Garden Report

My garden is doing well.  I fenced off the peppers from the rabbits with chicken wire.  At first glance that sentence sounds like a recipe; peppers, rabbit and chicken.  It’s not.  Put it in the category of struggling to coexist and live in peace. 

   

We live by a ravine where rabbits flourish.  In the winter we have rabbit tracks in the snow all over the backyard and every spring baby cottontails show up.  My wife thinks they’re delightful. She coos when she sees them.

“Aww, look at him, little bunny.  I love those bunnies.”

I used to love them more, when they didn’t eat my pepper plants.  Things took a big turn last summer.  My peppers, for years grown freely in the open on a little garden strip I developed on the south side of the garage, appeared munched on.  Some were eaten clean off, others had their stems spared.  Occasionally a newly formed pepper could be found lying in the dirt, the leaves of the plant it clung to having vanished, nothing but a set of stems and a dying pepper.  When I approached the garden rabbits would scurry through the horseradish on their way to the lilacs and beyond.  I first bought chicken wire and put little round cages around the pepper plants, cylinders of chicken wire held down by a tent stake.  They knocked the cages over.  Nothing was safe.  They ignore the tomatoes and cucumbers, the garlic, the horseradish of course, and the asparagus.  But the peppers, oh my God, it was a massacre.

 

The peppers have become as endangered as the herbs.  Years ago I switched to growing our herbs in pots by my wife’s flowers on the patio steps.  Planting flat leafed Italian parsley, basil, and chives in the open ground was equal to feeding the rabbits.  They wouldn’t last a day.  But the peppers are fairly recent casualties.  Maybe there are more rabbits than before.  Heck maybe the DNA of rabbits from Mexico has made it’s way into our local rabbits, changed their palates, and made them more sophisticated thus increasing their taste for hot peppers.  The world changes you know.  Whatever has happened, my pepper plants are no longer safe.

It came to me that one solution would be renting a coyote or a large hawk.  I Googled service providers who might be able to place a wild animal in my vicinity but came up with nothing.  I saw it as a way to take me out of the equation and let nature, with a little help, take its course.  I don’t see well enough to buy a .22 and shoot the rabbits, imperiling the neighbors, as if I wanted to own a gun and kill things anyway.  I could easily blame predators when a rented coyote wolfed down the rabbits but it would be a lot harder to pass off a motionless bunny dead from a gunshot wound as the victim of someone else. 

“Oh look honey.  Jeez, somebody came into our yard and shot that rabbit.”

Actually, I was done shooting things a long time ago.  As a kid my family, me included, both shot and ate wild rabbits on the farm during the season.  After hunting we skinned and cleaned the rabbits on a wooden fence by the barn, two eight penny nails sticking out of the top board especially for the purpose of impaling the little guys by their hind legs so they hung upside down while we worked on them with a knife. With the right cuts a rabbit skin comes off like a glove.  And it has been decades, maybe four, since I’ve eaten wild rabbit, although it is delicious.  My Mom cooked them slowly in a cast iron pan with onions.  But times and my outlook have changed.  Shooting and killing rabbits, along with butchering and eating them, are behind me I think.

 

I was avoiding the obvious, an all out fence, because fences are a pain.  I have a narrow little garden that you can reach the middle of from either side.  No need to go tromping through the rows.  It was handy.  When you put up a fence you need to either step over it or install a gate.  And regardless the option you choose a fence puts you inside an enclosed space crowded with the plants while weeding, tending, and harvesting.  I may be clumsier than normal now and I have big feet.  Invariably when I get in there and kneel down to pull weeds I manage to mangle something or other by stepping on it.  Work on the tomatoes, smash the garlic.  Weed the peppers at their peril.  I have 29 pepper plants in a small space.  You have to be nimble and controlled, qualities my rather large body no longer possesses, if it ever did.  I’m a free range kind of guy.  I don’t like to be fenced in, or out.

I grow a variety of hot  peppers:  Habanero, Serrano, Jalapeno, Caribbean hots, Cayenne, and Pequins.  I also grow some mild ones for balance; Poblanos and Anaheims.  I’ve grown them for years.  I make and can my own Jamaican jerk with the Habaneros, and concoct a chili paste with the rest of the peppers.  I grow lemon grass most years and add it to the mix, along with other stuff, giving the chili paste an Asian bent.  Since I’m Irish and the paste is my own recipe I call it Irish Asian.  It has real kick.  My kids like it a lot but it is too hot for many.  The Serrano peppers in particular are great for making green sauce.  Combine salt, Serrano peppers, oven roasted tomatillos, onion, and lime juice and you’ve got a fresh green salsa can’t be beat.  If you get creative you can add peppers to nearly everything, omelets, salads, you name it. 

So I put up the damn fence against my will because of a slowly developed respect for animal life that has extended even to insects.  When we get spiders and wasps in the house I do my best to catch them in a jar and release them outside.  I’ll admit I have been smooshing ants in the house of late.  Ants suffer from a lack of wings.  If they could evolve to fly they might escape death at the hands of humans but all they can do is crawl feverishly fast, making a break for it across the open formica.   They rarely make it to safety.

My son Dean helped me with the fence.  He didn’t see it as a big deal.  We bought chicken wire at Farm and Fleet and steel fence posts.  It went up quickly.  I staked the bottom down with tent pegs in places where the ground might allow bunnies to scoot under the fence.  It took a lot less time and work than I imagined.  Young people are good helpers in that regard because they are oblivious to pre planning considerations and worry.  They just do it.  You can over think those kinds of projects when you have a too much time on your hands.

I also planted marigolds, which people say repel rabbits.  I planted them in spite of being very skeptical about their effectiveness.  I can’t say I know rabbit behavior well but I find it hard to believe a hungry hare would pass up a tender pepper plant because of a short yellow flower.  I wouldn’t, that’s for sure.

 

So far the pen of imprisoned peppers is doing quite well thank you.  They look constrained though.  I hope it doesn’t affect their psyche, if they have one.  Would you feel hot and spicy looking at the world through chicken wire all day?  As if they could look.  As if they could move in the first place.  I don’t know.  It just seems wrong.

The tomatoes are having a good year, so far that is, judging by the vines that produce the actual tomatoes.  Last year was a wash out.  Too much rain and cool weather early.  I admit that I became discouraged last year and let my garden go.  It seemed hopeless.  The puny outlook for the tomatoes coupled with the much reduced pepper crop did me in.  I neglected everything. Weeds took over.  I let the scapes grow way too big on my garlic plants and left the bulbs in the ground far longer than needed.  I didn’t dig my horseradish.  A trip to Montreal in the summer didn’t help but it was all my fault.  I was a bad gardener.

Every spring I start with high hopes.   A friend brings up his roto tiller sometime prior to Mother’s Day, I add compost, and we churn up the dirt.  We do that twice a year.  In the fall we till when everything is out and then I sow rye grass, which is good for the soil and is great cover, keeping out early spring weeds.  When I cut the rye in the spring, saving the stalks for mulch, I think of how nice it would be to have a little field of it just once, letting the stems yellow and the heads of grain develop.  I don’t know what I would do with a bushel of rye.  I would love to make whiskey out of it would be entirely too much work and time.  So a crop of rye remains a shimmery kind of goal that probably isn’t going to happen.  I try to keep that list as short as I can.  It’s the reverse bucket list, the things you know you probably won’t do.  Who wants to think about that?

This year I’ve resolved to be a better gardener and so far I am.  In addition to the fence I rotated the placement of things, putting the peppers where the tomatoes were and vice versa.  I put up the tomato trellises, rebar grids given to me by my friend Wedge the iron worker, padding the sharp steel ends end with blue foam noodles.   Who I’m protecting is unclear.  Very few kids frequent my garden.  Maybe I’m protecting myself from stumbling into them.  Heck, maybe I’m protecting the rabbits.  That would be ironic.

I tie the tomato vines carefully to the rebar as they grow to give the plant height and keep the fruit off the ground.  So far this year I’ve been especially good, swinging by the garden every morning and doing a few things on my way to the shack rather than trudging, head down with my thermos in hand, straight to my work without giving a thought to the plants not twenty feet off my path.  I have been careful to pinch off the sucker sprouts that grow in the crotch of the vines coming off the main stem.  I also pinch off the early blossoms to get stronger plants before the real action begins later.   I have 15 tomato plants whose output is destined to be both eaten and canned.  I plant one grape tomato for salads and snacks, a number of different kinds of slicers for BLT’s and more, and Romas for canning.  I make a sweet tomato relish with cloves and vinegar from my Mom’s recipe.  She called it chilla sauce.   It makes roast beef taste even better than it is.  If I close my eyes while I eat it I find myself in the past, eating at the kitchen table on the farm.

I cut the scapes off the garlic plants earlier than ever this year, while they were still small and tender.  Just this morning I had a scape and Jalapeno frittata, topped off with a zig zag stripe of Sriracha sauce (I’m flat out of Irish Asian) and a glass of cold milk.  I am guiding the cucumber vines into the garden and off the lawn.  I pull a few weeds every morning.

Dean asked me to plant some eggplant this year so I have four nice plants coming along in a corner.  I think he’s planning to make baba ganoush.  I put the two Brussels sprout plants our friend Sharon gave us next to them.  You can let Brussels sprouts stay in the garden past frost.  We usually have them for Thanksgiving.

It’s a hopeful thing, planting a garden, but you have to sustain that hope throughout the year.  A garden asks for little really; some protection from weeds and herbivores, and water if the rains don’t suffice.  But the plants do the real work on their own.  It’s something of a miracle.  They take nutrients from the dirt, suck up sunlight and water, and in the end give us so much.  All that is required is time, a little attention, and hope.  You can’t lose hope.

Muhammad Ali

On the night of June 30, 1975 I was hitchhiking in Algeria.  I had left Algiers, where I  stayed a few days, and was headed to the Tunisian border and ultimately Egypt.  I was getting good rides.  I was on the main road which was taking me through a sparsely populated coastal plain along the Mediterranean.  Villages were small and far apart.  Looking back at my world atlas now I would put myself somewhere between the bigger towns of Azazda and Annaba.  As the sky grew darker traffic thinned.  It was a clear night with no moon and my surroundings seemed safe.  I had walked a distance out of a village where I was dropped and, thinking my travelling was over for the day, was looking for a place to get off the road and pitch my tiny tent when a truck passed me and slowed to pick me up.  I ran after it, my backpack bouncing up and down behind me.  My knees ache now just thinking about it.  I was 24.

The truck was a little Datsun pickup piled high with a square load covered by a tarp.  It looked hopelessly overloaded, sitting way low in the back.  In the truck were an older man and what I guessed was his son or a relative of some kind.  The older man immediately began barking orders in Arabic to the younger one, where to stash my backpack, where to allow me to sit.  I watched closely where they put my pack, in a corner near the cab under the tarp.  You never knew when you might need to grab your stuff and go.  The young man drove and they gave me the passenger seat, with the old man in the middle.  It wasn’t easy to get the truck moving again.  After slipping the clutch and laboring through the gears they finally got it up to speed.  After a time we clipped along nicely through the warm North African night.

They knew not a word of English and I knew next to no Arabic.  Up till then most people I encountered knew at least French, which I could struggle through.  But Arabic was tough to decipher.  I made it a point while hitchhiking to be friendly, ask questions, and show interest in my travelling companions.  It seemed like the right thing to do but it also at times extended the ride.  I asked them what they were hauling.  I kept motioning to the bed of the truck behind us, shrugging, and putting my palms up.  Finally the old man understood.  He laughed and brought a bottle of Algerian pop in a returnable bottle from under the seat.  Pulling a fairly large folding knife from his robe he put the blade under the cap, pried it off using his thumb as a lever, and handed it to me.  I smiled, thanked him profusely, and chugged it.  It was terribly sweet, but I was their guest and I thought it only polite to drink it all.  Besides I was thirsty. He offered me another and I declined.

The old man kept looking at a wrist watch with no band he pulled out of some interior pocket inside his robe and talking excitedly to the young driver.  The kid sped up.  From time to time he would hit a bump, the truck would bottom out on the springs, the old man would yell, and then he would slow down.  Then the old man would protest that he was going too slowly.  He couldn’t win, that kid.

At some point I nodded off.  I was awakened by braking and the feel of something smooth and different under our tires.  We were off the gravel road and onto smooth sand, stopping at a roadside building.  When they switched off the truck I could hear a generator running.  My companions piled out of the truck and motioned for me to follow. 

We entered a dimly lit bar or café of some sort.  On a crude stand high on a wall behind the counter was a fairly large black and white TV.  A thick black extension cord snaked across the floor.  The place was lit by the equivalent of Coleman lanterns.  It was jammed with bearded and turbaned Algerians in djellabas, the standard North African robe.  They were anxious for something to begin.  The place was buzzing with talk and anticipation.  I was in the middle of a conservative country area unlike Algiers.  Alcohol was not available, at least not publically.  The crowd was drinking tea, coffee, and that awful Algerian pop that filled the back of our truck.  My companions put an incredibly strong espresso in front of me with lumps of thick white sugar.

A man got on a ladder by the TV and began fiddling with the knobs.  The room grew quiet.  Light appeared on the screen, then static snow.  The man began screaming instructions through a window to another man, who repeated them, screaming apparently to someone else.  I realized there was a man on the roof adjusting an antenna.  Slowly an image began to emerge on the screen.  I looked in amazement.  The fuzzy outline of a black man in a hooded white robe was dancing in the corner of a roped off square.  The picture became clearer.  It was Muhammad Ali. The assembled crowd roared.  I raised my arms above my head.  Men around me began to clap me on the back.

“American!”  They shouted at me above the noise, pointing to Ali.  “And Muslim!”

The place was up for grabs. A man who knew some English made his way towards me and began talking excitedly in my ear.

“We watched him fight George in Kinshasa.  We watched from right here.  It was the rumble.”

He was referring to the “Rumble in the Jungle” eight months earlier in Africa where Ali defeated George Foreman in Zaire to complete his comeback by consolidating all the heavyweight titles and becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

“Where are they?”  I had to yell to be heard above the crowd.

“Malaysia.  Kuala Lumpur.”

“Who is he fighting?”

“Joe Bugner.  Englishman.”

We looked up at the TV screen.  Ali, the referee, and Joe Bugner were huddled in the middle of the ring.  Ali was staring coolly at his opponent.  My new friend looked at me and laughed.  It was a big laugh, and a long laugh too, his mouth wide open and ringed by a black beard.  He was missing some teeth.  When he was able to talk again he said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes,

“Ali will kill that European man.  He is our hero!”

I yelled back “Mine too!”

 

And with that the bell rang and the fight was on.

I thought back to the first Ali fight I followed, when he was still Cassius Clay.  My Dad and I watched the Friday night fights, sponsored by Gillette, on our black and white TV on the farm. You could call us fight fans.  But I never especially identified with the Friday night fighters.  They were no name guys on the screen.  Cassius Clay was different.  He was more than just a fighter.  He was something new.  Especially for a black man.

He was brash and outspoken, a self promoter.  He talked fast and loudly, often in rhyme, and used big words.  But the quality that set him most apart from the small town white world in which I was growing up was that he bragged.  You didn’t brag where I lived.  You didn’t try to appear smart either.  In fact when you got out of line, someone in authority might ask you

“Are you being smart?  Are you trying to be smart with me?”

As if smartness was bad.  I knew it wasn’t.  But appearing smart, or acting as if one was smart, was taboo.  Humility was the quality that mattered.  Bragging was for people with no class, and certainly not for black people.  It took a lot of nerve for a black man to say those things.  That’s what I heard in my community anyway.

Cassius Clay got on TV and said he was pretty.  He said he was the greatest of all time.  He said outrageous things.  And he baited his opponents.  He called Sonny Liston a bear, a slow lumbering dumb bear.  He walked around the streets of New York City with a pot of honey hoping to draw Liston the bear out of his cave and get him to fight.  He threw a bear trap on the lawn of Liston’s house.  He was outrageous, and the media loved it.  Most of white America, including my older brother, wanted to see him get his ass kicked all over the ring.  They liked their black athletes quiet and smiling.  I silently wanted Clay to win.  He was my secret hero.  I wanted all his predications to come true.  I wished him all the success in the world.

On the night he first fought Sonny Liston, in February of 1964, the fight wasn’t on TV.  My brother went to Peoria to a closed circuit showing of the fight in a theater.  Paid good money for the ticket.  My Dad was gone somewhere, maybe a meeting at the Consistory.  Mom was in the kitchen baking.  I laid on the couch in the living room and tuned in the fight on the fancy new stereo in the living room my brother Denny had brought home from Germany when he was in the Army.  Howard Cossell called the fight.

 

Nobody gave Cassius Clay a chance to win.  Liston was too strong they said.  Clay didn’t punch hard enough.  Somehow I knew Cassius would prevail.  When Liston didn’t answer the bell at the start of the seventh round, sitting instead on a stool in the corner of the ring, Cassius Clay became the heavyweight champion of the world.  I jumped off the couch and yelled.  I threw my arms in the air.  I knew he would win and he did.  My Mom called out from the kitchen

“What happened?”

“Cassius Clay just showed the world he really is the greatest!”  I yelled back.

“Oh for God sakes David settle down.”

My brother Darwin also went to Peoria for the closed circuit showing of the fight in Lewiston Maine when the newly named Muhammad Ali had been champ for just over a year and was in a rematch with Sonny Liston.  He said later he got there a little late and was just sitting down into his seat and the fight was over.  A “mystery punch” by Ali, that later was shown to be a legitimate hard chopping right cross ended that contest early in the first round.

Ali proved unbeatable in the ring.  He had a talent and a style that has never been equaled.  He moved and danced.  He had a terrific jab.  But that is not what made him great.  Boxers and other athletes can only be so great.  But a public figure who becomes famous enough to gain a platform on which to speak, and uses that platform to affect the greater good achieves true greatness.

 

Cassius Clay encountered and befriended Malcolm X who helped him convert to the Black Muslim religion. Both men were then followers of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam in America, who sought to make black people in America strong and independent.  Muhammad Ali was a religious man who lived according to Muslim principles. He adhered to those principles so strongly that he seized his career from white handlers and turned it over to the Nation of Islam.  When he was reclassified 1-A by the draft board he refused to serve in a white man’s war on religious grounds.  He was subsequently convicted of a felony and stripped of his titles, unable to box from March of 1967 to October 1970.  By refusing to be drafted into the armed services he sacrificed his best fighting years, and countless dollars, on principle.  His suspension from boxing started when he was 25 and ended when he was 29. 

Muhammad Ali tied the Vietnam War to the black experience in America in such a way that I understood, even as a 16 year old farm kid in Danvers Illinois, both issues immediately for what they were.  He spoke with such a clear voice.  This was not a brash boxer hustling to promote his next fight.  This was a principled American man acting out of conviction.  He could have joined the army and fought exhibition bouts for two years and been hailed as a patriotic American hero.  But he didn’t.  He took the hard way.  He acted on principle and refused to be a part of it.  Listen to what he said about the Vietnam War.

“I ain’t draft dodging.  I ain’t burning no flag.  I’m staying right here.  You want to send me to jail?  Fine, you go right ahead.  I’ve been in jail for 400 years.  I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die.  You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese.  You my opposer when I want freedom.  You my opposer when I want justice.  You my opposer when I want equality.  Want me to go somewhere and fight for you?  You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for my right here at home.”

Ali stood firm and appealed his conviction.  In June of 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court in Clay v. United States overturned Ali’s conviction by a unanimous 8-0 decision.  Muhammad Ali resumed his boxing career.  He retired in 1981 with a record of 56-5 after winning the heavyweight title an unprecedented three times.  But boxing was not his biggest contribution to the world.

Muhammad Ali inspired people across America to see their country for what it was.  When I got to college in 1969 as an English major I was fortunate enough to be exposed to material I never knew existed.  I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and other stories of the black experience in America.  A kid raised on a dairy farm in a community and a school without one black person came to realize the hell that white America foisted on black people in this country through their own eyes and in their own words.

But before I had that education, Muhammad Ali sounded the call.  He pointed the way.  There was something wrong, and he announced it.  I was following the Vietnam War closely on the farm, reading everything I possibly could about it, and when I came to realize that young black men were dying in disproportionate numbers to their white counterparts, his words rang so true.  Early in the war, when blacks made up only 11% of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to over 20% of the total dead.  Black leaders protested and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back.  Those black leaders were emboldened by Muhammad Ali’s early and brave stance. 

Muhammad Ali changed history, both in regard to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement in America.  He proved to be not only a true American Hero, but an international hero for oppressed people everywhere.  He represented moral strength in the face of huge adversity.  You could sense his power and presence.

That’s the emotion that came back to me that night in Algeria, wherever I was, in 1975.  Ali didn’t knock Joe Bugner out in Kuala Lumpur but instead won a lopsided decision after 15 rounds.  Every time he landed a punch a packed house of Algerians and one American in that little country town screamed approval.  It felt like he was fighting for us.  All throughout the fight I was dying for a drink.  It’s a cultural thing I guess.   It seemed wrong to celebrate a certain Ali victory without a beer or a whiskey or something.  Actually, I smoked a little kif with some of the young men after the fight which made up for it some.  It was an unforgettable experience, enjoying the camaraderie of men I didn’t know who shared little but had a common bond; the admiration of a celebrated man.

 

That fight was a warm up for the “Thrilla in Manila” four months later when he beat Joe Frazier for the second and last time.   Had he stopped boxing then, at his peak, he might have escaped his medical fate of Pugilistic Parkinson’s syndrome.  But the pull of money and the fame proved to be too strong.  He kept fighting.  Ironically, his public struggles with the illness may yet contribute to the eventual downfall of boxing as we know it, the sport another possible victim of the specter of concussion and senseless brain injury.  Muhammad Ali died Friday and I lost a hero, as did countless others around the world.  I know some men were surely sad in a little town somewhere in Algeria.

Rest in Peace.  And thank you. 

No Justice No Peace

As Sam and I walked past the Federal Building in Chicago I couldn’t help but think of the drama that took place inside during the Hastert sentencing hearing just weeks ago.  The hearings, much anticipated, grabbed the headlines. Our country’s longest standing Speaker of the U.S House of Representatives was exposed as a sex offender.  His victims, then teen age students at Yorkville High School, now adults, testified after all these years in court against their former coach.  The media gave us a glimpse into the secrets of a small town and how they can impact people, both the small and the powerful.  And now it’s all over but the prison sentence, the civil suits, and of course the healing. 

So much goes on in Chicago, in Illinois, and in the world that keeping up on it all is hopeless.  So I was not surprised when I walked to the corner of the plaza into the clutch of people gathering there and found I was unfamiliar with the organization sponsoring the event, their issues, and their campaign to air them. I was there because Sam, a new young friend from church, asked me to go.  I was not unfamiliar with the politics of the group, but I share them.  However it had been a long time since I stood behind those values in the way I was about to that chilly Monday morning.

The organizers had the gear of street protests: the bullhorns, the lightweight portable sound systems, the printed placards, the handwritten signs.  People in high vis green vests were the marshalls, others in blue jackets were designated as spokespersons to talk to the police and media.  The leader gave us instructions before the speeches started.  I knew the drill.  Lay out the day’s events, fire up the crowd, start the march, reach the target, begin the action.  It was nicely organized, calculated, and orderly.  I was glad to be part of it.

The main speaker, a young man about Sam’s age was Tom Gaulke, pastor of First Lutheran Church of the Trinity.  At 31st Street and Lowe Avenue in Bridgeport, his church is a community anchor celebrating its 150th anniversary this November.  Tom is navigating a tiny Evangelical Lutheran Church of America on a path to relevancy and revival. “Much that I imagined about what ministry might look like had radically changed, but the message of grace remains central, and increasingly important to proclaim in a world filled with guilt, crushing expectations, and alienation,” Gaulke said, “ that’s what Jesus would do.”

In 2011, he and partner organizations in Bridgeport formed Bridgeport Alliance, a grassroots group that promotes responsive government and an improved quality of life for Bridgeport residents.  It currently advocates to restore the 31st Street bus line. He’s the board president for Southsiders Organized for Unity And Liberation, and he serves on the board of IIRON, which trains people to participate in civic life through collective action.  Gaulke also has been active in the Moral Mondays campaign that has organized demonstrations against Gov. Rauner’s Illinois proposed budget cuts, which many believe will severely hurt services for the working class and the poor.  That is what brought Tom Gaulke, Sam Barbour, and I together that day.  We are united in the belief the budget that promises to emerge from Governor Rauner’s stubborn political stance has and will hurt the people who need help the most.

“I am here” Tom Gaulke once wrote on his blog “to create a world where those oppressed by abuse or other injustice are freed to speak out against injustice, and find others to join them in speaking out, giving them power - and a world where they can do this in the name of God.”

While still in Federal Plaza we heard from individuals affected by the closure of social service agencies and the slashing of social services.  Students from Illinois’ public colleges pointed out to the crowd that the Governor’s proposed budget allocates only 70% of last year’s dollars (largely unpaid) in the coming fiscal year.  It appears they were bailed out in recent weeks.  In truth they were given short rope.  Future state support under Rauner promises to be cut by 30%.  Medicaid is cut.  Local agencies are already crippled.  We prayed in English, prayed in Spanish, and then we marched.  I carried a placard.  Where we were taking our grievances I didn’t know but I hoped it wasn’t far.  Bad knee you know.

We marched just kitty corner southeast from Federal plaza, blocking traffic for only a short time, to the building at 131 S. Dearborn that houses Citadel, a nebulous financial company unknown to me.  I hoped it was not in the portfolio that was once my 401 k.  (I checked.  It’s not.)  There were perhaps two hundred of us.  I didn’t know why we were stopping there. I walked up to one of the organizers and asked

“What is the significance of this building?  Why are we here?”

“This is where Ken Griffin’s company is.  His office is in there.  We’re hoping he’s in there now.”

“I see.”

I didn’t see at all.  Just as I didn’t know Tom Gaulke neither did I know Ken Griffin.  I Googled him while standing on the sidewalk outside Citadel.  On my phone screen I learned this: born in Florida, age 47, graduated Harvard University, founder and CEO of Citadel since 1990, annual salary $1.7 Billion, net worth $7.3 Billion, Religion Presbyterian Christian.  Those are billions.  With a B. 

After I got home I learned more about him.  He’s rich and powerful, a lot like Illinois’ current governor.  His narrative, according to Wikipedia, goes like this.

In 1986 during his freshman year at Harvard Ken Griffin began reading Forbes magazine and investing.   In his sophomore year, he started a hedge fund focused on convertible bond arbitrage.  The fund was capitalized with $265,000 from friends and family, including money from his grandmother.  He installed a satellite link to his dorm room to acquire real-time market data. The investment strategy he devised helped preserve capital during the stock market crash of 1987.  Griffin’s success enabled him to launch a second fund, and between the two funds he was managing just over $1 million upon graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a degree in economics.

After graduating from Harvard, Frank C. Meyer, an investor and founder of Glenwood Capital LLC, provided Griffin with $1 million to invest.  Griffin exceeded Meyer's expectations and, according to the New York Times Meyer made 70% return on the investment.  In 1990, Griffin founded Citadel in Chicago with $4.6 million.  By 1998, Citadel had grown to a team of more than 100 employees and $1 billion in investment capital.

In September 2004, Fortune magazine ranked Griffin, who was 35 that year, as the eighth richest American under forty in the category of self-made, United States based wealth.  By 2014, Griffin’s net worth was estimated at $5.5 billion. It’s apparently gone up since then.

In 2012, Griffin said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that "This belief that a larger government is what creates prosperity, that a larger government is what creates good is wrong." Griffin makes political contributions and donations to political candidates, parties, and organizations that support his views of limited government.  He donated $2.5 million to Bruce Rauner, Republican candidate for Illinois governor.

In December 2015, Griffin endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and stated that he plans to donate millions to a pro-Rubio super PAC.  Before this endorsement, Griffin had donated to three super PACs supporting Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker for the GOP nomination.  Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin.

And that is how Sam and I and so many others came to stand in front of Citadel.  Because Ken Griffin is the money behind and the voice in the ear of Governor Bruce Rauner, who by withholding money to community agencies has hurt so many in needy neighborhoods and communities in Illinois who rely on government to help them.  The same people Tom Gaulke strives to help through his church in Bridgeport.  Ken Griffin stands with Bruce Rauner.  Sam Barbour and I were standing with Tom Gaulke.

We crowded against the glass doors of 131 S. Dearborn.  It was lunch hour in the loop and as 1:00 p.m. drew closer people who had ventured out of the building for lunch could not re-enter.  Some were getting in from somewhere, probably the parking garage.  But Moral Mondays volunteers sat in the middle of revolving doors with others holding the panels so they could not turn.  Inside other volunteers took positions in front of the elevators.  Three prominent members of Moral Mondays sat in the lobby, chained together, plastic PVC pipe covering their chains.  Protesters supporting the action that day sang songs, chanted, stayed together, and kept their eyes on the cops.  Chicago Police formed behind us and were soon present in the lobby. They were cool and professional.  Preselected protesters were there to be arrested for acts of civil disobedience and the police had an obligation to make those arrests in order to clear the building.  It struck me that both sides played their parts well.

Things began to happen in the lobby.  Workers with power tools were summoned first to cut the PVC sleeves off the arms of the protesters, then to cut through the chains that bound them together.  The police and building maintenance me produced folding panels so that our view was mostly blocked.  Fox News had a videographer and journalist on scene and later provided the most coverage and best news footage.

 

With his billions Ken Griffin buys art.  Lots of art for lots of money.   As of February 2016^[update], Griffin had purchased Willem de Kooning’s 1955 oil painting, Interchanged, for $300 million, and Jackson Pollock’s 1948 painting Number 17A, for $200 million, both from David Geffen.  He likes nice things.  He has a gold replica of one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world in Citadel’s lobby, Winged Victory.  He likes to win and he’s used to doing so.  Victory looks as though it suits him well.

One of the things Ken Griffin does not like is large government.  I think it is fair to conclude that government cramps Ken Griffin and others like him.  From where I sit in the shack I would say their actions indicate they dislike government taking their money as taxes and competing with them in areas like employment, service provision, and policy setting.  And though Illinois has been good to Ken Griffin, I mean he did came here in 1990 and having done business out of Chicago for all those years is now worth $7.3 Billion, give or take a Million, he has taken aim at Illinois’ state government by helping to install his friend and kindred soul Bruce Rauner as governor to act upon that dislike of government by making it smaller.  He believes less government = more good for you and I, but certainly him.

 If you make Illinois more business friendly, their theory goes, by lowering worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance costs, installing right to work laws, holding the line or lowering taxes on corporations and small businesses, everything gets better for everyone.  If the economy is better for Ken Griffin and Bruce Rauner it will be good for us.  That’s the theory.

Back in Bridgeport, the neighborhood Richie Daley left for a condo overlooking Millenium Park, Tom Gaulke and his parishioners are concerned about other things.  They’re trying to find ways to help homeless kids now that the State is not paying the agencies that used to help them.  They’re worried about their neighborhood public schools.  They’re trying to keep gun violence off their streets.  They have lots of worries.  The Bridgeport Alliance wants to restore the 31^st Street CTA bus so that their neighbors without cars can get to jobs in other parts of the city.  They are skeptical the theory, you know, of making Ken Griffin richer will translate to better conditions in Bridgeport.  They have other ideas.

For instance, they believe a graduated state income tax, which would produce more revenue by applying a higher tax rate on larger incomes, would raise revenue which Illinois could use to help poor people.  With increased dollars it seemed then possible for government to increase drug treatment for addicts, improve infrastructure like public transportation, fund neighborhood agencies which cared for local kids.  But that was quickly rejected.  That’s Tom Gaulke’s theory and the theory of many.  Tom goes even further to suggest such thinking may be part of a larger plan that commands us to help the needy, feed the hungry, care for our brothers.  Tom finds that in the ancient literature that guides his primary work as a minister.  It’s not a big jump from the money changers in the temple to standing in front of Citadel for Tom Gaulke.

It’s the premise of Moral Mondays.  We have a moral duty to help those less fortunate than us.  The path Illinois has taken for the past 11 months is basically immoral.  Something must change.  Taxing the rich seems feasible.  A graduated income tax got about a week’s play in the media and then it was shelved.

Failing that the coalition proposed a tax on financial trades.  A tax of .002% of the average trade value applied to the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board of options would generate $10 Billion dollars.  With a B.  The CME (Chicago Mercantile) immediately threatened to leave the state.  The proposal found no traction.  Taxing the rich seems logical to the poor and many others.  But it goes nowhere in Illinois.  But then Illinois is now led by the rich.  After all the rich funded Governor Rauner’s successful campaign.

We were standing right in front of them at the clean glass doors and windows of Ken Griffin’s Citadel at 131 S. Wabash and the rich inside, protected by the police, turned their backs on us and put up screens to block our view.  31 protestors were arrested that day.  That was part of the action.  Individuals, many parishioners of churches throughout Illinois, gave themselves up to be arrested to make a political point.  So far it has not resonated.  The stalemate between the rich and the poor goes on.  The rich, as you might guess, are currently winning.

As the arrests began Sam and I left.  Though I’m retired Sam has a new baby at his house and had to get back to Ottawa.  We had sandwiched our trip between his Econ class at Kishwaukee College and his obligations back home as a new Dad.  We didn’t have time to be arrested.  The booking, the bail, the court appearance.  Those arrested were prepared I’m sure.  They knew what they were doing, what the charge would be, how it would affect their record.   Lives are on the line in many ways.  Voices are shouting to be heard.  So far, money is talking louder.

That was May 9.  It is now June 1 and Illinois still has no budget .  The struggle continues.

Bathrooms

This is a touchy subject.  I’ve noticed throughout a lifetime of reading, and now with an eye on writing, that what we do in toilets, eliminating bodily waste, is not represented particularly well, if at all, in literature or its contemporary new cousin blogging.  I think I know why.

You can write about how well you’ve slept, go into great details about meals you’ve eaten, gain readers by your ability to write about sex, wax in great detail while describing diseases, injuries, blisters, sunburn, road rash, medical procedures, gunshot wounds, stabbings, what have you.  But venture into the daily, if you’re lucky, human experience we all share known by many names but most acceptably as pooping, or sprinkle throughout your novel the number of times its main character urinates, and you cross the line of what readers will tolerate.  They will put your book down and never pick it up again.  They will click your writing off the screen of their device within seconds.  You may be getting ready to bail at this very moment.  Why?

Nobody wants to read about it.  It’s a fact.  You can write about ingesting, even digesting, but elimination is taboo.  We’ve learned as writers that we can’t share everything about our lives because there are things humans just won’t stand for.

And let me assure you I’m not going to write about it today either.  I’m going to write about where we carry out those activities when we’re not at home.  It’s a blog about public toilets, offered in the manner of an advice column.  Last summer I wrote a series of blogs about the best places to eat hot dogs.  Today I’m writing a single blog about where you might choose to use a public facility for the most personal of functions when you’re away from home and you must leave your comfort zone.

Because in the world of where we poop and pee, I think we all agree that Dorothy said it best in the Wizard of Oz -  “There’s no place like home.”  Give me a bathroom in my own house, where my magazines are, where I know where everything is located, the air freshener, and the extra TP in the bottom drawer.  Put me where no one is going to walk in on me, and if they do they’re someone I love.  Give me familiarity, give me comfort, give me habit, frequency, and repetition.  Give me my own toilet, the feel of my own seat or that spot on the wall where I put my hand while standing and letting loose.  There’s nothing like it.  It’s a joy to be at home when you need to go.  But unless you’re a complete hermit it is virtually impossible to use your own crapper exclusively.  You’ll be out somewhere in the world, you’ll need to go (you know you will) and you need a strategy.  There are choices available.  I’m writing this to help you create one.  Let’s start with the least desirable toilets out there.

Grocery Stores

There are problems with rest rooms in grocery stores at nearly every level, but for me they begin and end by the question of who cleans them.  Have you seen the signs in public bathrooms that ask you to please report to staff any unclean conditions?  I’ve rarely if ever done that anywhere, but I’m telling you now I would never do so in a grocery store BECAUSE I DON’T WANT THE PEOPLE SELLING ME FOOD TO CLEAN TOILETS.

Who are you going to report that to?  How about the person in produce unpacking and laying out an inviting display of unwrapped lettuce?  My nightmare is that I inform the friendly woman arranging bright green heads of romaine of a big mess in the far stall in their men’s room, she thanks me, and rushes in to clean it.  Not her, please, for God’s sake, nor the people in the deli who slice the turkey.  Certainly not the butcher.  And by all means spare the checkout clerks. Why, they have their hands on literally every food item that leaves the store.  I know grocery stores are big facilities and we need rest rooms in them for our convenience but unless I absolutely have to use a grocery store bathroom I’m not doing it.  Store designers put them up front, or otherwise try to separate them from the vast array of food as best they can, but still it’s off putting to me.  At the store I shop most frequently the bathroom is located next to the floral section, which makes sense.  We don’t eat the flowers after all.  But by and large, as clean as they might be, there is something unseemly about grocery store public toilets and I don’t recommend them.

Gas Stations

Gas stations are the closest thing we have to stand alone public rest rooms.  It’s perfectly acceptable to stop at a gas station simply to use their rest room.  None but the smallest and most provincial station owners expect you to make a purchase in order to use their facilities.  You may have to ask for a key, which the person behind the counter usually offers gladly.  They may even wish you a good day when you leave, sailing out the door immediately if you’re in a hurry.  No problem.  Gas stations usually have plenty of parking, they’re small buildings, the rest room is convenient, it is but one of the services they provide us.  That’s the problem.

Gas station rest rooms are among the most heavily used in America, along with fast food and other roadside businesses.   When you use a gas station toilet, especially one along an interstate highway, you’re using a toilet shared by thousands of people.  I venture to guess that if there is a ranking of toilets most likely to be out of toilet paper, the gas station toilet would win hands down.  Too many people use those bathrooms.  If you must choose among gas station restrooms, choose a new place.  They’re almost always better ventilated.  They have those new high speed air hand dryers, which are a living hell for people with hearing aids by the way, but lots better than the old ones.  I always wipe my hands on my pants anyway after using either.  I prefer paper towels, assuming I wash my hands, but we’re getting off the subject.   That is a whole other blog post, or at least a good joke.  Gas station toilets may be unavoidable, but there are better choices.  Let’s move on to those.

But before we do how about the terminology?  I’ve interchangeably used the various names we use for these rooms in which we do our most private business, but they are not entirely accurate.  We’re so repressed on this subject we can’t even be straightforward semantically.  No bathing takes place in public bathrooms, just as little if any resting occurs in restrooms.  Why don’t we call them all toilets?  Because that’s somehow offensive?  We have a long way to go in regard to this whole concept.

   

Hospitals and Medical facilities

While not entirely convenient, given the location and size of our hospitals today, the toilets in hospitals and most medical facilities are damn good.  For one thing they are sparkly clean. These are after all nationally accredited institutions with the highest standards for cleanliness and sanitation.  The toilets reflect that.  They are generally Spartan when it comes to furniture and decoration which is a good thing when you’re talking public toilets.  You won’t find bad floors or outmoded equipment in a hospital toilet.  On the contrary, their toilets are usually made from Cadillac building materials; high quality ceramic tile, good institutional stools and sinks, mirrors flat to the wall, and always handicapped accessible with wide doors, grab bars, and good locks.  I find there is usually plenty of soap and toilet paper in medical facilities, although the soap tends to be watery and antiseptic smelling and the toilet paper that flimsy but stiff one ply kind.  Why is that?  We don’t know do we?  Bulk purchasing I’d guess.  Despite that drawback most all toilets associated with medical joints are a good bet.  If you’re near one, try it.  You won’t be disappointed.

But the crème de la crème of public toilets, the star if you will of what can be a dreary sky of options when away from home, is found in a place you may well have overlooked.   I feel a certain amount of pride in bringing this find to you.  It is the fruit of personal research and just plain luck.  And so I pass it on to you.  If you are away from home and need to go, look no further than the nearest community institution whose deposits are insured by the federal government.

Banks

Banks are where it’s at when it comes to going away from home.  There’s a reason for the development of this fairly recent phenomena.  Here’s the story.

Back in the nineties when Bill Clinton was President and the federal budget was balanced the banking industry enjoyed a period of significant prosperity.  Money was in ample supply, interest rates were low, loans were plentiful and construction was booming.  As a result, banks across the country seized upon those factors to tear down, build new, remodel, expand, and otherwise upgrade banks everywhere. There was increased competition among banks and bankers turned to their facilities to create or keep an edge over the bank down the street.  In my community of Ottawa virtually every bank in town reinvented itself.  Savings and Loans became banks, old banks renamed themselves, banks and credit unions bought out smaller banks, and in the process lavish new bank buildings sprang up to take the place of tired old institutions.

 

Ironically during that same time computers changed the mechanics of banking in rapid and dramatic fashion.  Not only were paper checks no longer cleared by armies of workers in the back office but banks that were designed for increased foot traffic began to see fewer and fewer people in their buildings.  Customers were paying bills on line, getting their cash from the drive through ATM’s, buying checks on the internet.  And then to compound things debit cards made checks largely passé.  You rarely have to go into the bank now.  And when you do the few remaining employees look up in surprise.  You could shoot a cannon off in most bank lobbies and hurt no one, significantly lowering banks’ value as a targets for terrorists.  There is that, I suppose.  Cold comfort to laid off bank tellers. 

But the other unintended but terrific result of the improvement of bank facilities along with the rapid disappearance of customers inside them is this: their toilet facilities are pristine, by far the best in town. 

For weeks this past fall I had been driving around with my real estate tax bill in the visor of the Buick and decided suddenly one day to pay my taxes at an Ottawa bank where I have a savings account.  I needed to pay my taxes, yes, but I also had to go to the bathroom and was driving past the bank.

This bank has a power assist door.  You pull the handle only to get the door started and it opens itself.  Classical music plays through hidden speakers.  But for the music the place is very quiet.  The floor is marble. Turning the corner into a spacious well lit lobby a single employee at a desk surrounded by wood panels smiles broadly as I approach.  The rich dark wood around her looks to be walnut or mahogany, a swinging half door held on by shiny brass hinges.

 

“How can I help you today?”

I look past her to a marble counter with matching wood accoutrements.  Standing there is a lone bank teller amidst at least eight teller stations.  I hesitate.  She fills the silence.

“Would you like a mint?”

This bank passes out individually wrapped mints, the soft buttery kind like you get at weddings or when kids sell vacuum packed cans of candy to support their school band.  They’re great mints.

“Thank you.”  I take a handful.

Her full attention is on me, as if she has nothing else to do but tend to my needs.  Maybe she doesn’t.

 

“I’m just here to pay my real estate taxes.”

“Of course.”

This woman has an exceptionally big and genuine smile on her face.  I can’t imagine feeling so happy working at a bank.

“Amy can help you.”

As she says this she sweeps her hand towards the lone teller, who now is also looking at me.  I can’t see into all the glass walled offices along the wall, but those within my view are all empty.  I get the feeling it’s only the three of us in the entire building.

“Thank you.  Uh…where are your rest rooms?”

You have to say rest rooms in situations like these, as phony as that term might be.  It would be gauche to ask a woman for directions to the toilet.  Not good form.

“Just around the corner sir.”

She used her other arm to gesture in the direction of the facilities.   I’m not entirely sure but I think Amy, overhearing our conversation, pointed that way too.   Both women are positively beaming with smiles.  I make my way quickly in the direction of the crapper.

The door is solid wood, heavy, thick, and polished.  When I open it a light came on by itself.  The marble continues from the lobby floor into the bathroom.  It is gorgeous and shiny.  A granite counter with built in sink sits atop a vanity that is, I think, cherry.  The grain of the wood is beautiful.  The toilet itself is one of those which flushes almost silently.  My wife would kill for a bathroom like this upstairs at our house.  And unlike hospitals, on the wall full roll of thick high quality toilet paper.

 

Not only did this relatively small room not smell bad, it smelled wonderful.  How often do you encounter a public toilet with a wonderful smell?  You’re happy with the absence of smell right? This one smelled like a field of lavender, and it was immaculately clean.  I felt as if I was the first person ever to use this toilet.  I almost hated to leave.  The water was I’m sure softened, and made softer by an aerator on the spout.  Not one water spot on the faucet, knobs, or sink. The soap dispenser was full of that really thick and rich liquid soap, the kind that’s hard to rinse off. Thick paper towels.  A waste basket with nothing, absolutely nothing in it till it cradled my one used paper towel. 

   

Of course the bathroom in the bank is beautiful.  They spared no expense when building it because it’s a bank which has plenty of money, or did when it was constructed.  But the key advantage the bank has over the grocery store and the gas station is their bathrooms get perhaps the least use of any bathroom in town.  Not only are there less employees there to use the toilets than when it was first built, there are far less customers in the banks than the facility was designed for.  An abundance of great bathrooms with little use equals a great deal for you.  I recommend that when you can’t go at home, drop into a bank.

On that particular day I used the bathroom, paid my taxes, and got mints and smiles both upon entering and leaving.  Try getting that kind of service anywhere else.   You don’t need an excuse to drop into a bank.  Since I discovered this hidden gem of community service I’ve since gone to banks simply to use their bathroom.  They’re fine with it.  I genuinely believe they are glad someone shows up.  Try it.  You’ll be glad you did.  You might even get candy.  Don’t tell them I sent you but do tell me if you agree that those bathrooms are the best in town.

You’re welcome.  You can thank me later.   

A Musical Conversation with my Dad

May 8^th was choir appreciation Sunday at our church.  Our pastor was out of town at her son’s college graduation and choir members were asked in her absence to deliver responses to one of three questions: Why Church?  Why Music?  Why Worship?  When I saw that simple question: Why Music? in connection with church, I immediately remembered a talk I once had with my Dad on that very subject.  Here’s that talk, along with some background on my Dad and our family.

My Dad turned 42 the year I was born. And though math is not my strong suit when I was ten he was 52 and he was 62 when I was twenty.  So as a kid I thought of him as old.  I never knew him with hair.  He was a farmer.  He milked cows, sowed oats, made hay, shucked corn and did all the things farmers did back then and that was how I knew him.  He hardly ever went to town.  He lit Camel unfiltered cigarettes with a Zippo lighter and snored.  He laughed easily and was very kind.  As I got older I came to realize he was soft hearted.

It took a while for me to imagine my Dad having a life other than the one I saw him living.  I’m not sure kids, at least kids when I was growing up, grasp that life can change or that your parents had choices and that things happened to them, both good and bad.  I don’t know when I started to put the narrative of my Dad’s life together but when I did I was astounded at what I found.

We had an upright piano in the living room that no one could play.  If you opened the lid on the bench there was sheet music no one could read.  I take that back.  My brother played the trombone and my sister played the coronet in fleeting stints with the school band.  So they might have been capable of reading that music but they didn’t.  Mom and Dad gave the piano away, to cousins I think.  Iowa cousins?  I’m not sure anyone knows now.

In the attic there was a bass drum, a wood block, a cymbal and a snare drum.  They had always been there way off in a corner.  At some point at the dinner table, which from the time I was nine was made up of only Mom and Dad and I, I asked whose drums those were.

“They were mine,” my Dad said, in the past tense.

“When did you play them?”

“When I was in high school.  I was in a combo.”

“What songs did you play?”

“None you would know.”

And that was that.  My Dad played the drums?

My Dad went back to church at some point, maybe when I was in Junior High.  We would sit in the same pew every Sunday, Dad on the left and Mom on the right.  When we stood and sang hymns I sometimes held the hymnal together with Mom and sometimes with Dad.  My Dad’s voice was smooth and strong, and he sang on key.  When the notes got too high he would drop an octave.  Sometimes he saw it coming and started an octave lower at the beginning of a phrase but sometimes it was just one note to the next.  I learned to do the same thing.  I thought that was improvisation.

My grandfather, my Dad’s dad and also a farmer, died in an auto accident when my father was eighteen.  His mother tried to hang on to their tenant farm but it became too difficult so she moved her family of four to Oak Park and they all got jobs in the city.  My Dad worked downtown.  I couldn’t picture my Dad, who always wore big overalls on the farm, in downtown Chicago.  It seemed unreal.  He told me once that the office building where he worked was near Symphony Hall and that sometimes after work he would go there to see if they had leftover single tickets.  When he could buy one cheap he would go in by himself. 

“I never knew music that beautiful existed,” he said.  “I would sit in that big hall with all those people, more people than live in Danvers, and the music from the instruments would fill up the place and sort of wrap itself around me.  The sound was amazing.  And I didn’t know a soul there.”  When you’re a farm kid from a small town it’s hard to get used to being anonymous.  My Dad and his first wife, also a farm girl, left Chicago and came back to her Dad’s farm to raise their family.

My Dad sang on the tractor.  I could hear him singing sometimes when I took him lunch in the field.  He made up new lyrics to old songs.  He didn’t whistle, at least when I knew him.  He hated doctors and that extended to dentists.  Dental care and my Dad were not acquainted.  When his teeth went bad I think he lost the ability to whistle.  Or maybe he never had it. There are some things we never know about one another.

When my Mom sang in church she belted out the hymns.  She was off key, scratchy, sometimes not even close to the melody.  She didn’t seem to care.  When I looked up at her as we sang in church she smiled back broadly.  I don’t know if she realized how bad she sang but if she did she didn’t care.

When my Dad was thirty six his first wife, Irene, died in childbirth.  He brought a new baby boy back to the farm to join two brothers and a sister but his wife never came home again.  And the next morning, and every morning and evening after that for thirty two years, he had to milk the cows, who looked at him dumbly that next morning, unaware his life had caved in.  Dad, his motherless children, the cows sheep and chickens all lived together on his father in law’s farm, where my Mom and I would also later live.

When I was old enough to imagine and appreciate that experience, probably after I became a father, I asked my Dad how he got through that part of his life.

“I’m not sure how I did it.  But a lot of people helped me.”

“Were you going to church then?”  Dad had a big gap in church attendance.  That’s another story.

“Yeah.”

“Did going to church help after Irene died?”

“Yes it did.”  He was quiet for a moment.

“I would go to church and the women there would help me with the kids.  It seemed like the only time I could sit still and be with other people comfortably.  I was in a fog for quite a while.” He kept thinking.

“It wasn’t the sermons.  I could barely concentrate on anything, let alone words in a sermon.  My mind would wander back to Irene and my troubles.  It was the music.  It was that good organ music they play before church starts when everyone is quiet.  It calmed me down.  And the hymns. Oh God the hymns felt so good.”  He became animated as he talked.

“It felt so wonderful to sing after I had been so sad.  It helped just to hear my voice blend in with the other people in church.  I couldn’t talk to them about what happened to me but I knew they cared for me and singing with them, all of us on the same beat with the same words, I think sometimes it was the best I felt all week.”

He paused.

“Yeah church helped me a lot.  But it wasn’t the talking.  When I needed it most it was the music.  It lifted me up.” 

The Principals are Wounded. Bring in the Seconds.

So when was the challenge thrown down on this duel that is dominating Illinois politics?  I’m not sure. Neither am I sure why it started in the first place.

 I’ve not shared with you everything I learned about dueling but the dark side of this testosterone charged deadly contest was to sucker an opponent into a contest he was sure to lose.  Duels became in that case a legal and socially sanctioned way to erase a rival from existence.  If you played it right you could eliminate an enemy through a lopsided duel with little personal risk.  Life can be awful as you probably realize if you’ve lived any time at all.  One of those awful times is realizing you’ve not only been manipulated but that you have no recourse.  Being drawn into a duel and killed is one thing, but being grievously wounded and defeated while living with the realization you were in fact taunted into a contest you were doomed to lose, and had no one to blame but yourself, well, I would hate for that to happen to me.

 

It’s anyone’s guess when the parties concluded the only way to settle their differences was through a duel but mine is that it began when Speaker of the House Michael Madigan sent a message to Governor Bruce Rauner via a budget bill filled with spending priorities approved by Democrats in House and Senate minus a tax increase.  Passing that budget bill sent this message:

Madigan: “We have passed a budget bill and are in control of this process.  Your job now sir, as governor, is to sign it and by doing so become complicit in admitting that Illinois needs a tax increase to carry the spending plan out.”  Gauntlet thrown.  Face slapped.

Our new Governor didn’t react well.  Early in his term he all but admitted the need for new revenue, and expressed the possibility of approving an extension of the income tax at its previous level, but this?  To put virtually no stamp of his own on Illinois’ budget and accomplish nothing his campaign promised?  That would not be shaking up Springfield.  That would be same old, same old.  In response his rhetoric, his spluttering blame filled speeches, the vitriol (does that have anything to do with vituperation?) boiled down to this retort:

Rauner:      “You have the audacity sir, the unmitigated gall, to suggest I tie my   political party and administration to the same template of  government  spending that has put Illinois in this fiscal hole o’ these many years while helping you raise taxes besides?  You expect me to accept this while gaining no satisfaction on my turnaround agenda?  I’ll be damned sir, damned if I will consent to that.  I accept your challenge wholeheartedly and without reservation.”

Madigan:    “Excellent.  What weapons do you choose and where?”

Rauner:       "I choose private social service agencies in communities throughout  Illinois.  At what distance?”

Madigan:     "We’ll fire from whatever distance the newspapers, TV anchors,  bloggers, twitter feeders, and Rich Miller allow us.”

 Rauner:       “Agreed.”

Rapid acceptance of terms can be a bad sign when arranging duels.  You would like to see some hesitation from the other party.  A wince of the face upon hearing the weapon selected, a hint of discomfort at the prospect of doing battle with a weapon your opponent feels unskilled in using would is a welcome sign. 

As it turns out, Michael Madigan and the Democrats have been using social service agencies for years in all sorts of ways.  Social Service agencies are like Poland in Europe.  When war breaks out the first thing that happens is some invader rolls into Warsaw.  The Democrats know all about manipulating social service agencies, and the people they serve, for political purpose.  Not only do they seem to have no problem using that weapon, they seem to welcome it.

Governor Rauner may have sensed that.  He quickly offered a solution that would eliminate the need for a bloody fight to the death.

Rauner:  “Should you wish to reconsider risking death in a close range shooting match you may acquiesce to my demands which are these: term limits, an independent and fair electoral map, significant changes in collective bargaining, right to work, no fair share contribution among unions, and changes to worker’s compensation law.  What say you Mr. Madigan?”

Madigan:  “I say Mr. Rauner without reservation and with total confidence in my position, NO.  I will not consider such demands which are outside the purview of the matter at hand.  Let the duel begin.”

The rawness of dueling, the possibility of death, and the stark reality of preparing to die is designed deliberately.  The prospect of a fatal duel should and typically does force careful consideration, among thinking men, of the importance of one’s position in a given matter.  The prospect of death has a way of clearing out the clutter.  The parties should weigh outright retraction of offensive remarks or actions, or at the very least entertain some compromise in hopes of avoiding the duel.  Because in theory the desired outcome of a duel is not necessarily the death of one’s opponent but the removal of dishonor he by taking back words or deeds inflicted upon you.  Removing the stain on one’s reputation is the deal.

That conclusion relies of course on honor being the true goal.  The argument falls apart completely if either party’s real motive is simply killing his opponent.  In that case it matters not at all what compromise might be offered.  All logic is ignored.  The result in that case progresses this way; stubborn resistance to reason, fact, and persuasion followed by ready, aim, fire.

Calculations of possible damage from backing down or parsing one’s offensive assertions, brainstorming scenarios, considering a different tack should all be part of the dueling process. Hopefully such deliberation is done in collaboration with trusted advisors.  That’s where the seconds come in. 

Seconds.  Not shooters or shootees, but friends who help the combatants through the process or better yet find a way to avoid the whole damn thing.  It’s a beautiful little system really.  Seconds are all over the place in the Tipperary code.  Here’s but some of the tasks of seconds sprinkled among the code’s 26 rules.

Rule 3. If doubt exists as to who gave the first offense, the decision rests with the seconds; if they won't decide, or can't agree, the matter must proceed to two shots, or to a hit, if the challenger requires it.

Rule 14. Seconds to be of equal rank in society with the principals they attend, inasmuch as a second may either choose or chance to become a principal, and equality is indispensable.

Rule 18. The seconds load in presence of each other, unless they give their mutual honors they have charged smooth and single, which should be held sufficient.

Rule 21. Seconds are bound to attempt a reconciliation before the meeting takes place, or after sufficient firing or hits, as specified.

Rule 24. In slight cases, the second hands his principal but one pistol; but in gross cases, two, holding another case ready charged in reserve.

Rule 25. Where seconds disagree, and resolve to exchange shots themselves, it must be at the same time and at right angles with their principals…

Who are the seconds in this Madigan vs. Rauner duel?  John Cullerton for Speaker Madigan and Christine Radogno for Governor Rauner.  And what have the seconds accomplished?  Damn little.  The duel continues unabated.  They fire, reload, suffer hits, but no one is declared the winner.  They appear to be fighting to the death.  Do they want it that way?

A huge hit was scored when Representative Ken Dunkin-D went missing on a key vote and later voted against Madigan on another.  Madigan was heavily wounded.  In the primary election shots were fired furiously and Dunkin was defeated, which hurt Rauner deeply, especially after spending all that money.  The duelists are still standing, though crippled from the conflict.  Behind them stand the seconds reloading pistols when they should be working furiously towards reconciliation.  For God’s sake have Illinois politicians forgotten how to throw each other a bone?

Madigan will not accept right to work laws in Illinois or term limits.  Everybody knows that. That concept, “Everybody knows that”, is actually a great way to find and avoid deal breakers.  Anybody that knows anything in Springfield could relate that bit of common knowledge about Madigan to the new governor.  Go ahead, ask they guy who cleans toilets in the Capitol building. 

“Excuse me sir, I hate to interrupt you but do you think Speaker Madigan would accept term limits and right to work laws as part of a budget deal?”

He puts down his Johnny mop and looks directly at the guy posing the question.

“Hell no.  Everybody knows that.”

Same with Governor Rauner.  Do you think Rauner is going to back down from this duel deal without getting something?  No.  Everybody knows that.  So what is Speaker Madigan going to give him?

Speaker Madigan should give Governor Rauner the fair map.  By 2020 the Speaker might need a fair map.  Find something in the worker’s comp law that Rauner can hang his hat on.  HE needs to be able, however lamely, to claim a victory of some sort when this is over.  Maybe tweak collective bargaining.  There must be something in there Democrats can live without.

In addition to term limits and right to work Rauner should give up on changes that most directly threaten unions and work for incremental change over the next three years.  You can’t there from here now.

Instead of tilting at windmills ala Don Quixote why don’t both sides work on genuine school funding reform?  In regard to school funding you can’t freeze property taxes until school board members across Illinois know there is another way for them to fund quality public education in their communities.  Simply freezing property taxes isn’t reform.  Local school boards exist to maintain good schools, and in Illinois for good or bad boards maintain good schools primarily through property taxes.  Locally elected school boards have few other choices.  Fix the funding mix for schools and then freeze property taxes if you choose, but not the other way around.   Communities and politicians who represent them can’t support education reform unless it works at home.  Everybody knows that.

And Hello?  Have you forgotten that pension reform is the big prize? Instead of posturing theoretically about economic theory, the future of Illinois, and your political parties do that.  Hunker down with the actuaries and figure something out.  There are plenty of meaningful tasks to accomplish, why keep shooting at someone who won’t go down?  Get to work on things Illinois can actually do given today’s politics.  Be real.

I say the duelists in Illinois need new seconds.  If I were Governor Rauner I’d bring in some old hand with a good smile, a moderate profile, a firm handshake and some common sense like Representative Bob Pritchard from DeKalb.  He’s not known for putting out a line of bullshit.  He sees things in a balanced way, speaks sparingly, and can be trusted. 

And while it seems ludicrous to even offer advice to Speaker Madigan he clearly needs help.  I’d tap Jehan Gordon-Booth on the shoulder.  She has no particular political ax to grind, comes Peoria which is outside the political maelstrom that is Chicago, and isn’t inflammatory.  To the contrary, she’s calming.  If she proposes a deal you can trust she’ll make good on it.

 

Something clearly must give.  If one or both sides wanted leverage in forcing a compromise I believe they have all they’ll ever get right now.  It’s impossible to do an FY 17 budget without a FY 16 budget on the books.  On May 4^th 64 human and social service agencies sued Governor Rauner and the State of Illinois for over $100 M.  The basis of the suit?  Enforcing the provision of services in contracts they haven’t paid a dime for since July 1, 2015.  Sounds reasonable to me.  What else you going to do?  Close down and let the needy in your community fend for themselves?

What if the new seconds don’t prevail and this political duel continues?  In that case I propose we go back to the old fashioned duel.  I know a woman in Hannibal, Missouri with a big Jon boat that claims she can find Bloody Island in the Mississippi River where Lincoln’s and Shield’s lives were spared by the fast talking of their seconds.  She‘d be more than glad to give them a ride there.  She’s disgusted with both Speaker Madigan and Governor Rauner as we all are.  Given the choice of weapons available in America in the 21^st Century I’d hate to see it.  Glock 9’s at 20 paces? AR 15’s?  Bloody Island would most certainly live up to its name.

I’m kidding of course.  But Illinois has to act.  Someone needs to take over for the principals who have both proven they aren’t up to the task.  We’re past the point of declaring winners.  We’ve crossed over into the business of saving lives.