True Ancestor

Sunday Afternoon: A Meditation

The two couples that come over with their young children for brunch have left. The dishwasher is running.

Chicago's watery afternoon light begins to weaken.

The Bears are winning a final, meaningless regular-season game. The town's other teams are mired in mediocrity. Baseball is nowhere in sight.

A host of tasks cries silently to me from my desk.

Outside my study, remnants of December's 17 inches of snow sweats off the asphalt shingles of the mansard roof.

The router on my desk blinks and winks.

I sit and look out the window at the sclerotic tree branches, the deserted office park, the fat and frantic squirrels high-wiring across the backyard fence.

Five cardboard cartons of old papers stare at me from beneath the study windows.

Oldest Daughter sings to herself as she primps for another evening out.

My Mexico tan itches and peels and flakes; I feel like Gabe's gekko, when it turns pale and frosted-looking and sheds its bumpy skin. But that happens in the Spring, an eternity from now.

In the meantime: I pray for a speedy end to the Iowa caucuses. I begin to have a funny sense, which I haven't had before, that John Edwards could wind up facing John McCain for the presidency.

May clarity come to you, and to me, and to us all. Speedily.

And may we put that clarity to good and lasting use.

Happy New Year.

--T.A.

Death of a Neighborhood Grocery Store

Another venerable institution -- a neighborhood grocery store, a socialist experiment, an icon of my childhood -- has bitten the dust.

The Hyde Park Co-op was a cooperative grocery store started in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood as a Depression-era, working-man's alternative to company stores. It was started, in all likelihood, by U. of Chicago idealists who wanted to create a collective -- oh, and by the way, get good food at decent prices. In time, it became the neighborhood grocery store -- a place whose smells, whose characters, whose chilly charm I can still recall, and whose opaque white fluorescent lights, ensconced in a drop ceiling, made me dream of heaven.

I remember trudging alongside my mother (in those years when she wore horrible Danish clogs and sounded like a Clydesdale thundering along the cobblestones) through the aisles of that store, sweating in my corduroy winter jacket with my mittens clipped onto the ends of the sleeves. I remember the neighborhood kids who bagged groceries there, and the vast aisles of produce and the smell of wet cardboard and citrus. I remember discovering the allure of infinite food, and the colorful aisles of cereal boxes; the siren song of Captain Crunch and the grrreat, cheerful masculinity of Tony the Tiger's Frosted Flakes.

I see the Co-op, still, from a small child's perspective. When I revisit my memories of the place, they're from perhaps three feet off the ground: the shelves are enormous, the workers' green aprons look like sails on a schooner, and the cornucopia is a miracle, each aisle disappearing in a parallax of impossible plenty.

Which is, of course, no reason to keep the store around. To read the comments under the Chicago Tribune article about the Co-op's demise is to understand how far the Co-op has fallen in recent years. It was never exactly a food boutique, but commenters (many of them former U. of Chicago students forced, for lack of choice, to shop at the Co-op) feel the Co-op is getting its just desserts (pardon the expression).

Perhaps Hyde Park is, too. Now the University will rent the space to a Jewel or a Dominick's. The neighborhood that loves to be different will be a little more like every other neighborhood. And the neighborhood residents who subsist on low or fixed incomes -- well, ironically, they'll actually probably be better off.

--T.A.

I can't go home again

Part of the Father's Day festivities this past weekend included going down to my parents' apartment, which for the past 15 years or so has been their summer home (they spend the rest of the year in Florida),and divvying up some possessions and an impressive book collection: this year, the aged and revered parents plan to give up the apartment, which we moved into as I began the 8th grade.

There are few vestiges left of my time there. The upright piano that they moved into the bedroom, so they no longer had to listen to my melancholy improvisations, is with my brother; my boxes of textbooks and typed high-school and college papers are already in my basement; the oddly comforting bedspreads with lion cubs peering out of tall grass; the knick-knacks from our sojourn in Mexico have been gathered up, or thrown away, or have simply vanished.

I'm the only one of my parents' children who really spent time growing up in the apartment. The apartment itself was just the tip of the iceberg. The building was a vertical amusement park to me and my friends. We discovered a roof deck that was great for doing all sorts of things adolescents shouldn't do (of course, most of them involved the wonders of gravity, nothing sexier).

We loved tiptoeing down the interior fire-stairs and trying to eavesdrop on the kitchen conversation of our handful of Nobel prize-winning neighbors: was that really Chandrasekhar reading Shakespeare out loud? Was that Saul Bellow on the phone to his agent? Did a friend who shall not be named really blow dope smoke under Milton Friedman's door?

Lucy Kaplansky was a neighbor and high-school friend (we actually played high school concerts together, she on guitar, me on piano). Lucy's father was a mathematician. We lived on 4, the Kalanskys lived on 9. The first time I ever saw Professor Kaplansky was in the elevator. I pressed 4, he pressed 9 -- and his eyes lit up.

"What do you know!," he said to me. "Two successive squares!"

To which I almost replied: "What -- you mean, you and me?"

To this building will forever belong the smells of new carpet and fresh paint; the sounds of bottles crashing down the incinerator chute (which the builders forgot to insulate);  the thrill of furtive make-out sessions with girlfriends on the fire stairs, in the bicycle room, on the roof deck; the Stonehenge-like precision of the Sun setting behind Rockefeller Chapel on the equinox, and the languid purple of the summer sky holding a thunderstorm.

Those internal fire stairs were a refuge to me. I'd climb them for exercise, or just to get away. I'd climb from our apartment on 4 to the roof deck above 15. I'd go up and down dozens of times a day when getting in shape for my summer-camp hiking excursions, or for the high-school soccer season. I loved passing the genteel artifacts of my neighbors on their landings: elegant, emptied bottles of bourbon or vodka; broom cabinets and baking tins; discarded posters from the bedrooms of grown children; cartons of paper towels. I felt I knew them while remaining invisible myself. Each floor, like each inhabitant, had its own personality: a glyph stenciled onto the wall, a knick in the iron railing, the smell of a meal: here, elegant Indian food, there, burnt pancakes and bad syrup.

Life goes on. My folks, while still, thank God, living independently, want more mobility and fewer things. The apartment, a family redoubt for 35 years, will be passed on to someone else.

But for me, time stands still there: it will ever be the 1970s, and I will always be climbing toward the roof, listening to my neighbors in their apartments -- all of us busy in our elegant honeycombs, bowered above the street, lifted a little above life, always, imperceptibly, moving on.

--T.A.

And a room to every purpose under heaven... A time to snore, a time to sleep...

Ann Althouse notes with wry approval the latest architectural trend: separate bedrooms.

Once again, the One True Wife and I are ahead of the curve.

It began a few years ago, when my nocturnal heavy breathing turned into a full-bore snore (right about the time I edged over 200 pounds). After a few visits to an allergist, and a sleep study that might have been gleaned from the how-to manuals of Abu Ghraib (a tasteless exaggeration -- but not by much), I decided to lose some weight. I did, and the snoring diminished. Winter set in, and I gained much of the weight back.

And so the Wife perfected the routine of retreating to the pitch-dark guest bedroom in the basement, along about 3AM. This is when she begins emerging from deeper levels of sleep, and when one violent schnork from me will keep her up, or mostly up, for the rest of the night.

Add to that the confusion of a premature end to hibernation, and you have a recipe for connubial calamity -- if we're both in the same bed. But that's rarely the case through the night. And by the time morning comes, one of us will be in the basement -- she, in full retreat from my snoring, or I, retreating from her out of deference (and a frisson of fear).

In recent weeks, the Wife retreated to the "dungeon" to find respite not only from my snoring but from the early-morning, late-winter sunshine that would come bounding into the room like a white puppy, a little too cheery, a little too early. Spending the morning hours sleeping in the basement kept her from waking up weary, because in our bedroom, she said, "I'd have to sleep with my arm over my eyes and my ears at the same time." I dare you to try that and not get tired.

I don't think our marriage would survive separate master bedrooms. There's something depressingly solitary and self-indulgent about the prospect -- and something deliciously improvisational about sleeping half the night in a room that's theoretically reserved for others. We like to curl up together at the end of the day, talk, decompress and sink into sleep together. Plus, I keep her warm -- my naturally high internal thermostat being one of my principal gifts to the marriage.

So, rather than actually dealing with my snoring, and the host of medical problems that can result from it, we're just going to go sleepwalking through the house in the wee hours, finding different places to rest our weary bones and get a break from each other, which, even in our unconscious moments, turns out to be quite salutary, thank you.

But just a few hours at a time, mind you: once we had separate bedrooms, I'd just be that much closer to being put out at the curb with the rest of the recycling.

--T.A.

In Which the One True Wife Succumbs to the Tyranny of Voice Mail

It had to happen eventually.

Last week, the One True Wife's noble experiment in doing without home voice mail ended with her surrender to the phone company.

Upon her surrender, the Wife discovered that, upon ordering the basic voice mail package, our monthly phone bill actually will go down by two dollars a month. This struck me as a perverse and insidious message from the phone company, the message being: We've got you now. We'll make so much friggin' money off you, we'll even give you some of it back each month. After all, they now have a dedicated, proprietary, low- to no-cost advertising pipeline dumping directly into our home. They can leave us a little sale-mail anytime they want.

Of course, moms of Gabe's friends can now reach the elusive Wife either at home or on the road. Deliverers of goods, doctors' offices confirming appointments, Middle Daughter's school -- all those people and institutions that have our home number as the preferred point of contact -- can now leave the little opal-blue light on top of our cordless phones blinking madly, begging for attention.

This seems especially ironic in light of this comment, over at me True Ann-Sister's post on a very different but really fascinating topic; and this article revealing, among other things, how much time we spend consuming (or being consumed by) media; and this excerpt from an NPR story last week on "Blackberry Orphans".

I am building toward a book, or at least an extended rant, on the subject of the emptying of our souls (and particularly Jewish souls) by technology. But in the meantime I refer you to the book Amba speaks about here, and to this one, too, which contains this ominous passage:

[O]ur stone-age biology and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched. . . As societal roles become yet more complex, specialized, and far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to master, while providing fewer visceral rewards . . . Even the most successful individuals often find their work boring, difficult, unnatural, and unsatisfying, more like a sustained circus performance than a real life. Caffeine substitutes for natural adrenaline. Those original activities that do remain--eating and child raising, for instance--are often squeezed by the strange new tasks. The mismatch between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty.

By the standards of our inherited tribal psychology, we are sick and crazy. Physically, however, we are healthier and live longer than ever, and we have vastly more options in every sphere of activity. Few city-dwellers would be prepared to adopt the circumscribed life in a stone-age forest village, despite uneasiness with their own. . . The world is rushing away from our ancestral roots ever faster, stretching the limits of both our biological and institutional adaptability.

Please leave a message. I mean, stay tuned.

--T.A.

In Which the One True Wife Ends the Tyranny of Voice Mail

The One True Wife is no friend of the electronic and the electric. She seems to emit a force field that fries circuits and melts motherboards.

She is a delightful bundle of contradictions, is the Wife: socially gifted but with a misanthropic streak. Anal retentive but philosophical about it. Very chatty, but irritated by chatting.Constantly busy, except on Saturday, the Sabbath, when she lies in bed and reads for about five hours. On Saturdays, only Spike the Gekko moves less than the Wife.

And so, after all our various experiments with voice mail had failed -- after the phone company's exorbitant bills made her cancel their service, and after the Wife's force field had stroked out several answering machines -- she decided that she would use the most recent machine's still-operational outgoing message system. She recorded a message that says, "Thank you for calling. We're sorry that this machine cannot take voice mail. Please either call me on my cell [and she gives the number], or call back between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. Thank you."

At first, I admit to being angry about this. You live with someone, you don't get to make that kind of decision unilaterally. After all, even though the One True Wife works mostly out of the house, she's not the only one that gets phone calls there (the rest of us are, however, statistically insignificant). What about relatives ("Are you kidding?", she asked)? What about emergencies ("They can call my cell")? What about invitations ("Anybody who wants to reach us that badly will make a note to call us the next morning. Anybody we really enjoy talking to already has our cell numbers. And everybody else can just... well, go away.")?

What's more, I said, isn't it kind of arrogant to say 'If you want to reach us, you have this one-hour window'? Not really, said the Wife. I'm even more friendly when our friends call now. And I'm very apologetic.

The phone doesn't ring nearly as often. The Wife's friends don't call in the morning much, because they're too busy getting themselves and everybody else out of the house. So they call on her cell phone later in the day, or she calls them. Middle Daughter has long had her own cell phone implant. Gabe and his buddies don't use the phone much, yet.

Most messages turn out to be irrelevant intrusions into an already-busy day. Now that my panic at not being constantly reachable in seven different ways has subsided, I'm starting to enjoy it.

I think.

--T.A.

Time to Go

My three days in New York are coming to an end. It's been heart-warming and disorienting.

The city gives me a very dark feeling in my center. Even walking down a street flooded with sunlight, I feel like I'm suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The sky is too far away. The windows of elegant apartments and restaurant after tony restaurant make me feel hollow in the middle. Amba says the canyon-like avenues here compress not only space but time. It does feel that way.

It's been great hanging with her, but I miss my home.

The talk at Makor was good. Many old friends came, and some new ones, like Satyaman of blog-commenting fame. Amba was there. So were my ex in-laws, whom I hadn't seen in 17 years. I riffed on themes from the book, did my irreverent shtick, talked about the legitimacy and continuity of the Jewish meditative tradition. People were by turns curious, passionate, frustrated, challenging -- in a word, Jewish!

Time to pack a last few things, and flee the canyons.

--T.A.

Violation

My sister Martha called last night, just as I pulled into the driveway: her apartment -- the apartment she shares in the summer with my parents; the apartment I lived in through high school, and that's been occupied by some combination of family members since 1972 -- had been broken into.

I find myself wanting to share this information, but not go into any detail. When something like this happens so close to home, you tend to get paranoid. Boundaries and barriers dissolve; the eyes of strangers carry veiled threats or cryptic messages. Who's been watching? Who's been reading? How much do they know?

Of course, this didn't happen directly to me. It happened to my sister, and to my parents. The burglars used a crowbar to smash open the apartment door, and made off with stuff of sentimental and material value. Last night my sister was terrified. This morning she was angry, and still frightened. Tonight, we were to go out to dinner with a relative visiting from California. We canceled: she doesn't want to have to go out in the evening, and then come back.

This building is fortified like Fort Knox, massive as Stonehenge, locked down like a federal pen. And, perhaps because of this -- and because of a certain academic timidity and cringing correctness -- residents do not watch out for each other much, nor do they scrutinize visitors. Once you're inside this building, your hard work has been done. Getting into the apartments has proven all too easy.

This redoubt has been the home to a handful of Nobel Prize winners and top-drawer University of Chicago professors. Like our lives, it can seem a comfy combination of invisible and impregnable, until the inevitable happens.

The building does not have video surveillance. The building managers should consider that. There are only two entrance/exits to the building. Get a couple of cameras and recorders. It won't get people's belongings back, but it might catch some bad actors and deter others.

The cops left a black, inky substance blotched through the apartment, trying to lift fingerprints. My sister and her beau swept up the splinters from the shattered door, picked up the contents of emptied drawers and tumbled shelves, scared off the violent ghosts, and went to sleep in the violated space.

This morning, everything seems different. All our pretexts for comfort and safety appear puny and helpless in the face of the desperation of a punk or addict with some entrepreneurial spirit. The more ominous and global threats recede, and every chump with a tattoo and a crowbar seems destined to rock our world.

--T.A.

The Lawn, Left to Its Own Devices

It's been a very dry summer here in the Midwest. Dry, and hot.

Because of that -- and because I simply will not pour thousands of gallons of water on a lawn to green it up -- the back yard looks like a scale-model replica of Iwo Jima. There are craters, literal craters, filled with straw-like blades of grass you could light with a match; there are large thistles and odd tumors of dirt and roots, and there are dozens, literally dozens, of ant hills.

We've divided responsibilities inside and out, and the lawn is my department. We've removed about a third of the lawn for low-maintenance plantings, perennials and annuals. This is the department of the One True Wife. This part of the yard generally looks spectacular.

I have a feeling I've said all this before, but I'll say it again: the yard is a perfect metaphor for our respective approaches to life. Mine is a kind of "Que sera, sera" approach to lawn maintenance, as to all of life.

ME: Ah, whatever. . . You know, this is how Nature wants it to look! . . . (more defensive) You don't like it? So maybe you want to take over responsibility for it?! . . . (on the bright side) Think what we're saving on water! . . . (passing the buck) No amount of water could save a lawn from a summer like this . . .

The Wife's approach is to improve, impose order, and above all to enjoy the all-too-rare chance to work outdoors, to design and decorate using Nature's own materials and regenerative powers.

HER: These plantings will do better over there . . . Let's move them today, it's not too hot . . . I'm really bummed the apple tree hasn't blossomed  . . . and this tree got much bigger than I expected; can you trim those top branches? . . . we have these weeds coming through the fence from the neighbor's yard, I need you to cut those . . . And, oh, David, please do something about the lawn . . . it's basically an ant farm without the view!

I must strive to care more about these things. I am all too content to peer out at the back yard from the kitchen, to watch the chipmunks, the robins, the bees, even, at dusk, the occasional skunk or fox using our yard as theirs. Two years ago, a coyote loped through the yard. I'm just pleased that it's fertile ground for animals.

Still: the yard is too similar to my desk at work, and to the inside of my head. Maybe nourishing one will nourish the other . . .

--T.A.

Goodbye, Paradise

Down on the Gulf Coast again; the air is humid and still. I walk outside with my morning cup of coffee, stand on the seawall, and am immediately set upon by no-see-ums, the tiny, almost invisible biting flies that can only get to you when it's windless.

The air makes me feel like I'm inside an athletic sock. The siding is weeping off the sold and semi-abandoned house next door; the burglar alarm, or something, was beeping all night. I didn't hear it during the night: it was drowned out by the Gulf's lazy waves, and by the crickets, which synchronized their chirps to the alarm's rhythms. Once the sun came up, they went quiet, but the alarm, sadly, did not.

Then began the parade along the beach: the man my folks call The Faithful Walker, a tall, balding fellow who walks on the beach, rain or shine, hell or high water, every morning, and parks his car next to our house; a tubby old guy jogging, his Pekinese tottering along after him; a jogging couple, impeccably outfitted in matching jogging shorts and shirts; a classic beach bum on an old Schwinn: Homo Floridensis.

Over the Gulf on the far southwestern horizon, thunderheads already soar up toward the atmosphere's upper edge. The sunrise, however, is stunning: it appears a Saharan dust cloud has arrived in time to lehd a watercolor quality to the morning's dewy air.

The Gulf water is an ominous coffee color; birds are almost entirely absent. An occasional baitfish leaps and darts in the warm water close to the shore, but somehow the little plops and flutters only serve to underline a shocking absence of life. The shore is laced with seaweed, churned up by the previous afternoon's thunderstorms; the seaweed is bedecked, like a nautical Christmas tree, with the ornamentation of vacation: barnacled beer cans, broken bottles, abandoned beach toys, a still-sealed but soaked bag of Cheetos.

Nature is fighting for its life here. It may be winning: all of a sudden, towering sea oats have sprung up on the sea wall -- as if Nature's own venetian blind were trying to screen from our view the death of Paradise.

--T.A.