Dec. 10. A journal, begun late

David Rutter,

10:28 a.m. CST

Dec. 10, 2016.

Do you ever know who you are, even if life is a search for that self?

I do not know.

I have been many people in many lives. Unrepentant, angry son who found forgiveness from parents long before it was deserved. A father of minimal skill who never gave as much as attention as he should have. A husband with regrets for the love he wasted and ignored. A writer who thought himself better than the evidence suggested he was. A human male

All signals and signs, but not proof.

So who am I now, and does it matter that reflection seems my only value?

At some moments, I am not the son of Rutters and Browns, but the great grandson of McGlones who were immigrants. I feel the blood of Ireland in me some days, but I do not know if that is some illusion. This day, in fact. I do not know what that means for my life, but I wish to know if only out of curiosity.

I have always been a curious man, perhaps in both meanings those words imply. I have been curious. And perhaps I am a curiosity. But who am I?

Maybe if I seek that answer, I will find something of value than I have been unable to discover by walking through my own life. If I do, perhaps I will share it with you.

David

And then she was gone….A belated note of appreciation

Four days before Mayo Angelou passed away from this world, she talked to her 385,000 followers on Twitter.

“Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God,” she said.

And then she was gone.

But, of course, poets are never gone. Their words, if they are strong and clear enough, live.

There is no way to prove what history will make of Angelou, though if we had to guess, we would expect she will be revered longer than any of us.

She had a voice that sang clear and pure over the rumble of a hard life.

The one-time high school dropout, waitress, actress, singer and first female conductor of San Francisco street cars never went to college though she spoke six languages and was given 30 honorary degrees from colleges.

She was a self-taught everything, but mostly self-taught about being an American which she often elevated without seeming smug or haughty. She understood the nation’s identity well enough so that Wake Forest University sought her out to teach American Studies. She was a magazine editor in Egypt and a college professor in Ghana.

As a 7–year-old, she had been raped by her mother’s boyfriend. He was later killed by avenging uncles. The horror left her mute for five years.

When she finally spoke again, the horror had fled to be replaced by a stirring, powerful, hopeful but almost gentle defiance. She truly did understand “Why The Caged Bird Sings,” her seminal work.

“I created myself,” the woman born in St. Louis as Marguerite Ann Johnson once said without a hint of self-promotion.

She was the lyricist, and the music was life.

 

When she died at 86 this week in North Carolina, she left the world, but her words did not.

 

“Look where we’ve all come from … coming out of darkness, moving toward the light,” she once said. “It is a long journey, but a sweet one

How the gays are ruining marriage

As one who has ridden the matrimonial merry-go-round with only mixed results, I have decided to accept the Catholic Church’s offer of exculpation.

The church’s official view of marriage is that it is under fire by gays. By under fire, we mean they are gay, and we can’t stop them from being gay. And by that, we mean it’s not merely that they do “gay things,” but they “are gay.” It’s hideous.

Gays are doing something bad to heterosexual marriage, and we must construct moral fortresses to thwart the effects of their gayness upon us. For all we know, they sneak into your house at night and make you gay without warning or approval.

If you have a lousy marriage or have – gasp – ended one through the civil legal methods at your disposal, then it was not your fault.

It was gay people all along. Go, my son, and sin no more.

Whew! That’s a relief. Until now, I thought it was because I am a supercilious, sanctimonious, intemperate jerk. Until now I had stood before the court of public judgment with no useful cloak of invisibility.

But it turns out all those former in-laws were wrong. I’m fine. It’s the gays.

I don’t know how it was gay people. But it was.

Right after the Church announced that being gay will almost surely send you to hell – the big hammer in the Thor sub-ministry – they enforced hell through politics. The Indiana Legislature has an identical view.

Letting gay people be gay, as in not hiding gayness as any self-respecting gay person should do, not only adds to their sins, but it causes you distress, too.

You are diminished. Your religious rights are challenged. You are less of a sanctified, free citizen under God than you would be without their interference.

Because of, well, there’s the problem. I don’t know why. No clue.

The last person to make this case was Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, the only senator to rise recently and argue against banning discrimination against gays in the workplace. It’s not like other Republicans have stopped believing in bilious bigotry. It’s part of the franchise; it’s just that Coats was the only one who spoke up for it. But that’s just the Senate. There are plenty of ignoramuses in the House if the law is ever called for a vote there.

Here’s the Coats’ argument, which augments the Catholic Church position. The current non-law appropriately encourages employers to fire anyone for being gay; stop their promotion because they are gay; reject them from being hired because they are gay; even fire them because they MIGHT POSSIBLY be gay.

Their very gayness imperils religion, and we believe in the absolute right of religious expression, except for the ones that blow up young girls for going to school.

The Church certainly does not want litigation with more lawyers peering into its own gay sex issues. We understand that completely.

In the signature letter from the U.S. Conference of Bishops on this issue, the princes of the Church suggested: “No one should be an object of scorn, hatred, or violence for any reason, including his or her sexual inclinations.” However…

Yes, the dreaded conjunction.

However, the bishops said, the “definition of ‘sexual orientation’ was too vague, could include other forms of sexual conduct and would legitimize same-sex marriage.”

When sophistry must be argued aloud, it often sounds like gibberish, because it is. The bishop of Springfield, Ill., staged a “Mass of Sort-of Exorcism” this month to call down the seraphim against marriage equality in Illinois. Too late; the law passed.

But things are getting strange. Even the pope offered misgivings about judging people he does not understand. Bishops trembled.

Maybe gays have tricked the pope, too. Some gays are very sneaky that way, and don’t “look” gay or “sound” gay. They are so expertly camouflaged that you cannot tell they are smitten with the gay bug.

While they were ruining my married life, I never even saw them. But if their role in my problems is confirmed, I’ll expect a hefty alimony refund. An apology wouldn’t hurt, either.

I trust the Church. After all, who knows more about marriage than an organization run by aging celibates?

David Rutter was an editor at six community newspapers more than 40 years, including nearly a decade as managing editor of the Post-Tribune. His column appears Sundays in the Post-Tribune. Contact him at david. rutter@live.com.

The “Crazy Tree Guy” brings home a Gettysburg legacy

Bruce Kile and David Rutter relax in Gettysburg during the “tree exchange.”

David and the original Gettysburg Witness Tree.on a Saturday in May.

There’s no point to an obsession that falls short of being a magnificent obsession. Passion without emotion is silly.

Perhaps the word obsession itself is a shorthand signature to describe ideas we won’t quite understand and appreciate even less.

So I likely was obsessed last weekend, and I might as well accept the term and take pride in it. Or maybe I was just committed to a good Idea I couldn’t shake.

You judge.

I drove 1,400 miles to find a tree. Seven hundred miles there on Day 1., 700 miles back on Day 3. One day in between to collapse in a hotel room.

The object of this quest wasn’t even a complete tree, just a tiny sapling barely three feet tall. But there might be only one of them now, and the frail mother tree is located in one place and one place only.

The 300-year-old honey locust overlooks the site in Gettysburg, Pa., where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Address. The Witness Tree has been battered by weather and time, but still hangs on. It overlooks the graves of 3,500 Union soldiers who died only yards from where they are buried.

Over the years, the local historical society in Gettysburg – specifically forester and organization president Bruce Kile – raised saplings from that tree to sell as a fundraiser. There are 1,600 of them sprinkled around the eastern United States. But the National Parks system eventually frowned on the initiative and suggested strongly it end. So the historical society stopped. They don’t want people profiting from items taken from the grounds.

There likely will be no more saplings from the old tree, the last living creature from the battleground where the nation was preserved in 1863. The towering honey locust literally is the last witness, and no one can tell how much longer the tree will live.

So I called and found Bruce Kile. Finding people is one of the things I know how to do.

Are there any saplings left?, I asked in full expectation that he would say no.

One, he said.

Could I acquire it? The answer to that would likely be no, as well. But it wasn’t.

Yes, he said. You can have it. But I can’t ship it. So you have to come and get it.

So I did.

But an obsession is thin and unappealing if it’s not interesting enough to inspire allies. Mine were good friend Jennifer Evans, who gave up a free weekend to help with the driving. The other was Kile.

And a third was Clint Bull, the manager of the Enterprise car rental franchise in Libertyville. When I described my plan, he thought it was such a good idea that he donated a new car for the weekend.

His staff designated me as the official Crazy Tree Guy, a title happily accepted because you can’t fight facts.

I stood beside the Witness Tree last weekend and touched the bark.

Just down the hill was the spot where Lincoln spoke. Visitors gather there. No one pays any attention to the tree, which is just as well. The local historians know the tree well and are not anxious to make it a national celebrity, even though they could.

Celebrity is an ugly burden of our era, and the fascinations of 21^st century life are untempered by restraint and wisdom. Better to let the tree live in gentle obscurity than be swarmed by sightseers. The ground around the tree is open and untrampled. The ground needs to breathe freely to keep the honey locust alive.

Children and adult visitors stroll past, most of them only vaguely knowing what happened here, or how we are touched and shaped by legacies we hardly know exist. They visit the cannons and statuary, but they leave the old tree alone in its anonymity.

So now the sapling has been placed in the hands of the scientific staff at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. They will plant it, and raise a new honey locust in my family’s name.

Theoretically, I own the tree, but that’s a description with little meaning. No one owns history. We all are caretakers of the little tree and the memories of what Gettysburg means. Can the nation endure? Can the little tree?

The little shade tree is a gift to the people of Illinois from me and the friends who shared in the weekend obsession.

If you are going to be a Crazy Tree Guy, there might as well be a point to the craziness.

70-year union is remarkable but friendship for 70 is astounding

 

 

We wish we knew how to guarantee human happiness.

We’d pass it along.

We wish there were a fool-proof traffic diagram that allows people to reach the tranquility that Beverly couple Bob and Dorothy Truhlar have reached.

Before anyone leaps to an easy, formulaic answer about this question, most of us don’t know how to translate comfortable aphorisms into real life models. So there is no easy answer to this biggest question of all: Can you learn how to be happy and to share that life of happiness with someone else?

Dorothy is 89.

Bob is 90.

They’ll celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary this week by going out to dance as they did on their first date when FDR was president.

They seem to be, above all, comfortable with each other.

They love each other. Still.

They like each other. Still.

We wish we knew for sure this was the most obvious answer, but the Truhlars seem to share a common quality that we’ve noticed happy people all possess. In fact, newspapers have been writing about lovely, charming long-term married couples for years, and the stories usually reflect that the couples share common qualities.

They tend not to take themselves too seriously. They look like folks who don’t spend much energy being angry at each other or anyone else. That might be the greatest life skill of all these days, because being angry and upset seems to be the natural state of existence. Doesn’t every message that assaults us in the media demand we be angry, take a side, pick winners?

 Maybe we’re being naive about this, but we seem perfectly ensconced in the Age of Self Righteousness when no difference goes un-argued, and no ego stands aside.

The Truhlars seem to have become friends first. They liked how each other looked at things and sensed the world. They shared ideas. They laughed. They liked each other’s differences. At the least, their courtship certainly seemed more like what 1941 was than what 2011 is.

They probably expected to actually know each other as people before they expected the benefits of love.

Mostly, they have managed to turn a deep friendship into a 70-year love affair. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who can tell?

We do know that in a universe currently infatuated with hostility, arrogance and indifference, being married for 70 years is a testament to the powerful tolerance of love.

And being best friends for 70 years? That might be the greatest achievement of all.

 

 

Why we remember the kids who died on miserable rocks

 

The island where John Peter Fardy died is a miserable heap of slag not worth a drop of an honest man’s blood.

Ask any Marine.

They left lots of blood on that miserable excuse for an island.

But that was 66 years ago, too long to hold a grudge against a nation or an island. It is not too long ago to forget,

Fardy’s death on May 7, 1945, was heroic even by the standards that separate Marines from most mortals.

He was a kid. He was 22 when he traded his life for the lives of all his friends in Company C, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. In a flick of a second, he chose. The Japanese hand grenade came sailing at the feet of his eight-man squad. He was their leader. He chose. He dived on it. It killed him.

So Fardy came home figuratively this week. His body did not come home to Illinois from that miserable island until four years after his death, and then his grave at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Worth Township showed no sign of who he was. No sign that he was a Medal of Honor winner.

That oversight was corrected this week with a rededicated headstone that told local citizens that Marine Cpl. John Peter Fardy had once been one of them.  His Leo High fellow alumni did the honors. Bagpipers played the Irish Anthem for him. Veterans of World War II rose to salute.

You might think that this was merely sentimental old business of a kind too removed from life now to mean much. You could not be more wrong about that.

Fardy should remind us how war is often as unexpected in its heroisms as it is deliberate in its indifference. Fardy’s death was not only testimony to courage; it also symbolizes the sad burden of fate. We must care. War does not.

His choice on the day of his death was almost forgotten by history and, sadly, had no effect on World War II. In a better world, gallantry should produce profound good. It did, in one way. Consider the hundreds of Company C grandchildren and their grandchildren to come.

But two weeks later, the battle that took 200,000 Japanese lives on that miserable rock and 12,000 Marine lives, too, was rendered moot.

Two mushroom clouds, not Okinawa’s staggering human price, ended the war.

That’s why we must remember John Peter. We remember not only who he was but who he might have been had he lived.

If we forget him, we might forget all the others, too. We might forget the awful waste of war.

But we won’t.

 

The Masked Woman and Tonto of Blue Island win the day

 

Nancy Madrigal thought of Joan Silke as the Masked Woman of Blue Island, Ill.. She fought for justice when almost no one else would, and even those who would benefit often reviled her.

“She was the Lone Ranger,” she said.

Silke relied on Madrigal’s equal doggedness as her “Tonto” in a 16-year struggle with bureaucracy, courts, and boardroom hostility. But Silke’s lower-threshold guerrilla war with Clark Oil over its right to spew crud likely has extended over 30 years.

If you think that one person has too little power to change history with the power of her determination, you’ve never met Joan Silke. The force and voice of her will beat 100 corporate lawyers into submission. She won for all the right reasons.

For that effort, 6,000 Blue-Island-area residents this week began receiving their share of a $60 million settlement with the corporate descendant of the pollution-prone Clark Oil refinery that fouled the area for years.

That was before Silke donned her mask.

So this is another one of those civil court cases where everyone makes a bundle of cash and goes away happy? Not really. In fact, not at all.

What Silke and her small band of allies fought to achieve was not compensation for the damage done to lives by decades of noxious emissions, but only the measurable loss to property value from living downwind from the gunk-spewing monster at 131st Street and Kedzie Avenue in unincorporated Worth Township.

Proving the value of property damage was the most direct route to compensation, but there was a more meaningful subtext to the long debate with Clark Oil and its successors, Premcor and then San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp.

This was only nominally about money and damage to homes and land. More fundamentally, it was about corporate indifference to damaging people’s lives. The polluters ran and hid from that responsibility behind the shield of a clankingly slow court system.

So the courts made the victims prove every ruined car paint job, every garden strangled by fumes, every foundation crack. What could not be proved was how miserable it was to live there, and how much that misery was worth. But juries sometimes understand what damages life even if lawyers and judges don’t.

Silke certainly knew. She’d lived 500 feet downwind of Clark, and when frazzled, desperate plaintiffs wanted answers and hope, they called her. When Clark workers were angry they might lose their jobs, she was the target of their outrage.

Sometimes $60 million doesn’t seem nearly enough. To that issue, Blue Island will benefit from the settlement as a community. The money will go into local merchant pockets, but as Mayor Don Peloquin says, people will pay bills, replace cars, buy new refrigerators, fix their houses.

Life should be just a little easier. Just a little better. They have Joan Silke to thank for that.

 

 

Cigar Club Confidential….an excerpt

“

 

“I rarely wear underwear,” said Disco Dave, lately of Miami, although the topic had not come up. He eased back in the big brown leather chair.

“Yes, we’ve heard, and we wish you wouldn’t do that,” Mo said, averting his eyes, “because it ruins the ambience.”

“I never take an ambulance,” said Disco of the Big Silver Wavy Hair and linen beach shorts. He was either 55 or 80.  No one is quite knew because is both fit and decrepit at the same time. It’s an optical illusion. “I always drive myself to the hospital, like last fall when one of my fingers was cut off during that knife fight.”

 

“Knife fight?”

 

“Yeah, when I was defending my date against a gang of Colombians that had attacked us before dinner.”

 

“Which one?” Mo asked while trying not to be interested because that was always a mistake with Disco.  Mo did occasionally express curiosity as a way of setting up a joke.  He was short and round and had the perfect non-committal George Burns face for straight lines.  He also was well preserved and feisty, just as the cigars he favored. He appeared to be sort of Jewish though not anything variety as specific as Reformed or Orthodox or Hassid. He was more like a Maduro. Tightly wrapped with many layers.

The club was a blend of doctors, lawyers, financial wheelers, several retired KGB agents and several more aging Mossad operatives who had decided it was safer to retire in Wilmette than Jerusalem. It was a male environment.

Many of the club’s habitués were boldly, demandingly Jewish and spoke Hebrew there with as much flair as any language spoken in the joint of which there were at least four or five. Mo was mostly Mo-ish and unique unto himself.

“Doris,” said Disco, the Man of Tan.

“No,” said Mo who already realized that he had just taken the herd down a box canyon from which there was no escape. “I meant, which finger?”

 

“It was Doris AND her sister, Doreen, because I always like to have options,” Disco continued. He punctuated the moment with the Disco Dave horizontal arm locomotive pump action to indicate ultimate romantic success.  “It actually was my entire right hand. Did a hell of job reattaching it. Was awake during the whole thing. Luckily, I can still bowl. In fact I bowled a 320 last week in Miami.”

 

We pause here to tell any women that might have stumbled into the joint that they should to take no solace or hope that a new century has had much positive effect on men. Men tell stories to each other about women and their success with women, though in Disco’s case, if he had experienced as much sex as he claimed, he would have been dead. Stone, cold dead.

 

We all knew that, and we even suspect that Disco knew we knew.  Logic did not stop the stories. That narrative was a welded, permanent appendage of the cultural landscape, and appearances must be maintained. So an old man with good hair will still make the case insistently that he is sexually active, usually with young women. It could happen. We hold to that optimism.

 

But back to bowling with Disco.

“You can’t have a score higher than 300,” said Mo from behind the boulder in the box canyon.

 

“You can in Miami,” Disco continued as he wolfed down the Boston Market’s slice of Super Coconut Supreme Pie from the rolled up bag in which he usually carried most of his personal belongings. “Effingcolombians changed the rules. I got the pie from Peggy at the front desk at Baker’s Square. She wants me.”

 

Baker’s Square was across the street. Apparently every woman there wanted Disco Dave. Even the 90-year-old customers with walkers and oxygen masks snugged down over bright red lipstick. When it came to women, Disco was THE Man. He was desired passionately everywhere. Fort Lauderdale? Ditto. Miami? Don’t even ask. Disco Dave was the Flying Dutchman of Romance.

Every year like the swallows to Capistrano or the buzzards to Hinckley, he would return at Memorial Day. He drove a Hyundai from South Beach.  “Chicks love it,” he often announced even if the cigar club lounge mostly was empty.

But North Shore women had standards.  That was the theory. We believed there were still two or three females there who might have second thoughts.

 

“You can still bowl?” Mo asked.

 

“Yes, because I’m left handed. I take off the right hand if I don’t need to use it.”

 

“Let’s see you take it off,” Mo said.

 

“Can’t,” said Disco. “It leaks too much blood and makes me limp.”

 

“Limp?” said Mo. “How……” He tried to stop himself but it was too late.

 

“Because then I can’t do my Fontainebleau Hotel lounge act. Walking on my hands while I balance Gertrude on my butt while I spin her in the air at 845 rpms. You can’t see her. Just hear her whoosh as she goes by.”

 

“Gertrude?”

 

“She’s Brazilian. We’ve had a thing since 1987.”

 

“And you can’t walk on one hand anymore?”

 

“Oh sure I can, but it makes me sort of hop. And then Gertrude gets to bouncing. I don’t want her to go flying off my butt in the middle of the lead musical number.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“I Only Have Ice for You.”

 

“You mean Eyes?”

 

“No, the act is me opening a tray of ice with my teeth and mixing her a Long Island Ice Tea.”

 

“While she’s balanced on your…”

 

“Butt, that’s right.”

 

“And you now take off your right hand when you don’t need it?”

 

“Yes, sometimes I keep it right here in the bag.”

 

“Next to the pie?”

 

“Yes, and my dirty socks if it’s been a long night. Which it usually is, if you know what I mean.” Disco Dave was geared for the summer.

 

But when Labor Day arrived, he would board his trusty Hyundai steed and gallop for South Beach. He had vowed 15 years ago never to touch snow again or allow it to touch him.

 

Mo, who was 64 when he entered the lounge that day, now he figured he’d aged to about 71. They had not been productive years.

 

But he still had both of his hands. And he was wearing underwear. It had been a good day, after all.

 

Why Ryan Royall’s death is doubly tragic

 

 

There are two tragedies in the death of 17-year-old Ryan Royall.

First, and most profoundly, his death deprives a family of a loving son and his classmates of a cherished friend. Every sign says he was a great kid whose future was going to be as great as he chose to make it.

But the second tragedy spreads out to touch everyone in the community. Every one of 500 fellow teens at the Ho-Chunk Sports and Expo Center party in Lynwood that night; every one in the larger community who desires a respectful, peaceful, caring life.

The second tragedy touches us all, and this is it.

It’s almost sure that someone near the parking lot where he was gunned down last weekend either saw who did it, or knows who did.

The person who knows might be reading this now.

We hope so.

Because if you are reading this, then we want you to remember who Ryan was and consider who he might have become had the bullet not struck him down. Maybe he was a friend. You may have known both Ryan and the person who shot him.

A party, teenagers, guns. It might have been random; it might have been a grudge. Maybe Ryan just got in the way of a bullet aimed at someone else.

We might never know all those answers, but what we do know is that too many kids are shot down by killers who are never caught because part of our community closes around them in a cocoon of quiet.

There are few more pervasive and corrosive cultural cornerstones in the black community than the refusal to help police solve a crime because that is helping the “enemy”.

“We” don’t help the “enemy.” And “we” punish those who do with our scorn.

The suspicion of police forces runs deep and even deeper in community attitudes. It’s a cancerous membrane.

A newspaper might not be able to fix a societal chasm such as this one simply by offering our opinion.

But we do hope that the one person who knows, the one person who saw, can summon courage and do what it is right.

Telling police what happened and who pulled the trigger will not solve black-white issues in this country. All our voice can do is to help you remember who Ryan Royall was, and why his death should mean more than the silence it has produced.

If you are reading this, speak.

Doesn’t Ryan Royall deserve it?

 

We should choose hope

Written during christmas week, 2012

 

 

 

If this month of tragedy in Connecticut has brought us to any conclusion, we now know we must make some decisions.

 

And what better time to figure out the important things in our lives than this morning, on a day that celebrates joy through the transcendent power of hope.

 

Newtown might leave a permanent scar on all of us, but it also has called us to consider who we are and what we wish for ourselves and our children.

 

At the core of this reconsideration should be the unshakeable knowledge that we choose either good or evil.

 

Day by day, hour by hour. We can choose either hope and peace for ourselves or allow despair and grief to dominate us.

 

And if we are to have hope, we must chose hope. We must proactively chose good.  It’s an act of will, not a state of mind. If nothing else is clear, we now know that no one will give it to us. We must take it and build it.

 

As for a starting line, we suggest you try the “26 Acts of Kindness”, an idea that came from former “Today” TV host Ann Curry.

 

In her plan, she summons peace by doing one act of kindness a day in honor of each of the children and teachers killed in Newtown.  A quiet little moment of deliberate hope and generosity will do just fine.

 

One by one they are accumulating across the Internet. It’s a wave. A movement.

 

Said one man:  “Our first act of kindness…our daughter made a card for the police officer that lives in our neighborhood. We put it on his car to surprise him when he went to work. We hope to continue this past 26.”

 

One family, one child, one act of kindness at a time.

 

Choose hope.

 

Maybe the “26 points” won’t solve what is wrong with us, but we all have something to give each other. It’s time we do. Even in the legend, the little drummer boy had nothing but the quiet rhythm of his drum to give.

 

It’s all just a question of hope.

 

Merry Christmas.