“I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself.” —Sally Rooney

“I think I might be the voice of my generation...or at least, a voice of a generation.” —Lena Dunham (as Hannah in Girls)

Not long after I graduated from high school (class of 1990), I became a perfect mark for books backed by a specific marketing strategy. And by this I mean books that are shilled as generational touchstones.

You know the kind of books I mean. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. On the Road. Infinite Jest. Prozac Nation. Anything by Halle Butler or Sally Rooney. Anything by Lena Dunham. The Fire Next Time. The Sun Also Rises. Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

That last one might seem far-fetched, even to those who’ve heard of it. An earnest, nazel-gazing little novel about, yes, a seagull, it became a best-seller in the early 70s, a time when many Americans were on a similarly earnest journey of nazel-gazing self-discovery.

Have I read it? Please. It came out in 1970, two years before I was born. By the time the book was on my radar, as a pre-teen and teen of the 80s, such late-hippie affectations had become a ruthless punchline.

By the mid-80s, a book like Jonathan Livingston Seagull might as well have been written in the Victorian Era or the Stone Age for all it spoke to readers of the new crop of books coming out. Specifically, the new crop that was being marketed to a certain kind of reader.

I was about 13 years old when Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero came out, in 1985. I have no memory of it as a book until the widely panned movie version was released a couple years later. Which was rated R so I didn’t get a taste of that either in real time.

But Ellis, who was 20 years old when he published Less Than Zero, was already being anointed the “voice of a new generation.” And he was being lumped in with a bunch of other relatively young writers who were dubbed “the Literary Brat Pack.” Jay McInerney, who had just published Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, at age 29, was one of the pack. So was Tama Janowitz, who came out with Slaves of New York in 1986, when she was about 28. Depending on your sources, Michael Chabon was also part of the Literary Brat Pack, as were Meg Wolitzer, Jill Eisenstadt, and Donna Tartt.

Decades later, the truth would come out that some of these writers barely even knew each other. Never mind the photos in such rags as Vanity Fair of what appeared to be Janowitz and Elllis and McInerney all partying together at some glamourously boozy writers’ event in NYC. In a 2016 Harper’s Bazaar article about the Literary Brat Pack, Janowitz said of Ellis and McInerney, “I didn’t know those guys. We would bump into each other at various things we had been invited to, but it was like creating a movement, as if somehow we had been hanging out together beforehand.” Ellis concurred. “I really can count on one hand the number of dinners I actually had with her.”

But for lack of another name for this “movement,” the “Literary Brat Pack” it was for any writer under age 30 who had published a novel to decent reviews between the mid-80s and early 90s.

Soon, however, there would be another name for this bunch, and for those who followed them and those who read them.

In 1989, the year I entered my senior year of high school, Newsweek magazine came out with a special issue on “The New Teens,” featuring a cover of three spunky teens, I guess, and enticing headlines like “What Makes Them Different” and “Who Are Their Heroes?” and “Advice from Judy Blume, Grace Slick, John Waters.”

Unlike Less Than Zero, I vividly remember this issue. The cover, at least. I can’t recall what was on the inside, like, who “their”—meaning my and my friends’—heroes were supposed to be. Or what advice the woman who sang “Feed your head” in the 60s could have possibly had for me. (I probably appreciated John Waters’s words of wisdom though.) I know I talked on the phone with a friend about the issue. I remember he wanted to know what I thought of the kids who were interviewed. We might have made fun of it all. Or maybe we took it seriously.

The point is that even though Newsweek was the kind of magazine your parents or school libraries subscribed to, not the kind of rag that teens willingly sought out and purchased, it got our attention.

The following year I graduated from high school. I had no idea what to do with my life, and in fact I bucked the trend at my school and didn’t go to college right away. Not even a community college. I had a vague notion of wanting to travel. To go on the very same journey of self-discovery that was promoted by books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Or On the Road. Now that book, Kerouac’s book, a “voice of a generation” book from an even earlier time, I had read. And I’d loved it.

I’d also read a few likeminded books recommended to me by friends. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Tim Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. More books about journeys and discovery, about bucking society’s expectations in defiance of the fuddy duddies of yesterday. Only thing is, with the exception of Adams’s kooky novel, these books all belonged to yesterday, to a generation definitely not my own.

But that didn’t seem to matter to me.

Because by this time I’d also read a few of the Literary Brat Packers. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life. Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. I wasn’t sure what to make of them. As far as I could tell, they all seemed to be about cocaine. With a little bit of Wall Street, art, and fashion thrown in. I mean, as a recent high school grad from Illinois, I could relate to stories about people who just want to jump in a car or a spaceship or DayGlo-colored school bus and zip around the country or universe with friends. But snorting lines in a toilet stall in a gallery in SoHo was completely beyond my comprehension.

I kept at it with the Literary Brat Packers though, maybe with some hope that reading the writers “of the moment” would help me figure out what it meant, if anything, to be a freshly minted adult at the end of the millennium.

So when McInerney’s Brightness Falls came out in 1992, I gave it a read. Another novel of 80s excess set in NYC, it had something to do with a brilliant and successful couple’s downfall. I recall thinking that it was a more mature work, Gatsby-like in ambition. Definitely a “statement novel.” But also totally beyond the understanding of a 20-year-old retail and food-service worker from the Midwest.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Donna Tartt’s much-heralded debut The Secret History came out that same year, I was becoming skeptical of works by hot young writers. To some degree, Tartt’s novel might have been a tad bit closer to home. Its main characters were college kids after all. People my age at the time. But...these were rich kids at some ritzy liberal arts college out East. (Tartt, like Ellis and Eisenstadt, was a Bennington alum.) One of the book’s characters, as an elderly woman I worked with at a local library scornfully remarked, is a guy named “Bunny.” So yeah, I passed.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The days of the Literary Brat Pack were numbered.

In 1991 a Canadian author named Douglas Coupland published a novel called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Coupland was 29, but he wasn’t being put forth in any way as the voice of a new generation or the member of a pack. His “novel” wasn’t even that. Instead, Generation X was something of a quaint throwback to medieval works like The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron--a rather plotless collection of stories told by a group of disaffected 20s-somethings in California.

But if the premise was old, the delivery was new. For one, there was no standard 8.5 x 11 inch hardcover edition of Generation X or even a standard paperback edition. From the get-go, it was published as a rather oddly dimensioned 7.85 x 9 inch softcover book with a cloudscape stretched across the top half of the cover and a solid band of orange, green, yellow, or white across the bottom. It felt like a big floppy disk. On the inside, it resembled a zine. The margins were peppered with somewhat dispiriting facts about modern society, zeitgeisty graphics, and call-outs of terms invented by Coupland, like Successophobia and The Emperor’s New Mall and the soon-to-be-timeless McJob.

This was legitimately something new. Something that felt fresh and intriguing. Remember that Newsweek cover? What makes “the new teens” dfferent? However Newsweek answered that in 1989, the magazine probably didn’t see Coupland coming.

Nobody did. Because Coupland didn’t get the Vanity Fair treatment. Not at first. And the book was something of a word-of-mouth sensation, not the kind of novel to be featured in your local library’s book discussion group. Which was perfect for a book that came to represent a determinedly anti-brand and anti-consumerist generation.

As for the title, Coupland was inspired by a chapter in Paul Fussell’s 1983 nonfiction work, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, a book I never even heard of. Thank the lord that someone else has. In the newsletter Culture: An Owner’s Manual, W. David Marx writes, “The final chapter of Class is called ‘The X Way Out’ where Fussell identifies an emerging group in society he calls ‘Category X’ — well-educated, Bohemian-like consumers who construct obscure lifestyles in order to transcend traditional status symbols.” Marx makes the argument that by titling his book Generation X, Coupland “decided to define his generation by its aesthetic choices — specifically, fighting the class hierarchy through the focus on cultural and subcultural capital over economic capital.”

In other words, Coupland was resisting the pigeonhole marketing of his generation, and his book, right there in the title.

Before you knew it, Ellis, Tartt, Coupland, Chabon, and even McInerney were being labeled Generation X writers. Or, at least, writers whose works and characters represented the experiences of Generation X. Never mind that the generation itself was soon defined as people born between 1965 and 1980, and several of these supposed “Gen X” writers went back to the 1950s.

It didn’t matter. There was no going back now. The term was out there, and no doubt marketing teams across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could claim for their own purposes a catchy yet edgy name for the coveted youth demographic. Because just like it’s easier to communicate to a crowd contained in one area, instead of blaring from a loudspeaker pointed in all directions over open ground, it’s much easier to shill to people who’ve been wrapped up with a label.

Names are tricky things. They give things legitimacy and anchor them in meaning, but when applied to a large group of people, they reduce those people to a captive audience. And with a captive audience you can make people listen to or do almost anything.

As anyone who’s ever perused a catalog or read an astrology chart knows, the next step after labeling something is to describe it with a few punchy yet vague predictions and adjectives, the kind that can apply to anybody at any time. Ideally, the adjectives should be semi-flattering. They should hint at distinction and specialness, at some je ne sais quoi that sets this...thing...apart from all the other things before and after. You do want people to buy what you’re selling after all. If you really want to spice it up, you should also toss in some element of danger, a hint of caution, a touch of the forbidden. Not so much to set off any “buyer beware” alarm bells, but enough to stir the buyer’s curiosity.

So, if it’s a group of people you’re trying to sell and sell to—specifically, a group of people born between this year and that—you might flatter them by saying that they’re already much wiser than the people born before them. You also might tell them that nobody’s seen the troubles they’ve seen before, which is flattering in the sense that it validates their anxieties and fears, even if it is quite condescending and possibly even absurd (considering that humans have been dealing with all kinds of crap for centuries now).

To put an edgy spin on it—because young people love to walk the edge, I guess—you can rebrand their so-called preternatural wisdom as “cynicism” and their anxiety and fears as “apathy.” If that seems to lose ‘em, reel ‘em back in by telling them that they’re, say, “diverse,” so much more “diverse” than the people who came before them. In all the history of the world, no one has ever “diversed” as much as these “diverse” young folk have “diversed.” It’s really quite commendable.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, if it sums up you, your friends, and school chums, even for just 10 seconds of your life so far, congrats! You’ve got yourself a generation: Generation X!!!!!!

Or maybe this label is supposed to go with Millennials. Or Gen Z? Or the Lost Generation? Or Libras. Maybe Geminis. Yeah, that’s it: Gen Z Geminis with a diverse no-foam Greatest Generation moon. Maybe the label is b.s. Maybe we can make it mean whatever we want it to mean. If one generation rejects it, recycle it for the next. Young people, they like recycling.

But back to Coupland’s Generation X. It wasn’t long before Coupland found himself in the “voice of a generation” club alongside Ellis and Tartt. Meanwhile, McInerney and Janowitz kind of dropped out of the picture, while others filled the void. David Foster Wallace. Zadie Smith. Elizabeth Wurtzel. Dave Eggers. Colson Whitehead. Jonathan Franzen.

No surprise that Coupland rejected the label, even if he did keep writing about the pecularities of people under age 30 as if he, too, wanted to corral them into some kind of subclass. Case in point, his second novel, Shampoo Planet, came out in 1992 and centered on the younger sibling of one of the main characters in Generation X—a determinedly anti-Boomer Alex P. Keaton-style “global teen” named Tyler who at one point declares “My memories begin with Ronald Reagan.” Confusingly, Coupland defined “global teens” as “alien to X as X is to baby boomers.” Even though the “global teen” characters in Shampoo Planet belonged to the X years, as the generation would come to be defined.

That kind of confusion should have been a warning against taking generation labels too seriously. But as we stand now, in 2025, generational labeling (and bickering) has been dialed up to 11 since the days of Coupland et al.

When it came to the first books that got the Gen X label, I have to admit I drank the Kool-Aid. Generation X thrilled me when I first read it. Not that it resonated with me. Who needs resonance when you’ve got that cover! Those call-outs! That marginalia!

I remember I was especially eager to read Shampoo Planet, even if Coupland’s “global teens” comment did mystify me. His comment that the book was specifically about people under age 25 (which I was at the time) is what got me hooked.

But Shampoo Planet left me wanting. Just as with those coke-snorters in Slaves of New York, I didn’t relate to Tyler and his friends. The title, for example. It came from Tyler’s obsession with hair and grooming. That alone felt like b.s. to me. Still does, especially when you consider that this novel came out one year after grunge took over with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” another so-called generation-definer. It also followed on the heels of Ellis’s American Psycho, a extremely violent novel about a serial killer that became a bit of a rallying cry for free speech—and also centered on a young charater obsessed with grooming. For the record, Ellis did it better, had more of a point with it, knew what his targets were.

But which was it? Were we preps or were we slobs? Achievers or slackers?

I couldn’t tell you. As a reader, I removed myself from the debate. I didn’t read Zadie Smith or Donna Tartt or Bret Easton Ellis or Dave Eggers—not until much later. Forget Elizabeth Wurtzel. I thought her book covers were a joke, an obvious ploy for “controversy”—maybe not engineered by her, but still. Twice I made an attempt at Infinite Jest. Interesting writer, but I didn’t get very far either time. Same with The Corrections, though I only gave it one shot.

Instead, I just read what I wanted to, no matter when it was written and who the book was supposed to be aimed at. I read a lot of Irish literature, including some current folks (Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe, Colm Toibin). I read Romantic poets and classic American texts and celebrity bios and African American fiction and books by women. I fell in love with the novels of Louise Erdrich, Tayari Jones, Emer Martin, Cormac McCarthy, and Toibin. I loved Frank O’Connor. I loved Lonesome Dove and Kristin Lavransdatter, two epic masterpieces that are worlds apart in setting and style. I read more poets. I adored Shelley and Keats, Yeats, Kevin Young, Frank O’Hara, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. I liked random reads like Hector Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum and Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell and Richard Rodriguez’s Darling and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The Creative Quest by Questlove. That book by Patti Smith where all she talks about is her favorite detective shows and coffee.

Sometime in my 40s I finally circled back to Generation X. By this time, people my age had long passed the expiration date on coolness and no one was putting us on magazine covers anymore asking what makes us different, partly because magazines had become about as relevant as a Richard Brautigan novel. Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Gen Xers were already getting lumped in with Baby Boomers, our one-time enemies, who in turn were suddenly being burned at the stake for everything from hastening climate change to ruining Facebook. More often than not, Gen Xers were overlooked entirely. Skipped over from Boomers to Millennials. Like we weren’t there, hadn’t made so much as a dent in the culture.

Maybe all this societal change and generational name-calling stirred in me some sense of territoriality mixed with nostalgia. Because I started checking out some of the heavy hitters of my generation’s salad days. A collection of David Foster Wallace essays (pretty good...a mixed bag if anything). The End of the Tour. OK, that’s a movie, but a movie about Wallace. White Teeth. (Liked it.) The Goldfinch. (Started out decent then became a slog.) The Interestings. (Meh.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Less Than Zero. (I had no idea it was a Christmas story.)

Mixed in with these reads were some by the new kids. Normal People. (OK.) Beautiful World, Where Are You. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Eileen. (Not bad.) Self-Care. (Yeah, dumb.) My Year of Rest and Relaxation. (Also not bad.) The New Me. (Pretty good.) Banal Nightmare. (Also pretty good but the relentless nastiness starts to feel like “uh huh, uh huh, flips pages to move it along.” I can be convinced otherwise though.)

And yet, say I saw glimmers of myself in those books. My younger self, my current self, whatever. Say there were parts that resonated with me. Parts that made me laugh, made me feel wistful. Say there were characters who felt like people I knew. Places and scenes that felt so true I could picture them as if they were playing out right in front of me. Given that these are supposed to be “Millennial” books, and I’m no Millennial, is that a bug? Am I just imagining universality? Or is that a feature?

Maybe it’s what literature is supposed to be. And maybe it’s what humanness, no matter when you’re born and when you die and what years fall in between, is supposed to be.

In 2021 Bret Easton Ellis came out with The Shards. Ellis has become something of a cranky old man in recent years, but a cranky old man who is ride or die for his generation. No surprise then that The Shards is something of a love letter to the 1980s. Its music, its movies, its hedonism. Much like those coke-addled tomes of the Reagan era, The Shards is about people with whom I have nothing in common other than sharing the Earth around the same time in history. Much like Less Than Zero, its characters are all spoiled, amoral rich kids in Los Angeles who do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex, always with a pool nearby. In The Shards, though, there’s a plot about a serial killer that somehow...makes you feel for these trashy teens. It’s a gripping read, but that’s not what surprised me. What surprised me is that it resonated with me. That it almost felt like, yeah, this was the 80s. This is Gen X.

It could be that nostalgia has finally primed me for the kind of marketing that accompanied Gen X novels of the 90s. That in the face of rapid change, I’m giving in to a Kool-Aid flashback and clinging to something familiar. Nodding along to the spiel, happily handing over all my money, buying the T-shirt and not even pretending anymore that I’m wearing it “ironically.”

It’s also possible that Ellis just wrote a good story. Did he write it for people like me? Or any and all takers?

Most likely the latter. It sounds dumb, after all, to propose that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby for flappers and bootleggers, with no eye on immortality. Kerouac originally modeled himself after Thomas Wolfe, a serious and conventional novelist. Then he wrote On the Road. That novel wasn’t him throwing in the towel, and it certainly wasn’t him trying to set a trend by catering to an as-yet undefined generation of rebels, beatniks, drop-outs, and seekers. The very idea is, again, dumb.

Instead, On the Road was a self-serving creative breakthrough—as all swing-for-the-fences literature should be. It’s why young people still fall in love with the book decades later. And why crabby old post-menopausal hags like me can admire and look forward to a new Halle Butler novel, as well as a new Louise Erdrich. Even a new Bret Easton Ellis.

Generations come and go. Good stories are for the ages.

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“I certainly never intended to speak for anyone other than myself.” —Sally Rooney

“I think I might be the voice of my generation...or at least, a voice of a generation.” —Lena Dunham (as Hannah in Girls)

Not long after I graduated from high school (class of 1990), I became a perfect mark for books backed by a specific marketing strategy. And by this I mean books that are shilled as generational touchstones.

You know the kind of books I mean. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. On the Road. Infinite Jest. Prozac Nation. Anything by Halle Butler or Sally Rooney. Anything by Lena Dunham. The Fire Next Time. The Sun Also Rises. Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

That last one might seem far-fetched, even to those who’ve heard of it. An earnest, nazel-gazing little novel about, yes, a seagull, it became a best-seller in the early 70s, a time when many Americans were on a similarly earnest journey of nazel-gazing self-discovery.

Have I read it? Please. It came out in 1970, two years before I was born. By the time the book was on my radar, as a pre-teen and teen of the 80s, such late-hippie affectations had become a ruthless punchline.

By the mid-80s, a book like Jonathan Livingston Seagull might as well have been written in the Victorian Era or the Stone Age for all it spoke to readers of the new crop of books coming out. Specifically, the new crop that was being marketed to a certain kind of reader.

I was about 13 years old when Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero came out, in 1985. I have no memory of it as a book until the widely panned movie version was released a couple years later. Which was rated R so I didn’t get a taste of that either in real time.

But Ellis, who was 20 years old when he published Less Than Zero, was already being anointed the “voice of a new generation.” And he was being lumped in with a bunch of other relatively young writers who were dubbed “the Literary Brat Pack.” Jay McInerney, who had just published Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, at age 29, was one of the pack. So was Tama Janowitz, who came out with Slaves of New York in 1986, when she was about 28. Depending on your sources, Michael Chabon was also part of the Literary Brat Pack, as were Meg Wolitzer, Jill Eisenstadt, and Donna Tartt.

Decades later, the truth would come out that some of these writers barely even knew each other. Never mind the photos in such rags as Vanity Fair of what appeared to be Janowitz and Elllis and McInerney all partying together at some glamourously boozy writers’ event in NYC. In a 2016 Harper’s Bazaar article about the Literary Brat Pack, Janowitz said of Ellis and McInerney, “I didn’t know those guys. We would bump into each other at various things we had been invited to, but it was like creating a movement, as if somehow we had been hanging out together beforehand.” Ellis concurred. “I really can count on one hand the number of dinners I actually had with her.”

But for lack of another name for this “movement,” the “Literary Brat Pack” it was for any writer under age 30 who had published a novel to decent reviews between the mid-80s and early 90s.

Soon, however, there would be another name for this bunch, and for those who followed them and those who read them.

In 1989, the year I entered my senior year of high school, Newsweek magazine came out with a special issue on “The New Teens,” featuring a cover of three spunky teens, I guess, and enticing headlines like “What Makes Them Different” and “Who Are Their Heroes?” and “Advice from Judy Blume, Grace Slick, John Waters.”

Unlike Less Than Zero, I vividly remember this issue. The cover, at least. I can’t recall what was on the inside, like, who “their”—meaning my and my friends’—heroes were supposed to be. Or what advice the woman who sang “Feed your head” in the 60s could have possibly had for me. (I probably appreciated John Waters’s words of wisdom though.) I know I talked on the phone with a friend about the issue. I remember he wanted to know what I thought of the kids who were interviewed. We might have made fun of it all. Or maybe we took it seriously.

The point is that even though Newsweek was the kind of magazine your parents or school libraries subscribed to, not the kind of rag that teens willingly sought out and purchased, it got our attention.

The following year I graduated from high school. I had no idea what to do with my life, and in fact I bucked the trend at my school and didn’t go to college right away. Not even a community college. I had a vague notion of wanting to travel. To go on the very same journey of self-discovery that was promoted by books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Or On the Road. Now that book, Kerouac’s book, a “voice of a generation” book from an even earlier time, I had read. And I’d loved it.

I’d also read a few likeminded books recommended to me by friends. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Tim Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. More books about journeys and discovery, about bucking society’s expectations in defiance of the fuddy duddies of yesterday. Only thing is, with the exception of Adams’s kooky novel, these books all belonged to yesterday, to a generation definitely not my own.

But that didn’t seem to matter to me.

Because by this time I’d also read a few of the Literary Brat Packers. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life. Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. I wasn’t sure what to make of them. As far as I could tell, they all seemed to be about cocaine. With a little bit of Wall Street, art, and fashion thrown in. I mean, as a recent high school grad from Illinois, I could relate to stories about people who just want to jump in a car or a spaceship or DayGlo-colored school bus and zip around the country or universe with friends. But snorting lines in a toilet stall in a gallery in SoHo was completely beyond my comprehension.

I kept at it with the Literary Brat Packers though, maybe with some hope that reading the writers “of the moment” would help me figure out what it meant, if anything, to be a freshly minted adult at the end of the millennium.

So when McInerney’s Brightness Falls came out in 1992, I gave it a read. Another novel of 80s excess set in NYC, it had something to do with a brilliant and successful couple’s downfall. I recall thinking that it was a more mature work, Gatsby-like in ambition. Definitely a “statement novel.” But also totally beyond the understanding of a 20-year-old retail and food-service worker from the Midwest.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Donna Tartt’s much-heralded debut The Secret History came out that same year, I was becoming skeptical of works by hot young writers. To some degree, Tartt’s novel might have been a tad bit closer to home. Its main characters were college kids after all. People my age at the time. But...these were rich kids at some ritzy liberal arts college out East. (Tartt, like Ellis and Eisenstadt, was a Bennington alum.) One of the book’s characters, as an elderly woman I worked with at a local library scornfully remarked, is a guy named “Bunny.” So yeah, I passed.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The days of the Literary Brat Pack were numbered.

In 1991 a Canadian author named Douglas Coupland published a novel called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Coupland was 29, but he wasn’t being put forth in any way as the voice of a new generation or the member of a pack. His “novel” wasn’t even that. Instead, Generation X was something of a quaint throwback to medieval works like The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron--a rather plotless collection of stories told by a group of disaffected 20s-somethings in California.

But if the premise was old, the delivery was new. For one, there was no standard 8.5 x 11 inch hardcover edition of Generation X or even a standard paperback edition. From the get-go, it was published as a rather oddly dimensioned 7.85 x 9 inch softcover book with a cloudscape stretched across the top half of the cover and a solid band of orange, green, yellow, or white across the bottom. It felt like a big floppy disk. On the inside, it resembled a zine. The margins were peppered with somewhat dispiriting facts about modern society, zeitgeisty graphics, and call-outs of terms invented by Coupland, like Successophobia and The Emperor’s New Mall and the soon-to-be-timeless McJob.

This was legitimately something new. Something that felt fresh and intriguing. Remember that Newsweek cover? What makes “the new teens” dfferent? However Newsweek answered that in 1989, the magazine probably didn’t see Coupland coming.

Nobody did. Because Coupland didn’t get the Vanity Fair treatment. Not at first. And the book was something of a word-of-mouth sensation, not the kind of novel to be featured in your local library’s book discussion group. Which was perfect for a book that came to represent a determinedly anti-brand and anti-consumerist generation.

As for the title, Coupland was inspired by a chapter in Paul Fussell’s 1983 nonfiction work, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, a book I never even heard of. Thank the lord that someone else has. In the newsletter Culture: An Owner’s Manual, W. David Marx writes, “The final chapter of Class is called ‘The X Way Out’ where Fussell identifies an emerging group in society he calls ‘Category X’ — well-educated, Bohemian-like consumers who construct obscure lifestyles in order to transcend traditional status symbols.” Marx makes the argument that by titling his book Generation X, Coupland “decided to define his generation by its aesthetic choices — specifically, fighting the class hierarchy through the focus on cultural and subcultural capital over economic capital.”

In other words, Coupland was resisting the pigeonhole marketing of his generation, and his book, right there in the title.

Before you knew it, Ellis, Tartt, Coupland, Chabon, and even McInerney were being labeled Generation X writers. Or, at least, writers whose works and characters represented the experiences of Generation X. Never mind that the generation itself was soon defined as people born between 1965 and 1980, and several of these supposed “Gen X” writers went back to the 1950s.

It didn’t matter. There was no going back now. The term was out there, and no doubt marketing teams across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could claim for their own purposes a catchy yet edgy name for the coveted youth demographic. Because just like it’s easier to communicate to a crowd contained in one area, instead of blaring from a loudspeaker pointed in all directions over open ground, it’s much easier to shill to people who’ve been wrapped up with a label.

Names are tricky things. They give things legitimacy and anchor them in meaning, but when applied to a large group of people, they reduce those people to a captive audience. And with a captive audience you can make people listen to or do almost anything.

As anyone who’s ever perused a catalog or read an astrology chart knows, the next step after labeling something is to describe it with a few punchy yet vague predictions and adjectives, the kind that can apply to anybody at any time. Ideally, the adjectives should be semi-flattering. They should hint at distinction and specialness, at some je ne sais quoi that sets this...thing...apart from all the other things before and after. You do want people to buy what you’re selling after all. If you really want to spice it up, you should also toss in some element of danger, a hint of caution, a touch of the forbidden. Not so much to set off any “buyer beware” alarm bells, but enough to stir the buyer’s curiosity.

So, if it’s a group of people you’re trying to sell and sell to—specifically, a group of people born between this year and that—you might flatter them by saying that they’re already much wiser than the people born before them. You also might tell them that nobody’s seen the troubles they’ve seen before, which is flattering in the sense that it validates their anxieties and fears, even if it is quite condescending and possibly even absurd (considering that humans have been dealing with all kinds of crap for centuries now).

To put an edgy spin on it—because young people love to walk the edge, I guess—you can rebrand their so-called preternatural wisdom as “cynicism” and their anxiety and fears as “apathy.” If that seems to lose ‘em, reel ‘em back in by telling them that they’re, say, “diverse,” so much more “diverse” than the people who came before them. In all the history of the world, no one has ever “diversed” as much as these “diverse” young folk have “diversed.” It’s really quite commendable.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, if it sums up you, your friends, and school chums, even for just 10 seconds of your life so far, congrats! You’ve got yourself a generation: Generation X!!!!!!

Or maybe this label is supposed to go with Millennials. Or Gen Z? Or the Lost Generation? Or Libras. Maybe Geminis. Yeah, that’s it: Gen Z Geminis with a diverse no-foam Greatest Generation moon. Maybe the label is b.s. Maybe we can make it mean whatever we want it to mean. If one generation rejects it, recycle it for the next. Young people, they like recycling.

But back to Coupland’s Generation X. It wasn’t long before Coupland found himself in the “voice of a generation” club alongside Ellis and Tartt. Meanwhile, McInerney and Janowitz kind of dropped out of the picture, while others filled the void. David Foster Wallace. Zadie Smith. Elizabeth Wurtzel. Dave Eggers. Colson Whitehead. Jonathan Franzen.

No surprise that Coupland rejected the label, even if he did keep writing about the pecularities of people under age 30 as if he, too, wanted to corral them into some kind of subclass. Case in point, his second novel, Shampoo Planet, came out in 1992 and centered on the younger sibling of one of the main characters in Generation X—a determinedly anti-Boomer Alex P. Keaton-style “global teen” named Tyler who at one point declares “My memories begin with Ronald Reagan.” Confusingly, Coupland defined “global teens” as “alien to X as X is to baby boomers.” Even though the “global teen” characters in Shampoo Planet belonged to the X years, as the generation would come to be defined.

That kind of confusion should have been a warning against taking generation labels too seriously. But as we stand now, in 2025, generational labeling (and bickering) has been dialed up to 11 since the days of Coupland et al.

When it came to the first books that got the Gen X label, I have to admit I drank the Kool-Aid. Generation X thrilled me when I first read it. Not that it resonated with me. Who needs resonance when you’ve got that cover! Those call-outs! That marginalia!

I remember I was especially eager to read Shampoo Planet, even if Coupland’s “global teens” comment did mystify me. His comment that the book was specifically about people under age 25 (which I was at the time) is what got me hooked.

But Shampoo Planet left me wanting. Just as with those coke-snorters in Slaves of New York, I didn’t relate to Tyler and his friends. The title, for example. It came from Tyler’s obsession with hair and grooming. That alone felt like b.s. to me. Still does, especially when you consider that this novel came out one year after grunge took over with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” another so-called generation-definer. It also followed on the heels of Ellis’s American Psycho, a extremely violent novel about a serial killer that became a bit of a rallying cry for free speech—and also centered on a young charater obsessed with grooming. For the record, Ellis did it better, had more of a point with it, knew what his targets were.

But which was it? Were we preps or were we slobs? Achievers or slackers?

I couldn’t tell you. As a reader, I removed myself from the debate. I didn’t read Zadie Smith or Donna Tartt or Bret Easton Ellis or Dave Eggers—not until much later. Forget Elizabeth Wurtzel. I thought her book covers were a joke, an obvious ploy for “controversy”—maybe not engineered by her, but still. Twice I made an attempt at Infinite Jest. Interesting writer, but I didn’t get very far either time. Same with The Corrections, though I only gave it one shot.

Instead, I just read what I wanted to, no matter when it was written and who the book was supposed to be aimed at. I read a lot of Irish literature, including some current folks (Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe, Colm Toibin). I read Romantic poets and classic American texts and celebrity bios and African American fiction and books by women. I fell in love with the novels of Louise Erdrich, Tayari Jones, Emer Martin, Cormac McCarthy, and Toibin. I loved Frank O’Connor. I loved Lonesome Dove and Kristin Lavransdatter, two epic masterpieces that are worlds apart in setting and style. I read more poets. I adored Shelley and Keats, Yeats, Kevin Young, Frank O’Hara, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. I liked random reads like Hector Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum and Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell and Richard Rodriguez’s Darling and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The Creative Quest by Questlove. That book by Patti Smith where all she talks about is her favorite detective shows and coffee.

Sometime in my 40s I finally circled back to Generation X. By this time, people my age had long passed the expiration date on coolness and no one was putting us on magazine covers anymore asking what makes us different, partly because magazines had become about as relevant as a Richard Brautigan novel. Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Gen Xers were already getting lumped in with Baby Boomers, our one-time enemies, who in turn were suddenly being burned at the stake for everything from hastening climate change to ruining Facebook. More often than not, Gen Xers were overlooked entirely. Skipped over from Boomers to Millennials. Like we weren’t there, hadn’t made so much as a dent in the culture.

Maybe all this societal change and generational name-calling stirred in me some sense of territoriality mixed with nostalgia. Because I started checking out some of the heavy hitters of my generation’s salad days. A collection of David Foster Wallace essays (pretty good...a mixed bag if anything). The End of the Tour. OK, that’s a movie, but a movie about Wallace. White Teeth. (Liked it.) The Goldfinch. (Started out decent then became a slog.) The Interestings. (Meh.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Less Than Zero. (I had no idea it was a Christmas story.)

Mixed in with these reads were some by the new kids. Normal People. (OK.) Beautiful World, Where Are You. (Ugh. Did. Not. Finish.) Eileen. (Not bad.) Self-Care. (Yeah, dumb.) My Year of Rest and Relaxation. (Also not bad.) The New Me. (Pretty good.) Banal Nightmare. (Also pretty good but the relentless nastiness starts to feel like “uh huh, uh huh, flips pages to move it along.” I can be convinced otherwise though.)

And yet, say I saw glimmers of myself in those books. My younger self, my current self, whatever. Say there were parts that resonated with me. Parts that made me laugh, made me feel wistful. Say there were characters who felt like people I knew. Places and scenes that felt so true I could picture them as if they were playing out right in front of me. Given that these are supposed to be “Millennial” books, and I’m no Millennial, is that a bug? Am I just imagining universality? Or is that a feature?

Maybe it’s what literature is supposed to be. And maybe it’s what humanness, no matter when you’re born and when you die and what years fall in between, is supposed to be.

In 2021 Bret Easton Ellis came out with The Shards. Ellis has become something of a cranky old man in recent years, but a cranky old man who is ride or die for his generation. No surprise then that The Shards is something of a love letter to the 1980s. Its music, its movies, its hedonism. Much like those coke-addled tomes of the Reagan era, The Shards is about people with whom I have nothing in common other than sharing the Earth around the same time in history. Much like Less Than Zero, its characters are all spoiled, amoral rich kids in Los Angeles who do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex, always with a pool nearby. In The Shards, though, there’s a plot about a serial killer that somehow...makes you feel for these trashy teens. It’s a gripping read, but that’s not what surprised me. What surprised me is that it resonated with me. That it almost felt like, yeah, this was the 80s. This is Gen X.

It could be that nostalgia has finally primed me for the kind of marketing that accompanied Gen X novels of the 90s. That in the face of rapid change, I’m giving in to a Kool-Aid flashback and clinging to something familiar. Nodding along to the spiel, happily handing over all my money, buying the T-shirt and not even pretending anymore that I’m wearing it “ironically.”

It’s also possible that Ellis just wrote a good story. Did he write it for people like me? Or any and all takers?

Most likely the latter. It sounds dumb, after all, to propose that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby for flappers and bootleggers, with no eye on immortality. Kerouac originally modeled himself after Thomas Wolfe, a serious and conventional novelist. Then he wrote On the Road. That novel wasn’t him throwing in the towel, and it certainly wasn’t him trying to set a trend by catering to an as-yet undefined generation of rebels, beatniks, drop-outs, and seekers. The very idea is, again, dumb.

Instead, On the Road was a self-serving creative breakthrough—as all swing-for-the-fences literature should be. It’s why young people still fall in love with the book decades later. And why crabby old post-menopausal hags like me can admire and look forward to a new Halle Butler novel, as well as a new Louise Erdrich. Even a new Bret Easton Ellis.

Generations come and go. Good stories are for the ages.

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The Diners of DP

Abundance is relative.

The town I live in has a modest skyscraper of a library (four stories) with an outdoor patio overlooking downtown. It’s not the tallest building around, by any means. Some years back my suburb went a little crazy with condo development, and those structures have come to dominate the skyline.

Still, there’s a decent bird’s-eye view of downtown and all the businesses it has to offer. From a vantage point like that sometimes you notice things that don’t stand out at ground level. You see patterns that you don’t readily pick up on foot or in a car.

Like the thing that strikes me when I’m looking out over my town is how many diners there are. Not as many diners as there are condos, dammit, but enough to feel like one’s bottomless cup of joe runneth over.

Here’s the rundown of the diners of downtown Des Plaines.

In the very center of town, directly across the train station, is a diner that’s had more career pivots than Cher. This magical place, called The Sugar Bowl:

• opened as a soda fountain in 1921

• revamped mid-century to throw an ice-cream factory and candy kitchen into its mix

• inspired a (foiled) family-proprietor hit job in the 1990s

• shut down after said foiled hit job

• reopened and thrived to become the town’s oldest surviving business.

A few blocks east and just across the river is the cozy (and frequently packed) Des Plaines Family Restaurant & Pancake House, where the best power ballads of the 80s and 90s will serenade you while you eat. (Is that Roxette I hear? Yes, yes it is.)

Follow the river south about a mile and you come to Mrs. V’s, a Greek-owned breakfast and lunch joint opened by a married couple with kids in 2003. Several years later the place was sold after the husband died. But locals revolted against the new menu and new name. Thankfully, the widow reopened Mrs. V’s in all its homey glory in 2016. (Can I say the hash browns at this place are the most melt-in-your-mouth I’ve ever had?)

Now, if you go west from the train station and around the corner there’s The Choo Choo, a tiny diner no bigger than a box car that opened in 1951. The Choo Choo’s claim to fame is a model train that brings customers their hamburgers and malteds. The restaurant’s owners beat Ray Kroc (aka Mr. McDonald’s) to the punch in the speedy hamburger biz by a few years—the very first Mickey D’s opened up about two blocks away in 1955. McDonald’s, as we all know, went on to conquer the world. But guess which of the two burger joints endured in downtown Des Plaines? The original McDonald’s was torn down in 2018. The little choo-choo place that could is still in operation.

A bit farther west, following the train tracks, is a Mexican diner that rose from the ashes of a pancake house that had been there forever but finally decided to throw in the towel after the pandemic. Los Azares almost looks the same inside as ye olde Porters Grille did, right down to the dinettes and the classic counter with stools. American, Mexican, Greek, restaurateurs of all stripes know not to mess with a good thing. Los Azares’ website says the restaurant began as a dream for the owner. He’s onto something...

Diner Americana

The question is, do all American towns have it so good? Is this abundance of local diners normal? Or should I ask, is it normal in 2025? Is it normal—and even welcome—in a culture that years ago jumped into the “foodie” lifestyle like a fork sinking into a bottomless chicken pot pie?

Diners are pure Americana, part of the fabric of U.S. culture like rock and roll, the Grand Canyon, summer blockbusters, Ferris wheels, and surf music. There are songs about diners (Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” and about 65% of Tom Waits’s catalog), paintings of diners (Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Automat), famous diners on TV (Monk’s in Seinfeld, Mel’s in Alice, Al’s in Happy Days), and countless movies with memorable diner scenes.

Diners work in film much like they do in real life. Meaning, if you’re watching a movie and all of a sudden the scene shifts to a diner, you know something good is about to happen. A great exchange of dialogue, a good joke, a confrontation, a reckoning—a slice of life basically, comical or romantic, ominous or ordinary, intimate or explosive.

Diners are places where old friends go to catch up, couples go to have a heart to heart, families go to fill up their bellies after church, truckers go to fill up on coffee before heading back on the road, party animals go to cap off a night of clubbing (and soak up all that booze!), and lonely people go to feel at home.

Politicians on the campaign trail make a point of heading to a local diner (with cameras in tow) to get a feel for what the average Joe or Jane is thinking about the issues. We all know it’s a show, of course. A ploy to be seen as a man or woman of the people. Because “of the people” is the universal translation of “diner.”

Other writers have put this in fancier terms, describing diners as microcosms of American democracy or symbols of American egalitarianism. Another term you sometimes hear is “third space.” Third spaces are the places you go beyond the first space (your home) and second space (your school or work) to find community. In the United States, diners are the quintessential third space. A place that’s there when you need it, a common ground for everyday people.

In reality, it hasn’t always worked out that way. Not everyone is welcome in every and any diner. Diners were part of the battleground during the civil rights movement, after all. African Americans had to fight for the right to simply sit at a lunch counter and drink a cup of coffee or have a meal, to be treated with basic human dignity.

Moreover, local spots tend to attract locals, and as anyone who’s wandered into an unassuming-looking Irish bar in certain parts of Boston or Chicago can tell you, nobody’s more territorial than a local. Easy Rider’s most thrilling moments might be the ones that revel in the feeling of glorious American freedom on the open road, but the movie’s key scene (the one that portends its shocking ending) is when Wyatt, Billy the Kid, and Jack Nicholson’s subversive-minded small-town lawyer encounter a group of hippie-hating rednecks in a local diner.

Yet the call of the lunch counter, of a stack of pancakes at 3 am or a bottomless cup of coffee topped off every 10 minutes by a cheerful waitress who calls you “hon,” endures.

But for how much longer?

Disappearing Diners

Even before COVID, there were reports of the disappearing American diner. In 2019 The New York Times said diners in NYC were shuttering on an average of 13 a year. The culprits were rising rents and other costs and the trend toward new mixed-use development projects.

Then the pandemic came and took a Grim Reaper-style scythe to all kinds of restaurants across the country. All-night diners were especially hard-hit. Fewer people want to work late-night hours anymore, certainly for the kind of wages that service staff and line cooks are expected to live on. Younger generations drink less compared to the hard-partying (and I say that with pride) night owls of Gen X, the Baby Boom, and the Silent Generation. Younger Americans also rely more on delivery apps to satisfy their late-night (or any-hour) munchies.

Meanwhile, face-to-face socializing has to some degree been compromised by remote work, texting, online chats, and social media. Why call your friend and ask you to meet them in ten at the corner diner for a coffee and chat when you can just save the walk/drive and money in favor of a quick text?

It’s no wonder that the diners that have managed to survive have limited their service to the breakfast and lunch hours.

These factors of costs, COVID, and changing habits have been well documented. But I think there’s another factor that plays a role. The rise of foodie culture.

Foodies Are No Fun

“Foodie” is a term coined in the 80s to describe nonprofessional folks with an obsession with fine dining, celebrity chefs, and “culinary experiences.” A key word here is “nonprofessional.” Because foodies, from my experience, tend to be self-declared experts who have never even set toe in a professional kitchen. Foodies are people who never worked a fast-food job for a summer back in high school or the concession stand at their neighborhood pool or a pizza-delivery gig in college. People who wouldn’t work a job like that, on principle. Foodies are people who’ve never wrapped a burrito with a line of customers on the other side of the counter staring them down, never burned their hand with grease while shaking out a french fry basket, never nicked their knuckle with a cheese grater and scrambled around in a panic to clean up the blood and hunt down a bandaid yet still get the order plated in time, never suffered through a morning or lunch or evening or weekend or holiday rush trying to deal with a suddenly broken dishwasher or an overheating cooler or two coworkers who’ve called in sick.

One kind of culture is built on affordability, on the concept of the restaurant as a transactional yet welcoming space and of food as sustenance and comfort, on food as a fact of life. The representative menu of this culture is a collection of what’s tried and true, what appeals to the most people most of the time.

The other kind of culture is built on cultivated (and often expensive) tastes, on the concept of the restaurant as a status symbol and of food as art. The menu of this culture is an artifact and yet a moving goalpost that reflects expertise (which in itself is often based on the customer’s assessment rather than the collected labor, experience, and skills of the chef, cook, servers, and other staff).

I’m sure I don’t have to connect the dots for you. You know which culture matches up with the foodie and which one with the diner. You know because the larger culture, as we can see by the fact of the disappearing diner, has been morphing to keep up with one more than the other.

“Foodie” the word might have been wormed its way into the lexicon in the 80s, but I think it took a while for the culture itself to evolve and creep across America. Life was slower back then pre-internet, after all, and my own anecdotal evidence from working in the food service industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s tells me that there wa s glorious time when the average couple looking to buy a cake for their upcoming nuptials couldn’t tell rolled fondant icing from poured fondant or the difference between bavarian cream and buttercream filling. They had to go to a bakery or a reception hall and talk to an actual paid expert and maybe taste a few samples and look through a modest photo collection of wedding cake designs and then pick the one that best matched their budget and tastes and reception plans. That’s how it went in the early 90s, at least.

By the 2000s, thanks to foodie culture (OK, and the internet too) and its evil spawn of celebrity chef/baker porn and ridiculously edited cooking competition shows, people now show up at their local bakery or Jewel or Costco with a photo of some five-tiered monstrosity that they saw on Cake Boss or Pinterest that has a random pile of donuts on it or a replica of a Gucci handbag with edible diamonds or a 3-foot-tall dragon positioned upright on its tail and expect you to make this for their kid’s kindergarten graduation tomorrow and pay you $30 bucks for it. They will also want it iced entirely in whip cream with fresh strawberries all around the edges and ombre shading and maybe some firework sparklers burning not just when the cake is ready to be rolled out for the party but when they pick it up 5 hours beforehand. Oh, did they say they plan to pick it up? No, they meant they want it delivered to the party location. Which is 20 miles away in downtown Chicago on the 67th floor of the John Hancock building on the Saturday afternoon of the Air and Water Show. And it’s all possible, they know, because, you see, they saw this on Cake Boss or in Bon Appetit. And as you try your best to take down this order and even call in the manager and baker and cake decorator and local police and fire department for help, this “foodie” will lose their patience that it’s taking so long to get down all the details and that they have to answer so many unreasonable questions and demands like “what flavor cake do you want” or “how do you spell your kid’s name” or “we require full payment in advance for insane orders like this.”

They will call you “unprofessional” (or even just “stupid”) and walk out in a huff. Then they will do what foodies are born to do. The one thing that is really the whole point of being a foodie. The only actual skill, much less power, that foodies have.

Posting a snarky review online.

Because the internet is the domain of foodies like the kitchen is the domain of actual cooks. Foodies are people who, deep down, know they couldn’t hack it a second in a kitchen (probably not even at home), so they redirect all their energy into writing about food and eating and dining on review sites and other online spaces. Which have become the (virtual) third spaces that diners once were. Yes, foodies seek “experiences” in real-life restaurants, but increasingly only so they can post about them.

My thoughts here aren’t new territory or anything. I’m only saying what most normal people have been thinking for years now—and what the larger culture has begun to eviscerate in movies like The Menu (2022), starring Ralph Fiennes as a brilliant chef who’d rather die than keep catering to (literally) the whims of a diverse cross-section of self-deluded and thoroughly hateable foodies.

In fact, making fun of foodies goes back a bit in film and TV. Which brings me to this post’s title. What is “bullshit jam”?

Bullsh*t Jam

It’s my term, as a former food service worker, for much of what comes out of a foodie’s mouth. And it’s a term I borrowed from the late great Debbie Reynolds and the great (but not late) Albert Brooks. Back in the 90s the two of them starred in a comedy called Mother, written and directed by Brooks, about a middle-aged writer who decides to move back in with his widowed mother to see if he can figure out where his relationships with women have gone wrong. Much hilarity ensues as the snobby Brooks has to endure the budget-conscious tastes of his stuck-in-her-ways mom.

In one scene, mom and her grown-adult son go grocery shopping together, and sonny tries to get his Greatest Generation mother to spend something like eleven bucks on a chintzy-sized jar of jelly with frou-frou wrapping. “C’mon, Mother, let’s experience this together,” Al says, pretty much forcing the jar into her shopping cart. He then lays down some theory that she treats herself cheaply, which she’s instilled in him. Deb reminds him that she lived through the Depression, which Al pshaws at, saying, “We’re in the 90s, Mother. It’s fancy jam time.”

Indeed, compared to 2025, the 90s were pretty awesome. But then sonny suddenly believe he’s had an epiphany, right there in the grocery store aisle. Brooks tells Debbie Downer Reynolds that he thinks her relentlessly bummer “Depression story” guilt trip signifies that she doesn’t like herself that much. Which, again, she’s transferred to him, and that’s what his underlying problem with the chicks is all about. Mom balks at all this, of course, telling her son that she likes herself very much, thank you, and yeah, no way is she going to shovel out so much cash for “bullshit jam.”

Hear, hear. If it isn’t apparent by now, I’m with Mom on this one.

Time will tell which kind wins out. Or if there’s something better or worse on the horizon of American culinary traditions. I feel some hope in the success of the show The Bear, a series that’s not about a diner but about a sandwich shop that’s semi-transformed into a fine dining restaurant.

Revenge of The Bear

The Bear, which, like all awesome things, is set in Chicago, has been deconstructed by all kinds of critics for what it says about food, cooking, celebrity chefdom, fine dining, and the restaurant industry. For me, The Bear is a classic workplace show, no different than Alice, another great series set in a food establishment, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Barney Miller, Hill Street Blues, Taxi, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, or The Office. The show is about workers and the twisted camaraderie that develops among people forced to spend hours of their day together for a common purpose.

What’s great about The Bear is that it gives foodie viewers exactly what they lust for in excruciating detail, but to see it you have to watch the struggles of the people who make that food, who create your “culinary experience,” also in excruciating detail. You have to watch these chefs and cooks and waiters and sandwich makers and hosts and sommeliers deal with issues like family dysfunction, health scares, stretches of unemployment, racist microaggressions, ageism, romantic break-ups, money problems, bad reviews, imposter syndrome, exciting and nerve-wracking new experiences on top of the everyday mishaps and challenges that come with working in a professional kitchen and working with the public.

None of this is particularly funny. In fact, a lot of the show is a downer or at least really stressful to watch (which makes sense, because restaurant work is indeed stressful). But for some reason The Bear is classified as a comedy, and I think I know why.

It’s a long, slow burn, but the punchline finally hits its peak in the current season—season 4. At the beginning of the series, the show’s restaurant is just a dumpy but popular Italian beef joint. Over the next few seasons the joint undergoes a transformation into Carmy’s chi-chi dream place, The Bear. But for good measure, or to hedge all bets, they keep selling the sandwiches out of a side window. In season 4 we learn that a food critic stopped by and gave the sandwiches a rave but said “meh” to the fine dining. The sandwiches are making bank while The Bear is proving to be a beautiful but chaotic, inconsistent, and possibly hopeless financial sinkhole. That’s the joke. And it’s on foodies.

Don’t believe me?

Consider this.

There’s an episode called “Forks” in season 2 that people lost their minds about. People, meaning foodies. In “Forks” Cousin Richie is sent to be an intern for something like a week at some fancy restaurant, and from that experience he learns so much, grows as a human being, and becomes The Bear’s secret weapon in customer service. Not to underrate the greatness of that episode, but in season 4 Richie hits a mental brick wall in his work after The Bear gets its mixed review. The good news is that he finds a way over the wall, for both himself and The Bear, but its not his training at the forks place that brings deliverance.

The make or break moment is easy to miss. About halfway through the season The Bear crew learns that one of the evening’s diners is a family from out of town who are celebrating their daughter’s cancer-free diagnosis but disappointed that their visit to Chicago didn’t coincide with the winter season, because she’s never seen snow. On the spot, Richie figures out a way to make snow happen for her, and as he jokes to his cousins, “Thank you, fucking Devry.”

Chicagoans know that Devry is a local tech-training college that used to do cheesy advertising on TV and pretty much operated as a scam school. But if Carmy can turn a greasy spoon into a fine dining establishment, Richie can turn a Devry education into a potential lifesaver for The Bear.

As the crew work overtime to make it snow outside the restaurant, some nerd who was dining by himself looks on with admiration at the staff’s ingenuity and kindness to the out-of-towners. The implication is that this loner is an undercover critic, and he’s duly impressed with what he sees. Could a stellar review be in the future for The Bear? Could it be these same schmoes who not so long ago were filling Coke cups and tin napkin holders for humble sandwich eaters are working at the same level as a Michelin-star chef?

In the first episode of the latest season of The Bear, Carmy comes out and says it: “Restaurants are special places. People go to restaurants to be taken care of…to feel less lonely.”

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“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…”

When it comes to major film cities, Chicago isn’t a place that comes to the average moviegoer’s mind. Sure, it’s inspired some great flicks and TV shows: Some Like It Hot, The Blues Brothers, Thief, Hill Street Blues, ER. It was a perfect stand-in for Gotham in Batman Returns and the real backdrop for a lot of those NYC/Philly scenes in Empire.

But it’s nobody’s idea of an important film center. There’s no hub of filmmakers or studios here, despite the various film festivals the city hosts or the existence of renowned local film organizations like Facets or the film and video program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). It’s more of a theater town than anything, with Steppenwolf and The Second City our two biggest bragging rights.

But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when Chicago was home to a pretty important film studio, a studio that introduced one of cinema’s all-time greatest characters. The studio building still stands too, even though it goes all the way back to the silent era. Which means Chicago was there almost at the beginning of the birth of film, when moviemaking innovation was a wild, wide-open territory and the medium was so very different than it is today, yet so familiar.

On the north side of Chicago is Essanay Studios, a former motion picture company founded in 1907. For nearly a decade, Essanay made films out of its Chicago studio until the city’s notoriously rotten winter weather forced many of its stars and filmmakers to pack up for southern California, where the motion picture industry had coalesced in a suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood. But in that near-decade Essanay produced more than 1,000 films, many of them filmed on the Chicago lot that borders Andersonville and Uptown. Essanay’s star players included Gloria Swanson (a Chicago native), Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Lewis Stone, Ben Turpin, Colleen Moore…and Charlie Chaplin. It was Essanay that gave the world The Tramp, a 1915 silent film that introduced Chaplin’s beloved “Little Tramp” character as he came to be known around the world.

Essanay got its name from the initials of its two founders: George K. Spoor, who had been working in film in Chicago as early as 1897, and Gilbert M. Anderson, who had starred in the milestone 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery, a 10-minute silent Western in 1903 that is considered the first narrative film. Anderson was also one the first cowboy film stars, known as Broncho Billy Anderson. The two men originally called their new company the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company, but they soon changed it to Essanay after the “S” in Spoor and “A” in Anderson.

Essanay’s first studio was at 510 Wells Street in Old Town, which was where its first film was shot, An Awful Skate: or The Hobo on Rollers, filmed and released in July 1907. It starred Ben Turpin, the studio’s janitor, who would become known for his trademark cross-eyed comic characters. The film was advertised as a “tremendous laugh-making picture that will make a warm weather audience wilt.” It cost a couple hundred dollars to make but earned thousands upon release. (And they say Jaws was the first summer blockbuster!)

A year later, a bigger studio lot was built at 1333-45 W. Argyle. This is the location that stands today.

According to a (very charming) 1909 article in Moving Picture World, the studio at Argyle had a “daylight studio” immediately south of the indoor studio where outdoor shots could be filmed. The article’s author marvels at the construction of a padded cell (“not the usual painted upholstery, but the real thing”) for a new production called The Curse of Cocaine. (You can always count on Chicago for bringing the gritty melodrama.)

I love the article’s harrowing yet glamour-tinged account of the studio’s film processing department: “In the dimly-lighted developing rooms a dozen or more white gowned young ladies were busy putting the thousands of feet of celluloid strips through the various baths, or chemical processes, necessary in the developing of the films.”

In 1909, Essanay built a lot in Colorado to film more of its Westerns. Then in 1912, they opened a lot in Niles, California, where the canyon setting and the year-round warm weather provided a better site for shooting Anderson’s Broncho Billy films. In 1914, Essanay successfully wooed Chaplin away from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. Apart from landing Chaplin, Essanay’s other contributions to motion picture history include the first film version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1908), the first biopic (of many to come) of the outlaws Jesse and Frank James (The James Boys of Missouri, made in 1908), and the first slapstick pie-in-the face scene (1909’s Mr. Flip, with Turpin on the receiving end).

Chaplin spent two years with Essanay before Chicago’s cold weather and Chaplin’s own demands for a bigger salary and more creative control sent him back to southern California. By this time, Essanay was struggling. The company tried forming partnerships with other film studios to keep going. But the writing was on the wall that the future of motion pictures in America was in sunny Hollywood, not the north side of Chicago.

Norman Wilding, a producer of industrial films, took over the studio on Argyle for several decades. Then WTTW, Chicago’s local public television station, took it over for a short while before selling it. The Midwest office of Technicolor had a lease in the former studio for another while, as did Essanay Stage and Lighting Company. Today, St. Augustine College owns part of the building. The site was designated a Chicago landmark in 1996.

As for the “S” and “A” of Essanay, Spoor died in 1953 in Chicago at the age of 81. He was a true innovator in film, having invented one of the first film projectors for larger screens as well as an early attempt at 3-D film. Anderson died in 1971 in Hollywood at age 88. (Some reports say he was 90.) He left the movie industry in the 1920s and lived in obscurity until 1958, when he received an honorary Oscar for his pioneering film career. Spoor had received his own honorary Oscar 10 years earlier, and Chaplin got one in 1972. All were well deserved. Anderson, however, is the only one with a Chicago park named after him: Broncho Billy Park, located at 4437 N. Magnolia in Uptown, not far from the Essanay building.

So there’s Chicago’s first great claim to film fame. If I had to pick our second greatest movie contribution, I’d go with the fact that our city was once home to not one but two of the country’s most famous and respected film critics: Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Both men left an indelible mark on the city and the journalistic craft of film criticism. Siskel, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, has a beautiful theater named after him, the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street, which partners with the film program at SAIC. Right across the street, Ebert has a marker in the sidewalk under the marquee of the Chicago Theatre. Ebert also has a statue and a film studies center named after him in his hometown of Champaign/Urbana in central Illinois, plus a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first film critic to get one. He was also the first film critic to receive a Pulitzer Prize, for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times.

I was inspired to write about Essanay and Chicago’s important film contributions by the ongoing strikes in the American film industry. As I write this, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents writers in film, television, and radio, and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), which represents film and television performers, have both been on strike for several months regarding wages and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in film and television.

Each week since the strikes began, some celebrity or other has made the news for some comment or action they’ve made regarding the strikes. This past week it’s been Drew Barrymore, who unwisely planned to return to production of her talk show without writers, until both WGA and SAG members called her out for scabbing. (In fairness, others who’ve announced plans to cross the writers’ picket line this past week include Bill Maher and Chicago gal Jennifer Hudson. Say it ain’t so, Jen!)

As a nobody, I can’t pretend to really know what’s at stake in the film industry. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see writers’ and actors’ point about AI. I’d say most of us these days have some concerns about AI and its impact on people’s work and livelihoods, regardless of what your own work is. As a freelancer, I’ve already had language added to my contracts forbidding the use of ChatGPT or AI for writing content, and I was only too happy to see these clauses added. To me, it means my employers are looking out for my labor and the skills I’ve acquired over the course of my career as a working human being.

On the flip side, I’ve also had one recruiter contact me so far for work that involved writing content that would be used to program and improve the performance of AI content-creation software. In other words, to do work that would put me and other writers out of work in the long run. Needless to say, I ignored the offer. But it sure scared me.

For a while now, I’ve been dismayed at the way the word content gets thrown around these days to describe everything from truly creative work to news articles to Insta posts to advertising copy. (Believe me when I say I’ve heard the term used in the laziest ways.) Why can’t we just call a thing what it is? An article. An editorial. A movie. An advertising jingle. A company newsletter. A sitcom script. An Instagram post. A photo. A film review. When did it all become this bland behemoth known as content?

It’s just a word, I know. But then again, that’s what those who defend the use of AI to produce written materials might say about any and all kinds of writing. It’s just words, just language. Anyone can do it. And now, AI can do it all for us—from the writing to the spell-checking to the editing to the mysterious, sometimes glorious, sometimes wretched creative bumbling and brainstorming that has always been strictly the domain of us humans. Only humans create art. Only humans have the nuanced, messy experiences that can lead to the creation of a poem, a screenplay, a joke, a novel, or a cheerful email to a troubled friend. That’s what film and TV writers do, and that’s what the people who play out the words of film and TV writers do as well. That’s what movies are for. To serve and represent our humanity.

Ask yourself, can AI really produce the kind of intimate, thoughtful, well-written film criticism that won Roger Ebert a Pulitzer? Can it produce the kind of barbed yet mutually respectful arguments that made Siskel and Ebert so fun to watch on Sneak Previews and At the Movies? Can it inspire the same kind of free-wheeling, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks innovation that typified the early film industry? Is there even a chance that AI can capture the genius that drove Charlie Chaplin?

As for Chicago, it may not be a movie city, but it is a labor city. Considering Chicago’s history as an epicenter in the struggle for workers’ rights, sometimes I wonder what the film industry would look like today if Essanay never left and movie stars and filmmakers had all flocked here instead of Hollywood. Would the unions be even stronger? Would there have been less glamour but more realism in the movies throughout the early and classic years? Would there be more of an alliance between technical workers and creative workers?

We’ll never know, of course. But when I think about the different roads the early American film industry could have gone down, I think about how artists, and all people, have a tendency to weather change overall. Films still do get made in Chicago, and the city still produces great talent. And out in Hollywood, the industry has survived numerous creative (and literal) earthquakes. Sound films were thought to be a major threat at first. People thought it would be the end of movies. It ended quite a few careers, sadly, but movies went on, and Hollywood even came to laugh about it all in one of the greatest films of all time, Singin’ in the Rain, which told the story of the shift from silents to talkies. I’m not sure if AI is more of a real threat than “talkies” turned out to be—maybe out current worries are just classic tech anxiety. Or maybe there’s a real battle for our humanity ahead. (I know, that sounds like the plot of a cheesy Hollywood movie. But everyone loves a cheesy movie from time to time.)

Other earthquakes in film history include the end of the studio system, the threat of McCarthyism, and the fight for artists to have individual control over their careers and creative work. Charlie Chaplin was one who was at the center of all of those earthquakes. His desire for more control was one reason he left Essanay. And the human spirit was a foundation of all his films.

Film critics and historians say before Essanay, Chaplin’s comedy in the Keystone films was meaner and more farcical. Crude and cruel. Pure slapstick. Yes, the little guy with the bowler hat first shows up in one of Chaplin’s Keystone shorts in 1914. But it was at Essanay where he introduced more sophisticated storylines and finely observed physical comedy, and where he developed “The Tramp” into a more textured human character.

After Essanay, Chaplin went on to the feature-length films we all remember him for: The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights. His storylines became more emotional, yet he still delivered the bumbling physical humor and the big laughs. In Modern Times he told a story about people getting caught up (literally!) in technology and machines and the way progress and industry can dehumanize us all.

Then in The Great Dictator, Chaplin caved to technology himself and gave us the first film in which we got to hear his voice. He used it make a famous plea for humanity in a speech at the film’s end. That quote at the top of this post is from the speech. When Chaplin was given his honorary Oscar, some of those same words from the speech were used to introduce him, and Chaplin came out to a standing ovation that lasted a history-making (for the Oscars) 12 minutes long.

On the one hand, if artists survived the so-called technological and political threats to moviemaking back in the day, maybe there’s no doubt they’ll survive them now. Technology, after all, is what allows us to enjoy films, radio, TV, streaming, the whole lot of it, to begin with. And politics…politics is gonna do what politics is gonna do. In the end, I think art always ends up having the last word, even under the most fascist regimes. (Ozymandias, anyone?)

But Chaplin’s work—both his physical comedy and his words—show us that to fear the machine is an ever-present human concern, and maybe the best way to combat it is to assert your control, your identity, your humanity through art and the act of creation. We’ve all been given gifts of some sort. Chaplin had the gift of humor and comedy. Writers have the gift of words. Actors have the gift of empathy and role-playing to make audiences believe they’re seeing the real thing happening before their eyes. These are all skills and tools some of use to make a living and/or make art. That’s really what the current writers’ and actors’ strikes are about. They want their say in how their work is used and they want to use the skills and tools they have. Technology is a human tool. We get to use it and replace it as needed, it shouldn’t get to use or replace us.

Connections: There’s a lot of stuff out there (dare I say content?) about the strikes. The only couple things I’m going to link to here is, first, this recent Deadline interview I enjoyed with director Richard Linklater, in which he talks about this era of content creation we’re living in versus the indie film heyday of the 90s, when Linklater came up (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise). A solid quote:

“Tech companies came in, and we went from film being art, with value, to it becoming content that you click on.”

In the interview, Linklater mentions a new documentary, The YouTube Effect by Alex Winter. (Hiya Gen X! Winter is lodged forever in your hearts and memories as Bill from the Bill and Ted movies. Bill was the not-Keanu-but-equally-cute one.) The doc has a lot to say about content creation and its effect on the news and film industries—and on our brains. You can find it on streaming channels, but here’s the trailer. Some of Winter’s other films include a doc about Frank Zappa, the kind of original, way-out-there artist whose work AI never could duplicate.

Finally, here’s our buddy:

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For Memorial Day, in honor of my father, I’m sharing this article I wrote a few years ago about his military service in Korea and his Honor Flight experience with a Northern Illinois vets’ group. At the end of this article is a video of the Honor Guard service at his funeral in February.

Dad’s first homecoming as a war veteran was in March 1953, two years to the month after he was drafted into the army for the Korean War. He arrived home to the U.S. at Seattle, to a port with a small crowd of civilians and a sign reading “Welcome Home Defenders of Freedom.” He’d been overseas since September 1951, entirely in Korea except for two weeks extra training at a naval academy at Etajima, Japan.

From Seattle, Dad traveled with other returning soldiers by Pullman train to Camp Carson in Colorado Springs. The Pullman was a step up from the slow-moving, no-sleeper troop train he’d rode when he was inducted in Chicago and sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in 1951—a step up in comfort, at least, if not in service. Soldiers were entitled to a free dinner on Pullmans, which didn’t please the porters working for tips. “If you want your dessert, put some money on the table,” the porters told the soldiers. “If we don’t see any money, you don’t see any dessert.”

After nine days at Camp Carson, Dad finally made it back to Chicago. He wanted to get home soon as he arrived, but my grandmother had other ideas. Proud of her only son and happy to have him back healthy and whole, she and my grandfather and my aunt June (my dad’s only sibling) headed to the lakefront to take pictures with my dad still in his uniform. My grandparents and aunt were in winter coats (March in Chicago demands them), but my dad had only the lightweight Eisenhower jacket he’d been given by the army. When my dad sees those pictures today, what he remembers most is the wind and cold coming off Lake Michigan that day.

Perhaps the cold winter welcome home was only fitting—the war in Korea was one of the first major conflicts of the Cold War, after all, and a cold war was what soldiers in Korea found themselves literally engaged in, battling through an especially harsh and deadly winter in 1950–51. My dad’s service was in the second and third winters of the war, and he was farther south in the fighting zone, in lower mountainous areas than the first winter’s troops. Still, he spent his first winter sleeping in a Quonset hut, the second sleeping on a cot on the floor of an abandoned schoolhouse. Of the two, he preferred the Quonset hut. It was drafty, but it kept in the body heat better and made the freezing nights a little more tolerable.

Thankfully, Dad’s second homecoming as a war veteran was in warmer days—in August 2015. He had a bigger crowd too—including his wife, six children, and several grandchildren—and a full motorized escort in the form of a bikers’ club all the way back to Chicago from Milwaukee Airport. This time around, the homecoming was from Washington, DC, where my dad went with 45 other veterans on an Honor Flight organized by the Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois. Dad was part of a group representing veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War and from all four branches of military service—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as well as the Women’s Army Corps. There were three women veterans, including a former “Rosie the Riveter” bomber aircraft worker, and one father-and-son duo, a man who’d served in WWII making the trip with his Vietnam veteran son. The veterans ranged in age from 65 to 96. Their Honor Flight trip lasted three days, and less than three weeks after their return, one of the group would pass away. This is the story of their Honor Flight and homecoming.

Dad first heard about the Honor Flight program in 2011, when a friend and former coworker of his signed up in Chicago. Harold, my father’s friend, was 92 and a WWII vet who spent the last months of the war as a POW in a German stalag. More than 60 years later, Harold still carried bullets from enemy machine-gun fire in his back, a “souvenir” of his service that had caused a lifetime of health problems. His Honor Flight was a one-day trip, the standard length of most Honor Flights. He was accompanied by his daughter, who served as his guardian (usually a family member or friend assigned to the traveling veteran to help him or her during the trip). After the trip, Harold didn’t live long enough to tell much about it—he died the day after his return. His story, though, was covered by a few local news outlets, and my dad was impressed by what the experience had meant to Harold’s family.

In 2013, Dad finally applied for his Honor Flight with the same hub Harold had gone through. But Dad did not serve in WWII, and despite his age (he was born in 1928) he was waitlisted. The hub he’d applied with has made WWII vets their first priority, and until all vets from that war have gotten their chance for an Honor Flight, Korea and Vietnam vets remain on a waitlist, with the exception of any who are terminally ill.

This is standard policy with many of the 130-plus Honor Flights throughout the U.S. The network’s founding mission was to transport aging WWII vets to DC to see the National World War II Memorial, which opened to the public in 2004. The first Honor Flights were made in May the following year, when Earl Morse, an Ohio-based veterans’ physician and former Air Force captain, offered to personally escort a number of his patients to see their new memorial before failing health made it impossible. Then in 2006, Jeff Miller, a North Carolina dry-cleaning businessman whose father and uncle had served in WWII, began an organization called Honor Air that borrowed from Morse’s idea but figured out how to use commercial airlines to escort the veterans and fund their trips. By 2007 Morse and Miller had merged their programs to form the Honor Flight Network.

Since that first Honor Flight in 2005, the network has brought over 145,000 veterans to their national war memorials. James McLaughlin, current chairman of the network, says in 2014 alone over 21,000 vets and over 18,000 guardians visited DC. With an estimated 514 WWII vets dying each day according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the focus remains on bringing veterans from that war to their memorial. But with Korean War vets reaching their 80s and even 90s, some hubs have begun opening up applications from veterans of Korea and Vietnam. A few hubs have even sprung up that are reaching out exclusively to Korean or Vietnam War vets (as well as hubs exclusively for women veterans). On my father’s Honor Flight, there were 23 Korean War vets—the largest group out of the three wars represented. Meanwhile, three of the eight Vietnam veterans on the trip were already in their 70s.

This wasn’t the first time the Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois, the hub my father finally went through, took Korean and Vietnam War veterans on its Honor Flight. An official Honor Flight hub since 2010, the Veterans Network Committee (VNC) opened up its trips to post-WWII vets in 2014. One of the vets on that trip was a terminally ill Vietnam vet, but the committee’s founder and president, Randy Granath, reckoned it was time to open up to Korean and Vietnam War vets anyway. After this year’s VNC Honor Flight, when I asked Granath about the limitations some hubs still impose, he brought up the fact of people getting cancer in their 50s or dying of a heart attack in their 40s. “Who are we to say who can’t go?” he says, adding that he hopes to keep doing this long enough to include Gulf War vets on the VNC Honor Flights.

Granath is a Vietnam vet who’d been active in veterans groups in the 1980s. He wasn’t planning on becoming involved with a veterans organization again in more recent years, until his son, Kyle, entered the military. Kyle had been in the ROTC at Ball State University in Indiana when 9/11 happened. He was called to active duty in 2002, ultimately serving nine years in the military and completing five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Kyle was in the service, Randy and his wife, Pattie, became frustrated with the lack of support and resources for current service members and their families and with what they felt was a gap between the civilian community and veterans. Eventually the Granaths decided to build a new local veterans group, and the Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois was born, with five initial members, in March 2010.

Headquartered in Cary, a town about 45 miles northwest of Chicago, today the VNC is a full veterans organization with 140 members and 13 programs offering assistance to veterans and their families, one of which just happens to be the Honor Flights. Its other programs include support groups for veterans, food deliveries and assistance to homeless or disabled vets, care packages for overseas military, and a Memorial Day “Field of Honor” display in which more than 325 U.S. flags are planted in public sites around Cary to commemorate the Illinois soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a vets’ organization, the VNC is unique in that nonveterans are welcomed as charter members. It’s a way to create awareness and promote community involvement by including people who may not have served in the military themselves but who still have “skin in the game,” as Randy calls it—such as the parents or spouses of soldiers on active duty or the children of war veterans. Granath describes the VNC’s structure as like an accordion, gesturing as if he’s holding one in his hands. “We have the Honor Flights for the older vets on the one end and the Field of Honor for the younger generation on the other end, and they function like bookends and bring in all the rest of the programs together.”

The Honor Flight, however, is definitely the VNC’s most time-consuming program, requiring at least six months’ preparation, from the fundraising that begins in March to the actual trip in August. The VNC’s Honor Flight is a 3-day trip, rather than the standard 1-day event of most other hubs. While this limits the VNC to only one Honor Flight a year, Granath points out there’s more time for the veterans to get to know each other on their trip and bond over shared experiences. Granath doesn’t come out and say it, but there’s a clear therapeutic element to the VNC’s version of an Honor Flight. Not just a way for old veterans to see their war memorials or for civilian Americans to say thank you to veterans, the VNC’s Honor Flight allows for whatever emotional needs the veterans may be seeking to be met—whether that’s bonding or respect, validation or closure. And it’s an element that becomes even more apparent during the homecoming portion of the VNC’s Honor Flight.

What Dad wanted from his Honor Flight was a chance to see some of the memorials in DC. He had donated to the fund for the Korean War Veterans Memorial back before it was built but had yet to see it since it opened in 1995. He was in his 60s when the memorial was being built—he’s in his 80s now and suffered a heart attack in the time between. Until he got accepted for the VNC’s 2015 Honor Flight, he was still being waitlisted at the original hub he applied with back in 2013, and he only heard about the VNC Northern Illinois hub through a chance conversation with the VNC Honor Flight cochair at the local American Legion.

One of his first actions after getting accepted was picking a guardian. He chose his eldest son, Dan. There are six children in our family, and of course any one of us would’ve loved to have gone with him. But Dan happened to be there when Dad got word of his acceptance, so he got the job of guardian. Dan has no military experience, nor have the rest of us in the family. Dan grew up during the Vietnam War, but the draft ended shortly before he turned 16 and mandatory Selective Service registration ended nine days after he turned 18 in March 1975. (The war ended another month later, on April 30.)

No one in our family since has come as close to military service, mandatory or voluntary. But for a few generations we had a run of warriors in our lineage, a family tradition of “skin in the game” that we know goes as far back as the Civil War, when a great-grandfather of my mother’s served on the Union side. A 40-something emigrant from Ireland, he likely signed up for the cash bounty that enlistees were offered during that war. In World War I my maternal grandmother’s cousin was killed in France only 11 days before the Armistice. My paternal grandfather, who’d emigrated to the U.S. from Norway as a child, also fought in World War I. He was drafted, yet as a foreign-born citizen he was also required to sign a loyalty pledge to the U.S. In World War II one of my uncles was drafted into the Navy and another uncle enlisted in the Army at age 17 at the end of the war. The latter uncle, Daryl, was still in the service and stationed in Germany when the U.S. entered the Korean War. He was sent immediately to the front lines in Korea where he served as a rifleman and endured that first brutal winter of the war, a winter so cold that dead soldiers were routinely stripped of their cold-weather gear by opposing forces.

This uncle never spoke of his war experiences—until 9/11 and the run-up to the war in Iraq, when all the talk of war and terror in the news must have finally brought up some long-buried memories and emotions. As the U.S. was gearing up for war, he had a rare conversation about Korea with my father one night, where he admitted, in the understated way of Midwesterners and men of the Greatest Generation, that he’d been terrified when he got to Korea (“At first I was afraid I’d turn chicken…but I guess I made it through alright.”). The conversation turned to Iraq and my usually conservative uncle surprised my liberal father by strongly objecting (as my father did) to President Bush’s call to war. It wasn’t right to be sending our young people there. It wasn’t going to do anything but put them in harm’s way.

After the conversation, my aunt and mother—both of whom had been listening quietly—were a bit mystified as to what made my uncle start speaking so much about Korea so suddenly. In 50 years of marriage this was the most my aunt (who’d met my uncle at a USO right after his return from Korea) had ever heard him talk about the war. Later that night he had a nightmare of some sort that awakened and physically distressed him to the point of breaking out in a heavy sweat and requiring a trip to the hospital and made him momentarily confused about what year it was and even who and where he was. This was also a first.

Despite the Honor Flight Network’s original mission of getting all WWII vets to their DC memorial, neither of my uncles, though still alive, is able to go on an Honor Flight. Lloyd, my Navy uncle, is literally bent over in half by Parkinson’s, and Daryl currently undergoes kidney dialysis three times a week. I don’t know if they’d want to go even if they could. Perhaps they would, perhaps not. As I’ve learned from my dad as he’s mentioned other veteran friends of his, some veterans simply aren’t interested. Maybe they don’t want to revisit the past, or maybe they don’t like to travel. Or maybe they don’t want to deal with another lengthy application. To go on an Honor Flight, both veterans and their chosen guardians are required to fill out extensive paperwork, covering everything from medical history and needs to travel identification clearance. The VNC’s application arranges for the veterans to get TSA clearance ahead of the trip to save time and help things run more smoothly at the airport, which Granath says often results in some comical misunderstandings. Instead of supplying an official photo ID for TSA purposes (as explicitly requested in the application), the vets will turn in sentimental shots of themselves from their last vacation or their grandkid’s wedding.

As the date of the Honor Flight nears, there are orientations for the vets and their guardians, and family members are asked to write letters and cards for their veteran, which is unbeknownst to the veterans themselves. As the family, all we’re told is that at some point on the trip the veterans will be presented with our letters and cards, something like in their service days when the mail arrived with cherished letters from home. For some reason the idea of a veteran with no family not getting any mail worries my mother. (I chalk this up to her own childhood wartime memories. She had a sister who spent World War II writing to soldiers overseas and collecting their photos, something like the Marty Maraschino character in “Grease.”)

When the first day of the Honor Flight finally comes, Dad and Dan head out early to a local school where all the veterans, guardians, and VNC volunteers are gathered to make their way to Milwaukee Airport by coach bus. Milwaukee Airport is about an hour away, but it’s something of a calmer leaving point than the Chicago O’Hare and Midway airports. Considering there are 46 veterans, 46 guardians, plus volunteers and VNC members, as well as a wheelchair for each veteran (for health and insurance reasons, regardless of whether the veteran has mobility difficulties), the smoother the check-in and boarding process can be, the better. The group will be flying into Baltimore and checking into a hotel with a group dinner in the evening. It’s at these airport procedures, both in Milwaukee and Baltimore, where the veterans start to experience their first surprises, their first public gifts of appreciation and honor. At the airports are active military members and glee clubs who applaud and cheer on the veterans as they wait for their flights. (“It was kind of embarrassing,” Dad says later of all the unexpected attention. But my brother laughs and says, “Yeah, Dad was holding his hands out on both sides giving everyone high-fives, the whole time I was pushing him.”)

Their next day is a full one visiting up to 11 memorials in DC. Along with the memorials dedicated to the veterans of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam are memorials to the Navy and Air Force, the battle at Iwo Jima, and women in the military. They also visit the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery to see the changing of the guard. Each memorial has been included on this trip because each has its own meaning to every veteran. There are three women veterans in this group—a member of the WWII Women’s Army Corps, a woman who worked on aircraft bombers during WWII à la Rosie the Riveter, and a Marine who served in Vietnam. At the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, there’s a chance for the women to register their experiences and draw up their service records on a computer. When one of the women, Rose of the Women’s Army Corps, draws up her record, complete with a photo of her younger self in uniform, a volunteer puts it on a giant screen for everyone in the room to see. In pictures from that day, Rose beams alongside her record of service, looks thoughtfully at the image of her 1940s self, and sits patiently under the giant screen as the other vets and guardians and volunteers take her photo. At the Korean War Veterans Memorial my dad gathers for a group photo with the other Korean War vets around the stainless steel soldiers in the center of the memorial. In the pictures, the pale green statues appear nearly bleached white by the midday sunlight, and it looks nothing like the kind of weather my father and the other vets of Korea remember.

It’s such a full day for the veterans and their guardians, back home we don’t get many updates other than the occasional text or photo from my brother. After their memorial visits, they have another group dinner ahead of them on their second night. Meanwhile, we’re preparing for the homecoming for the next day, making signs and planting little American flags around the house and yard. On the third day of the trip, the group is scheduled to get back to the Chicago area around noon, and the families are to head over late morning to the local school where everyone gathered the first day of the trip.

It’s on this last morning, on the flight back to Milwaukee, when the veterans get mail call. The VNC volunteers walk up and down the aisles of the plane delivering packages to the vets—for each, an envelope filled with letters and cards. My dad’s envelope is stuffed with letters from my mother and all his children and grandchildren, as well as cards from schoolchildren who’d been asked to write the veterans so that every vet has something, everyone gets mail. For my father there are drawings of rainbows and blue houses and even a detailed depiction of one child’s classroom, with messages like “I hope you are having a little fun!” addressed to “Dear Vetaren.” On the plane my brother sits next to my dad as he quietly reads his mail. Afterward Dan will tell us Dad became visibly emotional while going through all his letters, more than at any other time on the trip.

Back home the rest of our family arrives at the school for the homecoming ceremony. The school entrance is lined with flags—national, state, military, POW/MIA. There are elderly color guard soldiers gathered near the curb and teenage naval cadets huddled beside the side door, and a few pre-teen scouts weaving through it all. Inside the school the auditorium is set up with a few hundred folding chairs, more flags and bunting, donated food and drinks, and a long table at the back with information about the VNC and the Honor Flight Network. At the front of the auditorium, a big band plays Glenn Miller and other swing-era oldies, with a few recent-ish selections from the Blues Brothers (no, we are not in Chicago city limits, but we’re close enough).

The mood is festive and Fourth of July-ish. My family and I sit on some lower bleachers as updates from Dan come in about their journey from Milwaukee Airport. I recognize a couple faces from the local American Legion and note a number of exceptionally calm, golden-coated dogs wearing camouflage vests and American flag bandannas around their necks. These are comfort dogs, raised and trained by veterans to serve and help other veterans at home or at VFWs, VA hospitals, or trauma care centers and such. Each dog has a veteran owner, and when one of them catches me trying to take a quick photo of his dog, he hands me a little trading card of sorts. I look at the card and see a puppy version of the dog in the arms of the same man talking to me. Underneath is a pet’s name (Blitz) and a human name (Bob). “He’s named after a military dog from Vietnam, one of the K9s. All the dogs are,” says Bob, who also served in Vietnam. One of the other men hands me his card, and before I know it I have four comfort dog trading cards.

We get word from my brother sooner than we expect that the VNC buses are only a few minutes away. He mentions they have an escort, but none of us realize what that means until they arrive. Everyone has gathered outside and lined up along the curb when a rumbling is heard and begins to grow louder. There are sirens too—police escort vehicles—but it’s the rumbling that takes over the neighborhood. Suddenly an army of motorcycles swings around the corner, growling past us for a good few minutes. Some of the bikers have a person on their backseat or riding shotgun, and I’m momentarily confused and worried in thinking these are the elderly Honor Flight veterans. But finally two coach buses come around the corner, to much cheering and applause, before parking in front of the school entrance.

The veterans are let off one by one. Each one gets a walk or wheelchair-escort of honor with his or her guardian up the pathway into the school, passing all the families and cadets and color guard soldiers and the line-up of flags and homemade welcome-home signs. This is the point when it becomes hard not to be affected by this event. For most of us there, this is the first time we get to see all the other veterans besides our own. Some of them are very frail, some cannot sit up straight anymore, a few salute with a visible hand tremor, most smile and wave, and a couple look unexpectedly overcome by the welcome home, their caps pulled low to cover the emotion in their eyes. My dad does not spot us in the crowd as he makes his entrance. He salutes the color guard and the cadets, and my brother smiles big behind him. Dad is wearing a Korean War vet cap and has sunglasses on, so it’s a little hard to see his face and reaction, but we, his family, can see he is fighting back tears. We’ve known his face all our lives, so we just know.

Back inside the auditorium, the vets sit up on the stage facing all the audience. It takes a while for everyone to calm down—so many families keep running up to their fathers and mothers and grandparents there on the stage, as if they haven’t seen them in years and can’t stand to be separated from them much longer. I have a memory of a picture I saw in a school textbook when I was a teenager, of a young woman running across a tarmac to greet her father upon his return from Vietnam. It seems a silly comparison to make now, since these war veterans have been gone only three days—but the picture flashes in my brain anyway, for the first time with an emotion I can feel along with it.

The crowd eventually situates itself and settles down, and soon there are songs and speeches by Randy Granath and the other VNC organizers and the mayor. The guardians have joined the rest of us among the folding chairs and bleachers, and as each veteran is introduced on stage, my brother supplies information here and there, pointing out which guys our dad bonded with the most and telling us about the father-and-son veterans on the trip. The oldest of the group is a WWII vet named Walter, his son Ben is a Vietnam veteran. One lives in northern Illinois, the other in Colorado. But the VNC arranged it so they could do the Honor Flight together, each with his own guardian.

In between the speeches and commentary, the veterans are presented with gifts. This year, for the first time for the VNC, a group of women quilters in Huntley, Illinois, have made a quilt for each veteran. The Quilts of Valor project began in Delaware in 2003 by a former Peace Corps worker and nurse-midwife whose son was deployed to Iraq. The project spread to Huntley in 2011, when the Gazebo Quilters Guild began making quilts for local amputees who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each quilt is unique with an entirely hand-stitched front, taking over 100 hours of individual labor, and the names of the women who worked on the quilt sewed into its bottom corner with a message of gratitude. They’ve even made one for Randy, the founding organizer, a father of a veteran, and a veteran himself. And Randy returns their favor by taking his quilt and wrapping it around his body, modeling the women’s arduous and beautiful work for everyone in the auditorium.

Next the veterans get another gift from the motorcycle crew, and we finally learn who these bikers who brought the veterans all the way nonstop from Milwaukee to Chicago are. The Warriors Watch Riders are a group of motorcycle enthusiasts, many of them also war veterans, with local crews who provide escorts for military events such as homecomings, funerals, and Honor Flights. They look like you’d expect a group of bikers to look—leather-clad, tough and tattooed—so it’s all the more touching to see them approach each of these old veterans with respect and a sense of protectiveness. They present each veteran with a coin with military and motorcycle symbols on it and a striking message: “Never again will an American warrior be scorned or ignored.”

After the homecoming, rather than rumbling off right away, the bikers stick around to shake the hands of the veterans, giving each one personal thanks for their service. All the families mill around the auditorium and the school entrances, taking pictures or thanking the VNC volunteers and meeting the new buddies their veteran made on the trip. In the meantime, the big band has hit it up again and a few folks show off their swing moves at the front of the auditorium. With Dad, my family returns to my parents’ home, with its front yard decorated with flags and welcome-home signs, and we spend the rest of the afternoon hearing about the trip and eating homemade chocolate cupcakes topped with American flag picks.

In the days and weeks to come, there are a lot of memories of the trip to sort through for my dad. So many pictures and videos, cards and letters, and questions and congratulations from those of us who stayed home. I live with my parents and help my dad edit his pictures and order print-outs from the local drugstore. Eventually I meet with Randy Granath to hear more about the VNC and the Honor Flights. The homecoming celebration is what sticks in my mind the most—perhaps because that was the only part of the experience I and the rest of my family were a part of, but also because of all the work that went into it. I was struck most by what incongruous groups the homecoming brought together: therapy dogs, a ladies’ quilting club, a biker gang. Yet undeniably they all share an underlying purpose of not only respect for war veterans but also comfort and protection. Before the homecoming I’d been expecting more jingoism at the event, and though there were American flags all over the place (as well as all over our front yard) and there was a singing of the national anthem of course, there was more attention to the kind of healing this entire event could bring to veterans than I’d anticipated. And cutting through all the celebration and bunting and big band tunes was a clear demonstration of what the community can do to contribute to our veterans’ healing, of how the gap between the civilian community and the military and veteran communities might begin to close itself up.

Honor Flights began as a response to the unsettling fact that every day our country loses hundreds of World War II veterans, members of the Greatest Generation who helped fight the Allies to victory and usher in an era of prosperity in the United States. But that’s just one of many unsettling facts about our veterans that need addressing.

Episodes like the one my uncle had 50 years after his war service may have been rare for him, but they aren’t rare for war veterans in general. Not now, not ever. Not even for the supposedly stoic Greatest Generation who we’re told simply “got on with it” after the war ended. In his book The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, war reporter and former Marine David Morris notes a 1951 study of 200 World War II vets that found 10 percent of them still suffered “combat neurosis.” Subsequent studies in the 1980s recorded continuing high PTSD rates among WWII veterans, especially among Pacific theater POWs, 85 percent of whom suffered from PTSD forty years after their service. But few Americans heard or took much notice of these findings. While many soldiers of WWII received a hero’s welcome on their return home, neither the government nor the public were interested in giving much attention to the veterans’ post-war psychological condition.

In Korea, American soldiers endured brutal weather conditions that left many of them with long-lasting health problems caused by extreme cold exposure. After the war they came home to much less fanfare than the World War II veterans had gotten, to national indifference by most accounts. (Dad came home to a port with some bunting and some family picture-taking by Lake Michigan.) The U.S. lost at least 36,000 soldiers in three years of warfare, but down the road the Korean War would become known as “the Forgotten War” by historians, and its warriors’ sacrifices and stories would get shuffled aside by the controversy over another brewing conflict in Asia.

The Vietnam War brought the first wide-scale awareness of PTSD and its prevalence among war veterans to the American public. But many veterans of that war still found themselves coming home from a military battlefield to an emotional one, as public opinions and disagreements about the war itself often took precedence over how to welcome home and honor its soldiers and foster their readjustment to their communities. There are arguments to this day over whether Vietnam veterans were treated with as much disrespect on their return home as national memory claims. (Were returning Vietnam veterans really spit on and called horrible names, or is that just a myth? What emotions and experiences prompted the Warriors Watch Riders, many of whom are of the Vietnam generation, to come up with the motto “Never again will an American warrior be scorned or ignored”?) But these arguments miss an important point, which is whether our nation was ever much effective in figuring out how to reintegrate veterans into American life after their war service, in acknowledging veterans’ ordeals and experiences and providing them with the resources and respect they need (and explicitly ask for) during their readjustment to civilian life.

Statistics from recent years show we’re still failing our veterans. According to the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, at least 22 veterans and at least 1 active duty soldier die by suicide per day. The VA also estimates the rate of PTSD among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ranges from 10% to 20%. Meanwhile, every few years scandals involving VA and military medical centers recycle themselves, exposing the life-threatening delays, neglect, shoddy conditions, and malfeasance at some of our official veterans’ facilities. Our warriors continue to return from battlefields abroad hurt yet determined to heal, but the society that keeps sending these men and women to war continues to fail at addressing their hurt and helping them to heal.

It’s the veterans themselves who have consistently responded to these failures by organizing, by creating public rituals and building monuments that will force communities to remember and pay proper respects. And many local communities are trying to meet their veterans more than half-way in whatever ways they can. Honor Flights are one such attempt to make up for our long-standing national disregard and ignorance. The Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois is another such attempt, a local grass-roots group of vets and citizens with “skin in the game” that painstakingly plants a flag for every Illinois soldier sacrificed in Iraq and Afghanistan every year, that provides care and assistance in the form of holiday turkey dinners and overseas care packages and support groups to struggling veterans and distant active-duty soldiers, that crafts a three-day adventure to our nation’s capital for our aging warriors, complete with time for bonding and reflection, a bikers’ escort, a big-band serenade, and handmade quilts with over 100 hours of respect and gratitude sewn into them. Not that an Honor Flight for every American veteran is the answer to our country’s bureaucratic problems—in some ways an Honor Flight is just a gesture really. But it’s a gesture that involves a great deal of planning, and of listening and paying attention to veterans, as well as tremendous local and volunteer efforts. The big official veterans’ organizations might learn from these local efforts, from the grass-roots groups like the Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois. So might a few of our politicians—from all points of the political spectrum. Because if local communities and volunteer-run nonprofits can organize so well and give so much, what’s keeping the government from doing better?

Only a few weeks after my dad’s Honor Flight, we got word that one of the other vets on the trip had passed away. Rose of the Women’s Army Corps, the one who’d had her military record put on a big screen at the Women’s Memorial. Randy Granath would tell me when I spoke to him a couple weeks later that this is fairly common with Honor Flights. They almost always lose one or two veterans right after the trip. Sometimes it’s expected, sometimes not. Maybe some of them would’ve died even sooner if they hadn’t had the last few months of preparing for their trip to keep them going a little longer. My dad’s friend Harold, the first friend of his to go on an Honor Flight, died only a day after his return. At the very least, he and Rose and all the other vets who pass on go out with one more item crossed off their bucket list, and their families can say they know their veteran got the local respect and honor they deserved.

Dad, meanwhile, took time writing thank you notes to everyone he could—thanking all the people who thanked him for his service. He sent one to my mother, to my brothers and sisters, to his grandchildren, to me, to Randy and the VNC, even to the quilting ladies. He wanted the quilting club to know how much he appreciated their beautiful handiwork, and how he wished he could have had a quilt just like it in his army days, to protect him against the cold in the warzones of Korea.

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In the past few months, I’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis three times. The first was out of curiosity. I’ve always been a fan of the real Elvis, but Luhrmann’s movie kicked my fandom into overdrive. After the first viewing I fell down an Elvis rabbit hole, and in many ways I’m still not ready to come up for air.

I think some of the renewed fandom was connected to my dad. On February 8, 2023, my wonderful, courageous, beloved father passed away at age 94. He’d been declining since August 2022, and a week before he died he was placed into hospice care at home. It’s been an emotional time, to say the least, and I think part of me has connected the emotions of love, loss, heartbreak, and admiration to the music and life of Elvis Presley.

Part of it was distraction too. I knew what was happening to my dad, what the inevitable was. But part of me couldn’t process it. It was scary and unsettling. So I processed some of it through Elvis, whose story and demise are well-known, and therefore familiar and safe, to all fans and all Americans.

Elvis and my dad had almost nothing in common. One grew up in the Deep South, the other in Chicago. One was world-famous, a rebellious trendsetter turned over-the-top American tragedy, an unapologetic mama’s boy, an icon, a seemingly effortlessly charismatic showman. The other a dedicated family man who worked for over 30 years at a phone and telecommunications company and had a 68-year love affair with his wife (my mother). One succumbed to addiction and congenital health problems when he was only 42. The other played tennis into his 80s, living into his 9th decade.

Both grew up in disadvantaged circumstances (to understate it) though. Both knew hunger as children. Both served their country. Both worked hard to support large families (my dad six kids, a wife, and the occasional extended family member; Elvis his immediate and extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, longtime loyal Memphis friends, band members and staff, and hangers-on).

While my dad was dying, I spent a lot of my spare time listening to Elvis’ music, watching other movies and documentaries about him, reading biographies and essays about his life and influence. More than one of the classic essays about Elvis quote from a William Carlos Williams poem, “To Elsie”: “The pure products of America / go crazy” is the opener. A great one, to be sure, but after reading the whole poem, I didn’t think it suited someone like Elvis, someone who grew up poor and southern in the pre-Big Media age. Someone “authentic.” Someone “problematic.” Someone real.

“To Elsie” is a great work by a great poet, but it’s in the voice of an upper middle-class voice (or “high class” as the song “Hound Dog” puts it) speaking about “low-class” working people. It lacks the straight-on emotional wallop of an Elvis song. Like “Heartbreak Hotel” or “In the Ghetto.” Like the gut-wrenching version of “Unchained Melody” that Elvis performed in the last weeks of his life and that brilliantly closes out the Elvis movie.

Elvis always sang from the heart and gave listeners and audiences the emotional experience they were seeking. “To Elsie” works on many levels, but not that kind.

In Peter Guralnick’s essential 2-volume biography of Elvis, which was published in the 1990s and which I’d been long meaning to read, I came across the factoid that Elvis first wore that famous gold suit in his first concert in Chicago. You probably know the suit. The one featured on the album cover of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong: Elvis’ Gold Records, Volume 2 in about as many manifestations.

The suit was designed by the legendary Nudie Cohn, who used gold leaf lamé for the suit that included jacket, pants, belt, necktie, and even gold shoes. Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, claimed the suit was worth $10,000, but the real price was $2,500 and a goldmine in publicity and cultural impact.

After the photo shoot for the album cover, Elvis’ first appearance in the suit was on March 28, 1957 to a crowd of 12,000 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, which kicked off his ‘57 tour. He would wear the full suit for only two more performances, claiming it was too hot and constricting to perform in. Or maybe he just didn’t like the look. Maybe he didn’t like being treated and gussied up like a commodity, like a walking, singing, dancing gold mine for his manager and recording company, rather than a genuine artist.

According to Guralnick, during the Chicago show Elvis dropped to his knees at one point and left $50 worth of gold spangles on the stage. The Chicago Tribune covered the show and reported that 13 girls fainted and had to be carried out, another girl clung to the stage and required 2 men to pry her away, and yet another teenage hellion swung at a cop with her purse and hit an 18-year-old usher instead.

Before the show, Elvis held a press conference at the Saddle & Sirloin Club at The Stock Yard Inn, a former hangout of Chicago meatpacking execs at the former Union Stockyards. Elvis good-naturedly posed with a hound dog and wore a considerably less flashy red and black vertical-striped jacket, though he did show off the gold shoes.

These days, like Elvis, the International Amphitheatre, Saddle & Sirloin, and stockyards are long gone. But the gold suit survives, at Graceland.

Thinking about Elvis in Chicago and his gold suit made me think of a poem by another giant of American poetry: “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

To me, this is the poem we should be quoting when it comes to Elvis. It seems to just speak to his myth. The tremendous beauty of his youth and explosive energy with which he burst onto our national consciousness, the trading of it all in for the army and then Hollywood, the fabulous bling and recklessness of his dirt-poor-sharecropper’s-son-turned-millionaire lifestyle, the shortness of his life, the generational impact of his music, and the question of his continuing relevance.

Does Elvis still matter? Maybe it’s too much to ask of anyone for too long after they pass. Nothing gold can stay. The gold outfit may be hanging in a museum, inside the mansion paid for with so many gold records. But the human being who inhabited it all was as fragile as a summer’s leaf in the final days of fall.

Maybe I’m overthinking it. But Frost’s poem doesn’t, and neither did Elvis’ music—at least, if they did, they didn’t let it show. Both men made their art look almost simple and easy. Sincere. Original. American.

It turns out I’m not the only to make this connection. In The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton has Ponyboy, one of her rebellious, misunderstood “greaser” boy characters, recite Frost’s poem. In the novel’s heartbreaking end, another greaser, Johnny, tells Ponyboy to “Stay gold.” The greasers are wilder, poorer, stuck on the losing end of life in their Oklahoma town, especially compared to the rich kid “Socs” who they end up rumbling with. Hinton’s story (also seemingly simple, like Frost’s poem and Elvis’ music) draws distinct lines between the greasers and Socs in everything from dress to musical tastes. The greasers love Elvis, while the Socs have moved on to the Beatles. It is 1965 after all. The Socs think Elvis “is out,” but the greasers think he’s “tuff.”

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie version of The Outsiders, the greaser kids all clearly take their look from Elvis—well, from poverty too. Coppola supposedly wanted a wall-to-wall Elvis soundtrack for the film. Not until a director’s cut released in 2005 did he get his soundtrack of Elvis songs. (Stevie Wonder provided an original song for the 1983 film called “Stay Gold.” Not one of my favorites, but Wonder is another one of those legends whose lesser work still beats most musicians’ best.)

As for Chicago, 1957 wasn’t the only year Elvis graced the city with his presence. In the ‘70s he performed at least 3 more times in Chicago: in June 1972, October 1976, and May 1977. By this time, he was in his era of jumpsuits, patterned silk shirts, wide heavyweight champ-style belts, and white bell bottoms. His very last time in Chicago, on May 2, 1977, he wore his Mexican Sundial jumpsuit, a white suit with the Aztec calendar on the front and back designed by Gene Doucette.

But my favorite piece of Chicago performance Elvis apparel is this beauty below, in a pic taken by a fan (Elvis always made time for one) at the Arlington Hilton.

The rainbow fringe leather jacket Elvis wears here was made by North Beach Leathers, who made several leather pieces for him. This isn’t even a great quality photo, but check out that detailing! The shades are also a custom design, by Dennis Roberts of Optique Boutique: aviator-style with gold frames, Elvis’ initials on the bridge, and the letters TCB (for “takin’ care of business”) with a lightning bolt (symbolizing “in a flash” … so TCB in a flash) engraved on the sides. I love the look because only Elvis could pull off this combo of rainbows, silk scarves, aviators, wacky acronyms, and personal branding. Also, the little smile. This was taken in October 1976. Less than a year later, he was gone.

No discussion about Elvis and Chicago would be complete without mentioning “In the Ghetto,” the Top 10 hit written by Mac Davis (who also wrote “A Little Less Conversation”) that tells the story of cyclical poverty and violence. The ghetto sung about is in Chicago, even though Davis claimed he was inspired to write the song by the experience a black friend of his growing up in Lubbock, Texas. Who knows why he chose Chicago of all places, instead of a Southern city. My take is Chicago’s harsh and crappy winter weather (“As the snow flies / on a cold and gray Chicago morn”) lent itself perfectly to the hard times the song describes. And in the ‘60s, Chicago was in the news as a place of racial unrest and turmoil, not least of which was violent riots led by white residents against Martin Luther King in ‘66.

Maybe Davis had no business setting the song in a Northern city, and maybe Elvis had no business singing it. By the time he recorded it, in 1969, he was a filthy rich icon, a once-poor Southern white boy singing black people’s music with poverty well behind him. Except anyone who’s experienced real poverty will tell you that you never really leave it behind.

To the end of his life, Elvis was haunted by the poverty of his childhood, as well as the death of his twin brother at birth. His beloved mother’s death in her 40s when Elvis was at the peak of his early career was another nightmare to cloud his dreams until the end. In Guralnick’s rigorous biography of Elvis, you can tell how much the memory of poverty preoccupied him by frequent “jokes” in interviews and private conversations like “Last thing I remember, I was driving a truck.” He and his father never stopped fearing it would all disappear “in a flash” and they’d find themselves back in Tupelo, Mississippi.

In that context, his excessive spending and lifestyle make more sense. You desperately want all the stuff you never had as a kid to prove to yourself how far you’ve come—and to erase the memory of those hard times. Hundreds of Cadillacs. Flashy jewelry. Flashy clothes. An antebellum-style mansion, the kind that was never meant for “poor white trash” like you much anyone of color. And as long as you can keep acquiring it all, you can keep telling yourself that poverty’s over and done with you.

Except it isn’t. Not in your mind or sense of self. Since my dad died, my mom’s been talking to me about this—how my dad’s childhood affected his work ethic and sense of family. He never wanted to end up back like what he experienced as a child, and he never wanted any of us to know that kind of precariousness. My dad’s method was the more sensible way, certainly compared to the excess of Elvis. But Elvis’ way also involved singing his way through his troubles and fears.

So despite his apparent distance from the setting and struggles of “In the Ghetto,” he sang it like he felt close to it. Because he was—through the hunger of his childhood, to his twin’s stillbirth just half an hour before Elvis’ birth, to his mother’s own death depriving him of her loving guidance the rest of his life and career.

The press made a field day out of it all, out of his roots and family struggles. Hillbilly jokes, disturbingly sexualized nicknames like “Elvis the Pelvis,” lurid tabloid tales including a published photo of him in his casket taken by a cousin desperate for the cash. Since his death, the reek of classism remains in the neverending lazy jokes, imitations, and caricatures.

Nothing gold can stay. That’s comfort when confronted with the worst and sorrowful when enjoying the best. I’m glad we still have Elvis’ music to remember him by, and Luhrmann’s movie seems to have revitalized interest in his work and conversations about his relevance and impact. Those conversations should include class and classism as much as they do race, gender, and sexuality.

Listening to Elvis songs didn’t make it easier for me while my dad was dying, but it did help lessen the silence and isolation you feel when you lose a parent. We all process things in our own ways. Maybe there was also a little of what Truman Capote once said about his tortured protagonist in In Cold Blood. It’s as if they were born in the same house, and Elvis took one door out, and my dad took the other. And as Robert Frost said in another great poem, that made all the difference.

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Thanks for reading. In May, I’ll share more about my dad.

On the topic of “In the Ghetto,” this brilliant longform article about the song by John Ross puts it in the context of its time and has some insightful stuff about Elvis’ connection to the song and his vocals and phrasing.

When I say I fell down an Elvis rabbit hole, I mean I really cannonballed down one, which isn’t hard to do given all the exhaustive blogs and books out there by other raging superfans. For more about his gold suit, check out the Elvis History Blog. A good site for articles and interviews (with everyone who ever met Elvis it seems) is Elvis Australia.

Want to know all the details about every concert he ever performed in Chicago or elsewhere, including what suit and belt he wore, how his band dressed, how many attended, and what the ticket stub even looked like? Well, the Elvis Presley In Concert site has a database that will allow you to learn it all.

And whatever happened to Chicago’s International Amphitheatre or the old Saddle & Sirloin Club? A site dedicated to Scotty Moore, Elvis’ original backing guitarist, will fill you in! I know…of all places.

Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love make up the best regarded Elvis biography. For those seeking a considerably shorter tome, check out Bobbie Ann Mason’s Penguin bio. As a fellow Southerner who grew up in the time of Elvis’ success, Mason offers a sympathetic view that doesn’t condescend or patronize him or his roots. As an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Mason also knows how to tell a compelling story, rather than compiling a bunch of dusty facts or half-baked anecdotes.

Finally…the movies. I like Elvis, obviously, even if I thought it as heavy-handed at times and left a lot out. But I guess even Baz can’t fit in all the epicness that made up Elvis’ life. I think it was robbed of at least 1 or 2 Oscars. I mean, none for the costumes even? The one that broke my heart though was cinematographer Mandy Walker’s loss to All Quiet on the Western Front. Had she won, she would’ve been the first woman to win for cinematography. She’s only the 3rd woman ever nominated in the category.

Meanwhile, I haven’t seen every movie about Elvis out there, but my favorite of those I have is Elvis & Nixon for Michael Shannon’s great portrayal of the King. Austin Butler did a great job, but I have to credit the Chicago-trained Shannon for capturing the humor and humanity of Elvis. Skip to 53:48 below for a great monologue in the moments before Elvis is taken into the Oval Office to meet Nixon (Kevin Spacey), when Elvis tells the story of his twin brother Jesse.

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Outside Ireland, many Catholics and Christians know little to nothing about her and may not even be aware there are other Irish saints (patron or otherwise) beyond Patrick. Maybe it’s sexism or maybe Brigid’s devotees just need some better PR.

There’s no shortage of great stories and miracles about her to spread around. Some stories claim she was originally a Celtic fertility goddess whose cult was Christianized and whose pagan festival of Imbolc, which honored the coming of spring, was turned into a Catholic holy day. The Church says she was a real, historical woman who lived in the 5th century and founded an important abbey in Kildare. Irish folklore tells of Brigid liberating women from servitude and concubinage–though maybe it was really Brigid who was sprung from slavery, since her mother was said to be a slave and her father a chieftain. A more unusual legend tells of Brigid healing a blind nun, who asked to return to “beauty of darkness” after realizing “the clarity of sight blurred God in the eye of the soul.”

In honor of this day, I’m sharing a story I wrote about recently for an article in the January issue of Sojourners magazine. It’s a piece on the Magdalene laundries in Ireland–specifically, an advocacy group that seeks justice for the survivors of the laundries: Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR).

For the article, I interviewed all five members of the group. I also interviewed a woman involved with Clann Project, a JFMR joint initiative, Mary Harney. Mary’s mother had been incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry, which resulted in Mary being taken away from her and incarcerated in an industrial school. She grew up to become an activist for many causes, including the cause of justice for her and other survivors of Ireland’s religious and institutional abuse.

Another woman whose story was included was that of Catherine, who had been in a Magdalene laundry as a young woman, before emigrating to England and then the United States. Catherine passed away several years ago, but not before forming a friendship with one of JFMR’s members and finally sharing her story that she had long kept a secret.

Mary and Catherine’s stories were both left out of the final version of my article. As someone who has worked in publishing for years, in many different roles, I understand why such decisions get made. There are space limitations in any print publication, plus different angles get highlighted and centered depending on the readership. But of course, it’s still disappointing. Mary and Catherine’s stories are important to know not least so that people in the Church–and anyone concerned about human rights–understand that church and state abuse in Ireland is not a problem of the past but very much still impacting survivors’ lives and Irish society.

It’s also not exclusive to Ireland. Catherine’s story alone tells us there are women who survived the laundries living among us in the U.S. The experience of JFMR’s founder Mari Steed, who was born to a Magdalene survivor and trafficked from a religious institution in Ireland to a family in the U.S. as a child, as well as Mary Harney’s tells us that thousands of their children live among us too. Steed’s life story in particular is a reminder that there were Magdalene asylums for “fallen women” in 20th-century America.

The experience and testimonies of Ireland’s survivors of church and state abuse should also be known to any American concerned about the future of reproductive rights here in the U.S. Our own federal law that gave women reproductive freedom was overturned last year, and more and more state laws are being overturned or changed to severely limit women’s freedom. These changes in laws have occurred due to the relentless efforts of so-called “pro-life” groups and individuals who claim to be doing God’s will. (Never mind, I guess, the rights of our fellow Americans who don’t believe in God or who have a very different conception of God than the fundamentalist Christian one.) Now that the “pro-life” movement has finally gotten its way, many of them are assuring the rest of us that adoption is the answer to all our concerns. Well, Ireland’s past and present can tell us something about how that tends to work out too, once church and state start to get too cozy.

When I spoke to Mari Steed, it was only a few days after Roe v Wade was overturned. It felt pertinent to ask her about the significance of the work she does through JFMR and the road ahead for activists in the U.S. On the so-called solution of adoption, Mari said, “At what point do we stop commoditizing women and children and childbirth and satisfying the desire of childless couples? We’ve got to get away from this mentality that, number 1, everyone has a right to a child.” She also pointed out that Ireland’s system stripped the choice away from many mothers in more ways than one. Of the children who were taken away from women in laundries and mother and baby homes, “many of us were not unwanted. They weren’t given the choice to do that.” Is this really what pro-life America wants? Do they have any clue?

In honor of St. Brigid’s Day, I thought I’d share those stories that got cut from my article here. I don’t have the reach of a national magazine, I know, but maybe a few readers will find this and be inspired to learn more about this issue in Ireland and in the Catholic Church. Maybe they’ll be inspired to lend some support to survivors in Ireland or the U.S. or to activists for reproductive rights anywhere. Working or writing for a number of religious publications over the past few years (even those that consider themselves progressive and centered on social justice), I’ve become accustomed to seeing women’s voices get censored or “polished” for tone. (The published version of an interview I did for one Catholic magazine with the novelist Louise Erdrich was edited to cut her comments that she supports women’s reproductive freedom and the authority of women to serve as priests in the Catholic Church. I’m still incensed about it.) Meanwhile, simplistic stories of “hope” and “endurance” serve to mollify anger about religious abuse and rightful demands for effective redress.

I think about St. Brigid’s reputation in Ireland as a woman born to another woman in bondage, as a woman who liberated other women, yet also as a woman who sheltered another woman from seeing the world clearly so she could see God more vividly in her soul. I think Brigid’s story is an eternal one of someone who rises to do mighty work. I think if there’s one certain blessing, it’s that there are people in modern-day Ireland still doing mighty work. You can read about them below.

When Mari Steed began searching for her birth mother in Ireland, she knew little about the system of secrecy and abuse that would lead her to co-found a social justice group to right its many wrongs. Born in 1960 in a convent-run mother and baby home in County Cork, Mari was one of more than 2,000 “banished babies” adopted from Ireland to the United States beginning in the 1940s. At 18 months old, she was taken to Philadelphia.

As a teen, Mari became pregnant and was put in a Catholic-run home in Philadelphia and made to give up her child. In the mid-1990s, after raising two more children, she decided it was time to find her adopted daughter and birth mother. Her American family were “decent people,” she says. “I don’t have any serious qualms with my upbringing. But I did begin to search for my mother to find out more about where I’d been.” She created a website to connect with other adopted people of Irish birth.

Eventually, she learned her mother, Josie, had given birth to her out of wedlock and was born to an unwed mother herself. In Ireland, such circumstances put Josie on the full “merry-go-round” of church-and-state institutions before the age of 30: a county home, an industrial school, then 10 years in a Magdalene laundry, then the mother and baby home. Steed, now living in Virginia, recalls she at first had no clue what all this information meant. “‘What are laundries?’ I didn’t even know what that was at the time.”

The answer led her down a rabbit hole of secrecy and obstruction. Originally founded as places of refuge for “fallen women” in the 18th century, Magdalene laundries evolved into institutions where women and girls labored for no pay as penance for transgressing Catholic Ireland’s moral and class codes. Unwed mothers, poor women, orphaned girls, women and girls who were seen as “promiscuous” or a burden on their families. The laundries were run by four religious orders in Ireland, with state oversight and funding. Survivors testify to having had their names changed and their hair shaved off. Their children were boarded out or adopted or sent to industrial schools. Some of the children, like Mari Steed, were subject to vaccine trials (conducted by the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, now GlaxoSmithKline) while in the mother and baby homes. More than 10,000 women and girls were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries between 1916 and 1996, when the last laundry in Ireland closed and when Mari was searching for her mother.

She found her in 2001. “She was overjoyed and had been waiting patiently for the day I would find her,” Steed wrote in Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, a book published in 2021 by the members of Justice for Magdalenes Research, a survivor-led advocacy group with the mission of helping Magdalene survivors and other Irish institutional survivors find their truth and gain justice.

Steed co-founded Justice for Magdalenes in 2003 with two other Irish adopted people: Angela Newsome, whose mother had spent nearly her entire adult life in Magdalene laundries, and Claire McGettrick, an adopted persons’ rights activist. In time the group shifted members a bit. Newsome is still a committee member, but two academics and a human rights lawyer signed on—James Smith of Boston College, Katherine O’Donnell of University College Dublin, and Maeve O’Rourke of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway—and the group of five is now known as Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR).

JFMR’s tireless advocacy has led to a state apology for Magdalene survivors in 2013, a “guerilla archives” of testimony and information that counters the Catholic Church and Irish State’s secrecy, and a greenlighted project that will turn a former laundry into a national site of conscience. JFMR’s members most recent book, Redress: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice, edited by O’Donnell, O’Rourke, and Smith, includes the testimonies of eight survivors in Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with all royalties going to the Dublin-based nonprofit Empowering People in Care.

How does an advocacy group that blends survivors and academics maintain its balance and keep their eyes on the prize of justice? And how do they persist when, as anyone paying attention to the ongoing reckoning of abuse in Ireland can see, the Irish church and government continue to throw so many hurdles in the way of survivors’ demand for redress? The answer may be in JFMR’s “melding of deep skills and personal experience,” as O’Rourke describes it—a mix of political activism, formal academic research, and grassroots organizing.

Claire McGettrick was born in Ireland in 1973 and adopted in-country at 6 weeks old. Since Ireland operates a closed, secret adoption system, in which adopted people have no effective right of access to their birth records, McGettrick grew up with no knowledge of her origins. “I had no information about myself whatsoever, including my original name, for example,” she says. Like Mari Steed, she went looking for her personal information in the ’90s and began campaigning for adopted people’s rights with Mari and Angela Newsome in a (since disbanded) group called Adoption Ireland. But McGettrick says their interest in Magdalene campaigning was ignited by a 2003 exposé in the Irish Times about 155 Magdalene women whose bodies had been exhumed.

In 1993 in Ireland, outrage erupted over revelations of a rushed exhumation of women buried in a mass grave on convent grounds in Dublin. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, who operated a Magdalene laundry in the inner north side suburb of Drumcondra, had petitioned to sell some of their land after the congregation fell into debt. But the Magdalene women who had been buried on their grounds, in an unkempt area entirely separate from the nuns’ cemetery, were in the way of the land deal.

The plan was to exhume their remains, cremate, and rebury them in a public cemetery in Glasnevin, which required an exhumation license from the Department of the Environment with a list of the names of those scheduled to be reburied. Despite discrepancies between the number of remains found and the number of names on the license, the exhumation was rushed through. After this travesty, the Magdalenes Memorial Committee (made up of survivors and advocates) organized to install a bench in the women’s memory in St. Stephen’s Green, with a ceremony attended by then-President Mary Robinson.

But as Steed says, it felt as if more needed to be done. “It kind of felt like, ‘Is that it?’ That just seems so little for women who were literally slaves.”

Ten years after the exhumation, investigative journalist Mary Raftery took another look for the Irish Times. She discovered that unbeknownst to the public, an additional 22 remains had been exhumed in 1993 and there were numerous discrepancies between the names on the exhumation license and the names on the headstones at Glasnevin Cemetery. Even worse, some had been cremated and bundled two or three to a grave to save on costs, resulting in commingled remains (a practice outside of Catholic teaching). Attempts to hold the congregation accountable proved fruitless.

Raftery’s investigation galvanized Steed, Newsome, and McGettrick into action. As adopted people whose own identities had been obscured or erased, they realized “this could be any one of us,” says McGettrick. “We had to do something.” She adds, “The way I look at it, the same system that took my identity away is the very same system that held women against their will, forced women to work without pay, and let women and children die.”

One of their first projects was the Magdalene Names Project, which offered a narrative honoring those who lived and died behind Magdalene laundry walls. The trio photographed the gravestones at the reburial site in Glasnevin Cemetery and then posted the names as a memorial in an online adoption support group. Later, McGettrick compared them to newly released materials from the 1901 and 1911 census, revealing lengthy periods of confinement. By building a “guerilla archives,” as McGettrick calls it, they gave survivors and families a means to start accessing their information. The archives also documented the truth of what had happened to thousands of Irish women. When JFMR’s political campaign for a state apology and redress got under way in 2009, the archives helped counteract the official narratives that women in the laundries went into them willingly, that none were incarcerated for long periods of time, and that their experiences “weren’t that bad.”

Boston College associate professor James Smith teaches courses on Irish literature in the Jesuit university’s Irish Studies program. Irish literature is known for giants like James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, but Smith’s course readings focus on the outsiders in his native country, those who were controlled or hidden away through the system of industrial schools, adoption agencies, mother and baby homes, and Magdalene laundries. (In full disclosure, I was a student in one of Smith’s courses in 2004, the first I began hearing about many of these places, even after having lived in Ireland in the 1990s.) Smith became involved with JFM while researching his first book, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment.

When I ask about the group dynamics of involving non-survivors in a survivors’ advocacy group, all members bring up JFMR’s twin core tenets: “It’s about the women” and “Do no harm.” As survivors and co-founders, Steed and McGettrick are the ethical heart, and the other members defer to them and to those who come to them to seek justice.

Smith also points out the benefit of having an academic at a Catholic university on board. For years, JFM’s mission was being stymied by Irish government and church alike. The archives of the Catholic orders in Ireland were—and still are—closed. Through BC, Smith had access to historical archives that proved without doubt the Irish state sent women to laundries and were financially complicit in their abuse and injustice.

Smith’s work also got the attention of a survivor named Catherine Whelan, an Irish woman in her 70s who lived 20 miles from Boston and phoned Smith up at the college one day in 2008 after reading his book. “How do you know my story?” she asked him.

Catherine had been dropped off at a laundry at age 14 by her father. She labored there for four years before fleeing to England and then the United States, where she kept her ordeal in her home country a secret. She worked as a nurse, never married, kept pets, and read avidly, especially books by Catholic thinkers and presses, which may have been how she found Smith’s book. “Her shame was the denial of her education,” Smith says, adding that Catherine had regained her faith after a great deal of therapy and was a daily communicant by the time she met him.

Catherine recorded a testimony with JFRM, who applied for a pension on her behalf. Because she had received no wages while laboring in the laundry, she fell below the full pension threshold and ultimately received only $7.11 a week for her troubles. Catherine became, and remains, a source of personal inspiration for Smith, a human face in a dehumanizing system and living proof that the issues of JFMR’s work is one of concern for the Irish diaspora and the international community.

Maeve O’Rourke was introduced to JFMR while working on her master’s in human rights law at Harvard. “That was our turning point,” says Steed. In her early 20s at the time, O’Rourke “completely dedicated herself to the mission. She was not about to let any minister talk her down or treat her like some young thing who didn’t know what she was doing.”

O’Rourke is also credited with bringing an international human rights lens to their political campaign. But if it wasn’t for survivors’ testimonies, her focus might not have landed on the human rights issues in her home country. O’Rourke says she remembers clearly the evening in 2009 when Michael O’Brien, a former mayor and survivor who had testified in the government’s inquiry into the treatment of industrial school children (which was published in 2009 as the Ryan Report), spoke out live on television about the abuse he suffered as a child and being called a liar by the congregations. O’Brien’s fierce, emotional statement left O’Rourke at a loss for words. Watching at home at with her father in Dublin, she said, “I don’t know why I’m going anywhere [else] to work on human rights.”

O’Rourke also realized there were “gender differentials” when it came to redress for survivors. The Ryan Report focused on child victims of male clergy but ignored the women of the Magdalene laundries and women religious. She began working with JFMR. Her master’s thesis was the legal submission to the Irish Human Rights Commission making the case for human rights violations against Magdalene survivors, accompanying Smith’s research.

After the Irish Human Rights Commission ignored the case, she brought it to the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) in 2011. There, JFMR met with success. UNCAT affirmed JFMR’s case and selected it as one of four urgent cases that required action and correction within 12 months. The international pressure for the Irish state to own up to its systematic abuse of women was on. Finally, the Irish government began a formal inquiry. But to really make a legal case for survivors, JFMR needed testimonies.

Katherine O’Donnell was director of the Women’s Studies Center at University College Dublin when Smith got in touch with her to join JFMR’s campaign. Originally, O’Donnell was attracted to JFMR out of admiration for their work. Her advice to her students interested in social justice work on feminist issues had always been, “Pick the good people you want to work with. It doesn’t really matter what issue, there are so many to choose from.” Then she met some of the women. “There’s an Irish phrase called faoi geasa, and it means being under an obligation. It’s a very ancient phrase, and it also means someone has kind of put a spell on you. It felt like a very intense sense of obligation once I met Magdalene women.”

Her role within JFMR has centered on oral histories. She says as the state was conducting its inquiry, it was crucial for JFMR’s campaign to gather testimonies from the women right away, because the government had placed the Ryan Report survivors under a gag order before granting them any compensation, under penalty of a steep fine and two years’ imprisonment. In the event that an apology and redress weren’t won for Magdalene survivors, O’Donnell wanted a bulwark of voices to counter the official narratives of Irish history, which still leave out so many voices. “So even if we lost the campaign to get a state apology, we had a history.”

On February 19, 2013, Ireland’s Taoiseach Enda Kenny formally apologized to women who had been incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries. Smith says for survivors like Catherine Whelan the apology was transformative. “A cloud evaporated, a shadow disappeared. She applied to the Magdalene restorative justice scheme,” Smith wrote in a tribute to Catherine in the Irish Times after her death.

But the redress scheme saw major bungling and stalling. And the Irish state spoke out of the other side of its mouth, as the saying goes, in its official report released after its apology, the McAleese Report. The report claimed women weren’t held in laundries against their will, were not used as slave labor, were not subject to abuse, did not spend lengthy sentences or lifetimes in them but only about three years on average.

How did JFMR—and survivors—respond? First, in 2018 JFMR organized a two-day event in Dublin to honor Magdalene survivors. More than 200 women participated, many returning to Ireland for the first time in decades from North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, from everywhere the Irish diaspora has made its way. On the second day, O’Donnell led a listening exercise that gathered the women in groups to ask them three questions. What do they want people to know about their experience? What lessons should be learned? How do they want to be remembered?

Again and again, the women said they want younger generations to know about the laundries so that history won’t repeat itself. It should be taught in schools, they said. They also want the church and state to open their archives and allow survivors and their families full access to their information. Lastly, they want more than just a statue.

On July 4, 2022 in Ireland, the Dublin City Council (DCC) voted unanimously to turn over a former Magdalene laundry to the Office of Public Works for a national site of conscience. Known as the Sean McDermott Street laundry, the 19th-century building was operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity from 1887 to 1996, when it became the last laundry in Ireland to close. Located in an economically struggling neighborhood with a long and layered cultural history in the heart of Dublin, the laundry is also at the center of the Open Heart City project.

Led by O’Donnell and Hugh Campbell, head of the School of Architecture at UCD, the Open Heart City project successfully stopped a proposed sale of the former laundry to a budget hotel chain. Instead, the site will provide a repository for national archives of records related to Ireland’s church and state institutions. Plans include lecture and performance space, a memorial garden, and affordable housing. O’Donnell says the name comes from the idea of opening people’s hearts and intervening to bring an open heart to “the atrophied chambers of our inner cities,” as one would in open heart surgery.

JFMR is hopeful about the future of the project, although McGettrick hopes the national archives at the site will include adoption records, and she continues to advocate for Ireland’s decriminalization of adopted people seeking their personal information. O’Rourke also hopes the recent focus on the site of conscience won’t ignore immediate needs that have still not been met. Among these are effective and swift redress for survivors of all Irish institutions, including those sideswiped by the latest commission into mother and baby homes, which resulted in similar denials of culpability as well as a 30-year seal on the commission’s records. O’Rourke and McGettrick’s initiative, the Clann Project, formed in partnership with the global law firm Hogan Lovells to offer free legal aid to survivors testifying before the commission. Post-commission, they continue to advocate for survivors and push back against the church and state’s secrecy and obstruction.

“That’s really, I suppose, when injustice and I first met.” This is how Mary Harney describes the moment when she learned from “a kind priest” that her mother wasn’t dead like the nuns in the industrial school had told her. When she went back to the nuns to confront them and demand her mother’s name and information, she says “That’s when it began, when I became an activist.”

When JFMR’s members talk about the future for Ireland’s survivors of institutional abuse, they say they believe the Irish state is hoping the issue will go away on its own, as the former Magdalene women die off and the rest just wear themselves out with frustration. But the Irish state clearly didn’t count on Mary Harney.

She identifies as “a resister.” Born in 1949 in the same institution as Mari Steed, Harney was taken from her young, unwed mother at age 2 and a half, on half an hour’s notice, and fostered out to a couple who neglected her. At age 5, she was put into an industrial school that also housed a Magdalene laundry. She was nearly 17 when she got out, soon moving to the UK to find her mother. “I loved her, and she’s my heroine to this day, and she loved me,” she says. But their reunion couldn’t replace the close bond from separation.

In the UK, Harney joined the British army. “I was institutionalized,” she explains. “I was comfortable in an institution because there were rules and you obeyed them and that was that.” After the army, Harney worked as a fire department dispatcher and got involved in trade union activism, then women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and AIDS activism. In her 40s she moved to Maine to earn her BA and learned about JFMR. Harney first gave her testimony during the Ryan Report commission (“an awful ordeal”). When she heard about the mother and baby homes commission, she contacted the Clann Project, who helped her to give her testimony again. She has also shared her testimony in Redress. Even as the state’s final report denied the full truth of what happened to people like Harney, she resists. “I thought when the commission’s report came out that I could hang up my Doc Martens and stop boots on the ground activism. But I can’t. For me, I have to keep going. And it’s with the support of JFMR—we all support each other.”

Today, Harney is back in Ireland, pursuing a PhD in human rights in her 70s. She works with Maeve O’Rourke at the Human Rights Centre in Galway helping people gain access to their records and is the community organizer to a group of students who have developed lesson plans to add Ireland’s history of survivors to school curriculums. “I love all these young people because they’re the future,” she says, her voice filled with affection and pride. “They are the people who will get the word out, the young people who will see that our legacy for justice doesn’t die with us.”

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When I first moved to Lincoln Square in 2001, I thought I had it made. It was a neighborhood with every kind of business a girl could want, all within a 6-block radius. Mostly independent businesses too—the Starbucks on the corner was still an outlier and one the locals didn’t let in without a fight. There was a movie theater, a used books store, a collectible toys shop, an apothecary, a hardware store (two actually), a video rental (Darkstar forever), a local sandwich shop, an old-fashioned German deli, two greasy spoons, and a record store: Laurie’s Planet of Sound. A real old-school record store, with vinyl, CDs, cassettes, t-shirts, posters, books, videos, and rock band buttons.

I’ve never been a music snob—my taste is mostly hopelessly mainstream and hand-me-down from Boomer and Silent Gen cultivations. But when you’re in your 20s, an indie record store is one of those beacons that even the uncool—especially the uncool—gravitate toward. The hope is for coolness by association, the idea being that just by living near a place like this, the hipness will rub off on you and transform you from loser into wannabe into, at long last, someone cool.

Well, that didn’t happen. But I still enjoyed the neighborhood. When I first moved there, I even thought I scored a jackpot with two cool record stores within walking distance. Because a little farther up Lincoln Ave., across the street from the Jewel, appeared to be another funky one, going by the sign hanging over the sidewalk.

BERjNaARDzzS record Jrm mart

Sounds aweZZsome.

Alas, it was just an old sign, the record store long closed. Still, in the years to come, my eye was always drawn to the sign on the way to Jewel or whenever I was walking up the street elsewhere. But I never gave it much thought beyond wondering why no one took the sign down.

Fast forward to August 2021. After an afternoon outdoor Irish session at Martyrs with a couple friends, I decide to walk down Lincoln to check out my old stomping grounds. To see what’s changed and such. It’s funny when you visit a neighborhood after a few years away. It never surprises me how some of the haunts that were hopping and successful back in the day are long gone while the strugglers or the details that had been left-over relics from another time even back then are still hanging around. Like that closed record store sign. There it was, soaking up the late summer sun, dangling off the front of what is now an alderman’s HQ.

It got me wondering again. Who was Bernard anyway? When was the store active? When did it go out of business? And why the bad lettering on the sign?

I went home and started consulting Professor Google. Plugging in the address (4243 N. Lincoln) along with the name “Bernard” and the words “records” and “record store.” What I discovered turned out to be worlds cooler than living near Laurie’s Planet of Sound or Reckless had ever been, even for one-time wannabes like me.

One of the first clues was a Flickr profile with a photo of the sign taken in 2009 and some commentary about its origins. William (Flickr profile owner) noted a T in the middle of the sign and suggested at least three businesses claiming it. He also said he found an architecture business card in the door with the T logo. Sure enough, a 2002 list of architectural services vendors by the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education shows a joint architects’ venture owned by Tripartite and Central Studio at the address.

But further down in William’s comments, someone else (good ol’ Allan PRO) pointed out the sign’s “Jrm” logo on the outer edge looked just like the one for a famed record store downtown.

Turned out Allan PRO was onto something. Yes, indeed, once upon a time this humble North Side storefront was an outlet of Jazz Record Mart, one of the most renowned record stores in the country. It was also the location of Delmark Records, a pioneering—and still rocking—indie jazz and blues label.

So that solved a significant part of the mystery. (I never did find out who Bernard was.) It also maybe explains why no one’s taken the sign down, even though both Delmark and Jazz Record Mart relocated or made their main home at other locations in the city long ago. A wise neighborhood would want to keep a sign like this around to preserve the cultural history of a city famous worldwide for its blues and jazz. And a wise city would want to preserve an important cultural landmark.

In 2016, downtown Chicago lost its great indie Jazz Record Mart store. In 2021, the city and world lost its owner and Delmark’s founder, Bob Koester. Fortunately, Koester had a survivor’s spirit, and his record store lives on in another name and location, while his label also has a new home and a new generation to keep the music spinning.

The story of Jazz Record Mart is something of a peripatetic one. Koester was a native of Kansas who came to Chicago by way of St. Louis. He was born in the 30s, the era of Big Bands, but was a collector of blues as well as jazz in his teens. After high school he moved to Missouri to study cinematography, but the record bug got in the way. He sold records by mail out of his dorm room, then set up a record shop—K&F Sales, renamed the Blue Note Record Shop—with another collector he’d met at the St. Louis Jazz Club. Eventually, Koester and his partner split up the inventory and Koester opened up a shop of his own on Delmar Street.

In 1953, when he was just 21, Koester started a record label, Delmar Records, subsidized by his retail sales. The first artists he signed was a St. Louis-based jazz group called the Windy City Six. He also signed local master bluesmen of the 20s and 30s era like Speckled Red, Big Joe Williams, James Crutchfield, and J.D. Short. The label was renamed to Delmark due to a licensing issue. Within a few years, Koester was also buying the masters of out-of-print recordings from other labels like Apollo, United, and Regal. After traveling to Chicago to purchase the rights to Paramount masters, he took his business here.

Soon after arriving in Chicago in 1958, Koester purchased Seymour’s Jazz Mart, a record store at 439 S. Wabash, for $1,500. Koester moved the business briefly to 42 E. Chicago Ave, then in 1962 he took it to 7 W. Grand Ave, where it took the name Jazz Record Mart. In 1979, he shifted the store to a larger space at 11 W. Grand and moved Delmark to 4243 N. Lincoln Ave.

Koester built Jazz Record Mart into a mecca for music collectors, despite also building a reputation for being cantankerous with staff and careless of customers’ tastes. A great Reader story about him describes him as essentially steering customers away from their own interests to his own, using the store turntable to play what he wanted more than he did leaving it free for would-be buyers to play a prospective purchase. He was difficult to work with. He didn’t advertise much and was ride or die when it came to print mail-order catalogs long after every other kind of business had created websites. He had an odd obsession with how packages should be taped, and he kept inventory with color-coded index cards, eschewing a computerized system.

Maybe true music lovers never minded. Robert Plant and the Rolling Stones were said to be regular customers whenever they were in Chicago. Blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite was an employee. Big Joe Williams supposedly slept in the store’s cellar whenever gigs brought him to the city. Junior Wells supposedly had his own key. Several histories of the store share a story from Nessa Records founder Chuck Nessa, a former store manager who recalled getting into a shouting match about modern jazz with Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band while working behind the register one day.

In the mid-90s, Jazz Record Mart was forced to move again to make way for a Denver-based microbrewery called Rock Bottom. No pun intended, even if it did seem this was a sign for things to come all around downtown Chicago’s independent business scene. This was also the era when the records biz was giving up on vinyl. But not Bob Koester.

Jazz Record Mart made its next and final home at 27 E. Illinois, a comparably posh location that would eventually make Bob’s brainchild neighbors with the Trump hotel completed in 2009 at 401 N. Wabash. (It’s also almost right on the spot of the first murder recorded in Chicago, where John Kinzie stabbed Jean LaLime to death in 1812.) If Bob was a bit too old school for his own good when it came to index card inventories and a foolish fondness for scotch tape, his stubborn love for vinyl turned out to be a wise move. In 2010, Reader music critic Peter Margasak voted Jazz Record Mart the best place in the city for vinyl, noting its stock included 20,000 78s.

As for Delmark and the Lincoln Ave. location, in a 1995 Chicago Tribune article about the Rock Bottom takeover and another in 1993 about the used CD sales biz, Koester says this was the site of a used records/CDs store called Collector’s Record Mart. Even if that became the official name and MO at some point, the sign on the storefront let everyone know this was still legendary Jazz Record Mart turf.

Not that Delmark alone wasn’t legend enough. Its output is outstanding. Delmark recorded jazz from the traditional to the avant-garde and blues from acoustic Delta style to electrified Chicago blues. I know next to nothing about jazz and blues, but even I can read a roster of Delmark artists and blink at the number of bigwigs: Junior Wells, Sun Ra, Buddy Guy, Arthur Crudup (you know him as the guy Elvis took his first Sun Records hit “That’s All Right, Mama” from), Sunnyland Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sleepy John Estes, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Eddie C. Campbell…if I left out a name that bona fide music buffs think I shouldn’t have, it’s only because I don’t want this post to turn into a Wikipedia-meets-Buzzfeed-style listicle.

Delmark’s impact is also felt in the number of labels started by former employees of Jazz Record Mart and the Delmark label: Alligator Records, Nessa Records, Earwig Records, Rooster Blues Records. Delmark even got around to recording some women: Shirley Johnson, Zora Young, Nicole Mitchell, Demetria Taylor.

In the few years before he died, Koester’s businesses went through some major changes. In 2016, rising rents pushed him out of his location on Illinois St. downtown. The move was mourned widely. Downtown Chicago didn’t need to lose one of the few truly independent, home-grown businesses left—especially one selling books and music, which are increasingly hard to come by in the modern brick-and-mortar retail world. I’d only been in the store a couple times myself. (I may have finally tracked down a copy of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live at the Star Club that I’d been searching for years there—it used to be an import you had to order from overseas.) I remember being in there and feeling a bit intimidated by the collection, though the staff must’ve been nice enough to not have left a bad impression. (I have the memory of an elephant for stuff like that, and the grudge-holding capability of any Irish person worth their salt.)

Working at the Bridgehouse Museum just across the river in 2015, I used to recommend Jazz Record Mart to the rare visitor who was looking for a store or place to go to that was off the beaten path and not another chain or tourist trap. It was honestly the one and only downtown business I felt I could recommend.

In true survivor style, Koester moved on to another store, another neighborhood: the tiny but still essential Bob’s Blues & Jazz Mart at 3419 W. Irving Park Rd. But only after selling the Jazz Record Mart name and inventory to an online collector’s vendor, Wolfgang’s Vault. In 2018, he sold Delmark to two local musicians, Julia Miller and Elbio Barilari. The label operates out of its studio location at 4121 N. Rockwell, not far from the old 4243 N. Lincoln shop. The new owners have upgraded Delmark’s practices by finally digitizing its archive and diversifying its distribution platforms, as well as continuing the label’s legacy of recording great jazz and blues artists.

In 2020, after Koester suffered a stroke, his son took over Bob’s Blues & Jazz Mart. Koester passed away at age 88 in May 2021. His obit ran in the New York Times and The Guardian. One of his life honors had been his induction into the Blues Hall of Fame back in 1996, one of the few non-performer inductees.

In recent years, it’s become a sort of a default response to look askance at white producers or “appropriators” of black music. The assumption is that someone is overstepping cultural boundaries and taking on the role of the exploiter. But such views oversimplify American culture and history, to put it mildly, and allow no quarter for the joy and love of music, for straight-up sincere fanhood.

Koester was motivated by a sincere love of jazz and blues, going back to his childhood and funneled through what was originally an aspiring filmmaker’s eye. Histories of Koester’s store and label credit him with helping to “document” Chicago’s music scene and development. He collected film throughout his life as well as records and screened films as well as hosted concerts. His record store became a strategy for subsidizing the recording. Meanwhile, he once said his recording strategy was based on longevity: “The whole idea with Delmark has never been to have a hit record, but to sell the records over many, many years. You don’t sell much right out of the box, but you can sell in small amounts forever.” That’s not the MO of a greedy capitalist out to make a quick buck and exploit others for the sake of the market, but the course of a connoisseur—a real fan.

It’s a happy thing Delmark has survived and a few indie record stores persist in this era of Spotify and Amazon. But will the city consider making some of these important music sites a landmark? Or are they just waiting for these places to get gobbled up by the next generation of developers or just rust away until they fall down? The fact that Jazz Record Mart got pushed out for a microbrewery in the 90s, then pushed out again due to rising rents doesn’t speak well for the city. (And look what we did to the old Maxwell Street Market.) Koester rolled with it, but if Chicago and the younger generation doesn’t take care, “Rolling Stone” will go down as just the name of an irrelevant old counterculture magazine or an aging white British blues band—and no one will remember what this city ever had to do with it.

Here’s a video of one of Delmark’s and Chicago’s greatest…

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I apologize for the long delay in getting this second part posted. In the past few months, I’ve had to put down two pets (both 19 years old), my dad has been (and still is) hospitalized, both he and my mom have just contracted COVID, and I’ve been undergoing the long road of testing to be a live organ donor to a family member (almost at the end…I think). I’ve also been working full time and freelancing at night and on weekends (but I’ve taken a break from school until January). I can’t promise to do better keeping to a regular posting schedule—just that I hope to post when I can about the rest of the topics I planned on writing about when I started this newsletter. I thank all readers for their patience.

When I was a kid, we moved out of the city to the suburbs. Right away I wanted to go back. Even a 6-year-old could recognize the difference.

For one, everything worth doing was in the city. Whenever I checked the paper for movie listings or music events, especially as I got older, the best of it was all in city limits. The suburbs were for 4th of July parades and bingo nights and church fish frys. The city was for adventure. Concerts, films, street festivals, protests, dance lessons in the park, poetry readings…

Okay, so that last thing might not appeal to everyone, but I was the kind of teen nerd who was as excited to see Allen Ginsberg live (like I did in my senior year of high school when he was touring with composer Philip Glass, who I’d never heard of) as I was to chase after The Police guitarist Andy Summers’ limo at the mall one rainy weekend afternoon (like I did at age 12 when he was side-touring with his artsy-creepy photography book, Throb, as the band was riding high around the world with Synchronicity).

I was still a teen when I heard about a new kind of poetry event going on in the city. It was called a poetry slam, and it was a down-to-earth, poetry-for-the-people kind of thing started by some blue-collar folks at the Get Me High Lounge in Bucktown in the ‘80s. Not long after, it migrated to some old jazz joint in Uptown: the Green Mill.

I can still remember reading about it in one of the local papers, a picture of poetry slam granddaddy Marc Smith and fellow poet Dean Hacker in a cowboy hat providing me a good visual of some kind of hipster honky-tonk, devil-may-care kind of event. Smith was described as a former construction worker. The words “working-class” and “blue-collar” were probably tossed around the page (it’s been a minute and I can’t find the archived article—but pushing against classism and class expectations was baked into the original poetry slam movement, so I’ve no doubt those words were in the write-up somewhere).

I was beyond intrigued. It felt like coming across your birth certificate stuck between the pages of a library book you only discovered accidentally after a long slog through shelves full of dusty assigned readings and bad recommendations from well-meaning people with dull taste. I felt like there really might be a place out there that fit me, that understood me.

From then on, I made it a goal to get to a slam someday. For the longest time it was all I wanted, more than going to any concert or to a club. But marooned in the suburbs, working in $4 to $5 an hour service jobs, and being a non-driver—and being under 21—I had no idea how to get there. For years I kept the idea of this magical sounding event at the back of my mind, intending to get to one someday. And not just any poetry slam. THE one. The Uptown Poetry Slam. The one at the Green Mill.

Well, I was pretty late getting there, but I did get there—in my later 20s after working overseas in Ireland and finally getting to college (downstate in southern Illinois). I moved to Lincoln Square at the end of 2001, just a couple neighborhoods over from Uptown. I lived right off Western and Lawrence, and it was an easy 81 bus ride up Lawrence to Broadway, to the heart of Uptown and the doorstep of the Green Mill. Sometimes I’d walk there, especially on Sundays when the whole day yawned ahead of me. Graceland Cemetery, where my great-grandparents are buried (where their graves used to be accessible, like graves are supposed to be—see the link, please), was on the way and I’d sometimes stop in and visit their graves.

There was a sad, cavernous, doomed-to-fail Borders bookstore in Uptown back then, trying to pave the way for gentrifiers to come (and they did come). Open lots and shuttered buildings that even on a bright Sunday afternoon could give you a creepy feeling while passing. (Those open lots were a sign of the aggressive displacement under way.) There were always more old-timers around than in the surrounding neighborhoods. It seemed to be a place for people who had seen better days. More than once I’d be walking along the sidewalk and suddenly come across a body stretched across the path (not dead, thankfully, just nodded out). Uptown was that kind of neighborhood—drunks peeing in doorways, drag queens sharing seats on the Broadway bus with suited-up proselytizing young Mormons (or were they Jehovah’s Witnesses?), someone screaming at an invisible devil outside the entrance of the old family-owned pharmacy where I got my prescriptions cheaper than I ever could at Walgreen’s.

Sundays was also the day of the slam—every Sunday night, starting at 7, with an open mic, then the guest slot, followed by the actual slam to close out the night. For poetry at least. You could stay on for the jazz. Which was (and is) the Green Mill’s whole raison d’etre.

The Green Mill has a memorable role in the film I wrote about in the first part of this post, the great early ‘80s neo-noir flick Thief. In the movie, James Caan’s character, Frank, a jewel thief and ex-con trying to go straight after one last big heist, is supposedly the owner of the Green Mill (as well as a Western Avenue car lot). We see him stopping in the bar on occasion to take a call or check up on the business. There’s no attempt to masquerade the bar as some other place, to give it a false storefront and a new name just for the movie. We see it as it is really looks from the street, great big neon green sign and all. At the film’s end (spoiler alert), there’s even a shot where it appears to blow up—to smithereens and everything.

The scene is kind of shocking to Chicagoans who, love the place or hate it, know the bar’s fame. Since Thief, the bar’s shown up in at least half a dozen other Chicago-set films, like it’s almost part of the filming contract with the city.

But was the Green Mill the legend it is now back when Thief was being made? Was director Michael Mann, a Chicago native, capturing a Chicago he thought or knew was on its way out? Or a Chicago he figured was timeless?

Thief is Mann’s first feature film. It’s so well done and beautifully shot, it’s easy to forget that he was still something of a novice filmmaker at the time, that he still had big and small screen masterpieces like Heat and Miami Vice ahead of him. Maybe he played it smart and stuck to familiar turf to ground him his first time around.

Mann caught the city at a great time for a stylish neo-noir story. Thief showcases a mostly pre-gentrified Chicago that was still gritty and authentically blue-collar. Even taking into account the choosiness of location—considering what well-known Chicago places were decidedly left out of the movie—local viewers can see how much the city has changed for good and for bad.

The Chicago in Thief is pre-Riverwalk, pre-Navy Pier amusement rides and theme restaurants, pre-flower beds up and down Michigan Avenue. The riverfront is still a concrete corridor of warehouses and ominous shadows in the film. The diners are empty of hipsters. Instead we see classically slightly heavy-set, definitely Midwestern, mustachioed patrons and women sporting belted and shoulder-padded polyester dresses, fabulously full makeup, and feathered perms. The lakefront, which Frank visits for his early morning run, is blessedly free of unnecessarily professionally attired cyclists who seem to equate a bike commute along Lake Michigan with the Tour de France.

Gaudy neon signs disrupt the city’s famous skyline. There’s not an architecture tour in sight. In a scene that showcases Chicago blues, as played by the Mighty Joe Young Band in the former Wise Fools pub, keen-eyed viewers might catch the original Potbelly’s location sign up the street—before the sandwich shop took over the city and suburbs and became a chain to rival the East Coast invader Subway.

Speaking of sandwich chains, in the Green Mill scenes, a perfectly unglamorous Mr. Submarine neighbors the bar. Inside the Green Mill, drinkers crowd the cozy booth seating, the bartender rings up drinks on an old-school ding-ding cash register, and Frank uses the house phone to make a call—none of which is meant to be nostalgic in a time before cell phones and computerized order screens. (Plenty of us still remember those times, that experience of being out somewhere and having to ask to use the bar or restaurant phone, of having a conversation or listening to a band performance punctuated by the sound of a register bell.)

I don’t think the movie itself is meant to be nostalgic, even if its style and themes mimic classic film noir in so many ways. The city’s infamous corruption and violence are two of the film’s major characters—they almost got top billing in its original title, Violent Streets. None of it has gone away. Flower beds and Ferris wheels can only fix so much. It’s only now, decades later, long after so many of the film’s real-life locations have been shut down, razed, or built over, that nostalgia overtakes our sense of shock at this violent, brutal, lonely city.

Still, nostalgia had to have played a role in Mann’s choice of the Green Mill as a location. Thief’s Green Mill is just a few years before the poetry slam era, but it was already a city landmark with a notorious past. Already the perfect bar for anyone looking for Capone’s Prohibition-era, jazz age Chicago. And yet, it was also a place on the definite skids.

A few years ago, Patrick Sisson published “An oral history of the Green Mill” in the Chicago Reader, which can’t be beat for learning all about the bar’s bona fide speakeasy credentials and changes over time. Starting out in 1907 as a beer garden and roadhouse (it’s right in the original name, Pop Morse’s Roadhouse), it really did become a jazzy hotspot and a gangster’s hangout. (So the framed photo of Capone that currently graces the bar isn’t just tourist bait, even if it is also a bit of an inside joke.) Billie Holliday, Anita O’Day, Joe E. Lewis, and Al Jolson really did grace the stage there. People really did get shot. Cops really did come and break up the joint for the boozing going on as much as the killing. There really are secret tunnels under the bar. And Uptown, with its beautiful Uptown Theater and Riviera movie palaces and regal Aragon Ballroom, really was a swingingly good-time hood in its day.

But by the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Green Mill—and the neighborhood—had declined. Sisson describes it as a sketchy place where “day drinking and drug use were the norm.” The Green Mill was full of people nodding off in the booths, hiding their needles and cheap liquor bottles in plain sight. The crowds at the neighborhood’s entertainment venues dwindled, attracting rougher crowds or no crowds at all (as the Uptown Theater closed for good by the ‘80s).

In other oral histories, collected by the late great Studs Terkel, a longtime resident of Uptown, the neighborhood is captured as a troubled place filled with struggling Appalachian migrants and Native Americans shifted off the reservations of the heartland states, all seeking jobs in the big city. The American Indian Center was located in Uptown on Wilson for decades, and Uptown was known locally as “Hillbilly Heaven” and “Redskin Row.” Halfway houses were a dime a dozen. Social services also opened up in the area, especially serving the area’s poor elderly, Asian, Native American, Appalachian, and Black residents. Terkel’s books featured interviews with many local people served by these agencies, as well as the workers employed by them and the activists who kept demanding better services from the city, more attention and solutions for the neighborhood’s poor and down and out.

It wasn’t until the mid-80s, when a south sider named Dave Jemilo bought the still beautiful Green Mill and nurtured it back to its glory days. The kind of joint attracting performers like Patricia Barber, Kurt Elling, Ari Brown, Bernard Purdie, Howard Levy and Ed Petersen, and Andy Brown. Jemilo turned the bar back into a jazz club and a landmark destination, a reputation it maintains to this day.

Uptown has remained a dodgy area though, with many challenges—and gentrification has only added to these, not necessarily resolved anything.

But in 1981, when Thief was released, Uptown was definitely no place for window shoppers and the Green Mill probably wasn’t being touted yet in tourist guides—not without a warning to the faint of heart.

So this is the beauty of Thief’s Chicago—a city that was what it was, that wasn’t yet there “for the gram,” a city with a broken-nose honesty to it, to steal from Nelson Algren’s famous (and perfect) take.

There’s also another layer of nostalgia that tinges the movie these days. Since COVID stole all our social lives and crippled all urban nightlife two and a half years ago, it’s bittersweet to watch all these scenes showing a crowd out and enjoying themselves in the bars, rushing through breakfast at a local diner—or having a heart to heart across a dinette in an empty one late at night in the movie’s most famous scene. Even the scenes where we see a group of bored office workers going about their jobs in a small, shared office space with no cubicle walls to shield their desks from each other is somewhat sad and odd to see in this era of empty office buildings, remote work, and zoom calls. Instead, the scene that most speaks to today’s weird new normal is the one in which James Caan visits his beloved mentor and best friend Okla, played by Willie Nelson, in prison—the thick plastic screen separating the men as they try to share an intimate conversation looks painfully familiar these days, doesn’t it?

Maybe it’s just because I first watched Thief right in the midst of the lockdown. The movie made me so homesick for the days when I lived in the city and took for granted all the places I could go to and all the things I could do with just a walk down the street or a bus or el ride away. It made me realize it’d been years since I’d been to the Green Mill, pandemic or no pandemic. In 2008, I moved away from the city—though not too far—and over time the places I used to inhabit became strangers to me.

While I was still there, the Green Mill poetry slam became a treat to myself. I didn’t make a lot of money—for a while, I worked for a measly $7 to $8 an hour at the Whole Foods in Lakeview. The poetry slam only cost $7 to get into. The Green Mill bartenders didn’t seem to care if you nursed a drink (even just Coke) all night.

At first, I could only go if friends went with me. Eventually, I could go on my own. I started to recognize the poets and have favorites, started venturing to other performances at events and places like Mental Graffiti and the Mercury Cafe. After starting a new job downtown, I went to the slam one night to notice a familiar face at the bar, my coworker “Steve in indexing.” Turned out he was part of a performance duo who had appeared many a time at the Green Mill and around the city.

I almost always left the slam inspired, energized. Sometimes instead of returning home after getting off the late-night 81 bus, I’d walk across Welles Park in my neighborhood to Jeri’s Grill at Montrose and Western, a true Nighthawks-like all-night diner that could’ve fit well into the atmosphere of Thief. Too bad, it’s gone now too.

I was shy though. I usually tried to remain inconspicuous and didn’t know how to start conversations with the poets. I never entered the slam—performance poetry doesn’t suit the stuff I write, or I don’t suit it—but I did read a poem during the open mic a couple times. The first time was to please a guy who pressured me into it. (Bad idea.) The second time was for me, just to say I could do it.

Another time I got roped with a few friends into going up on stage to “do some improv” after I stupidly opened my big mouth to Marc Smith to tell him we were all Second City students. Duh, acting students, with scripts like. Not improv. Smith led the packed bar into hounding us onto the Green Mill’s small but brightly lit stage, in an improv face-off with 4 random volunteers from the audience. Yes, it was terrifying. Yes, we sucked. Yes, I could feel the sweat running down my back like Niagara Falls. Yes, the “other team” (those 4 randos) beat us, measured by the crowd’s boos and cheers. Yes, the crowd was probably drunk and mistook us for pampered improv kids, but still. Yes, the booing was the loudest, most aggressive thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

“Well, I can never go back there,” I told myself after that. But yes, I did. It took me a few months. But I couldn’t hold a grudge against Smith, a fellow working-class creative with a mission to put poetry back into the hands of the people, inspired by Carl Sandburg. Smith is an interesting character. Onstage at the slam, he was loud, expressive, and dynamic—but every now and then he’d tell the crowd how shy he is, usually in some encouragement to people like me in the audience who might have wished to perform a poem someday, if it weren’t for being too shy. Smith claimed he was so shy when he started slamming, he couldn’t even order a pizza over the phone—he had to get a friend to do it. “If I can get up here and do this, anyone can,” he’d say.

I don’t think it was just talk. Outside the Green Mill, I’d see him every now and again in the area. Usually someplace authentically working-class, like the former Golden Angel pancake house on Lincoln Ave. (now a Lou Malnati’s) or the library. Never at the Whole Foods like a few other local celebrities I’d spy from the other side of the counter. Once, while living in a dump in Boystown before I got my downtown job, I applied for a part-time writer’s assistant job back in Ravenswood, down the street from where I lived before in Lincoln Square and would live again soon. I showed up at the address I was given over the phone by a woman named Mary. It was a house, a duplex—not an office. Turned out it was Marc Smith who was seeking an assistant. His friend Mary Fons, another fellow poet and a quilter, was cheerful and kind. Smith was soft-spoken, polite, and, yes, definitely shy. I didn’t get the job, but Mary said it was so close between me and the person they picked that she sent me to another poet who needed some part-time help. That poet, Emily Calvo, hired me and became a friend and a mentor.

I really miss that time—not all of it, of course, but definitely the Green Mill part. After moving out of the city, I went back a few times. But now I can’t even remember when the last time was.

Last summer, when things were supposed to be returning to normal, I went into the city to meet some friends at another place I used to go to now and again while I was in Lincoln Square. Martyrs’ on Lincoln Ave. There was supposed to be an Irish session on, followed by the Hoyle Brothers, a bunch of honky tonk guys who used to play during happy hour on Fridays at the Empty Bottle, yet another old haunt. This day, the session was outside, with social distancing still in swing—just in case. Before and after the session, I walked around the area and back to Lincoln Square. It was semi-bustling, which was good to see, even if more than half the places I used to know were closed for good and you could tell COVID was still impacting the businesses still open. Out of curiosity, I looked up the Green Mill and found they had limited their hours, tried moving patrons outside, had sent the poetry slam packing somewhere else…for the time being at least.

Now, here we all are another year later and it sounds like so many entertainment venues are still struggling to get the crowds back. Meanwhile, downtown Chicago is half a ghost town, half thoroughly gentrified, almost nothing like the city of Thief. The halfway houses and glorious banks and old department stores and wig shops of Uptown are mostly apartment blocks and Starbucks franchises now. Though even Starbucks can’t keep out the notorious Uptown riff raff.

The poetry slam has returned the Green Mill at long last—though at an earlier hour. It’s hard to imagine coming out of a slam with the sun still shining. Then again, during the COVID lockdown, it became hard to imagine the sun shining on our lives again at all. Hopefully, people will return to the nightlife in Chicago—the bars, the theaters, the jazz joints and dives (those few remaining anyway). Hopefully, I’ll get back out there sooner than later as well.

Connections:

Since writing part 1 of this post, James Caan passed away, at the age of 82. There was something like a million tributes after his death was announced. Without discounting the visceral impact of his performance as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather or the emotional impact of Brian’s Song or his great comeback role in Misery, many tributes mentioned Thief as possibly his best performance. (Personally, I loved him in For the Boys and Honeymoon in Vegas.) Caan was a complex, larger than life personality, as entertaining in interviews as he was onscreen. That’s a star in my book. He wasn’t perfect, which is another way of saying he wasn’t politically correct, which is another way of saying he was human. You can hold that against him, or you can be normal and human yourself and just enjoy his work for the terrific stuff it is. Here’s a couple interviews with him that show off his honesty and humor—one from a year before he died and one from the year after he made Thief.

I mentioned the Reader’s oral history of the Green Mill above. It really is a great read that tells you as much about the Uptown neighborhood and the city’s jazz scene as it does about the bar itself. Studs Terkel’s oral histories are another good source for Uptown history—his books Hard Times, Working, Division Street: America, and Race all have memorable interviews with Uptown residents about class system and social issues particular to the neighborhood back in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Studs was no passing tourist—born in New York in 1912, he moved to Chicago as a child in the early ‘20s and lived in Uptown from the mid-70s to the end of his life in 2008. For a taste of his work, and a chance to hear about Uptown from one its residents who became a well-known community activist, Dovie Thurman, check out this interview he recorded with Thurman a year before she died (in 1997).

Another great project worth checking out is Dis/Placements, a people’s history of Uptown, with before and after pictures, an Uptown timeline, and walking tours available.

I could post a million links to different poetry slammers at the Green Mill. I know a lot of people think poetry slammers all sound alike (true, some of them definitely do) or don’t like poetry slams or poetry in general. The video near the top called Poetry in Action is interesting for its on-the-spot opinions of Chicago people on poetry. But if you want to see what a great poetry slammer is capable of, check out this performance by the great Patricia Smith, a Chicagoan (and fellow Saluki!) who started out in the Chicago slam scene and is deservedly considered one of the world’s best. Patricia Smith wrote “Skinhead” in 1992. This performance is from Def Poetry Jam in 2002. After Charlottesville in 2017, the poem and performance went global. Warning that the language in this is raw, but this is a brilliant, essential piece of work.

Admit it. You’re still thinking about those tunnels, aren’t you? OK, then, get a tour of ‘em here:

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Three days ago the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a decision made in 1973—just one year after I was born—that essentially made abortion a legal right for American women.

This is devastating news. It isn’t hyperbole to borrow from FDR’s statement about the day Pearl Harbor was bombed: This is a day that will live in infamy.

Make no mistake about the fallout from this decision. Women and girls will die due to lack of access to full reproductive health care. Women will lose their livelihoods since so many will no longer be able to make a fair choice between holding down a job and bearing a child—with, of course, women in lower-paying jobs and jobs without health insurance getting boxed into a corner the most. Many girls will lose their education, no longer able to make a fair choice between continuing their schooling and bearing a child they are not prepared to take care of, being so young themselves. The circumstances that led to their pregnancies, whether from a loving relationship or from rape or incest, will be moot. Some women and girls impregnated through rape may even be sued by their rapists for custody of a child not even born. It’s already happening. Women will be imprisoned for trying to exercise bodily autonomy, as will doctors in many states for trying to help women and girls, for essentially taking their medical vocation seriously and treating their female patients as equal, sentient human beings capable of making decisions about their own life and health. Women’s clinics in states that still allow abortion will continue to be targeted for violence, until the entire country is “pro-life.”

I know nobody’s waiting to hear my take on this. I’m an ordinary American woman with a pretty average (maybe even below average) level of individual power. I’m not rich, I’m not famous, I’m not connected. I’m also middle-aged, just a few months short of 50, and post-menopausal as of 2019, with no daughters (or kids at all) of my own. Which means that today’s Supreme Court decision doesn’t affect me in the same way it would have just 10 years ago. I’m not married and never have been. Socially, I’m a lifelong loner. I’ve never been pregnant. I have cats. I’m the kind of invisible woman our country and culture ignore except to ridicule once in a while.

I’m a survivor too, but let’s face it—even in this era of #MeToo, with a current president in charge who co-authored the Violence Against Women Act (I will always respect Biden for this), our culture still doesn’t give a shit about survivors. If it did, this Supreme Court decision wouldn’t have happened. If it did, two men credibly accused of sexually assaulting/harassing women wouldn’t be on this Supreme Court. If it did, the corrupt, failed former game show host, and verified woman abuser who appointed one of those justices would’ve gone to jail where he belongs instead of the White House.

But I’m a woman all the same, and an American citizen, not to mention a human being—which should be self-evident with the phrase “I’m a woman,” but going by June 24, 2022’s decision, clearly some people still don’t think “woman” equals “human.” So of course, today’s decision does still affect me. It affects every American, everyone living in this country—red state or blue, citizen or immigrant, documented or undocumented, male or female, young or old.

On the day of the decision, I went to a march in downtown Chicago where the governor of Illinois spoke, promising to keep abortion fully legal in Illinois and firm up the state’s abortion and health care laws even more so no Republicans can dismantle them. I wasn’t there for his speech. I arrived just before the marching from Federal Plaza around the Loop began.

I was at the march alone, but surrounded by people of all genders, races, and ages as we marched slowly through the Loop. There was everyone from moms marching with their grade school age daughters to old women with thick waists and gray hair. The majority of the people around me though were younger, looking to be in their late teens to 20s. So part of me felt a bit out of place. I wondered if this was my march to participate in, no matter I’m a woman. Maybe this is a young generation’s fight, I thought. I wondered if I should just stand off to the sidelines and cheer them on, as I saw others doing.

As we marched along chanting “My body, my choice” (the female marchers) / “Their body, their choice” (the male marchers), I remember one very young woman behind me shouting her part to the point her voice was straining. She was the loudest person I heard at the march, chanting like her life depended on it. Because it does. At one point she passed me up or I fell back, and when I saw her it surprised me just how small and slight she was, given the volume and strength of her voice. I’d put her on the Supreme Court in a minute.

But it also struck me how fortunate I had been, despite never having had to deal with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy (though believe me, as a survivor, the risk was there). I’d been born a year before Roe v Wade and made it all the way to menopause with full reproductive rights. These girls and women around me had suddenly been stripped of this freedom, no matter which state they live in. Fifty years of precedent, just gone. Because of the unfair and hateful biases of six justices, a ruling that can’t be easily changed back (we are stuck with these fools for the long haul like a varicose vein), the girls and young women marching around me may have decades ahead of them of fear and worry and fighting for a right that should be self-evident, like our Constitution says, a right that is unalienable, that comes with simply being human. The thought of it overwhelmed me to the point of near-tears.

But it wasn’t all despair. I was just as much moved and humbled.

Roe v Wade was not an overnight success story, to put it kind of cheesily. It came through the backbreaking justice efforts of countless women born before me. Women of the Baby Boom, Silent, and Greatest generations, and the generations before them. Many of those women are long gone now. Even those who didn’t live to see Roe v Wade decided back in ’73 still left this world a better place. They left it as heroines. What a trampling on their graves and their legacies this evil turn of events is. What a wasting of their work.

(Necessary not-digression: No matter how anti-child the pro-life movement may like to paint feminists and abortion rights activists, many of these women were/are mothers and grandmothers. I see these women—and it’s important to see them, to not erase them or brush them aside but make them visible—and I’m reminded of those elderly ladies, 100+ years old, born before any woman had suffrage in the U.S., who came out hell or high water to vote for Hillary Clinton, who had actually lived long enough to see a woman become president. And then…what happened? Their tenacity, grit, and pride all trampled on by the corrupt cronyism of former frat boy jerks like Cheeto and Co., Tucker Carlson, and now, Brett Kavanaugh with his creepy high school calendars tracking beer bong parties like they were as integral to his life as, say, tracking a period is to the girls he bullied.)

(Hillary still won btw. And Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill? They told the truth.)

How hateful it is to treat the humanity and justice work of all these women, younger and elder alike, like a leaf that can be just flipped over recklessly by six supreme fools. What an anti-life decision. Because there is nothing pro-life about anti-abortion laws. It is all misogyny. All cruelty, control, and power grabs.

So how do I know this? How do I know how bad this is and how bad it’s going to get? I know because I’ve seen it elsewhere. For a time, when I was much younger, and at the age most affected by anti-abortion laws, I lived in a country with such draconian systems.

I went to Ireland to work and live in 1995, when I was 22. At the time, not only was abortion still illegal in the country, but also divorce and same-sex marriage. Contraception had only been legalized a few years prior. Yet birth control and condoms were still hard to get outside the cities, and many of these social issues were still not discussed openly. Mid-90s Ireland was a country still controlled by the Catholic Church—its schools and education system, its hospitals and health care system, its government. The seeds of dismantling it were just being planted at the time, mainly through the testimonies of a few brave church abuse survivors, who’d be joined by hundreds of others in the decades to come.

But what did this church and state collusion mean for Irishwomen? It meant Irishwomen trapped in abusive marriages could not legally escape their husbands. It meant teenage girls and young women hid their pregnancies until the birth of their child. It meant many of them still had their babies taken from them, adopted out from church-run Mother and Baby Homes illegally for cash. It meant Mother and Baby Homes unceremoniously dumping the remains of hundreds of dead babies and children they were unequipped to care for, who had become sick in their poorly regulated facilities. It meant birth records falsified by nuns, and church and state archives kept closed (as they still are) to adopted persons and their birth mothers alike. It meant one teen girl dying alone in a field in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary after she gave stillbirth to a baby whose father she never named. It meant another teen girl being apprehended with her parents in England and forced to return to Ireland, and then detained, for trying to obtain an abortion after being raped by a relative. It meant dozens of women a day travelling across the Irish Sea to the U.K. to obtain an abortion (or even just birth control). It meant girls and women, especially poor and working-class girls, rape victims, girls deemed too pretty or promiscuous or just plain spirited, incarcerated in Mother and Baby Homes or Magdalene laundries, institutions run by nuns where “fallen women” were sentenced to work out their “crimes” by laboring unpaid doing the congregation’s and community’s laundry. In the mid-90s, the last of these hellhole laundries were only finally closing—though many of the older women incarcerated in them were simply transferred to church-run nursing homes rather than allowed to finally live a free and independent life. All in all, what happened was women died. Children died. Children were abused. Mothers and babies were separated from each other. Women and girls were imprisoned and enslaved, no exaggeration, by the church and state, working together in infamy.

In recent years, many of these horrific laws and systems have been subverted, beginning with divorce in 1996 and leading up to abortion as late as 2018. Not even five years ago.

The damage caused by this deeply misogynistic and abuse-riddled church-and-state system is hardly over. Survivors of clerical abuse, of the Mother and Baby Home system, of Magdalene laundry institutions, including adoptees to families in the U.S., are still fighting for their rights to compensation and redress and to their own identities through access to birth, church, and state records that remain locked away from public view. Even just six years before abortion was legalized in Ireland, a young woman died as a result of not being allowed to terminate a very much wanted but unviable pregnancy.

Back in the 90s, I was as aware of these issues in Ireland as I was oblivious to them. Ireland was (and is) a beautiful place with a rich culture and many generous-hearted people. That’s what I chose to focus on. But I saw news headlines, heard stories, noticed the wall-to-wall religious iconography in so many homes and even on the street in the heart of bigger cities like Dublin.

And I was a young woman myself.

I told myself I was lucky though. I was only passing through. I could—and did—always go home to a country that offered more rights for women, a country with separation of church and state declared right in its Constitution. In reality, I took the reproductive rights in the U.S. for granted, and as a still practicing Catholic at the time, sometimes I even questioned their rightness, though never to the extent of voting against them. Yes, you can be Catholic and support women’s right to choose—not to mention a Constitution that does what it claims to do by refusing to preference one religion’s belief above others.

Maybe I sound smug to compare myself to the women I met and knew in Ireland back then and call myself lucky. For one, there has always been a huge disparity in the U.S. between how rights are doled out to some women than others, based on race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, language, geography, religion, ability, education level, and citizenship. The rights I was so smugly proud of in the U.S. privileged some women (i.e., white chicks) over others, founded as they were on oppression and hypocrisy.

They were also already well under attack.

The first time I went to Ireland, a year before I worked there, was in 1994. I was 21. While there I met three other American women, a mother and her adult daughters in their late 20s and early 30s. (Funny how they seemed so much older to me then.) I distinctly remember waiting with them at a bus stop (in Waterford, I think) while the younger daughter read through a copy of USA Today she had gotten her hands on somewhere. I remember her suddenly shaking her head and making a disapproving noise, reading out loud about how “another doctor” was shot to death by an anti-abortion zealot. In Florida, she said.

Rewind another ten years or so and I’m with my parents and one of my sisters in Florida for a vacation. I’m about 12 or 13. We’re in the state over spring break to visit Disney World (my one and only time, and I’m admittedly a bit old to enjoy it), Epcot, Daytona Beach, and my mom’s close friend Joyce, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. Joyce takes us around town, including to her “clinic” for a tour. When we’re inside, I note all the classic posters showing images like a man with a baby bump and messages saying, “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?” and somehow I put it together that this is an abortion or birth control clinic or something. But I don’t really know yet what that means. Apart from the vintage posters and the picture of Gloria Steinem that Joyce keeps on her office wall, the most memorable part about our little tour is Joyce’s story of a protestor who showed up one day claiming to have a bomb with him (of course it was a “him”). Joyce tells us he waited quietly for the police to come and arrest him, and she points to the chair where he sat waiting. Fortunately, he didn’t hurt anyone that day, but Joyce still needed to start wearing a bulletproof vest to work.

Back home in Illinois, I make my Catholic confirmation a few weeks later, but I don’t think it occurs to me to worry whether visiting an abortion clinic makes me a sinner or anything. It’s not until another year or two later when some anti-abortion people show up on my high school campus and hand out graphic leaflets to us girls walking on the lawn and minding our own business (I remember a teacher or someone coming out and chasing them off) that I start to worry and feel confused.

But in my sociology course, I have a teacher who rails at us about knowing our rights and tells us rape is never the victim’s fault and how the “morning after pill” works and how one of her closest friends died of AIDS, and she assigns us homework like going to a store to locate and price out the condoms and OTC birth control or developing a catchy but educational advertising strategy for a form of contraception and then presenting it to the class. (My group came up with a Rockettes idea for a month’s worth of birth control pills, standing in a kickline complete with top hats and legs.) She seems kind of extreme but at least she’s never boring. In hindsight I often wonder how many of her students’ lives she saved, how many of us she kept from a situation that would’ve robbed of us our youth and health. And she did it not through prohibition or restriction or guilt and shame, but through honesty and education.

Joyce passed away several years ago from cancer, and my sociology teacher has long since retired. Is there an America for women like them anymore? Could my former teacher be allowed to teach the way she did in a school today, or even just a few years ago, as anti-choice and anti-woman laws straight out of mandated transvaginal ultrasound hell ramped up.

And now here we are, regressed to the barbarities of the past.

It startles me and frightens me to think where we are and where we’re headed. I think of the place Ireland used to be for women. I’m happy for the freedom and justice women in Ireland have won (though there is still so much to be done for survivors there, and note, we’re only talking the Republic of Ireland here—many restrictions remain in place in the North). But I’m horrified for what women here have just lost and what’s still to come from this court. Ireland’s grim past is what the likes of Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas want for America’s future.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s that strong voice of that young woman marching behind me on Friday, the sister and granddaughter of those elderly women who marched in their own day.

Back in 2018, when Ireland was gearing up for the popular referendum that would finally result in the country’s legalization of abortion, Irish citizens living around the world planned trips back to Ireland just to vote. (Absentee or mail-in voting is not allowed in Ireland.) For Irishwomen under age 50, this was the first time they could vote in a law affecting their own bodily autonomy, as the last such referendum had occurred in 1983. Like those old women intent on voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, many Irish emigrants moved hell or high water to make it back to Ireland and cast their vote. Literally, just to cast a vote. Those who couldn’t make it back helped fund flights back for others, sent messages of support, and organized walks and fundraisers where they lived abroad.

In Chicago, a small group of young Irish people were among those who held a walk to show their support for the Yes vote back home. They were kind enough to allows Americans to walk in solidarity too, which about four or five of us did. We walked along Lake Michigan all the way from Montrose Harbor to a pub in Lincoln Park (you knew it had to end in a pub). The news that came a few days later from Ireland was an amazing testament to the power of the people and proof that even the darkest days can come to an end.

Not even five years on, dark days have come for American women. They can’t last, or America won’t last. There is nothing American about taking rights away from half the population. Six Supreme Court justices have earned themselves nothing but infamy. (That includes you, Miss Stepford Wannabe, Illegitimately Appointed, Can’t Even Name The Five Basic Rights In The First Amendment Amy Coney B.)

But if it can change one way, it can change another. So godspeed the reproductive rights movement in the USA.

• Midwest Access Coalition

• Planned Parenthood

• NARAL

• RAINN

• Emily’s List

• Catholics for Choice

If you want to learn more about what still needs to be done in Ireland and the history of church-state oppression against women and ongoing justice work there, these are survivor-led organizations that you should check out and support:

• Justice for Magdalenes Research (read my article in National Catholic Reporter too)

• Clann Project

• Open Heart City

Now listen to Shirley:

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I’m an introvert and even I’ve missed the in-person energy of seeing or hearing or doing something with a crowd of any size in a shared space. A small nightclub, a big stadium, a mid-sized mall movie theater, a neighborhood tavern, a cafe or library with an open mic night, an art gallery or community playhouse. Any space, as long it’s in the real world.

A few weekends ago I saw my first movie in a theater in gosh-I-don’t-even-know-how-long. It was at a small theater in Wicker Park on a biggish screen. These days people probably have home screens even bigger stuck to their living room wall. Still, it was a special experience.

The film was made by the brother of a friend (link at the end of post) and was part of a group of short films made by Irish and Irish American filmmakers for the Chicago Irish Film Festival. After the screening we all had a chat with a few of the filmmakers and Uber-moseyed to a famous haunted pub right across the street from another small theater where a notorious gangster met his end. Adventures like this used to be all in a night’s work in Chicago.

At the pub, I met the festival’s director and founder. She talked about how film festivals have changed and how important it is to return to in-person screenings, rather than hand it all over to the internet now. The festival had a virtual option following the initial in-person events. Smart move. But still, I agreed with her. Some films, maybe even all films, are meant to be seen on a big screen. Movies with shots of wide natural vistas and lush, colorful scenery. Stuff with special effects or elaborate sets. Or detailed, painstaking costuming that gets lost and goes unappreciated when viewed on a smaller screen. Comedies. Laughter is contagious after all, and those little half-chuckles you make at home watching Bowfinger or There’s Something About Mary aren’t quite as liberating as the loud belly laughs you find yourself making along with the crowd in a theater.

There was a time when you had almost no choice in the matter if you wanted to enjoy some art or entertainment. You had to be there, as the saying went. Except you really did have to be there.

I belong to Gen X, the transitional generation between analog and digital life. Most people in my generation have a pretty even split of memories before the internet and life after everything went digital. For the sake of this post, you can call it a split between the film festival experience and the binge-streaming experience. Even pre-pandemic, I’ve binge-watched at home with the best of them, but I can just as well recall the days when Chicago had only one or two theaters that showed art films, foreign films, revivals, restored prints, and the like. The days when you had to wait forever for that one or two-week window when an art film came to your city, then hustle across town to the solitary place showing it, before it was gone forever. But if the film was good, you’d remember it for a long time to come. It was an ephemeral and yet lasting experience.

Even when TV, cable, and home video became a thing, one after another, there was no guarantee your local video store or library would stock the more indie or arty stuff, or that a TV station would ever air it. Now there’s the internet and streaming and movies on-demand, and you can find (almost) anything with the click of a button on your phone or computer or home screen (almost) anywhere (almost) anytime.

It’s great to be able to watch so many shows and movies without leaving your home whenever you want. Same goes for listening to music. And yet…

Streaming hasn’t cheapened art and good entertainment, no more than did TV or radio or any earlier form of in-home entertainment. If anything, with the pandemic, streaming has just made it painfully clear what we’ve been missing these past couple of years—why going out is such a hyped and hopeful experience, and why entertainment and social venues are truly magical spaces. It’s not just the venues that look better after two years of limited to none socializing. Pre-pandemic art and entertainment also look different. Scenes of emotional connection and touch in older films, scenes of crowds and gatherings, scenes of separation too, they all seem poignant and coded now, like hidden messages that were just waiting for today’s pandemic-weary audiences to see and read them for the depth of emotion and tenderness they really convey.

A great example, IMO, is Thief.

Thief came out in 1981. An underworld story of a thief who tries to cash in on one last big score before getting out altogether—but the local mob has other ideas. The setting is Chicago, the director is Michael Mann, and the stars are James Caan and Tuesday Weld. There’s also total newbies at the time Robert Prosky, Jim Belushi, William Petersen, and Dennis Farina. And most surprisingly, Willie Nelson.

Mann was a newbie too. He had directed TV, but Thief was his first feature film. Upon release, it was critically acclaimed but mostly ignored by audiences. Mann went on to create Miami Vice (both the iconic 80s TV show and the more muted big screen version released in 2006) and direct the films Manhunter, Heat, The Insider, Last of the Mohicans, and Ali. Those projects got a lot more acclaim and attention. But in recent years, audiences have found their way back to Thief.

An overlooked feature of the film is its characters’ relationship to time and its cast’s age range. It is significant that almost the entire cast are people middle-aged and older.

In 1981, Caan was 40 years old, a major star whose career was slowing down. After Thief, he’d go into semi-retirement, struggle with addiction and the death of his sister, until coming back almost ten years on in Misery. Weld, a teen screen queen in the 1960s, was in her late 30s. In the film, she’s still gorgeous, but in real life she was at the age when most actresses are already getting cast as grandmas or can’t land a role to save their life.

Prosky, who plays the local mob boss, was 50 at the time, with just a few minor TV and stage credits to his name. His great character actor career (Hill Street Blues, Broadcast News, Mrs. Doubtfire) was still ahead of him. In Thief he delivers one of the most brutal monologues you ever heard. The combination of authority, menace, and cunning he brings to his performance is palpable. Farina was almost 40 and fresh off nearly 20 years working as a Chicago cop. He was originally hired as a consultant on set, but Mann, a Chicago native himself, clearly recognized a perfect blue-collar Chicago face when he saw one and gave him a bit role as Prosky’s henchman. Farina never went back to his police job. After Thief, Mann cast him in the TV show Crime Story, which turned him into the star he deserved to be.

Petersen and Belushi were both in their late 20s, but if you said Belushi was 10 or 15 years older, people would believe you. Playing James Caan’s burglary partner, Belushi may be the most Chicago thing ever caught onscreen in a scene where he unironically wears a three-quarter sleeve Hawaiian floral print shirt and a magnificently unelegant gold medallion and watch on a burglary scouting trip to California. I’ll get to Willie Nelson in a moment.

Part of the reappreciation of Thief may be simple chronology, the passing of time. Last year marked the film’s 40th anniversary. In normal times, this would’ve meant in-person retrospectives around the country and locally at places like the Gene Siskel Film Center. Mann, Caan, and Weld et al may have even made it out to a screening and film talk somewhere. Because of COVID, the best we got was a bunch of culture websites rolling out their think pieces about the film’s greatness and Mann’s career. Yay internet?

I watched Thief twice during the pandemic, first on a rickety old DVD and the second time streaming. OK, yay internet. But the minute it plays in a real theater again, I’m there.

Still, the pandemic might have been the perfect time of all to watch Thief. At first glance, Thief looks like just another gritty heist movie, complete with cops, mobsters, and big city corruption. There are scenes of violence and brutality (its working title was Violent Streets), plus a courtroom bribery scene that competes with a blues bar scene for being the second most Chicago thing about this movie after Belushi’s wardrobe.

But Thief also captures a vanishing, authentically working class, pre-hipster-and-tourist-oriented Chicago. A city of rainy streets and neon-lit car lots. Faux-wood-paneled suburban basements and standing-room-only blues bars. Skeleton-like vertical lift bridges and alley fire escapes. Shadowy underpasses and shady people. Nondescript red brick business fronts masking mob activity and beige-toned offices masking the corruption and coldness of bureaucracy. And humble heart to heart conversations—one in a prison visiting room and one in a highway oasis coffee shop. The emotions and themes underlying the film aren’t just violence and cruelty, but regret, an aching need for human connection, and the main character’s desperate hope to make up for lost time.

Caan plays Frank, a thief and ex-con whose fronts include a car dealership and a bar. Chicagoans will recognize the Western Ave. location of the car lot. They’ll likely blink hard when they see the Uptown location of his bar. Frank, it turns out, owns the legendary Green Mill jazz club.

Frank is also sweet on a stunning Lincoln Ave. diner cashier named Jessie, played by Weld. His idea of courting her is to say hi to her every morning at the diner for half a year before finally asking her out, then standing her up at the Wise Fools Pub before aggressively driving her over to the former Howard Johnson’s in the overpass oasis out on I-90 for a long, meaningful conversation. (This would have been a bit of a drive in real life, but no one outside Chicago knows the difference and the scene is so effective so…) On the way over he shouts lines at her like, “So let’s cut the mini-moves and the bullshit and get on with this big romance.” What gal could resist?

Seriously, this ten-minute heart-to-heart diner scene sets Thief apart from most heist movies and lays out Frank’s deepest emotions (link at top of the post). It may be the film’s most memorable scene, because it’s both beautifully written and played and so unexpected in a film like this. Sitting a few inches across from each other at a window dinette, Jessie and Frank spill their life stories. The camera keeps the headlights from the cars speeding beneath the overpass in the frame at all times, and the conversation is punctuated by the sound of the cars rushing along. A good noir effect, but also a reminder of time swiftly passing no matter what two people sitting in a diner may be doing.

As Jessie and Frank talk, we learn Jessie has a sad, shady past of her own and Frank barely escaped murder or worse while losing 11 years of time in the joint for the initial crime of stealing $40. Jessie expresses unconvincing gratitude for the ordinary, boring routine her life has become, but Frank sees right through it: “You’re marking time is what you are…You’re waiting for a bus you hope never comes because you don’t want to get on it anyway because you don’t wanna go anywhere.” Jessie bristles against Frank’s approach at first but softens as she hears his story. It says something about her life experience and current options that she ultimately tolerates Frank’s impulsiveness and rough edges.

Earlier in the film we saw Frank having another heart to heart, this time with his mentor, Okla, played by Willie Nelson, through a prison visiting room screen. That scene is played as intimately as possible given the barrier between the two men. Both of them keep eye contact the entire time, even more so than Jessie and Frank in their diner conversation. Okla asks Frank to promise to help get him out of prison sooner than later so he won’t die there (Okla has a heart condition), and Frank tells Okla about his plans to make a life with Jessie, even though Frank hasn’t even had his first date with her. And Okla has yet to get a pardon. But neither man seems to have time for anything but hope.

Time is clearly on Frank’s mind on his date with Jessie. He hands her a collage he made in prison that represents his vision of what life is and what it should be. A home, wife, family. There’s a cut-out of skeletons in one corner. Frank explains. On the inside, “you can’t even die right.” Outside of prison, you grow, you get old, you get married and have children, you’re part of life’s cycle.

“Who’s the old man?” Jessie asks, pointing at a photo of Okla smiling from the upper right-hand corner. In real life Nelson was not even 10 years older than Caan, but he was so grizzled-looking, he could believably play an old convict. Roger Ebert’s original review of Thief named Nelson’s brief screen time as the film’s only flaw. “The Nelson character quickly disappears from the movie, and we’re surprised and a little disappointed.” But that’s the point. We’re experiencing both Frank and Okla’s time crunch through their eyes. Okla’s fleeting freedom and Frank’s loss make us understand the stakes more deeply.

Frank is only supposed to be about 34, but casting an over-40 actor was the correct choice for a guy who “has run out of time,” as Frank tells Jessie when she balks at his proposal to start a life and family with him. “I have lost it all. I can’t work fast enough to catch up. And I can’t run fast enough to catch up.” Jessie tells him she doesn’t fit in with his vision, that she can’t have kids. She offers no details, but the implication, as with Frank, is her options in life are growing more and more limited as time passes.

Frank tells her they can adopt. And his life has been a mess. And he has a way “to make it happen much faster.” All of which sets up the big heist to come and the film’s violent finale. Along the way, Frank has one confrontation after another with various forms of authority, both official and underworld. In heist movies we expect scenes like this with cops and mobsters. What we don’t expect is a painful confrontation with an adoption agency that pits Frank’s messy life experience, of a formerly incarcerated person who was “state-raised,” against the kind of cold, classist, surface-orderly bureaucracy that shuts people like him and Okla away to steal years of their life without batting an eye. “This is a dead place,” Frank erupts at the agency clerk. The kind that makes kids wait forgotten in a room just for a chance to be part of a family. “After a while you tell the walls, my life is yours.” Who’s the real thief?

These scenes are touching or heartbreaking on their own. During a pandemic, a time of social isolation, they feel almost coded.

There’s no comparison between spending years of your life behind bars and spending a couple years having to refrain from shopping and moviegoing as much as you’d like. There’s no comparison between being a kid who’s “state-raised” and stuck in a holding place and being a temporarily home-schooled one who’s missing out on prom and graduation ceremonies due to COVID.

The experience of an ailing convict dying in jail just weeks before making a pardon is not equatable to one of someone in a nursing home dying alone and isolated from COVID.

Or maybe it is. Maybe that’s partly what’s been so unsettling about the pandemic. COVID has exposed great disparities in fortune and favor, made plain tremendous inequities that anyone with eyes could’ve and should’ve seen along. Privileges of economics, class, race, education, ability, age. But along with the disparities are disarming similarities. Nobody really uses time—time uses us. We all have an expiration date. And all our hopes and plans and choices are played out against the soundtrack of a ticking clock.

Even with lockdowns lifted in most places, and entertainment venues reopening, public life still seems precarious. There’s a long way to go until normalcy returns—and of course, given the kind of disparities revealed, some people want anything but a return to past normalcy. But if there was one thing returning to, it’s the public place that art and entertainment occupied in our society. Art and entertainment have always been a way to process overwhelming events and traumas. Music heals wounds, dancing invites us to fun and beauty, storytelling allows us to step into the experience of others, and plays and movies give us catharsis. You can experience it all alone in your living room, yeah, but if that becomes the new normal, then it will be clear that COVID has stolen even more from our lives than time.

This post is part one of a two-parter that discusses not only Thief and COVID, but public art and entertainment venues. The next post will continue the conversation about Thief but focus more on its depiction of Chicago nightlife—its clubs, its bars, its music. Especially the legendary Green Mill. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

Connections:

I started this post talking about the Chicago Irish Film Festival. Gordon Hickey is my friend’s brother, a born and bred Dubliner, and a talented up-and-coming filmmaker. Below you can see the trailer for his short film “The Cure,” which showed at the festival. Gordon directed, wrote, and starred in the film, which he made over just a few days’ time mid-pandemic in Dublin. Perfect for the theme of this post, Gordon’s short film is about a man in a race against time—and it’s terrific. Check it out and watch out for more from Gordon in the future.

After Thief, Michael Mann made pop culture history with the TV show Miami Vice, a show that was equally celebrated and mocked for its pastel wardrobes, MTV-style editing and music montages, and two ridiculously handsome male stars, Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas. I remember the show well, though I was still a pre-teen when it debuted, and it was a bit too “adult” for me to watch often. More than just an 80s sensation, Miami Vice was the launching pad for many future stars. Bruce Willis, Jimmy Smits, Liam Neeson, Ben Stiller, Wesley Snipes, Julia Roberts, Helen Bonham Carter, Benicio del Toro, the list goes on and one. The show also often cast already-famous music legends, from Miles Davis and Frank Zappa to Phil Collins and Eartha Kitt. in A couple years ago, someone created an amazing Twitter thread of the many famous faces who got their start or sneaked in a cameo on Miami Vice, starting with Married with Children’s “Al Bundy,” played by another great Chicago actor, Ed O’Neill.

Correction: Turns out O’Neill’s not from Chicago, he’s from Ohio. Where did I get the idea he’s from here? Maybe because Married with Children was set in Chicago. I don’t regret the error, I’m just embarrassed by it.

“Things did happen” is what Jessie tells Frank about her past on their diner date. Thief leaves Jessie’s past and future a mystery, leading some critics to dismiss her character as just another marginalized girlfriend role. A couple years ago filmmaker Julia Hart released I’m Your Woman, which took Tuesday Weld’s Thief character as its inspiration for a story about a woman who has to go into hiding with her baby after her thief husband disappears. The characters’ names are different, the setting is, uh, Pittsburgh instead of Chicago, and the actors in the main roles look about 10 to 15 years younger than those in Thief. The era is also a little earlier, in the 70s—in the trailer there’s a disco shot in place of Thief’s timeless Chicago blues bar. I haven’t seen this film, since you have to pay to stream it, and I’m a cheap woman. So I can’t tell if this version keeps the Jessie-inspired character’s shady, complicated past. But Hart’s idea to follow the woman for a change is fresh and welcome.

If you must stream, and you’ve read this far, Thief is currently available for free on lots of streaming channels like Kanopy and Roku. If you’ve read this far and you own a movie house in Chicago, or know someone who does, consider scheduling a few screenings of Thief in the near future. It’s a beautifully styled and filmed movie, and we all deserve to see this gem on the big screen.

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I don’t know what made me recall the Pigeon Man. Maybe it was all the cranes in the river. Maybe the birdsong…

When COVID struck, it was downers 24-7 in the news. People were desperate to find something positive to point to, and for a short while animals were the answer. As people became scarce in public due to lockdowns, animals started filling the gap in cities and suburbs—reclaiming their space, so the stories went. Many people could swear the birdsong in their area was louder, whether from reduced human noise or more birds gathering outdoors while they had the chance.

Supposedly, there were pictures to prove it—pumas spotted in Santiago, Chile; red fox pups in Toronto; lions sleeping right out there on the road in South Africa. So maybe such rare sightings weren’t exclusive to COVID time. Well before the pandemic, Chicagoans have spotted many a coyote downtown, as well as one unfortunate cougar and other very lost mountain lions. Maybe we just had more time and less distraction to note the wild animals in our midst during lockdown.

But the birdsong claim—that was for real.

A May 2020 article in the New York Times compared recordings in urban spaces before and during the pandemic. And you can hear the difference. Cities really did get quieter during lockdown. The article explained that the birdsong wasn’t so much louder—in fact, birds may have been singing more softly, since they didn’t have to compensate to be heard over the extra noise. Smithsonian Magazine also published an article that confirmed bird abundance really did increase in many cities and migratory patterns did change during lockdowns.

In Chicago, some ol’ tuxedo birds got to roam free around a museum and on the turf at Soldier Field during 2020’s lockdown. Pigeons took over the ghost town that became of the Loop. Where I live, just outside the city near a woods and across the street from the Des Plaines River, I noted more cranes and hawks while looking out my window, as well as a beaver swimming onto the banks of the river one day, deer roaming the banks (usually they stay farther into the woods), and a coyote running up and down the frozen river.

But was that unusual? Like many people suddenly working from home, I just had more time to spot the wildlife that was always there to begin with, whether I was away in an office building, or on the bus or train, or out running errands.

Working from home also meant people got more time to spend with their pets, who were probably the happiest they’ve ever been. People who didn’t have pets started adopting them for company during social distancing.

And that’s when the news cycle became circular. Back to the bad. When lockdowns lifted, people returned their pandemic pets to shelters in droves, especially puppies and dogs, so the reports said. Then came reports claiming, Nah.

For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to believe the original reports. Especially since The Great Puppy Return has continued into 2021 and 2022, according to many shelters and vets. It’s also completely on brand for humans. Every year, people give pets as Christmas presents and then return them when the baby animal gets a little older and loses its cuteness or the realities of responsible pet ownership start to sink in.

Maybe I’m also inclined to believe it given how people treat other people, and how the pandemic has exposed our tendency to treat certain others as expendable or “no big loss” when they get left behind. I’ve said it more or less in previous editions of this newsletter, and I’ll say it again. The population that has overwhelmingly suffered and whom we’ve lost the most in the pandemic has been the elderly. Stats bear this out, around the world, and yet it still seems as if society wants to shrug this off and shift the attention elsewhere. Anywhere but the old.

Sometimes I think old people hold a similar status in our culture as animals.

Never mind all the animal welfare orgs out there. Even then, the goal is to keep animals largely out of sight, out of human territory, under our control, and dependent on our benevolence. Animals are for nourishing human appetites or for feeding our sense of cuteness or altruism and good will. Even pet animals are considered lucky to have us, rather than the other way around—though the rush to gain their company during lockdowns kind of proves how desperate humans are for animals’ companionship and (what we hope is) love. We forget they’re one of us, and we’re them—we’re animals too. An exceptionally, even grotesquely domineering species.

(Look, with my four cats and a jillion animal pics all over my apartment and in my downloads, I’m guilty too.)

When humans reach a certain age, it’s likewise expected that they’ll begin to remove themselves from public view, to cluster together or self-isolate, to submit themselves to some form of institutional control and dependence or just fade away quietly.

Never mind the occasional beloved grandpa who makes the news or Betty White. Old people aren’t supposed to want to stay part of public life. They’re not supposed to keep working or wanting to work, except maybe at some piddly little job offered to them out of pity-kindness. They’re not supposed to still have romantic feelings or any continuing ambitions or new ideas. They’re supposed to retreat into their memories—but not share them with anyone but a paid and tolerant caregiver. They’re not supposed to express their views, especially political, cultural, religious, or societal. They’re supposed to “step aside.” Which means, shut up and go away.

When old people break these rules, they’re considered greedy and selfish. Or crabby. Boring and tiresome. A burden. Ignorant and out of touch. Out of order. Demented. Foolish. Clinging to youth and the past. Get off my lawnish.

Like they’re pets for the young, rather than our elders. Rather than the ones who’ve graciously and heroically paved the way. The ones who’ve already been there. The ones who know.

I think all the talk about animals coming out, animals coming back, etc, early in the pandemic was also an indication how desperate humans are for some societal transformation. We know most of us around the world are living in unbalanced, unhealthy societies. We know there are all kinds of inequities that need righting. As awful as COVID is, there’s an underlying hope that it will “burn off” the inequity—vanquish capitalism, re-wild our communities, transform our work environments and work codes, re-humanize our health care systems.

Personally, I had hoped there’d be a re-embracement of family, especially notions of extended family and multi-generational households. I also hoped we’d realize we need to look after our elderly better. Stand up for them. Listen to them.

So I suppose that’s why all these newsletters so far have had an “old man” or “old woman” at the center of them. Some older person who had once been young and vital, and who had maybe made a mark then. Or maybe they didn’t hit their stride until they were older. Or even lived out their life in obscurity, and it wasn’t until they were gone—just another old man or woman passed—that someone took notice of them and of what their life really meant. Henry Darger. Vivian Maier. Lee Godie. Vincent, the Suit Guy. Tim Robinson.

This one’s for Joseph Zeman, better remembered by some as the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square.

The shifting priorities and reduced time for socializing since the pandemic have prompted me to recall people and places from out of the blue of the past. Memories of someone or something from years ago would just pop up for no reason.

I don’t know what made me recall the Pigeon Man. Maybe it was all the cranes in the river. Maybe the birdsong.

For several years, between 2000 and 2008, I lived in the heart of Lincoln Square, on the north side of Chicago. I lived on Wilson between Western and Lincoln, just a few blocks south of Lawrence Avenue. If you know the area, you know that’s close to everything in the neighborhood. On the corner of Lawrence and Western was a Walgreens. In the front of it was a bus stop, a statue of Abraham Lincoln, and a fire hydrant. On the fire hydrant, for many years there was an old man. And some birds. Loads of them. All pigeons.

Joseph Zeman was a former newsagent who loved pigeons and loved to go out every day and feed them in his neighborhood of Lincoln Square. He lived in an attic apartment not far from the intersection of Western and Lawrence. People who lived in the area and shopped at the Walgreens were used to seeing Joseph sitting hunched out there on the fire hydrant in front of the store and feeding the pigeons. The birds flocked to him by the dozens, perching on his head, shoulders, hands, knees. They gathered around his feet. Some would even eat chips from out of his mouth. He’d talk to them as he fed them, kiss their feathers, and he’d stay there for what seemed like hours.

I used to see him. I didn’t mind him and didn’t think anything of an old man feeding birds. I like birds myself. But I knew some people who thought Joseph and/or his birds and/or his feeding them was a health nuisance. (My hairdresser was one.) They’d rather his birds, and likely him, go away. Out of sight.

Joseph was actually one of several noticeable old people you’d see around the Square, especially before the hyper-gentrification and explosion of baby boutiques, knick-knack stores, and cellular phone shops and health clubs took over, pushing out all the old German and Slavic delis and coffee houses, the clothing store for “big and tall” guys, the rundown (and useful) local hardware stores (including one with a bowling alley upstairs), the psychic storefronts and Polish salons operating out of the front room of someone’s house, the weird-looking coffee house and jazz club that was the legendary Nervous Center, the original tiny pre-rehabbed Davis movie house, the old school cheap all-night diners, and the Korean-owned convenience stores.

There were a bunch of old Slavic men (including my building superintendent) who used to play bocce ball in Welles Park like their lives depended on it every seasonable weekend. An older woman selling hot dogs at a stand on the other side of the park. An older homeless woman who used to sit with her bags in front of The Grind coffeeshop early in the morning and sing loudly in one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. An old homeless man who used to hunt for discarded cigarettes outside the Western Brown Line station. I think he had the clearest pale blue eyes I’ve ever seen. There was a group of old men, mostly Slavs, who’d occupy the McDonald’s further north on Western, by the old Ace Hardware/bowling alley, nursing senior coffees and arguing passionately about I wish I knew what for hours. An old Irish American cop who walked up and down Lincoln in the Square with his billy club hanging from his pocket—half threatening, and half like some B&W movie cop from a Dead End Kids picture. Another old Irishman (Kerry, for the record) and fluent Munster Irish speaker who used to teach the mother tongue at the Irish American Heritage Center further west and shuffle into The Grind on the weekends, always wearing dark clothing and an old black cap.

But Joseph may have been the only one who got a full-color profile written up about him the in the Trib. In 2004, Tribune reporter Barbara Mahany wrote a stellar article about Joseph, telling about his childhood, his St. Francis-like philosophy toward the birds, and his methods for bird feeding. Joseph had struggled with seizures after a stroke at 8 months old—he went unmedicated for his condition until he was nearly 50 and had endured two years in an institution in his teens. His parents had worked as a laborer and a typist. He had a challenging childhood, to say the least, and it sounds like an unhappy one.

He found acceptance with the birds. He’d first taken to feeding them while working as a newsagent downtown. Now, in his later years, he spent his days in front of Walgreens feeding them from stores he kept in ziplock baggies and baby food jars.

There are a lot of wise tearjerker quotes in the article, but the best one may be:

I’m really advertising to the public how easy it is to be good without an attitude; it’s just as easy to show decency as it is to hate today.

In 2007 Joseph was struck by a van and killed. He had just turned 77 a few days earlier. At the hospital where he was taken to, the only identification they could find on him was a laminated page from the Trib article about him. So the police called its author to break the news. After hearing of his death, Mahany wrote a moving update on her blog and in the Trib—the full version is on the blog.

There was a memorial in front of the Walgreens to him. There have been other tributes online and in art, including a touching poetical short film by Miguel Silveira called Manbird. The pigeons had to have missed him. He did far more than just feed them crumbs. As Joseph says in Silveira’s film, each bird was his personal friend.

“They got a mind,” he says. “They are much smarter than people think.”

I wonder what would have happened to Joseph had he lived to the COVID era. Would he have survived this terrible pandemic so far? Or would he have just become another statistic, another elderly person gone and forgotten, buried without fanfare regardless of whether they had family to mourn them? Would COVID have kept him away from his bird friends? Could anything, but death? A man doesn’t go to the trouble of packing baggies and baby food jars with bird food day after day and schlep them all the way to sit on a fire hydrant for hours out of boredom or sheer whim. He does it out of love and hope.

What would he have thought of the birdsong these past two years?

He would’ve loved it, same as the rest of us. Maybe he would’ve heard hope in it. Hope is not a song only the young can hear—or sing—after all.

Connections: On the subject of animals, everyone has a local shelter worth supporting. One of mine is the West Suburban Humane Society in Downers Grove, Illinois. They have found homes for several kittens I’ve found in drainpipes and my parents’ backyard (my mother’s kind of like the Joseph Zeman of her neighborhood, except cats). They are genuinely good people.

Likewise, there are many local places you can look into to help out the elderly. But one national organization that does important work, one that everyone has heard of and probably gets taken for granted, is Meals on Wheels. They were an important service before the pandemic—you can only guess how necessary they’ve become since 2020.

Public libraries also pick up a lot of community slack regarding service and programs for seniors, especially considering how the “digital divide” affects older adults. Libraries often offer computer and internet training and access to seniors at all economic levels, plus bookmobile service to homebound seniors and those who live in nursing homes. Since the pandemic, libraries have helped find vaccine appointments for seniors and loaned them hot spots and easy to use iPads. Our libraries need support, volunteers, and advocates to keep doing the good work they do. Just a thought.

Feel free to put your favorite organizations in the comments.

Writing this piece, I was reminded of a song from Mary Poppins called “Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)”. It’s almost Joseph’s story with genders switched and a cathedral standing in for the Lincoln Square Walgreens. It’s a lovely song. But another one I think I like even better is a folk song written by Ralph McTell called “Streets of London.” I learned this song when I was very young, sung by an underrated Chicago Irish group called Brogue (thanks to my brother Brian for sharing their music on YouTube). It’s been covered by everyone from Sinead O’Connor to Glen Campbell to Liam Clancy. But here’s McTell’s original.

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What is that gorgeous, mouth-watering vision in the photo, you ask? This is a tarta de Santiago, a Spanish almond cake that’s easy to make and light and flavorful. It’s a cake regional to the city of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain, the end point of the Camino de Santiago. The Camino de Santiago is an old pilgrimage route to the tomb of St. James the Apostle, whose body supposedly made it to this part of Spain somehow or other (hence, the name Santiago, the Spanish for St. James). The pattern on the cake is the Cross of St. James.

Since walking the Camino in 2011, I like to make this cake every year around the anniversary of my pilgrimage, as a remembrance. You can find the pattern for the cross online and print it out or trace it, then cut it out for your pattern. For the cake, you can use almond flour or almond meal, or take toasted whole or even slivered almonds and grind them to a meal texture in a food processor or an electric coffee grinder (like I do).

Tarta de Santiago

• 2 to 2 1/2 cups almond flour or almonds

• 1 1/4 cups sugar

• 5 eggs

• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon. cinnamon (optional, but better with)

• 1 teaspoon almond extract or 1 tablespoon Amaretto (also optional)

• freshly grated zest of 1 lemon

• powdered sugar for top

1. If using whole or slivered almonds, first toast lightly by lining a baking sheet with parchment paper and spreading almonds out in a single layer on the parchment. Bake in a 300-degree oven until very lightly toasted. This will only take a few minutes, so be careful not to let burn. Remove almonds from oven and let cool. When cool, grind in a food processor or coffee grinder until almonds are a meal texture and set aside.

2. Line a 9-inch cake pan with parchment paper on the bottom and grease or oil sides of the pan. Or, grease sides and bottom and flour the bottom of the pan. Tap out excess flour. Set aside.

3. In a large bowl, add sugar. Make a well in the sugar. Add eggs. Beat well.

4. Add cinnamon, almond flavoring, and grated lemon zest. Stir. Add almond flour/meal. Fold in until batter is well mixed.

5. Pour batter into prepared cake pan. Tap pan on the counter lightly to release cake batter bubbles. Put pan in 340-degree oven and bake for 50-55 minutes. Cake is done when you press the top lightly and it springs back.

6. Let cake cool off for at least 15 minutes. Remove from pan and place on a plate. Place cut out Cross of St. James pattern on top. Sprinkle powdered sugar over top with a sieve. Remove pattern. Eat and bless yourself with holy wonderment at such deliciousness. ;-)

Next recipe is for a French cookie that resembles a boat. Navettes are fragrant, hard, biscotti-like cookies from Marseille in Provence in the south of France. That’s a shot of this beautiful sun-soaked city from when I went there in 2009.

Navettes are meant to resemble a canoe-like boat, supposedly one that transported Mary Magdalene, St. Martha, and Lazarus (yes, the Arise! guy) to the coast of southern France for some reason a long, long time ago. Or maybe it was Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. Or maybe them and Mary Salome of Clopas and Mary, mother of James. (But not James the guy who ended up in Spain—James the other one, “the lesser,” whatever that means but it sounds rude.) It’s not clear how many holy people were gallivanting around in this one little boat and why they got around so much back then, more than modern-day hipsters on a 4-day/3-night California coast booze cruise. There were definitely multiple Marys involved though, because the boat landed at a place now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. If only one Mary had made her way there, you wouldn’t see all those S’s in the name, so that’s how you know this all really happened. Reallys and trulys.

Navettes are best eaten with tea or coffee, like biscotti. Their secret weapon taste-wise and fragrance-wise is orange blossom water, which you can buy online or in most grocery stores. You can buy navettes year-round in Marseille, but locals go wild for them on Candlemas, February 2nd, and eat them the way French people in the rest of the country eat crepes for this religious holiday. The cookies are even blessed for Candlemas. Europeans sure do love to eat holy things. Americans are just happy if it’s somewhat palatable, nevermind if a halo grows out of you in reward for something as mundane as chewing.

There are several bakeries in Marseille that make navettes, but THE place is Four des Navettes, by the Vieux Port and St. Victor Abbey. Four des Navettes is the oldest bakery in Marseille, in operation since 1781. On Candlemas, the local archbishop leads a pilgrimage from the port to the abbey, then crosses over to the bakery to bless the cookies.

When I was in Marseille I made a pilgrimage to find this magical old bakery and walked all the way from the port and everything too. It took me forever, and I didn’t even try the cookies but just bought a tin as a gift to bring to my dad’s friends back in Paris. Afterwards, I still felt pretty smug and saintly, but then I tarnished it by stopping in a bar for a Cuba libre. Later I completely wrecked it by going to see (and enjoying!) a violent American revenge fantasy flick (Inglourious Basterds). Imagine trading being #blessed for two and a half hours of sitting in the dark with Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same.

Navettes

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Are there expiration dates on memorials? When a favorite writer or artist dies, is it absurd to let a full year and a half pass before writing an appreciation? I’m asking for a friend and a stráinséar (the Irish for stranger”). One and the same person, someone I knew about a quarter of a century ago.

I think the answers to those two questions are no and yes. No, there’s no expiration date on memorials. And yes, of course it’s absurd. But only because time as humans think of it is absurd. Something most of us embody for just a few years on Earth—adding up to maybe one pulse in the universe’s eternal heartbeat—and yet try to impose on random objects and complex processes with arbitrary expiration dates? Even the acknowledgment of loss and appreciation through tribute and memory? Ridiculous.

So here’s a memorial no more overdue than a memory from 25 years ago or a story that began 25 centuries before that, on a land formation born maybe 250,000 centuries (but likely more) before that.

In April 2020, the writer, mapmaker, mathematician, and artist Tim Robinson died from coronavirus. He was 85 and had outlived his wife, Mairéad, by just two weeks, after she too died from the virus.

Robinson, an Englishman who moved to Ireland in 1972 to live on the Aran Islands off the west coast of the country, isn’t as well-known States side as he should be, even among American Hibernophiles and lovers of Irish lit. Maybe his subject matter is too local, or maybe it’s too vast. Likely both.

Robinson’s first books took on a plot of Irish land 12 square miles in total—barely more than half the size of the island of Manhattan—and a history in the making for a cool 10 or 15 thousand million years. With so much time yet so little space, he was able to give his subject the epic treatment, as if those twelve square miles were the epicenter of the Earth. To read his work is to feel utterly dwarfed, humbled, amused, and awed by this small bit of land and the way a human population has changed and been changed by it.

Robinson had his own varied history. He started out as a mathematics and physics student at Cambridge in the late ‘50s. Soon after graduation he met Mairéad Fitzgibbon, another recent graduate and an Irish-born activist and arts worker, in London. They married, and for the next decade Robinson worked as a visual artist and teacher in London, Vienna, and Istanbul. When Mairéad saw a brooding, elemental “documentary” about the Aran Islands in Ireland, Robert Flaherty’s famous and infamous 1934 classic Man of Aran, she and Robinson made a trip to the islands in the summer of 1972. By November that year, they’d moved there.

Robinson and Mairéad—known as “M” in Robinson’s books—settled on the largest of the three Aran Islands, Inis Mór. They began learning Irish, the first language of the islands, and taking long walks around the island. Robinson spoke with the locals, collected place names and their meanings and stories from the old islanders, and began creating exceptionally detailed hand-drawn maps of the islands. These he would eventually publish along with similarly intricate maps of the Burren and Connemara (on the Irish mainland). He and Mairéad would found an imprint for publishing the maps, Folding Landscapes, out of a former lace factory in the fishing village of Roundstone in County Galway, where they moved in 1984.

Two years after moving to Roundstone, Robinson published Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. The book’s subject was Inis Mór. Specifically, the perimeter of the island. It begins with Robinson standing thigh-deep in the ocean, contemplating time going back thousands of millions of years and intently watching the waves roll in and out. Until he realizes two of those waves are actually dolphins, leaping through the water in perfect harmony with each other and the waves.

“They were wave made flesh, with minds solely to ensure the moment-by-moment reintegration of body and world.”

This “wholeness beyond happiness” makes Robinson despondent even as he feels wonder. Is there a human equivalent? A “good step” like the dolphin’s “wave made flesh”? Robinson vows to make a pilgrimage around the island—in step, but also in time, through language and history, through culture and customs, through folklore and flora and fauna, through geology, through the science and stories of stones and air and sea.

Starting at the island’s eastern end and following the way of the sun, Robinson walks the perimeter of Inis Mór, remarking on particular features of the landscape as he goes—a jumble of stones, beds of seaweed and fossil shells, a storm beach, a puffing hole, an ancient stone fort that abruptly stops at a cliff edge 300 feet above the sea. Nothing is too lowly or insignificant for a story. How this field got its name. How this rock from over there ended up way over here. How one saint drove off another. The many island names, variants, and purposes of seaweed. The differences between limestone and granite, and how they led to a crude nickname for the Aran islanders by Connemara people across the bay and an equally judgmental one for Connemara people by the islanders.

In one stretch of shore, in a chapter called “Signatures,” Robinson tells about an ephemeral art installation that fell to misfortune after one of the west coast’s many storms and a nearby not-so-ephemeral sprinkling of fossils formed by the spore of an unusual alga. Also close by is a series of faint “horseshoe-shaped ripple-marks in the bed of a rivulet worn by rainwater in a sheet of bare rock.” So what, right? Well, according to island legend, these are no random timeworn landscape marks but sea-horse marks—“sea-horse” as in capall fharraige, or stail fharraige (“sea stallion”). Or rather, its foal, going by the faintness of the marks and a few key sightings of the creature by long-gone islanders whose stories among the current generation, as Robinson puts it, “are not disbelieved.”

Not all the stories are so charming or sentimental. There are stories about famine and poverty, about feuds, about drownings, about deaths by cliff fall. In “History of a Stranger,” Robinson tells about an Englishwoman who lived on the island in the 1930s, the artist Elizabeth Rivers. Rivers wrote a gentle memoir of her life there, Stranger in Aran, in which she left out one of the crueler experiences she endured, as well as a stark example of Irish Catholic misogyny. Unlike the custom among islandwomen and many Irishwomen on the mainland, Rivers wore trousers. It made her a target for the island priest, who drew upon Old Testament scripture in a sermon to indirectly encourage the local children to throw stones at such “immoral women” as the kind who wore men’s clothing.

When Robinson got done with the perimeter, he moved to pacing the island’s interior, publishing Stones of Aran: Labyrinth in 1995. A thicker text, this one allows a little more intrusion by the modern era, with stories about tourism and 20th-century visitors’ obsessions with a non-existent “pure” Irish stock and nostalgia for a never-existed mystical Celtic-Christian past. There are also a few paragraphs about a 1970s tofu-munching “California man-eater” intent on having an affair with an uninterested islander that I’ll just say ring a loud bell for 1990s island life as well. (Didn’t I say from the start I was “asking for a friend”?)

Eventually, Robinson wrote a trilogy of equally extraordinary books about Connemara. His work gained the praise of the likes of novelist Colm Tóibín and nature writer Robert Macfarlane—better-known writers (at least in the U.S.) who know brilliance when they see it.

Not that this needs saying, but I’m no Colm Tóibín. So maybe my appreciation doesn’t count for much. But Stones of Aran, especially Pilgrimage, changed my life. You might say Robinson’s books are the ones I’d take to a desert island. Even if I did already read them on an island. An island very much like the one the books are about.

The year Labyrinth was published I landed on Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, meaning Inis Mór’s “sister.” I’ve written elsewhere, a lot, about my coming to Inis Oírr and my life there, and I don’t want this newsletter to be a rehash of any of those writings. So here’s the short version…

When I was 22, I was a cooking school student who heard about a work abroad program for students. I signed up and got a permit to work in Ireland. I went over in May 1995, didn’t know a soul, had no job pre-arranged, nowhere to live, not even a credit card to my name, and went from Dublin to Galway on the west coast, living out of a scuzzy junkie hostel (and I mean junkie in every sense of the word) overlooking a canal (that I once saw a dead body floating in) while looking for work.

Ireland was still just on the cusp of the Celtic Tiger and I was having no luck with even the most basic jobs. So I blockaded myself in a phone booth in the middle of Eyre Square (yes, this was a pre-internet, social media, and cell phones time—and yes, it was fabulous, I’d love to go back) and called down a list of hotels out of the phone book. One of the hotels answered in a foreign language and laughed at me when I asked them to speak English. They took my name and number, just to be nice, and that was that…so I thought. A few days later the person at the hotel rang for me at the dirtbag hostel and said they needed help after all. Only then did I realize this was for a job on some island. Not even Inis Mór, which I had heard of and been to before, but some other one.

The hotel sent its chef on the boat to meet me in Galway and explain the job and island life, and I sat with him in a pub for an hour not understanding a word he said. Just nodding whenever he paused. After another couple days I took a cattle boat out to this island, Inis Oírr, and started work in a small, family-run hotel.

I spent the next three summers working in Ireland, mostly on Inis Oírr, and again in 2001. Inis Oírr is only about 3 square miles to Inis Mór’s 12. At the time, there were about 300 people, three pubs, a small shop, a little cafe and a restaurant, a craft shop, a castle ruin and shipwreck, a lighthouse, and a video store that was really six or eight rotating videos that one family set out on a table in their living room and rented out to neighbors who dropped in. That was about it.

Still, the island stunned me. I spent the first few days walking around in shock, feeling like I was in a dream. The front door to the house I stayed in nearly opened right onto the beach—one that overlooked Galway Bay with Galway City, the Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher beyond. On sunny days, which was often that first summer, the sea was blue as the Caribbean. Donkeys and sheep roamed the island’s little paths. At night, the sky was like a fireworks concert of stars and the islanders would sometimes gather in the pubs and play music, sing sean-nós songs, dance a few steps. In the evening, right in the middle of the dinner rush, the bodhran player would waltz into the chaos to heat up the skin on his drum over the stove’s gas flame, push aside the dinner pots and everything.

No one locked their doors. Everyone spoke Irish. Everyone knew each other. Everyone knew everything that went on.

As someone born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs, thousands of miles from any ocean, of course I was spellbound by this place. And so out of place.

I had no sense of what “small town” life was like, how everyone seemed to know every move you made, that you couldn’t speak openly about whatever was on your mind without it possibly coming back to you in a backtwisted bit of gossip. And as beautiful as the surroundings were, they were also so unfamiliar. I nearly gagged and blinded myself with salt the first time I took a swim in the bay. I had only ever swum in freshwater before. I accidentally swallowed water as I swam—never ideal, but not as much of an issue in, say, Lake Michigan—stood up and sputtered it out of my mouth, instinctively brought my hands up to wipe it away and rub my eyes, only rubbing more salt in.

Language differences. Not just Irish versus English, but Hiberno-English versus Americanese. Cultural misunderstandings. Impossible expectations of what American girls were supposed to know and act like and be like based on the Hollywood make-believe of TV shows and movies. The fact that I was entirely alone, at first, in this part of the world. I had no grip, such very little familiarity to help me gain my bearings.

Over time, I absorbed some Irish, tried teaching it to myself, made my own daily pilgrimages around the island. I’d ask questions about the flowers and stone walls and types of birds and such—but I think my questions only flustered the islanders. Maybe they mistook my attempts to make sense of what were unfamiliar surroundings to me as quizzes of a sort, or as being nosy. Most likely they only had so much patience for the endless questions posed by visitors year in and year out, as I’d start to experience myself.

Meanwhile. Tim Robinson’s books were laying around—in bookstores in Galway, in the island craft shop, occasionally beside a tourist sitting at the hotel bar.

The first couple times I tried reading Stones of Aran it didn’t take. I had no focus the first year or so I was on the island. Even when it got boring, like on dreary days or when more than a couple weeks passed before a visit to the mainland, I couldn’t make the boredom work for me. I was homesick. Boy crazy (I was 22, people). Lonely. Restless. Always bolting down one of the island boreens to the back of the island in between work shifts like one day I’d find a mall or movie theater or some other mundane diversion back there. Or to the end of the beach with one of the other hotel girls to sit on the rocks and talk about how slow the time seems to pass “out here” and what do you think the weather will be like tomorrow and is that a dolphin out there among the waves or…?

I can’t remember when or where or why I finally took to Robinson. I guess one day I finally grew focused enough or bored enough or disappointed with the islandmen enough that when I opened Pilgrimage again and encountered:

“Cosmologists now say that Time began ten or fifteen thousand million years ago…”

I was ready.

By the time I finished the book, the islands looked a less alien place. The landscape, and the culture built upon it and language formed by it, made a little more sense.

It wasn’t that Robinson’s book had all the answers. It wasn’t a primer. It wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, like an encyclopedia of island life. And even then, as young as I was, I recognized great disparities between Robinson’s experience and mine: different islands for one, not to mention that small, traditional, religious communities do not…well, react to the presence of a cultured, married man in his late 30s in the same way they do to that of a solo, single, inexperienced, working-class 22-year-old girl. Robinson himself recognized as much in his stories about Elizabeth Rivers or the “California man-eater.”

I think instead what Robinson’s writing did for me was teach me to focus, to pay attention to details, to see the layers of time and humanity in a place, any place at all, and to connect the dots between even the smallest natural detail, a local word, and a story.

Robinson’s writing is meditative, meandering, wise, sometimes intimidatingly and bewilderingly inclusive of the scientifically complex, and all gloriously pre-internet. It’s not to do with length. Some stories/chapters amount to just a page or two. It’s the layers in each one. The levels of attention and meaning, immense conceptions of time, and epic treatment of an endangered language and marginalized local culture. Robinson expects someone to care. He writes about a long-dead farmer’s half-rubbled field at the back of an obscure island the way other authors write about one of the major battles of World War II or some dust-up between today’s social media titans. It’s like Robinson read Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic”—with its lines about “important places” and “great events” like “who owned / That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land” and “I made the Iliad from such / A local row”—and took it as his personal storyteller’s manifesto.

This may sound like a lot of pretentious conceit, but here’s the thing. Growing up in the suburbs, in the American Midwest, I came to think of nature and the land as remote from me. I was a product of a plastic, superficial culture, a sterile, soulless place. So I believed. I carried that notion with me to Ireland, to Inis Oírr. And it proved to be as much a hurdle to my connecting to my new surroundings as differences in language or history. Think about it. Studies show that if you tell girls they can’t “do science” as well as boys, many girls will believe it and give up before they begin. The same trick goes for all kinds of stereotypes, all kinds of missed connections built on misconceptions.

But sometime after reading Stones of Aran and starting to look at the island landscape in a different way, I started to view my home landscape differently too. And even to read differently. If there were layers of history and meaning in an island field or a fossil, why couldn’t there be in any place or feature? In the kind of weeds that grow between the cracks in a onetime prairie-turned-suburban parking lot, in the disappearance of crows from northern Illinois, in the occasional diagonal disruption in Chicago’s otherwise almost rigidly reliable grid system, in the ever-changing businesses of a single storefront? Robinson’s writing led me to other “nature writers” like Annie Dillard, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry, sure. And to environmental books by William Cronon, Terry Tempest Williams, and Mike Tidwell. And to Nelson Algren and Rebecca Solnit. To specific passages in Richard Wright and Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín. To writers who didn’t write about nature or the environment—not necessarily, or not at all.

But look, it wasn’t all culture and enlightenment. I mean early on in my Robinson fanhood, I tragically if not entirely regretfully fell in love with an islandman whose seduction tactics included telling me he’d met Robinson after I raved a little too long about Stones of Aran. I was 27 by then. So no excuses this time.

As a reader and human, what Tim Robinson did was give me some bearings, some “Earth legs.” That’s in the long run. Some twenty-five years ago, what he did was give me some “island legs.”

It’s like this: One morning one summer I took the ferry to Galway for the day, and coming back in the evening, the sea had turned rough. Feeling sick, I sat huddled inside the lower cabin until one of the crew, an old Waterford gentleman named John Allen, told me I’d feel better on deck in the fresh air. But standing out there, I couldn’t keep my balance and clung to a pole. The captain, a glamorous English gentleman named Sean, said it was time I found my sea legs. He had me stand in the center of the deck while he, John Allen, and another crewmate surrounded me. They told me to bend my knees a bit, find my center same as on a bicycle, focus on steady point, breathe in the sea air. The sea swelled, the ferry rocked. Every time I fell off balance, which was often at first, one of the men would catch me and push me gently back to the center. This went on about 10 minutes. They were clearly enjoying themselves. It was as funny and ridiculous and wise as it sounds. It took me awhile, but I got the hang of it—and never forgot it. I took the lesson back home with me to Chicago. It comes in handy riding the el from time to time. One “good step” will steady your journey, any time, any place.

Rest in peace, Tim and Mairéad. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha uaisle.

Connections: I could leave a million links related to the islands for this one, but here’s one for each of the Aran Islands. I discovered the blog Doireann in America not long ago, by an Irishwoman who started it when she was living in Chicago. And now she’s living on the middle of the Aran Islands, Inis Meáin. I love her photos and observations of both Chicago life and island life.

On Inis Oírr, islander and photographer Cormac Coyne has been documenting island life for years and has exhibited his work on the island and online. Cormac moved to the island from Dublin about 15 years ago with his wife, Máire, a native islander. You can see some of his photos on Instagram. They are really special for a more intimate view on island life and worth checking out even if you’ve never been to the islands.

Here is a recent video of sean-nós singer Treasa Ní Mhiolláin of Inis Mór singing, with shots of her home island. At the end of this post is another video with an older recording of Treasa singing “Cúirt Bhaile Nua” and images from Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran, the docu-drama that inspired Mairéad and Tim Robinson’s fateful trip to the Aran Islands in 1972.

The best Tim Robinson pieces are his books. Go find one and read it. His maps are works of art too. Here’s an interview with him I found interesting, especially his comments about walking versus cycling versus riding in vehicles. The filmmaker Pat Collins made a documentary about Robinson that I have yet to fully see, but there’s an excerpt available on Vimeo. A friend of Mairéad Robinson’s wrote this tribute to her in The Guardian after her death in April 2020.

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I like to joke sometimes about the year I spent working as a bridge troll of sorts by the Chicago River.

In 2015 I worked at a museum inside an old bridge tower beside the Michigan Avenue bridge in downtown Chicago: the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum. The bridge tower (or “bridgehouse” in Chicago-speak) houses the controls and massive gears that lift the bridge whenever a tall boat needs to pass through. Inside the museum you can see the gears (and watch them move when a bridge lift happens) and learn about the construction of the city’s unique bascule bridges and about the history of the Chicago River.

Working there not only taught me more about my home city than I ever learned from years of living there or working elsewhere, it redefined my understanding of community.

For six months, from early May to Halloween, I spent five days a week greeting visitors to the museum, leading them up and down the five levels of stone stairs, telling people from all over Chicago, the Midwest, and the world about the river and bridges. I sat at a small desk looking out at the still-a-work-in-progress Riverwalk and the curiously clean blue-green river water as it flowed under the lower deck of the double-decker DuSable Bridge. Or I sat at an even smaller desk just inside the dark, easily overlooked Michigan Ave. street-level entrance and watched the glimpses of tourists rushing past the doorway. Other times I stood guard in the brisk spring/fall cold or sweated through the midsummer humidity beside the gears below the bridge, ready to answer questions by visitors. Or on the highest level in the tower, peeking out the rectangle windows at all the Mag Mile-headed shoppers, Loop office workers, CDOT guys, and assorted downtown characters crossing the bridge below. Some days I led small groups up and down the Riverwalk and across the lower level of the double-decker DuSable, working in stories of Chicago political and architectural history with that of the river and bridges.

The bridgehouse itself is a protected Chicago landmark over 100 years old. Same for the Michigan Ave. bridge, which was christened the DuSable Bridge in 2010 to honor the city’s first non-Native resident, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, whose homestead was located kitty-corner across the river from where the museum now stands. DuSable himself built his homestead in an area long settled by Algonquian tribes like the Potawatomi (who DuSable, a Haitian immigrant, married into). This means the museum/bridgehouse is right at the heart where the city was born and grew.

In the old days, the bridges of the Chicago River used to open dozens of times a day to let all the river traffic go by—especially ships coming and going between Lake Michigan and the waterways that link the Chicago River to the Mississippi River downstate. These days, the bridges only go up once or twice a week in the spring and fall to allow sailboats through. The age of industrial shipping on the Chicago River is mostly over—it’s a leisure vehicles’ ride now.

Part of this transformation has been due to the Riverwalk, which has been bringing people back to the river downtown for purely recreational reasons. I remember working in a building right on the river for a few years well before the Riverwalk, in the old red-brick traffic building between Lasalle and Clark. Back then there wasn’t much space to walk along or sit down and just watch the water and boats drift by. The river “banks” were almost all concrete blocks, walls, and tunnels, an unwelcoming place with barges parked along the walls and sheets of ice locked here and there in the winter. The building and dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 2005 by Wabash was one of the first signs of the new look to come.

Another big part of the transformation has been advocacy groups devoted to cleaning up the Chicago River after decades of industrial dumping and pollution going back to the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouse days. One of these is Friends of the Chicago River, the environmental nonprofit that runs the museum. Friends has been working to advocate for a cleaner, healthier Chicago River and river ecosystem since 1979. They work with the city’s schools and park district for environmental events and education, lead canoe trips, and help reclaim habitat for the remaining animal species in and along the river. I think what their work and advocacy comes down to is raising awareness and appreciation for the Chicago River as a place of community.

In Chicago, the word “community” is usually reserved for the city’s neighborhoods, meaning everywhere away from downtown. Downtown Chicago, and especially the Loop (so-called for the loop the el train makes around the central commercial district), was considered a place for work, commerce, and entertainment. The first settlements were there (hi, Jean Baptiste!), but it wasn’t long before most city residents made their homes beyond the central city, in the neighborhoods that sprung up west, south, and north of downtown.

For years, growing up in the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, I’d go downtown to hit the stores on State Street or the Mag Mile, or to visit the skyscraper landmarks and big-name museums, or drop a bomb of money (and sense) at events like the Taste of Chicago or the Old St. Pat’s Block Party. But after I started working downtown, I stayed away outside of work hours as much as possible. To me, downtown was a place to work—not to form community bonds and get to know the neighbors.

And the river—it was a kind of smelly, concrete-lined thing. There were nicer, greener sections of it in the neighborhoods. But I never thought of the river’s importance, about its past or future.

I had a connection to the river through my paternal grandfather, who witnessed the Eastland Disaster in 1915, in which more than 800 people died when an overpacked boat headed for an excursion out on the lake capsized in the river near the dock at Clark Street. But that event only underlined in my mind that the Chicago River was a distressed and unwelcoming place, rather than a natural feature that could be friended and made friendly again.

Working in the bridgehouse changed that. Between the exhibits and the familiarity that came from seeing the river up close every day, and how it changed with the seasons, weather, and time of day, the river started to become a place I could better read and understand, like you would a friend.

Likewise, downtown Chicago, a loud, dynamic, clanging concrete jungle of a place that I associated with strangers and stressed workers, started to reveal itself as just another neighborhood. It only took a couple weeks to identify now-familiar faces and voices, boats and barges, street performers and city staffers. And let me tell you, when summer really gets under way in Chicago, and tourists start arriving downtown en masse for a revolving door of events like Lollapalooza or the Air and Water Show, you really count on the familiar to stabilize your day and keep you from feeling overwhelmed by all the change and strangeness.

On the Riverwalk, there were fellow Riverwalk workers (from pop-up bar and restaurant servers to the cleaning and security crews), the captains and crew of the tour boat companies across and upriver from the museum, the husky bargemen striking hero poses on the giant barges that occasionally made dramatic sweeps down the river to much fanfare from onlookers, the skater kids and parkour people who I had to chase off the museum’s benches and landmark walls from time to time, and the 24-hour party people in speedos and bikinis flying by on boats with names like The Summer of George and Veuve Clicquot.

Since 2015 was the year Trump announced his candidacy for president (complete with racist, anti-Mexican sloganeering), and the Trump Tower was just across the river from the museum, I increasingly found myself leading tour groups into the heart of protests along the river. One man showed up frequently that summer wearing a lucha libre mask and the Mexican flag, inviting people to pose for selfies with him giving the finger to the Trump Tower in the background.

Up on the Michigan Ave. level, there were the Bucket Boys and a Motown group that often played on the plaza beside the bridgehouse marking the site of Fort Dearborn (the sculpture on the bridgehouse depicts the 1815 Battle of Fort Dearborn, but wrongly suggests that the battle was Europeans defending their home from Native Americans rather than the other way around), the Fannie Mae ladies at the store kitty corner from the museum, the eternally tourist-besieged waiters and cashiers at the Corner Bakery across from the Fannie Mae, the tellers at the bank where we made museum deposits twice a week (and traded Blackhawks talk), the bus guides hawking their theme tours (oddly, at an office podium right there on the corner), the young kids selling candy for their sports teams and older kids selling their demo CDs to anyone who’d listen, and a CDOT worker who used to carry a folding chair with him to pop a squat during bridge lifts, as if he was at Wrigley Field catching rays in the bleacher seats instead of the busiest intersection in the city.

The Michigan Ave. entrance was also a desired spot for street people and Streetwise sellers seeking temporary shelter. One man, a disabled vet named Rabbit, used to wheel his chair into the entrance to say hello to us museum staff and help out offering directions to the tourists who asked about a thousand times a day. (“Excuse please, do you know the way to Willis Tower?” “Willis Tower, you say? No.”)

Rabbit was one of several people I remember most. Sitting at the Riverwalk entrance, I came to memorize some of the commentary by the tour boat guides as they drifted by several times a day. One Shoreline guide even had a rap to explain the design of the Chicago flags waving from the DuSable Bridge. Like clockwork, he’d launch into it just as his boat was passing the museum and about to cruise under the bridge: “I so often get asked about the bars on the Chicago flag, I made up a little song about it. Folks, let me break it down for you. (beat) The Chicago flag / Has two blue bars / And four red stars…”

I came to rely on how long we had before closing time by the appearance of one of the Mag Mile’s statue guys—a man dressed in silver clothes with silver face makeup who stood frozen for hours beside the landmarks further “up the road.” In full costume, he’d cross the lower level of the bridge, a hard day’s statue work done, usually mid-afternoon.

It was also on the lower lever of the bridge that I came to discover the performance art of Vincent, a downtown legend whom I’d previously spotted along the Riverwalk—simply because you kinda can’t miss him. Sometimes known as Fashion Man or Suit Guy, Vincent is a club DJ turned computer programmer and longtime Marina City resident famous for his beautiful, bright-colored, tailored silk suits and bridge waving. The subject of a 2008 documentary and columns by Chicago journalists from Roger Ebert to Neil Steinberg, Vincent started a routine years ago of standing out on the downtown bridges and waving at the people on the tour boats as they passed under. Eventually he started adding moves like spins, finger-raining, and coat twirling. His suits range in beach ball technicolors from canary yellow to pin-striped turquoise to minty lime green. Once he went out on the bridge for a show, he might be there for almost an hour. I know, because I had a prime view from the cashier’s desk at the Riverwalk entrance. Even in the documentary about him, Vincent’s reasons for his bridge shows are something of a mystery. I honestly came to see him as a pure outsider/guerilla performance artist, someone who performs and perfects his art, wherever and whenever he feels like it, just for the joy and freedom of it.

As the Riverwalk expanded and came to completion, and grew more and more people to it, I sometimes wondered if Vincent was still going out on the bridges as much. Maybe there’s too much going on there these days for even someone like a man spinning around in a technicolor silk suit to be noticed. Back in 2015, along with all the human community, there was wildlife returned to the river downtown. A beaver lived at Wolf Point at the confluence of the main stem and the north and south branches—an inspiring sign considering how they used to flourish in the river before European hunting and trading and industrial pollution almost wiped them out. My museum co-worker and friend Rebeca, who lives downtown and used to walk her dog Lucas along the Riverwalk daily, would tell me about the birds she spotted, like a black-crowned night heron. Meanwhile, everyone feared the possible Asian carp invasion, and one solution that year was to fish ‘em out of the Illinois River before they made it through the Des Plaines River to Chicago and cook and serve ‘em up like salmon patties.

But since then, a high-rise has gone up at Wolf Point, driving the beaver away due to construction noise and invaded habitat, and recreational boat traffic has increased dramatically. The community of wildlife may have fled for the branches north and south. Though Chicago still fears the coming of the Asian carp.

Since COVID and the abandonment of downtown by office workers, who have yet to return at the level of pre-pandemic, I wonder if the community I encountered on the Riverwalk in 2015 has survived. With outdoor events like Art on the Mart, the Riverwalk has been an oasis for people who’d still rather not risk indoor activities. Are as many boats running these days? Have any animals returned? (Last winter, I remember walking down an eerily empty sidewalk on a weekday in the Loop and noticing how much the pigeons seemed to have the run of the place, right down to flying at human head level over the sidewalks like they were having the best, most carefree time of their lives.)

“Chicago is here because of the river.” That was a truth I’d hear again and again working at the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum. It grew up as a city because of the river’s goldmine access to the Great Lakes (and through them, to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic) and the Mississippi River (and through it, to the Gulf of Mexico). The river made and shaped the city, and the city in turn remade and reshaped the river. It’s the heart of the community, always and forever.

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Connections: Wanna see what it’s like to be inside the bridgehouse when the bridge is going up? Here’s a great video, with the gears in action and all.

Wanna see Vincent the Suit Guy in action too? You can watch the documentary about him, Vincent: A Life in Color by Jennifer Burns, in full on YouTube. His life story is really interesting, and yes, there are shots of him spinning on the bridge in his technicolor suits.

In news related to my previous post, on ageism, I did a little interview with Patricia Corrigan for an article on menopause for Next Avenue. Patricia reached out after fishing for menopause stories from women online and reading my Poetry Potluck piece. The article was one of a series for Menopause Awareness Month, which is in October.

I also mentioned the Art Institute of Chicago and School of the Art Institute’s workers’ union in my last post. Since then, there’s been a lot of outrage about AIC’s firing of its docents to initiate a new art education program with a more diverse set of paid workers. The Chicago Tribune wrote an awesomely blistering editorial that cut to the chase and called the action ageist and hypocritical. ArtNet wrote a piece suggesting the outrage is just right-wing anti-woke backlash. I’m with the Trib on this, and I think the ArtNet article author is entirely myopic about the prevalence of ageism and also misses some crucial points about art world hypocrisy and economic inequity. I think I’d believe AIC’s defense that they’ve got equity in mind if I didn’t know, thanks to those heroic AIC/SAIC union peeps, that the president of the museum makes nearly $1 million a year, that the museum in 2020 reported nearly $1.5 billion in net assets and received an endowment in another billion, plus a total operating surplus of nearly $69 million for the fiscal year, and that the museum administration wasn’t fighting the AIC/SAIC workers’ union very attempts to the extent of sinking funds into hiring an anti-worker PR firm. An organization truly so concerned about equity wouldn’t fight their workers’ call for fair wages and better treatment. And how is it that a museum that, in my lifetime, goes from charging a suggested donation fee to visitors (as a teen, that meant I could pay just 50 cents to go in the museum if I wanted), to charging admission but having a full free day every week, to charging $20 to $25 a head for most visitors with just a measly few hours of free admission one weekday evening, to a couple weeks here and there with some free days for Illinois residents and JUST NOW IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2021 be getting around to finally planning on paying their docents? Where has all this increase in admission fee money been going all this time? Oh yes, see the part above about the president’s million-dollar paycheck. So I really think this firing of docents thing (and giving them a whoppingly stingy two-year free membership) is all just smoke and mirrors equity. They’re doing something in the name of equity (getting rid of the old people) to make it look like they’re doing something in the name of equity. Pay no attention, meanwhile, to the workers revolting behind the curtain.

I published a culture piece last week in National Catholic Reporter about COVID, Dante, the afterlife, and Dinty Moore’s (editor-in-chief of Brevity) terrific new memoir, To Hell with It. Moore’s book questions whether belief in hell is worth the spiritual suffering and insecurity, and good-naturedly ribs Dante’s influence on people’s perceptions of the afterlife. Moore sent me a lovely note thanking me for the review. This made up for the dragging on Twitter by the “trad Catholic” crowd, who had a mini-conniption that I (or Moore, or NCR, or anyone) would question dogma even a little or have a little fun with Dante or compare this COVID nightmare to past plagues and something of a hell-time. I hope you give it a read, no matter what the right-wing goofs think. It’s worth checking out at least for the amazing William Blake illustrations of The Divine Comedy that the NCR editors wonderfully paired with the essay.

Finally, I also reviewed a book about Irish Catholicism and the abuse crisis, Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World, for America magazine’s fall literary review issue. This is a great, honest book about the changes in Ireland over the years and what the future of Irish faith (if it survives at all) could be. The best thing about this review is it unexpectedly reconnected me with a long-lost mentor—more to come on that…

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One reason is the ageism of COVID-19. In the United States, more than 90% of COVID deaths have been in people over age 50. Raise the age to people 65 and over and the death rates are greater for each older age group than all the younger age groups combined.

In many ways, this is impersonal ageism. It’s nothing against older people—just a fact of nature that our immune systems weaken as we age and viruses strike vulnerable systems. But COVID has exposed a more insidious kind of ageism. The kind that’s emboldened commentators to shrug off safety protocols, saying those who’ve died “were on their last legs anyway.” Or that’s fed into intergenerational blame games on social media and offensive takes that wiser editors would never allow to see the light of day.

Ageism also marred the vaccine roll-out earlier this year. Most states used extremely glitchy, appallingly ableist online appointment systems that many older people, who tend to fall on the negative side of the “digital divide,” couldn’t navigate or even access to schedule their life-saving vaccines.

Aging is not for the faint of heart

But I also have personal reasons for thinking so much about age these days. As a caregiver (along with my siblings) of elderly parents of the invisible Silent Generation, I’m sensitive to how old people are treated and talked about in our culture. The older you or the people you love get, the more you become aware of what a stigma aging is in a youth-obsessed society.

Not only are old people themselves pushed to the margins in our culture, so is any discussion of aging beyond ageist jokes and stereotyping. The real experiences of older adults (and the people who look after them, who tend to be middle-aged women or other elderly) go unheard.

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve heard many takes on what it’s like to be a parent of young children during this stressful time but comparatively little on what it’s like to be a caregiving child of elderly parents. Even more rare are accounts from the elderly themselves. For every thousand think pieces about millennials and boomers, there are few about the extremely at-risk Silent Generation and their caregivers. It’s the exact opposite of what a healthy society should be doing right now. Studies show everyone benefits the more different generations communicate and interact with each other. The more you get to know older people while you’re young, the more you understand the natural trajectory of life and the wisdom and resilience of experience.

Another personal reason is my own aging. I went through menopause during the pandemic (an experience I wrote about, with a food and poetry twist, for the University Of Tucson Poetry Center’s Poetry Potluck series). It was a lonely thing going through a major life and health change without being able to spend time with other women my age, to even see them due to social distancing and quarantine. Many women report feeling suddenly “invisible” in society after reaching 40 or 50—but of course, with social distancing, the invisibility became literal.

In the workforce, ageism affects men as well but begins earlier for women and occurs more often, compounding the sexism many women experience and limiting their careers and earning power even more.

The Older Woman Artist

Since this is a newsletter partially about outsider art, I want to delve into how aging is represented (or not) in the work of older women outsider artists.

A (weak) justification for ageism is that people lose relevance as they get older. They fall out of touch with their own culture. They don’t, or can’t, keep up with trends. Their art doesn’t have the power of younger artists.

This, of course, is a giant manure pile of rationale for marginalizing the middle-aged and elderly, as well as for our younger selves’ tendency to remain deeply in denial about the inevitability of death and our physical vulnerability.

Most ageism is really anxiety about death and illness, and there’s no one better to confront this anxiety in our culture than an older artist. Yet the art world and art competitions most often reward younger artists, overlooking those who started late (especially common among women artists) or lacked the crucial support and mentoring they needed to break through at a younger age (also typical of women artists).

Recent discussions on older women artists declare a breakthrough of sorts in ageism and the art world, based on the late-life success of women like Cuban minimalist Carmen Herrera and Japanese infinity room inventor Yayoi Kusama. Herrera finally sold her first piece at 89, despite painting since the 1930s and deep, longtime ties to the elite art world. Kusama first found success in the 1960s, only to see her ideas frequently stolen by male artists, before succumbing herself to mental illness and institutionalization and falling into obscurity.

Their success is encouraging, but shouldn’t be divorced from necessary conversations about ageism and sexism. Some critics consider the new appreciation for older women artists in part due to the prohibitively high prices for work by male and younger artists. “High quality at bargain prices.” In other words, women’s work is still being undersold. Another factor is the desire by galleries and dealers to attain “woke” brownie points for “inclusivity.” In other words, older women are still being patronized, still treated like outsiders.

What does the work and legacy of two of Chicago’s most famous female outsider artists tell us about the realities of being an older women artist?

Vivian Maier: The Nanny Photographer

Vivian Maier moved to Chicago in the late 1950s and shot thousands upon thousands of photos capturing the city’s faces and places, turning the unregarded and ordinary into the extraordinary. Recognition came too late, but her posthumous fame spread like wildfire.

Like outsider artist and fellow Chicagoan Henry Darger, Maier was secretive about her art and seemed to have had no formal training. She never married or had children, and died in poverty and obscurity, literally just as her remarkable art was being salvaged and discovered.

She was born in New York in 1926 and grew up between the East Coast and France. In the early 50s she settled in America for good, working as a nanny and later as a caregiver to elderly. By the late 50s, she’d moved to Chicago, working in a series of homes in the wealthy North Shore suburbs. (For a short while, she even nannied TV host Phil Donahue’s kids.) Socially, she was a loner, but a woman with sharp intellectual interests who loved movies, followed politics, and traveled around the world.

Maier began taking photos at a young age, starting with a simple Brownie box camera before switching to a Rolleiflex and single-lens reflex cameras. She photographed the children she took care of as well as the people and objects she encountered on walks in the city and around her employers’ suburban neighborhoods. She took photos on her many travels and even of celebrities passing through town on publicity junkets. She also took photos of herself—sometimes direct shots in mirrors, often fractured or blurred self-portraits as seen in shadows or distant reflections in a store window.

She never sold, published, or exhibited a single one. She didn’t even develop all of them, accumulating hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film by the end of her life.

Beginning in the 1970s, Maier’s employment record became spotty. The children she used to look after grew up, and Maier, in her late 40s and 50s, found it harder to find long-term employment. By the 1980s, she entered a period of financial instability that would trouble her until her death. She had bouts of homelessness and kept her photos and other belongings in storage lockers. In 2007, these items were auctioned off to several buyers.

In 2008, Maier fell on a patch of ice and was hospitalized. She lingered until April 2009, when she died at age 83. She had no idea, as she lay dying in the last year of her life, her work was being snapped up for nearly $100 a shot. One of the buyers of her auctioned storage items had begun selling her photos on eBay and uploading them to Flickr, with viral results. Having bought them through an auction house, he had no idea who the photographer was until he finally found a photo lab receipt with a name on it. He Googled the name. And there was her death notice. He’d missed her by only a few days.

It’s easy to understand why so many people fell in love with Maier’s work. There’s the nostalgia of New York and Chicago as viewed in black and white—and her striking choice of subjects. Maier noticed the kind of people who usually don’t get noticed.

Many of her photos were of people rendered invisible or unimportant in American society—laborers in the middle of a job task, homeless people sleeping in parks or doorways, black Chicagoans hawking goods at the city’s famous (and long-gone) Maxwell Street market, children lost in a world of their own on the beach or on the street. Maier paid especial attention to older people, particularly middle-aged and elderly women.

Are people drawn to Maier’s photos because they too feel invisible and thus seen by her art? Or do they feel drawn to Maier herself, a woman who went unnoticed in life?

In truth, Maier deliberately kept her talent a secret, for reasons we’ll never know. Maybe she felt anonymity freed her to take photos and pursue her art without much fuss or objection. People may be more likely to ignore a harmless-looking older woman taking their photo than they would a flashy pro or pushy reporter with expensive equipment. In that regard, being an older woman can have its advantages—the freedom of the outsider.

Since May, the Chicago History Museum has been hosting an exhibit of Maier’s color photographs, many of them never seen before by the public. The exhibit includes a photo of the artist dated in the 1950s, when Maier would’ve been about 30. It’s a good, clear shot, so it’s easy to see why the curator chose to exhibit it. But I wish one or two clearly showing an older Maier had been included, like the photo at the top of this newsletter. One that shows the age in her face, the experience of her life. The later one more truthfully shows the face behind the photos in the era largely represented in the exhibit (the 1970s). It also gives a greater sense of the passing of time and the accrual of experience in her work, the sense of change as well as continuity in a woman’s work practiced over decades—reminding audiences they are viewing the art not of an eternally youthful Mary Poppins-like character, and forcing them to reckon with their preconceptions of aging women and the supposed decline of older adults’ ability and relevance.

Lee Godie: The Bag Lady Artist

By contrast, Lee Godie’s photography gives audiences no chance to ignore the fact of her age. While her paintings depict youthful women and men (or “princes”), her photos all depict herself in her 60s through her 80s.

Godie’s background is as mysterious as Maier’s, maybe more so. She was born sometime between 1900 and 1910. (“I don’t celebrate my birthday,” she once said. “I celebrate my status as an artist.”) In Chicago, or in some place called Mudtown, Illinois—which may actually be Chicago. She married twice and had three or four children. Two died at a very young age. She had moved to Washington state by the 1940s, then disappeared after the end of her second marriage to re-emerge 20 years later on the streets of Chicago.

In Chicago, Godie became a local legend, often seen on the steps of the Art Institute, hawking her paintings and assuring would-be buyers that she was as good as Cezanne. She drew portraits of women and men with oversized eyes and long lashes, looking straight ahead or off to the side, often in profile, wearing large hats or old-fashioned attire. Sometimes she included natural elements like leaves or flowers and Chicago landmarks like the Hancock Building, with slogans scrawled across the canvas: “Chicago, we own it!”

Sometimes, in lieu of or in addition to her signature, she’d embellish her paintings with real pieces of cheap jewelry or a photobooth picture of herself holding the very same painting she was selling. To save on tools, she was known to remove the piece of jewelry before handing over the just-purchased painting to the buyer. Sometimes she also made cheaper duplicates of her work, selling the more vibrant versions at a higher price and the lesser ones to art students (who may have not appreciated the bait and switch) at a mark-down.

In this age of Instagram and photo filters, however, Godie’s most relevant work may be her selfies—black and white photos she took of herself in the Greyhound bus station photobooth. In these, she experimented with poses and facial expressions, sometimes bizarre makeup and styling choices (she liked using iced tea powder to make herself look tan), and artistic identities (posing with her tools of the trade or paintings). Often she colorized her selfies to make her lips or cheeks look ingenue pink or movie star red. Most importantly, despite her gray hair and secondhand clothes, she defied age expectations and ageist beauty standards in glamour girl poses, showing her bare shoulders or pouting her lips like a starlet.

By the 1980s, Godie had attracted national attention in articles about her in People and the Wall Street Journal. The articles led a woman named Bonnie Blank, her long-lost daughter, now a middle-aged woman, to track her down. After shadowing her mother for a while on the streets and sharing her company while drawing in the park, she revealed who she was. Godie didn’t miss a beat: “Yeah I know who you are, now pick up those bags and let’s get down the street.”

Godie’s daughter became her guardian and finally got her off the streets. In the fall of 1991, Chicago celebrated “Lee Godie Exhibition Month” by decree of Mayor Daley, and in 1993 the Chicago Cultural Center hosted a major retrospective of her work. She died in March 1994, in her mid-80s. Since then, her work has shown in Paris and London and is collected in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and in the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Sadly, her groundbreaking, anti-ageist selfies are not included in either collection.

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Connections: As mentioned above, I recently published an essay about aging and menopause at Poetry Potluck, a series of essays about food and poetry by the University of Tucson’s Poetry Center. I wrote about the fabulous poet Dimitra Xidous’ poem “Raisins” from her Keeping Bees collection—and there’s a recipe for bread pudding! If you’ve never read Xidous’ work, do yourself a favor and check it out. Here is a video of her reading another of her poems.

My favorite book collection of Vivian Maier’s work is Out of the Shadows by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams. The text is thoughtful and illuminating, and the photos are organized in a beautiful, poignant arc that does justice to Maier’s long and productive artistic life.

My favorite essays about Lee Godie include Nadine Modem’s in Elephant and Joe Lamb’s account of his friendship with her while attending SAIC.

Speaking of SAIC…after a year off due to the pandemic, the Met Gala in New York returned, compete with (maskless) celebrities and at least one (maskless) U.S. representative wearing a dress that got nobody talking about the arts and arts workers. Well, here in Chicago—whose radical laborers basically gave the country Labor Day—arts workers and museum/school staff from the Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have been marching to form a union. (With their masks on! AOC, take some notes.) As a former SAIC employee, I can attest that this union is sorely needed. Here’s a petition where you can support them. You know Lee and Vivian would.

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This past week, the national media have glut themselves on news about New York’s disgraced (now ex) governor Andrew Cuomo. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, tornadoes ripped through the state (at least half a dozen in the northern part of the state), and Chicago had three mass shootings in one weekend. Three mass shootings. In one weekend. 73 people were shot and 11 died, including a police officer. This kind of news seems relevant to national and global concerns about climate change, gun violence, policing, and racial/class inequities. But none of it got even a fraction of the attention the sexual harasser out on the East Coast did.

There’s a definite fatigue that comes with being a Chicagoan or Midwesterner and continually seeing your home city and region erased or underestimated by the media’s bicoastal myopia. On the one hand, after four years of Trump—a New Yorker who first built a skyscraper in Chicago with a giant TRUMP sign on its face that marred the downtown visual landscape, then spent his entire presidency loudly trashing Chicago for its violence (as opposed to showing genuine concern and trying to help find a fair and effective solution)—maybe we should be glad to have the spotlight aimed back in New York’s direction. Even before Trump, we had our day so to speak—eight years of general good feeling thanks to having a local of sorts in the White House. Anyone with eyes could see that Trump’s attacks on Chicago were his way of trying to get at his younger, cooler, smarter, better-looking, and more beloved Midwestern-based predecessor.

On the other hand, it gets boring (on top of disheartening) tuning into the news and seeing the same old navel-gazing and blatant cultural hegemony coming out of NYC/DC/LA. The same old erasure.

Maybe this is what bothered me about Henry Darger’s inclusion in Olivia Laing’s book. Laing is a beautiful writer—her prose is clear, elegant, and full of thoughtful, provocative reflection. I enjoyed learning about artists I knew nothing or not enough about—from David Wojnarowicz (Laing’s clear favorite), Klaus Nomi, and Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol, Billie Holliday, and Jean Michel-Basquiat. I also appreciated her compassionate reflection on Darger.

If anyone needed compassion it was Darger, a man who grew up poor and motherless in Chicago before being placed in a home for “feeble-minded” children downstate (in Lincoln, Illinois) around the time his father died. He remained there until his late teens, when he escaped the downstate asylum and walked the 200 miles back to Chicago. Back in the city, Darger got a job at a Catholic hospital on the north side and worked in Catholic-run institutions until his retirement. Not long before he died, he went into another institution, an old folks’ home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order. It was the same home where his father had died, the event that set him on the path to institutionalization to begin with.

Laing’s chapter on Darger dives into the abuses in institutions of Darger’s time, including in the homes and asylums in Chicago and Illinois. Official records of Darger’s life are spare at best, so studies on early 20th century institutional life and abuse have to serve as a stand-in. That and, of course, Darger’s art.

It’s almost certain Darger experienced and/or witnessed abuse as a child. Darger had a number of personality and behavioral quirks that have led art scholars and biographers to diagnose him posthumously as everything from autistic to a possible pedophile or killer. His creative themes were predominantly children and childhood, war, Catholicism, and fantastical elements of nature like massive tornadoes and hybrid butterflies with children’s heads or bodies standing in for insect parts.

Some of his paintings and collages depicted extremely violent battles between innocent children and evil adults—illustrations for his 15,000-page novel about a war between seven Christian girls, called the Vivian Girls, and a government that practiced child slavery: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion (better known as In the Realms of the Unreal). Sometimes the girls were depicted naked with drawn-on male genitalia. Much of his art used images he cut, traced, or duplicated and enlarged from newspapers, coloring books, and pulp novels. For years, Darger expressed extreme distress in his writing over the loss of a newspaper clipping of a child who went missing in Chicago in 1911. The loss of the image had a profound impact on his faith. For a time he attended Mass several times a day to appease God to help him find the lost image, then avoided Mass and forsook God angrily when the image remained gone.

As far as anyone knows, Darger was entirely self-taught as an artist and spoke of his work to no one. Only three or four pictures of him exist—two of them with a friend at Riverview amusement park in Chicago. This was his only known friend. He mostly kept to himself. He never left Illinois, except for a brief stint in Texas when he was drafted into the army in 1917. He was known around the neighborhood for searching in alley dumpsters for discarded newspapers and books, salvaging images for the art that no one saw or knew about. He hoarded odd items like twine and eyeglasses, and neighbors described him as a man who could be heard speaking in other voices, replaying conversations from the day, in his cramped, one-room apartment at night.

Darger very well may have had Tourette’s or been autistic. He certainly had to have been affected socially by the extreme adverse circumstances of his childhood. It’s no wonder the man kept to himself. But there’s no evidence to support any of the theories about possible criminal mindset or activity. None beyond some viewers’ discomfort with the more graphic, unusual elements of his art and his differences in ability and socialization.

Darger is probably the loneliest person discussed in Laing’s book by far. If we’re talking about lonely big-city artists, you can’t get any lonelier than Henry Darger, the ultimate outsider artist. But by throwing in a Chicago artist alongside New York artists (which Laing does without much discussion of the differences between the cities and regions), to me it felt like Darger was being displaced even more—and Chicago, the great, overlooked, “Second City,” as well.

Truth is, Darger the artist isn’t exactly a cultural ambassador for the city, or for any place on earth. After all, his masterwork was named after “the realms of the unreal.” And he didn’t create urban scenes. Yet it seems clear he was influenced by his surroundings. Here’s what I notice, as a Chicago-born person.

Chicago media and violence: He lived his entire adult life (except for that army stint) in a city notorious for its violence and crime and for the sensational headlines of its newspapers and media. Darger wasn’t the only one who salvaged newspaper headlines and images. My maternal grandfather, an Iowa farm boy who emigrated to the south side of Chicago in the 1920s to work in the factories, kept a scrapbook of news articles that interested him. I remember looking through it as a child and wondering about some of his choices. There were the usual memorable events, such as sports and wartime announcements. But also articles about accidents, fires, and kidnappings in the city, complete with stark, black-and-white photos of distraught parents, grim-faced detectives, and apartment exteriors such as the outside of a bedroom window from which one child was taken. As well were articles of religious interest such as a nun in Europe with stigmata (my grandfather was a devout Irish Catholic). I still remember the black-and-white image of her with dark trails dripping from her eyes down toward her chin, tears like the blood of Jesus. The image fascinated me as much as it horrified me. (Her name was Therese Neumann and the jury’s still out whether she was faking it or not.)

Who knows why my grandfather wanted to keep some of these articles. Yeah, some were interesting and historically important, but some were just lurid. But they do represent the kind of news Chicagoans were seeing on their doorstep or at the newsagents every morning in the era Darger was creating. You work with what you get. In that vein, Darger’s obsessions with child safety and with violence seem less “out there.”

The Church and Chicago: As a devout Catholic himself, Darger probably would’ve known who Therese Neumann was and maybe even had an image of her. He salvaged religious images as much as ones of children. Even now, Chicago is an intensely Catholic city, and much more so in Darger’s time. The Chicago archdiocese was responsible for much of the charity and social services in the city, including the formation of its health and education institutions. The neighborhood where he lived was especially dominated by the church, with the DePaul University campus and its founding church (and Darger’s home parish) of St. Vincent DePaul within blocks of his apartment (at 851 Webster off of Halsted in Lincoln Park). His childhood parish was Old St. Pat’s in the West Loop, another church that dominates the cultural and social life of the neighborhood, even to this day. Over his lifetime, Darger was institutionalized by the state as well as the Church, but it’s Catholicism’s dual themes of punishment and salvation that dovetail with the themes in his art and shaped his life and psyche. In Chicago, he wouldn’t have been alone in his devotion or his emotional ties to the Catholic Church.

Midwestern landscapes: Though Darger’s art was almost wholly absent of Chicago street scenes or imagery, the pastoral scenes and natural elements in his paintings and writing resemble Midwestern scenes. There’s something about the wide, blue, cloud-heavy skies in Darger’s paintings that recall the kind of wide-open landscape he would’ve walked through on his escape from the asylum in Lincoln back to Chicago. One of his written works devotes thousands of typewritten pages to the story of a massive tornado named “Sweetie Pie.” According to Darger’s recollections, he witnessed a tornado in 1908 while walking the 200 miles to Chicago. He also kept weather journals in which he laboriously recorded the local weather for about 10 years. This sounds strange and obsessive, and there’s a fascinating essay written by an art editor about the moral consciousness exhibited by Darger in these journals and his focus on the figure of the weatherman. I don’t mean to argue with experts, but I will say that Darger never sounds more like a typical Chicagoan or Midwesterner than in these obsessive weather journals. Here, the local weatherman is probably a bigger celebrity and focus of combined awe and derision than Oprah, Kanye, and the Daleys put together. In a city where the weather can give you all four seasons in one day, it’s hard for weather to not become a preoccupation of the mind.

Despite all this, Laing’s book locates Darger in New York because his archives are now housed there, in the American Folk Art Museum, which she visited to study Darger’s materials. Laing also mentions a visit to Chicago and to Intuit: The Center for Outsider and Intuitive Art in Chicago, which has a recreation (of sorts—it’s neater than the original) of Darger’s tiny one-room apartment on Webster Ave. But she gets a few Chicago names and locations wrong, which for a Chicago reader only highlights the New York-centric view of her book and Darger’s displacement as a Midwestern artist. This is a petty gripe, I know. But after reading the rest of the book and noting how much close attention Laing pays to particular neighborhoods and sites in New York in discussing the work of David Wojnarowicz or Warhol, I don’t think it’s too much to question why it didn’t occur to Laing to think more deeply about the implication of geographical urban difference before writing up her chapter on Darger.

Since Darger’s death, the discovery and dissemination of his work, and the legend that has grown around him as the ultimate outsider artist, there have been discussions about just how self-taught he was and whether he may have had even a smidgen of exposure to art history or lessons. The question that people’s wondering really seems to be getting at here is whether he would’ve been a different artist had he been less isolated—would he have been a better one, in terms of technique, or a less original one? Would he have self-censored his art? We can never know, of course. Just as we can’t know if he would’ve been a different artist—or an artist at all—had he been born in another city or lived in another place. It’s likely Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz would not have been the same artists they became, at all, had they lived elsewhere than New York. NYC is so integral to their work and their legend. Can Chicago make any such claims on an artist? If so, who would it be? Or is Chicago’s art world and are Chicago’s artists impacted by the Second City status of the city and its erasure?

How does cultural erasure affect a place’s sense of itself? How does it affect the local morale and temperament? Does it create an underdog or chip-on-its-shoulder mentality in the people who live there? Or a tendency to overcompensate? Can it add to a feeling of isolation or loneliness in the air, even if the place is big and bustling? Like a self-fulfilling prophecy of neglect? What does it do to the place’s creators, to its artists? Can it actually be liberating?

I ask the last question because once I heard a defense of Chicago’s cultural marginalization on a walking tour of the Old Town neighborhood, home to The Second City comedy improv school and theater. The guide, a comedian and former Second City student herself, said the great thing about Chicago for creative types is that there’s less pressure to be perfect, because you’re not being watched as closely as people on the coasts. She said in New York everyone is looking to get ahead, and in L.A. everyone is looking for an agent or producer who will make their career. “In Chicago, no one is watching you,” she said. “You can fail here.” Meaning, you can experiment. You can play. You can grow.

No one was watching Henry Darger. He was just a lonely, strange old man who hoarded trash out of the city’s alleyways. At night though, he experimented. He played around with the stuff he found in the trash. He taught himself art tricks. He made mistakes, failed, cursed his failures and impatience and frustration, cursed God too, but kept at it, night after night, for decades.

Chicagoans have created a beloved, world-renowned brand out of their “second-best” reputation. But everyone knows there’s a grudge energy propelling that brand. It certainly ain’t the graciousness non-Midwesterners derisively and ignorantly assign to anyone from “flyover country.” Many Chicagoans combine a territorial defensiveness about their city with a blowhard’s boasting. Some say this is behind another of the city’s reputations. In any case, just as there’s a grudge energy underlying the Second City brand, there’s a stinginess underlying the Windy City brand of territoriality and boasting. When credit is rarely given, you’d rather not share the little you get. And nothing hurts more than seeing the things achieved here overshadowed or taken away from us for greater glory somewhere else.

Once in awhile, at least, the media gets it right. Following on the Cuomo scandal, there were also a lot of headlines about the baseball match between the Chicago White Sox (yay!) and the New York Yankees (…..) in the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. The Sox won. The country has been desperate for some good news, and Iowa and Illinois brought it. Huzzah for the Second City! Huzzah for flyover people!

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Connections: Intuit currently has a Darger exhibit called “The Room Revealed—Methods and Manipulations,” about “the visual culture from which Darger drew inspiration.”

Next up: My next post will be about Vivian Maier and Lee Godie, a street photographer and a street artist, and thoughts about aging, ageism, and female outsider artists.

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How did you cope? Did you throw yourself into any long-neglected hobbies, finish any previously half-hearted projects? How did that go? What did you learn about yourself, about creativity and isolation? About loneliness, its dark energy, and what it brings to the world?

I wonder, when we’re all past the COVID era, how many artists and creators the isolation of the pandemic will have made of us all. Of course, not everyone had time to dabble in homemade tortilla making or sonnet writing during lockdown. The pandemic exposed all sorts of inequities in leisure time, quiet, personal space, work, family, & home arrangements, support (emotional, physical, financial), and access to the technology necessary these days for more and more activities (even unrelated to employment) and human connection. You can fall down an internet rabbit hole of essays, articles, studies, and think pieces about these inequities and the resentments they’re fostering between people of all different lifestyles, experiences, and circumstances. The truth is, we’re all stressed and hanging on.

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I know I am. Personally, I was able to work from home for most of 2020, with the help of a cheap laptop and basic internet service. I live alone, so I had plenty of space and quiet time to myself. I tried to make the most of it. I began a yoga routine. That didn’t last long. I started going for long walks in a nearby woods, developing a habit of going there to count how many deer I spotted. That was easier to stick to than yoga. (For the record, the highest count in one walk so far is 13.)

On the flip side, sometimes my job required me to go into the office, to catch up on stuff I couldn’t do from home. Working from home eliminated commute time, but it didn’t necessarily cut down on the time it took to do my work. I felt more stressed than ever. I’m also a caregiver to my elderly parents, who live just a couple miles from me, and of course I couldn’t go to them as often and risk infecting them. Still, there were times I had to break the rules and help them in-person. Even as I looked forward to getting out and going into work at times, I resented having to expose myself on public transit. It felt like a catch 22, like I was putting my parents at risk one way or another, whether by visiting them in person or by neglecting them to quarantine. Quarantining while caregiving proved to be a difficult balancing act.  

I worried about my parents, and my siblings and their families, constantly. At night, I had panic attacks and heart palpitations. I had insomnia. As a single person, sure I had plenty of time and space to read, write, watch movies, bake, or fix up my apartment—but I was no more able to focus than the next person.

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It’s funny how much guilt ensues from not being more productive even during a global plague. I doubt I’m the only one who felt I failed a test during lockdown, like a test on how to harness your loneliness, how to turn anxiety into a companion that brings out your inner creative. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned survivor’s guilt—the sense that for every week that you manage to evade COVID, you need to keep proving the worth of your survival, to show something for the time you’re being given when COVID is making it run out for so many other good people.

Before the pandemic, back in 2018, I read The Third Coast by Thomas Dyja, a book about Chicago, my home city, in the 20th century. The book introduced me to a local (and deceased) artist named Henry Darger. Darger isn’t a big part of the book compared to others like writer Nelson Algren or gospel singer Mahalia Jackson—but I was intrigued. After finishing it I made a visit to a gallery in the city, Intuit, which has a collection of Darger’s work, a re-creation of his apartment and work space, and work by other people called “outsider artists.” Something, I don’t remember what, made me think of Darger during lockdown.

A couple months ago, as the city of Chicago and surrounding Cook County reopened from COVID lockdown, I walked from my apartment to see the grave of Henry Darger in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines. I went there because it seemed a good idea to re-emerge from a year of social isolation with a visit to the resting place of the ultimate outsider artist.

The cemetery is a two-mile walk from my place. On foot, it feels like a journey through the neglected soul of Americana. A straight shot up a road that follows the smelly old Des Plaines River, crosses a commuter train tracks, squeezes past a Popeyes and comes close to the site of the world’s first McDonald’s (demolished in 2018, it’s just an empty lot now), then a car wash, a garden center, and assorted strip mall franchises, over a freight train tracks, past a trailer park, a bunch of mausoleum businesses, a massive medical complex, and finally a golf club with a giant pocked white ball at its entrance. After walking a shaggy shoulder of lawn (the sidewalk runs out, of course), there’s a cemetery gate on either side of the road. Darger’s grave is in the older, original cemetery on the east side of the road.

It’s a humble memorial, a flat stone at the back of the grounds in the Old People of the Little Sisters of the Poor plot. When Darger died in 1973, he was living in an old folks home run by the Little Sisters in Lincoln Park, the same place where his father had died in 1908. The sisters supplied a pauper’s grave. Darger had been poor his entire life, institutionalized for much of his childhood, then working as a janitor or dishwasher in a series of Catholic-run hospitals before failing health and ability forced his retirement in his early 70s. The current gravestone came a little later, paid for by Nathan Lerner, an accomplished photographer who was also Darger’s landlord and the man who rescued the poor old man from a certain entirely erased existence. It was Lerner, along with another tenant on hand to clear out Darger’s cramped, dingy, one-room apartment at 851 Webster, who discovered Darger’s lifelong secret.

Most people acquainted with Darger described him as a strange, lonely old man who muttered to himself, avoided people, went to Mass several times a day, and haunted the neighborhood alleys and trash cans collecting junk for…well, who knows what purposes hoarders and collectors pick up junk for. He seemed to have no family, no friends. In truth, he was an artist. A good one too. Good enough for his works to wind up in museums and galleries around the world, fetching up to $1 million, in the years after his death.

Along with massive collections of twine, rubber bands, magazines, and newspapers that Darger had scavenged from Chicago alleys and trash cans over the decades, Lerner discovered in Darger’s apartment hundreds of paintings and collages and a 15,000-page manuscript telling the story of seven young Christian girls leading a rebellion against an evil government that practiced child slavery. Titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, it’s better known these days as In the Realms of the Unreal.

Many of the paintings illustrated scenes from the epic novel, depicting excessively bloody battles and torture as well as idyllic landscapes filled with fantastical creatures and flowers. The children in these scenes, as in the novel, were predominantly little girls, but with male genitalia. Some paintings showed the same girl child over and over again, the same sweet face, ringlet curls, and static pose of innocence reproduced in a lineup with only varying dress patterns or flower hairclips to differentiate one from the next. Darger’s tools were a small, cheap watercolor set, clippings and torn images from magazines and newspapers, tracing paper, and reproduced images that were sometimes sent out for enlargement in a photo lab.

As far as anyone knows, Darger had no formal art training. Until his landlord and neighbor entered his apartment for clearing out, no one guessed he was an artist. When the neighbor visited Darger at the old folks’ home to ask about the discovery, Henry’s only response was “Too late now.”

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Too late now. All evidence suggests Henry Darger created every night of his life, alone in a cramped apartment on junk-scavenged supplies and the very few basic tools he could afford on meager dishwasher’s wages, from around 1910 to just a few years before his death in 1973. His biographers now know he did have one friend in his adulthood—a man named William Schloeder who may have also been his lover. Two of the three photos known to exist of Darger show him with his friend at Riverview, an amusement park in Chicago in Darger’s time. Otherwise, Darger really was a loner. Neighbors could hear voices coming from his room at night—but they were all Henry’s, replaying daytime conversations and arguments with the nuns and such, or maybe just living in a world of his own, in the realms of the unreal.

If you’ve seen any of Darger’s art, you know it’s not to everyone’s taste—which is another way to say some of it is very disturbing, at least confounding. What’s impressive about it is that Darger really did create a world of his own, populated with imaginary beings and events as well as themes that seem to reflect the troubling experiences and anxieties of his own life. Art scholars can show how his work evolved and improved over the years, how he developed techniques—seemingly, ones he figured out for himself through trial and error. (An excellent source for this is Klaus Biesenbach’s 2019 book, Henry Darger.) Darger’s writings express many moments of frustration and anger in his art creation (and in many of his other compulsions, which were legion). Still, he kept at it.

As easy as it is to feel disturbed by some of Darger’s art, it’s also easy to be touched or inspired by his energy, to fantasize about giving yourself over to creating without concern for whether anyone else will ever see or understand your creations. To just work, just create, just disappear into your own world, night after night, error after error, breakthrough after breakthrough.

What made Darger an artist? What or who was he trying to connect to through his art and writing? Was his art just a way to harness the tremendous loneliness and isolation of his life for good—for beauty or entertainment or self-soothing and understanding? Or to justify the supposed emptiness in a life without family or (many) friends, to make some use of himself? Did Darger really have that much more free time and energy than those of us living through the pandemic—a man who labored as a custodian for such low wages he couldn’t even afford a pet, according to the testimony of a neighbor in a documentary about him.

Is loneliness essential to creativity? How much of people’s impulses to take up hobbies and creative projects during lockdown stemmed from loneliness rather than boredom or a mere desire to stay productive? Would there be, can there be, art without loneliness? I think to say no suggests there’s some creative vacuum in human connection, an emotional fulfillment that also results in creative stagnation.

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I don’t have the answers to any of the questions I’ve posed here. I’m just another schmo trying to make sense of this strange and scary time we’re suddenly living in and the worries and impulses that the pandemic has brought to the forefront of daily existence, that have made so many previous concerns seem petty, or amplified them like all those inequities we can no longer ignore. I miss people but also feel the need to preserve and safeguard my energy. So many impulses feel in conflict with one another. Being around people when things reopened has been as awkward as it was exciting, like feeling alone in the middle of a crowded party, like living on an island in the middle of a big city.

I decided to start this newsletter to explore people, places, topics, and events related to loneliness, isolation, creativity, singularity, and connection. This includes outsider artists and other interesting misfits, specifically those associated with Chicago, the “Second City,” a great metropolis located in the heart of flyover country, a big city that is consistently overlooked. Which makes all its artists and residents outsiders, and everything that happens or develops here something of an open secret.

The next newsletter will focus more on Henry Darger’s life and how his experiences influenced his art, as well as what his being a Chicagoan means, if anything. After that, I’ll move on to other people, places, and topics: Vivian Maier and Lee Godie, the Chicago Riverwalk and one of its bridgehouses, the Technicolor Man of downtown Chicago, Jean-Baptiste DuSable, Tim Robinson and the Aran Islands, the islands of Chicago (Goose, Northerly, Stony, Blue), learning Irish in America, the sand dunes of Indiana and the boy who fell inside one, Girl X, the Green Mill and Michael Mann’s/James Caan’s Thief, the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square, informal economies and the vanishing Chicago hot dog vendor.

Connections:

My gratitude to the following sources on Henry Darger. Klaus Biesenbach’s book Henry Darger has great essays by Biesenbach, Michael Bonesteel, Carl Watson, and Brooke Davis Anderson as well as color reproductions of Darger’s art and excerpts from his writing. Bonesteel also has a website about Darger with tons of information, links, images, recollections—it’s terrific. Jim Elledge’s book, Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy, sheds light on Darger’s friendship with William Schloeder. Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City both feature chapters and unique insight on Darger. Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art on Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago has a re-creation of Darger’s apartment and gives visitors a chance to see great work by artists (outsider and self-taught) who deserve more attention than they’re given by larger institutions. Jessica Yu’s documentary The Realms of the Unreal is so good—it has interviews with Henry’s former neighbors as well as his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner.

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No man is an island. So tell your friends!