns all her energy into milk production and producing calves.  Because of all that, dairy cows produce manure in prodigious amounts.  That manure, in a smaller confined stanchion barn, must be removed daily.  Add that to your winter chores. Here’s how that goes.

 

Empty two fifty foot concrete gutters full of cow manure by shoveling one scoop of shit at a time into a wheelbarrow.  When full, brimming, wheel the barrow up a ramp out a side door, across a wooden runway, dump it into the waiting manure spreader, bring it back on the same path, and prepare to refill.  Repeat twelve times.  On a cold and windy winter day when the manure was steaming my brother Darwin, just a kid, was emptying a loaded wheelbarrow into the spreader and a gust of wind blew him headfirst into the spreader.  He got out, but not before cow shit filled his ears and nose.  All kids, they say, need to learn how and when to keep their mouth shut.  My older brother learned the hard way.  Darwin was never fond of milking cows.

When the gutters were empty of manure we spread crushed limestone in the gutter, and when the spreader was full (every third day or so) hooked the tractor onto the manure spreader, affectionately called the terd hearse, and drove it to the assigned field where we engaged the chain drive which fed the manure to the back beaters and flung shit high in the air.  We drove over the field till empty, watching for wind and changing direction cautiously, then drove back and put the manure spreader back into position.  Elapsed time from the start of shoveling to the end?  That easily averaged an hour a day from October till April.  Sundays too.

A barn cleaner like the one Badger sold had a powerful electric motor at the end of an elevated steel chute that dragged a continuous heavy linked chain with paddles through the gutters, automatically pushing the cow manure up the chute where it emptied into the manure spreader.  Voila.  A load of cow shit ready to spread untouched by human hands.  All that was required of the dairy farmer was to throw a lever on an electrical box.  The first time we saw it work we had huge smiles on our faces. Technology.  We loved it.  Really, who cared how much it cost?

There was symmetry to the kind of farming we did on that small farm.  Dad rotated crops on all the tillable acres: soybeans, corn, oats, and alfalfa.  We had permanent pasture with timber and a creek on land that otherwise couldn’t be farmed.  We scooped forty scoops of oats and sixty scoops of ear corn in a little box wagon we hauled to town behind a tractor each week to the feed mill at the elevator.  They added soybean meal, salt, and molasses and ground it while we waited.  The seal on the molasses valve leaked and I always got a thick finger full of molasses off it.  We brought the wagon home full of feed and scooped it back into the feed room in the barn.  Scooped it twice-first as whole grain next as feed.

We made two thousand bales or so of alfalfa hay each year and threw small bales down from the mow to feed the cows twice each day they were not on pasture. In addition we made oat straw for bedding.  The grain and hay the cows ate and of course the pasture they grazed all came from the land around us.  We drank raw milk from the cows and ate the cows as well, butchering them ourselves when I was young and later at the slaughter house in town.  We stored the meat at the locker plant, a big communal freezer in Danvers, until we got our own deep freeze at the house. We fertilized our fields with manure from the cows which in turn helped grow the crops we fed the cows. The cows not only made us money but fed us too.  Same with the chickens.  Milk, eggs, meat, and the garden dominated our diet.  Mom canned vegetables; sweet corn, green beans, pickles, pickled beets, and on and on.  We were organic and didn’t know it.  My Dad, being a modern farmer, used commercial fertilizer and other chemicals as did neighboring farmers in the grain fields when they became available, but he never stopped rotating crops or spreading manure.  It’s hard to find that kind of farm now.  But I have a feeling, and a hope, that technology may make it possible for dairy to achieve small scale viability through new efficiencies like these robotic milkers.

Modern farmers are using them to save labor costs, something we never incurred on our farm, because the family did all the milking.  We were a farm family.  My brothers and I helped my Dad, but no one helped as much as my Mom.  She was in the barn with the rest of us, and cooked all the meals and did the dishes besides.  I don’t think farmers valued their labor then in terms of dollars.  Putting long hours in on the farm was simply what farmers did.  The temptation, perhaps economic necessity, of working in town for wages to supplement farm income probably killed off small dairy farms.  Consider the winter work schedule circa 1960 for our small scale dairy operation like ours in Danvers.

 

6:30-8:00 a.m.                Morning milking, feed the calves

8:00-9:00                        Breakfast

9:00-10:30                      Wash the milkers, clean the barn, spread manure

10:30-noon                     Other farm work

NOON                            Dinner (followed by my Dad’s big nap)

1:30-4:30 p.m.                Other farm tasks

4:30-6:00                        Evening milking, feed the calves

6:00-6:30                        Wash the milkers

6:30 p.m.                         Supper

6:30-bedtime                   Leisure

Take that day and repeat it for the entire number of days you own a herd of dairy cows.  That was your life as a dairy farmer.  You could squeeze in a day off the farm from time to time, but only between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. and certainly not two days in a row, lest you fall behind.  In addition to the milking you had the grain farming; planting, harvesting, and cultivation, plus making hay, repairing equipment, caring for the pasture, cutting thistles, making fence, shelling corn, countless other tasks that farmers simply did. Take away the every day, twice a day task of milking however, and you might be able to take a job that actually paid you money directly for hours worked.  As tractors and implements improved and got larger, enabling farmers to plant and care for more grain acreage, selling dairy cows became easier not only because the milk check became smaller as a proportion of farm income, but because by doing so you could escape a grueling every day schedule of hard work.   You could begin to imagine such a thing as “vacation,” something we never experienced as a family.  I take that back.

When I was eight we drove to Ft. Leonard Wood Kentucky to watch my brother graduate from Army basic training.  We were gone three days and two nights and stayed in motels for the first time ever.  That was the extent of travel with my parents as a kid.  In our absence our neighbor Henry milked the cows.

Modern dairy farmers in the United States have been using migrant labor to milk cows, and it has been in short supply.  In the Netherlands, where labor is more generously rewarded, more than half the dairies now use robotic milkers.  Jesse and Jennifer Lambert of Graniteville Vermont just took out a seven year $380,000 loan to install two robots and retrofit a barn at their organic dairy farm.  They were looking for a more consistent way to milk their cows, spend more time with their newborn son, and at the same time save money.  They are saving $60,000 a year in labor costs that would have gone to a full time and part time employee, and are producing 20% more milk.

 

“No one wants to milk cows,” Jennifer Lambert said.  “Especially on the weekend.”

She also thinks the robots lead to more relaxed cows.  When a cow wants to be milked, it simply steps up into a stall, grain is dumped in front of it, and an arm reaches under its body to wash the teats.  Next a laser scans the cow’s body, and the arm attaches a cup to each of the four teats, milking them individually.  In addition, the technology collects and stores data about each cow’s production, body temperature, weight, and number of visits to the milking system and sends all that data to the farmer’s computer.

Wow.  You could sit in the barn on a lawn chair and read your smart phone or kindle while all that was going on.  Or stay in the house and read about it later on your computer.

 

I worked on a dairy farm near Aberdeen, Scotland in the winter of 1975 that milked 260 cows aided by a computerized system.  As groups of twenty cows came in the milking parlor we entered each cow’s number, printed on large ear tags, into a computer.  That number generated a portion of feed that was consistent with where they were in their cycle, cutting back as their milk production waned, doing what Dad did with a feed scoop and the knowledge of each cow in the barn.  It was nothing more a feed and data system.  But I never imagined a machine could milk a cow.  Why not I wonder?  Now 40 years later it’s a reality.

It would be wonderful if the cost of robotic dairy technology came down.  With even less costly labor small farmers might once maintain dairy herds, and we could conceivably return to drinking milk from local farms, perhaps even delicious raw milk.  Like small batch craft beer and whiskey, small batch locally produced dairy products, not only organic milk but cheese and butter as well, could have a resurgence.  I’d be the first in line, as long as I didn’t have to milk the cows.  

Compromise is Not a Dirty Word

Good news drives out the bad easily when we let it.  There are so many things we wish would go away that we crave distraction.  And so the Cub’s post season play takes over our attention along with the Democratic Presidential Candidate debate and we in Illinois and Americans everywhere glide through the waning months of 2015 as if all were well.  Just six days ago there were not one but two more school shootings, and an outcry from the highest levels for increased gun control measures that swiftly faded.  In order to protect each other we have gladly taken our shoes off in airports for fifteen years because of a single and unsuccessful shoe bombing attempt, but yet we shrug off any suggestion of efforts to control gun violence no matter how many children are killed.  I digress.

Two weekends ago we got together with family on Sunday for a brunch in Bridgeport, a neighborhood in Chicago.  Folks were in from Florida we don’t often see so we used their visit as an occasion to eat and drink and talk.  Nice day.

I was interested in what we talked about, or I guess what we didn’t talk about.  Though most of us were from Illinois we didn’t talk about state politics.  The rise in Chicago property taxes was touched on briefly but nothing on the budget stalemate in Springfield.  If the school shooting in Oregon, gun control or the lack of it, was discussed I wasn’t in the room.

We did talk about Syrian refugees, mainly I think because a Bosnian couple, neighbors of our hosts, were there as guests.  There were refugees themselves once, and have a special feeling for people displaced by politics and violence.  That’s why it’s good for me to get out of the shack and talk to people. I get the benefit of different perspectives.

We talked about each other.  We talked a lot about the Cubs.  We talked about the food, family that weren’t there, when we saw each other last and when we’ll be together again.  Everyone has personal news, things going on in their lives, and we’re nosy enough to want to know all about it.  I’m not sure what we talked about, but we talked and talked and talked.  Hours of talking, three or four conversations at once, catching up, learning new things, hearing from ourselves the answers to questions about our own lives we so rarely put into words.  It was good.  You might go as far as to call it wonderful.  I not sure why we don’t do it more often.

But after I was home, and thought of what wasn’t said, I tried to answer this:  If we don’t talk about urgent and pressing problems to our closest family and friends, who do we talk to?  Our Face Book friends?  That’s not what I call a real conversation.

On the night of the lunar eclipse I had a rare conversation about state government with regular folks.  We were sitting around Weber grills talking about the recent departure of the head of the Illinois’ Department of Agriculture, a local farmer from Seneca.  He was summarily dismissed by Gov. Rauner for saying the wrong thing, which was most likely true.  I don’t know what it was, some say the reporting of attendance numbers at the fair, but the recently hired head of the state fair resigned in protest of his boss’s firing.  Shutting people up by essentially eliminating them is to me one of our new Governor’s least attractive qualities.  In any case, I mentioned that there was some controversy about going ahead full throttle with Illinois’ two state fairs, Springfield and DuQuoin, in the absence of a budget and one of my friend’s reacted by saying

“You can’t cancel the State Fair.  All those 4-H kids that work so hard all year?  Take the fair away from them?”

I appreciate my friend for a lot of things but especially for thinking of kids.  He and I are both involved with our local county fair.  I’m a volunteer judge and he works year round to organize the dog show portion of the 4-H fair.  We jokingly call him the superintendent of dogs.  He’s a retired (but still part time) educator and a smart guy.  That he thought of those 4-H kids right away is consistent with his values.  He’s a good guy.  I hope my answer didn’t offend him.

“We can’t cancel the State Fair but we can take away day care for thousands of Illinois preschool kids whose families are poor?  We take care of the 4-H kids but abandon low income families who used to qualify for day care help?”

Another friend chimed in, “If you cancelled the state fair there would be a big ruckus.  But take benefits away from poor people and you hear very little.  Either no one notices or no one cares.”

I refuse to believe no one cares about low income parents and their children although evidence of that being true abounds.  The conversation ended there.  We just looked at each other and moved on to other topics.  Really, what more can you say?  Even more difficult, what can you do?  We’re a long way from another election in Illinois.

Here’s how ere’s Hereit has gone down in Illinois.  90% of the activities Illinois funded last year continue, cobbled together without a budget by the two appropriation bills Rauner did approve, court orders, and consent decrees.  The remaining 10% is in “no budget limbo” meaning contracts were not issued, or spending for contracts issued is not authorized.  What’s not being paid?  The state supported activities that no one notices or no one cares about.  Or in other words, the things you can get away with politically.

Political leverage for a quick budget passage was severely compromised when state employees were paid on time and public schools payments issued.  With paychecks flowing and schools open, and various other state functions secured by court rulings, Illinois entered a protracted stalemate that allows my life and perhaps yours to be affected very little, while screwing the less fortunate.  There have been a few exceptions.

Rauner’s administration closed the Illinois State Museum (which I’ve been to) in Springfield and it’s four satellite locations along with the World Shooting and Recreation Center in Sparta operated by the Department of Natural Resources (which I didn’t know existed). In both cases he laid off the administrative staff, but continues to pay the unionized state employees working there pending a court decision and so saves little money.  It is estimated that the museum closing will amount to savings of maybe $400,000.  Chump change really when compared to this year’s deficit estimated at $5 Billion to $8 Billion dollars if we don’t raise taxes to their former level.  That’s billion with a B you know.  Each billion comes with 9 zeros. Want to see just one?  Unless you’re a hedge fund manager or a politician you aren’t used to seeing numbers this big.

 

$1,000,000,000

Last year’s appropriations were about $66 Billion in Illinois, so a $5-8 Billion shortfall is a big problem, without even counting unpaid bills and all the fooling around the politicians do with numbers.  It’s all rather symbolic, the cuts and the rhetoric around them.  It’s a play for publicity and a ploy to influence opinion rather than an attempt to actual govern.  As the days go by and we don’t collect more income tax (you know, that temporary increase both parties allowed to expire January 1) the deficit just gets deeper.  Both sides know we need those taxes.  Who will get the blame for raising them is the only question remaining.  We’re watching a slow shutdown of state government.

I did check the sticker on my license plate when Jesse White said he was no longer mailing out expiration notices.  I have missed buying a new sticker before even when he does mail me the stuff.  But really, my life goes on relatively unaffected by the state budget.  How about yours?  You do realize don’t you that others are not so lucky.  After all, I’m on social security and about to be covered by Medicare, both federal programs.  Those who depend on the State of Illinois are the ones who are screwed.  In particular those that depend on that big fund in Illinois called the general fund that accounts for about $36 B of the $66 B Illinois spends.

 

State governments make public policy for their own citizens.  While they pass through a lot of federal money, about half their budget in most states for restricted purposes, states also decide how to spend their own tax revenue (which comes from state income tax, sales tax, gambling, and more) to fund and carry out those policies and fund priorities they create.  States have different problems. They spend their own dollars on public education, health care including mental health, public safety, child welfare and day care, social services, support for commerce and industry, agriculture, infrastructure improvements, state parks, all kinds of things, where they see fit.  It’s not fluff, this general fund spending.  On the contrary the general fund supports basic services that help keep the people of the state whole and healthy.  That spending improves and enhances the lives of Illinois’ citizens.  It’s government, and when it’s done right its good government.  The plan which carries out that spending is the annual budget.  Within it you can see the state’s priorities.

Illinois has not had a budget for over 100 days.  Who’s getting screwed because of that?  The people who depend on the activities the general fund supports which have not this year been granted a political pass.  That’s who.  Here’s a partial list:

·       Low income parents seeking day care

·       The mentally ill

·       Homeless and troubled youth

·       Drug addicts and alcoholics

·       The developmentally disabled

·       Seniors and handicapped persons benefitting from personal assistants

     

There are basic services needed and provided to vulnerable Illinois citizens that cannot be categorized as medical, fit under the rubric of health, and paid for by your health insurance policy, Medicare or Medicaid.  How and why did those services develop?  They developed because Illinois saw a need for them and appropriated money to fill those needs.  Do you see a pattern in that list?  Would you characterize any of those groups as connected, politically active, and vocal?  Many, perhaps most, of those Illinoisans are served by local not for profit agencies in your community whose mission is to help them.  They previously had grants and contracts, many held for thirty plus years, paid from general revenue funds that allowed them to carry on those activities.  Some of those organizations, especially those in rural areas without access to community foundations or significant corporate support, operate with budgets that are 90% or more state funded.  Last year’s payments, chronically late, have stopped dribbling in.  If your local agency is still open it has either spent from reserve funds or borrowed money to fund those activities since July 1.

 

In some cases besides not paying the agencies, the Rauner administration went out of its way to change eligibility requirements.  The low income families who last year could earn dollars up to a ceiling and still receive subsidized day care saw that ceiling drop by two thirds.  It is estimated that 90% of Illinois’ low income parents who received help paying for day care last year no longer qualify.  It was in legislative hearings about the effects of these emergency rule changes that Linda Satterfield of DHS was forced out of state government for telling the truth, suffering a fate similar to the Secretary of Agriculture.  Asked her opinion of what effect those changes would have she said “devastating.”  And that is pretty much the last word we’ve heard from Rauner’s people on that topic.

Illinois expanded its support for low income working families for a reason.  In 1995 Bill Clinton and Congress passed, with bi-partisan support, welfare reform which put a time limit on payments to low income mothers.  It worked.  Welfare rolls plummeted.  It worked in no small part because states like Illinois kept some of the savings they achieved through reduced welfare payments and invested them in sensible services like subsidized day care for working parents.  What do you suppose four months of a reversal of that policy has done to those families, some of them single parent families working minimum wage jobs?  Devastating is probably a fair word wouldn’t you say?

 

Few if any of these devastating measures have been reversed in the legislature.  Republicans have taken to voting present as a block, not wishing to vote no and appear unkind, which forces Democrats to take all the action, something they find impossible to do.  Politics won’t solve this I’m afraid.  Good government could.

 

Why have Illinois politicians put vulnerable Illinois citizens in this position?  Collective bargaining and term limits?  Future political control?  To advance one party at the expense of the other?  Really?  I think that’s shameful.  They should go into session next week and immediately do what is needed to take care of people who desperately need their government to act responsibly.  After they do, they can talk all they want.  I would tell them this if they would listen; talk till you’re blue in the face, beat each other up in the media, take polls, send out fliers, campaign all year, try to buy votes.  Go ahead.  Who cares?  We’ll decide your future when next we vote in any case.  But do none of that till you’ve passed a budget.  Not another word until you do your job.

   

Word has it Rauner and Madigan have not met since May.  Is that possible?  Surely they or their people are meeting behind closed doors and not telling us.  If they are I hope they are talking about things that really matter, like pension reform and an enlightened tax policy.  We deserve a very public discourse, so we can be better informed and thus smarter about whom we vote for next time.  But as for how to move forward, I suggest compromise.  Surely they remember compromise, that concept in which you get some of what you want but not everything.  You work to accomplish goals over time rather than insist it all happen immediately. Compromise does however requires listening, a certain amount of trust, and some faith.  All of those qualities appear to be in short supply in Springfield.

 

Compromise is not a dirty word.  It is a useful, even critical, strategy to employ when the plan you propose has components which are plainly non-starters.  Wholesale change to collective bargaining in Illinois is going nowhere, as are universal term limits, but I have an idea for a compromise that might work for the latter. Term limits for publicly elected officials have been talked about for many years and few governments embrace them.  But here’s one that could work.  Limit the number of years a single legislator can hold a leadership position-Speaker of the House, President of the Senate, Majority Whip, etc. which are determined by votes of their peers.  Limiting those terms would guarantee new people and new personalities regularly come into leadership.  It may sound small but that is a change that could shake up Springfield in a quiet but positive way.

I didn’t vote for Rauner but I didn’t think it was awful that Illinois changed governors. I like change. And while I didn’t agree with his approach to government and worried about his lack of experience in government, I thought Rauner was smart.  Turns out he’s just as pig headed as the rest.  Except for overdue and needed changes to Illinois’ criminal justice system, which enjoyed bi partisan support, his administration in its first year has accomplished little.  To the contrary, it is doing a lot of damage.  I guess it shows you don’t have to be a career politician to be unbending and inflexible.

What we need in Springfield and throughout Illinois are politicians of whatever background or experience who keep the best interests of the people they serve foremost in their mind.  I think neither Rauner nor our current legislative leaders are doing that.  I think both sides have another agenda.  I think we’re in big trouble in Illinois, and no one is leading us out of it.

We need a good week in Illinois government very soon. 

Writing Early in the Monring

There’s moonlight on the shack porch right now so bright.  I followed bits of it, circles, irregular shapes, of such bright light it lit up my shoes when I stepped in them through the yard from the house.  I thought it must be the streetlight but no, it was the moon high overhead shining through the trees.  That same eclipsing moon we saw fading away Sunday night is now high and bright at 6:00 a.m. Friday, just a sliver gone on one side, four days past full, not full again till nearly Halloween.

I’m in a race now, I’ve made a list, of things that must be done before winter comes.  For appearance sake I started with the hedges in the front yard.  I have a privet hedge between our house and the north neighbor that is my job to cut twice a year at least.  Trash trees grow, and stick out the top, faster than the hedge.  They are rooted between the hedge canes, nearly indistinguishable from the plant favored and nurtured, not to be cut down. It’s the same knot of wood at the base each year, long clipped from my near thirty years of living here, clipped again this year, the offender drug from the hedge and put in a pile.

Same with the lilacs.  I have a maple trying to grow that I thwart every year, and another nameless damn plant with rough ugly leaves that grows amazingly fast.  Some people pull these offenders out by the roots with chains and tractors I suppose, others paint them with poison hoping not to kill the desired plants around them.  I just cut them.  They grow back.  It’s a yearly thing.

And trim.  The lilacs if left alone would have grown all over my neighbor Bill’s windows by now.  As it was they were fast encroaching on his siding and out of control.  I took not only the new hand shears but the lopping shears with the big handles (Dull and bent, I need new ones) and the cheap saw I got at a yard sale.   Hacking away, feeling the muscles of my hands and shoulders tire as I made huge piles of branches.  I went on from the lilacs to the trees at the edge of the yard.  Seedlings from the redbuds take root and intrude.  The willow grows over the day lilies.  The choke cherry wants to extend its branches onto the shack roof.  I deny them.  I cut low branches, take out saplings, and this year eliminated an entire old bush half rotted at the root.  I’m a destroyer separating the yard from the chaos of the ravine.

When I enter the ravine I switch tactics.  It’s not my job to order that space.  While some neighbors clear the slope I’ve let mine go wild.  In the ravine I only remove traces of mankind and pull dead branches hung up on live ones, throwing them on the ground where they can rot proper.  It is life and death in there.  Trees sprout but, unable to move, are doomed for lack of light and die stunted and forlorn.  They can only hope the trees above them die while they’re still alive and give them chance to grow.  And they do, they die and rot in place and crash down. The ravine, a steep slope leading to a skinny creek, is littered with the trunks and branches of dead trees.  Too steep to haul them up for firewood I let them lay, let it all go.  There’s poison oak that grows in there, and wild grapevine but little else.  Shade, merely the absence of light, prevents the growth of grass or weeds.

 

I find a spent and rusted fuse on the ravine slope.  We have only circuit breakers.  It must have been there for thirty years.  I pick up five aluminum beer cans, two Styrofoam cups, a sheet of plastic nearly covered in loose soil and half rotted wood, and a wolverine snuff can.  I look for traces of the dead animal that caused the stink weeks ago but find nothing.  I wrap the trash in the plastic and carry it out.  Though just outside my shack window, there is no need to venture into the ravine again till spring.  Its best left alone.

This morning my hands hurt.  I have little scrapes and pokes from the wood I’ve been handling, and they’re a little stiff like the rest of me.  Today I have to trim a little more then burn what I’ve cut down.  Maybe at the end of the day we’ll roast hot dogs over the fire pit.
 

I read this morning in The Writer’s Almanac that crazy Wallace Stevens poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and a bit of his life story along with Graham Greene’s.  It is said that Graham Greene realized as a young writer that if he wrote but 500 words a day he would write more books than even the most prolific writers.   And so he did, every day, write 500 words and was so strict with himself he sometimes stopped in mid sentence.

The word sentence above was 831 and I’m just getting warmed up.  I wrote a 2,710 word blog post since Monday that I’ll save for next week, worked on finishing a short story, and outlined a possible novel this week all on top of lots of texts and FB posts and other miscellaneous scribbling.  I don’t have as much time as Graham Greene did when he was young. And then again, Graham’s stuff is polished and elegant.  It doesn’t look like I’ll be polished and elegant.  You can’t have everything.

Good luck to you in your preparations for winter.  Me?  I have things to write.  On top of that there is a hedge to trim, a shed to shingle, branches to burn, wood to split, jerk and chili paste to make and miles to go before I sleep.  That 'miles to go' line belongs to Robert Frost.  Then there's this:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.  

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

That is the first stanza of Wallace Steven's famous poem.  Look up the second and last stanza which is even better, more crazy than the first.  Aren't you glad the bunch of them; Wallace, Graham, and Robert, gave us this stuff?

P.S.-While you're at it, look up the meaning of concupiscent.  Who knew?