a warm evening and a Chicago hot dog

A few years ago the Salvation Army held its annual regional gathering, we call it ‘Congress’, in Schaumburg IL.

It is suburbs, but it is Chicago.  When you travel and people ask where are you from you don’t say ‘Schaumburg’.  You’d only get a polite uninterested ‘uh huh’.  So anyone from the Chicago suburbs with any sense says ‘Chicago’.  It sounds better than ‘Berwyn’.

During Congress part of my job was to stick close to one of our visiting dignitaries who, as often happens at these events, didn’t have a chance to eat lunch.  Busy greeting people.  A good thing, but it leaves you hungry.

Nearby the Schaumburg Convention Center he had spotted a place advertising Chicago hot dogs.  He asked if we could go there.  We did.  He got a hot dog.  He was happy.  I had done my job.

Tonight I remembered that hot dog and we visited Frankly Yours.  It’s at the corner of Algonquin and Thorntree Lane, just east of Meacham.

A nice warm evening.  We sat outside at one of the tables.  Serenaded by going-home traffic along Algonquin.  Bathed in the evening sun and wafting zephyrs.

Why hadn’t we stopped before?  The fries are hand-cut and [rant warning] do not have that awful coating so many places use.  Someone’s told me it’s cornstarch with whatever else the fry cook/restaurant chain thinks is a good idea.  It’s not.

Frankly Yours was good.  Hard to get to the hot dog while the fries are hot, crisp.  The sun’s shining.  Warm breezes.  Vehicles hum along the street.  This is a good moment in America.

Hidden by the styrofoam cup are her fried mushrooms.  They were okay.  But the fries.  And the hot dogs … the way they were meant to be.  And Coke is served here.  It’s taken me years to realize that Coke rules.  Pepsi drools.

I brought our trays inside, discarded the cups and wrappers.  An old guy was sitting in a booth near the door.  The boss.  I thanked him, told him the hot dogs were great.  He grinned and said of course they’re Vienna.

Of course.  Vienna Red Hots.  With neon relish.  Red tomato slices.  Yellow mustard.   A piece of art.

 

 

 

 

Our son Matt claims Gene and Jude’s as his favorite out in these parts.  He might be right.  I know that when we are in the city we gravitate to Byron’s on Irving Park, close to Sheridan.  But I rate Frankly Yours fries superior.  Sorry, Byron.

Grim news today from Detroit’s emergency manager

Kevyn Orr is Detroit’s Emergency Manager and he had a grim report today on the city’s financial situation.

Here’s a video of Governor Rick Snyder responding to reporter’s questions.

John took this photo a couple years ago. It’s near Dexter and Chicago. If it’s still there.  The bricks have been removed from the house exterior.  This is a common practice in Detroit.  During the night they disappear.  There’s a construction market for these wonderful Detroit bricks.  Not legitimate, but not stopping anyone from doing it.

Heidelberg Project fire

Here’s a report and video from the Free Press on this week’s fire at Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project.

Chicago: concerns over school closings

Once again, less-than-high-tech sharing of this story from today’s Chicago Tribune -

May 8th Chicago Tribune

In early March I posted what you can’t read won’t hurt you on this issue of justice in public education.   Now Chicago Public Schools is running into unexpected criticism from its hearing officers (retired state and federal judges) who after reviewing proposed closings of 53 schools oppose 13 of those closings.

controversy over 13 of 53 schools Chicago Public Schools proposes to close

What’s going on?

Alvin Ponder’s wisdom on guns

I laughed, and I’m sure I shouldn’t have, when I read what Jaylen Price’s great-uncle had to say about whoever’s bullet hit his 10 year old nephew a few days ago here in Chicago.

In some parts of our city you expect to hear gunshots.  See bullet holes in walls and windows.  Talk with someone about who got shot.  Chicago’s story is full of bullet holes.

If you stick around long enough you too will have your own shooting story.

Jaylen was hit by a ricochet waiting for a pizza delivery when men down the street started shooting at each other.  His great-uncle, Alvin Ponder,  gives it straight and simple about guns as reported in the Chicago Tribune -

“They (politicians) won’t stop everything, I understand that,” he said. “They don’t have to ban the guns, but they have to do things for gun safety, background checks, big magazines. These war weapons don’t belong on the street. Anything that is a semi-automatic is an assault weapon.

“If you can’t hit a target with 10 rounds, you should be doing another hobby. You need another life.”

It’s that last statement.

do you all understand?  10 rounds?  you still can’t hit it?  you should be fishing.  scrapbooking.

Get another life.  Not mine.

urban high

Today was a beautiful warm spring day.  Something about the air and light, and the warmth, reminded me of a morning almost thirty years ago.

It was a summer morning in Chicago.  We were driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway.  At about Independence or Homan when I glanced up at the rearview mirror I saw a car, an older model, a hoopdee, moving fast, passing everyone.  I watched as it moved up on us.  Over a hundred miles per hour.  Weaving.  Fast.  It seemed like we were standing still.

And then he was going to hit us.  There was nowhere for us to move into the lanes either side.  I just watched in the mirror.  I warned Gail.

The car must have just grazed our rear bumper as it passed on the right.  It seemed to float past us.  And then it was ahead of us.  And then we saw it shudder an instant as the driver for some reason made a sharp turn.  The car turned sideways and rolled.  I slid past the car that seconds ago had rocketed past us.

I glanced up at the rearview mirror and watched the hoopdee roll again, this time the driver come out of his window.  The car rolled over him.

By this time traffic was stopping.  We continued on.  I exited at Damen, near Rush-Presbyterian.  Turned north on Paulina, east on Ogden.  We pulled into our corps’ parking lot.  It looked as it always did, like a World War One battlefield.  We started our work for the day.

I recall reading later that week about this accident.  I was surprised.  The man was still living after being rolled over.  Perhaps he even survived.

Driving today on this beautiful warm day, remembering that morning on the Eisenhower, I also remembered what I saw a couple weeks ago in Detroit.

Traveling west on I-96 I exited for the Southfield.  It’s a ramp that takes you up high, left lane south, right lane north.  I started down the south exit, watching for merging traffic off the entry from westbound I-96.  All clear.  Safe.

On the Southfield, picking up speed, I see someone.  Walking north on the shoulder of the southbound Southfield.  I watch carefully.  It is a man walking aggressively, swinging his arms, his shoulders.  He is tall, slim.  He isn’t wearing a shirt.  Bare-chested.  It’s in the upper 30s.  I pass him.  I look up in the rearview mirror.   He is shrinking in the distance. I exit at Joy Road and head west.

These are the ways of people who are high.

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Vulnerability.

Can you imagine living through a situation where there is fear to go outside, where businesses are affected to the point of closing, and where everyone feels unsafe and vulnerable?

Noel isn’t talking about the Boston Marathon.  Read more at -

Reflections on the Boston Bombing from CCDA Noel Castellanos

Chicago, the future of Detroit, and the new Jerusalem

Today’s Chicago Tribune.  John Kass’ football is dead in America column in which Kass says -

Fans have been led to pretend that the violence is merely ancillary. But to say that violence isn’t at the heart of football is a lie. Remove the violence, and you remove what is great about the game, what is awe-inspiring and guilt-inspiring at the same time.

Right next to Kass is Rex Huppke’s she stands by her slam about Rachel Shteir’s NY Times review of three new books about the city she works in.  The city home now to 2.7 million.  3.6 million in 1950.  The city of “incessant boosterism”.  Where “bloviating roars on, as if hot air could prevent Chicago from turning into Detroit.”

I see how this upset some people.

Chicago turning into Detroit.

Long before Huppke’s article, before Shteir’s review, before the books by Dyja, Coen, Chase, Steinberg … I have wondered.

I have wondered when I began to see parts of Chicago which have necrotized.  I compare with the Detroit I have seen.  Chicago neighborhoods which will soon see their schools close.

Chicago is far from being in the same condition as Detroit.  But parts?  I can see it.  Perhaps Chicago as a whole will never.  But perhaps Detroiters of the 1950s would never have believed what their city is now.

I’ve mentioned in recent posts Jurgen Moltmann’s Ethics of Hope.  Moltmann is a theologian with a special focus in eschatology, dealing with last things.   But his way is a way foreign to TV and radio preachers who talk about the last days and how things will grow worse and we all better find a survival place to huddle and wimper while the world goes to hell.  Bloviating.

Instead, Moltmann sees the coming of God into the present.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

An ethics of hope sees the future in the light of Christ’s resurrection.  The reasonableness it presupposes and employs is the knowledge of change.  This points the way to transforming action so as to anticipate as far as possible, and as far as strength goes, the new creation of all things, which God has promised and which Christ has put into force.  The liberation of the oppressed, the raising up of the humiliated, the healing of the sick and justice for the poor are their familiar and practicable keywords.

This offers robust possibilities for us in the present time, in the city of Chicago, or Detroit.  Or anyplace where the people of God choose to act to transform our world and cities, in anticipation of a greater city (Revelation 21:10; 22:1-5).

ordinary Chicago

It is well past the middle of April but tonight’s forecast is for some snow in Chicago.

I have been spending quite a bit of time this week around the Northwestern Hospital campus along Lake Michigan.

Here are a few iPhone photos of what can only be considered ordinary scenes, the kind of sights which are there but we usually don’t see.  Why?  We are absorbed, distracted, focused on our mission of the moment, hour.

 

early Sunday morning westbound on Ontario at the Michigan Avenue traffic light

It always attracts our attention to see someone with their iPhone, standing at the corner, taking pictures of the buildings, street bustle, something that caught their attention, their fancy.

 

early evening from the parking deck

Instagram, Facebook.  Reality TV shows.  The unremarkable stories and ordinary things which catch the attention of ordinary people seems to be a significant theme.  Is there a lessening of interest and attention of Hollywood?  Perhaps not a lessening.  But how do we explain what is happening today as we watch America’s Got Talent and Duck Dynasty, check the Facebook posts by hundreds of our friends, look at images and scenes captured in Instagram?  Our interest and attention has broadened.  Eighty years ago media would have been little interested in ordinary people except as subjects of little-noticed documentaries.  Today social media and reality TV has expanded our attention.  Are celebrities less than what they once were?  Subdued?  The Big Lebowski.

 

evening from the 11th floor, a view northeast

All of this ordinariness sometimes becomes far more than we care to have shared with us.

 

 

 

 

 

But there are times when what happens is that the eye of the person has caught something beyond the ordinariness they behold.  They have caught something fleeting with the light, the time of day.  So they think.  Or that thing has caught the attention, the imagination, the awe of the beholder.

rainy day on Fairbanks Court

 

Cities are especially good for this.  So busy.  So much.  So little noticed simply because we are overwhelmed.  But it’s still there.

If on our daily course our mind

Be set, to hallow all we find,

New treasures still, of countless price,

God will provide for sacrifice.

The trivial round, the common task,

Will furnish all we ought to ask;

Room to deny ourselves, a road

To bring us daily nearer God.

 

John Keble

 

the life which is no longer loved: Boston and bombs

I am a runner.  I’ve never been to Boston.  And among the few races I’ve felt like running, only one marathon, the Chicago in 1986.  I enjoyed it and would do more but my plantar fasciitis is controllable now and I don’t want to jeopardize the great pleasure and benefits running gives.  I no longer have a young man’s feet.

But I share the sentiment of one runner expressed this week after the bombings.  Let’s show up in Boston next year and run it.

Many of us are just naturally defiant.  Downright ornery.  However, prudent man that I am, God bless each of you who run the Boston Marathon next year.  I’ll cheer you on and manage my achy left foot.

Defiance is a quality we admire in those with a cause.

As of this afternoon we don’t yet know the cause of the bomb-person in Boston.

We do know that much of the bombing taking place these days around the world is connected to causes.  And if we take a moment we may also realize that most of these bomb-generating causes are from those who in a sense are powerless.

I mentioned last week Jurgen Moltmann’s Ethics of Hope.  Moltmann is a German theologian, one of the most prominent of the late 20th and this century.  He wasn’t quite a man when called up for service in the Wehrmacht during the closing weeks of World War II.  Barely a soldier he quickly became a prisoner of war when he surrendered to the first British soldier he met.

During imprisonment he watched, and began to wonder about, the role which hope plays in human survival and existence.  Later, he became a dedicated Christian and theologian who wrote about his discoveries in Theology of Hope, The Coming of God and Ethics of Hope.

In Ethics Moltmann says “today human life itself is in acute danger.  It is not in danger because it is threatened with death – that was always so.  It is in acute danger because it is no longer loved.

After World War II, Albert Camus wrote: ‘The secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life’ … we had stopped loving life so as not to be so deeply touched by our own death and death of people we loved.

‘You love life, we love death’ claimed the letter of the Madrid bomb explosions of 2004.   ‘Viva la muerte!’ shouted a Facist general in the Spanish civil war of the 1930s.  The Nazi SS slogan was ‘Give death – accept death’.  The Taliban’s Mullah Omar boasted that ‘your young people love life; our young people love death.’

Moltmann identifies all these as symptoms of a ‘religion of death’.   It is a system of belief based on an experience of life where hope is absent.

A deterrent works only if the opponent wants to survive as well … this ‘religion of death’ is the true enemy of the love of life.

Robert Frost ends his poem The Census Taker with this yearning expressed by the lonely census taker counting up humans in places they are increasingly absent, somewhere in the wilderness of northern New England -

The melancholy of having to count souls

Where they grow fewer and fewer every

year

Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.

It must be I want life

to go on living.

Whoever made and set off the two bombs this week in Boston, is this a person who is an enemy of the love of life, whose religion is death?  Who does not want life to go on living?  Who has lost hope?

Whoever it may be, I don’t believe this person is a runner.

Is there hope?  And if so, how can we who love life bring good news to those (including bombers) who dwell in the land of the shadow of death? (Isaiah 9:2)