Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
Here we are in the middle of winter, and still no snow, and hardly any subzero days. Plenty of times we go out of the house in light coats. And look at this guy’s natty blue sneakers, seen on the train the other night. Just pristine.
Which worries me, all of this. This warm weather and lack of snow has been pretty pleasant, I admit. No wading through hip-deep drifts, no salt, no excavating the car: nice. But all that’s because we are in the middle of a stubborn, ugly drought. We haven’t had measurable snow in nearly 330 days, but it’s more than that. Over the long haul, over all of the midsection of the country, we are not getting enough rain, or snow. Last year the corn crop failed. This morning I saw that the USDA has declared the US winter wheat crop a disaster.
This drought means a few things, none of them dandy:
1. Higher food prices for us this year – less money for everything else.
2. A hungrier planet. The Midwest feeds the world.
3. Unrest. That’s a little word for a very big set of things. It does not mean yelling at the talking heads on your television. It does not mean cyberflaming. It means demonstrations and riots. It means street fighting. It can also mean people being shot full of holes and even governments overturned. The Arab Spring began with “unrest” over sharp rises in the price of wheat.
I do like those blue sneakers. The nice kid wearing them was also carrying what looked like a trumpet case. Good luck to you, kid, and to all of us.
Every time I push the panic button, this show up.
We are back from a drive to La Grange, Illinois, the rare Chicago suburb that is an actual place rather than a bedroom. Our goal was to mess around in an antique mall, where we found the elegant fellow above – a piece of Occupied Japan ware, six inches high. Lords and ladies are not my usual thing, but this guy is so foppish and dashing and imprecise that I got a big ol’ crush. Now he is living with us, showing off his fine self alongside a plastic brachiosaurus and a rock from Lake Ontario.
We had a great time in La Grange – we had a good lunch, we did a little shopping – we were only gone a few hours but it was all so different from our usual weekends that we felt like we’d been away on holiday. Very nice.
What made it easier to get out there and back is that this is day 324 of no measurable snow in Chicago. Three hundred and twenty-four days. The telly calls it a snow drought. It’s that, and a just plain drought, period. Chicago is also flirting with another record, for number of winter days above freezing. While this dry, balmy weather is very convenient for me in the short run, it is also unnerving.
Humans share one thing in common with china figurines – we do not look to the long term. What would this fine fellow have to say about this warm air, this lack of snow? He would say agréable, bien sûr – he could keep wearing his impractical flounces and fab green coat, and of course he would not have to worry about a slip-and-fall, an especially grave concern for those made out of china. In sum, being a brainless statue, he would love it.
Archery is not what I expected. For one thing, it involves a lot less muscle than I thought it would. I didn’t need mighty man arms. For another thing, it is very calm and precise. Some cultures regard it as a meditation, and I can see why.
Tonight was our very first archery class ever, and this is a big fat love letter to World Sport Chicago Archery. We walked in knowing not one thing about the sport outside of glittery Hollywood misinformation. After an hour, we were surprised to see we had learned quite a few basics and, even better, we had managed to beat up the target pretty darn good.
Archery was created to kill. One of the great things about World Sport ‘s range is the quiet, firm emphasis on safety. Everyone, even the highly skilled guys who bring their own compound bows, follows the same rules.
The whole environment is encouraging, patient, and positive. I was prepared to feel like a hopeless mess, but the instructors are so quietly confident, and so encouraging, and lead you ahead so gently and smartly, and after not that long, you realize you’ve learned enough, and acquired enough muscle memory, to sort of know what you are doing, and to definitely want to come back for more. And, because the range is in a Chicago Park District facility (the handsome, popular Pulaski Fieldhouse), the classes and range are open to all at a modest cost. For utter beginners like us, all the equipment is provided. I hardly ever say this, but I can’t wait for next time.
You know? You should try it.
P.S. I’m a big idiot with a giant bruise on my arm – didn’t do the elbow placement thing correctly for the first half of the proceedings and am suffering the consequences. If anyone asks about this big giant bruise, I will squint a little and look away and say archery accident, without smiling.
This is one of a box of police photos of automobile accidents from the 1950s, seen at an antique mall out in the suburbs the other day. Take a gander at that hefty grille and that windshield – two separate sheets of glass. I bet this was before the days of safety glass.
I’m one of those people who periodically catches some collecting disease. For a long time, I had the vintage hat disease. Then I had the flow blue disease. I successfully fought off the antique mirror disease, because mirrors – huge.
The thing about studying the past, collecting examples of the past, is that ultimately you never can know that much about it.
No matter how much you study it, no matter how smart you are, you will never know as much about living in that world as the dullest fools who actually lived in it. Even they know more of their world than you ever will.
Also, I can’t help but wonder if this was a not very successful test drive of a product from the used car lot there in the background. If so, oops.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
Last night we were up late, and one of the things we were doing was reading Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” – just reading it, trying to get our heads around it.
We are working up to seeing two movies, Lincoln and Django Unchained, and somehow, reading this poem has become part of our movie-going process.
The poem is about Abraham Lincoln, about his greatness, his sadness, his death, and the violence and suffering that war brings. Lincoln is the western star, fallen; he is the most beloved comrade; he is (and is not) a shy gray-brown bird singing from a thicket; he is, most of all, the soul and spirit of the hard-working, bountiful America Whitman sees rising all around him.
I am still re-reading and thinking about this poem, and probably will be doing that for a while. Among its wonders is that it is at once specific and hazy – in fact, fragmented. It makes me think a great deal about Lincoln, a man of the rough, crude, brutal, demanding old frontier and then of the thriving, eager, burgeoning nation: learning, growing, transforming, and at such terrible cost. We are still that country, bountiful and destructive, torn between ways of being.
…I hear your notes, I hear your call,
I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
Oh, just go read it. Read it here.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
We’ve finally got snow here in Chicago, even if it is just a bit; we are having a few very peaceful homebody days; we are getting to be with the people we love best and go to the swimming pool whenever we want; our biggest problem is what to do with all the different toffees that keep turning up here in some relentless tide of deliciousness. In other words, things right now are pretty thoroughly excellent.
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