When do you realize you’re in one of the most important days of your life?

For me it was as the newly minted missus and I sat and watched children play. A little boy wouldn’t go under the playground’s spray fountain like all the other kids. He was about 18 months or 2 years, maybe. I’m not good at gauging kids’ ages. But he squealed and clapped, excited by the water that scared him.

It sort of dawned on me this moment was important. I turned to look at my wife. Very important indeed.

It wasn’t the type of important day where something changes. No one died, was born, met someone special or discovered that real Mexican food is so much more amazing than the crap he’d been raised with — all important actual moments that have occurred in my life.

This was the type of import that comes from things being what they are, not from new things being born or dying. It was the importance of noting this is what my life is now, and that I really like it.

Happy Independence Day, America. I’m sorry for what we did, but we’re going to try to make it better.

I looked at the couch and blanket and said “I’m going to watch a TED Talk about atoms.”

And within three minutes, I was.

…

We live in a universe of absolute specificity. Any wild hair of an idea you have for entertainment, reading, videos or pornography can be in front of you in the time it takes to type the words and hit “search.”

In some ways, it’s good. I’m working on a research project right now. I found an allusion in a book from 2002 to a drunken brawl in an election in 1799 and, within a few minutes, found archive.org versions of the 1916 biography of John Marshall the 2002 book was citing and the 1884 publication the 1916 book cited of the posthumous memoirs of the guy who in his youth knew two of the old guys who saw the 1799 brawl in the first place.

Just a few years ago, that would have taken weeks or months to find. It would have taken trips to library after library and antiquarian bookstore after antiquarian bookstore in city after city to track down one obscure publication from 1916 just to spot a footnote directing me to do the whole process again to find the 1884 memoirs.

I did it in seconds, with Facebook open in another tab.

A lovely moment, but only possible through the combo of tech and chaos. I tracked down the source of the 1799 election brawl through technology. I learned the brawl existed by leafing through a random book plucked from the shelves at the Sulzer Regional Library.

This isn’t about FAKE NEWS or targeting algorithms or Dems only reading stories on Demon Trump whilst the GOPers learn the tale of St. Donald the Yuge. We all know today how dangerous it is to have a society find only what it wants, so this isn’t another screed on that.

This is about how charming it is to be lost.

If you put me in the middle of a foreign city with a cellphone, I could located the nearest police station, U.S. consulate, airport, bus map and foreign phrasebook that would teach me to say “Hello, reputable cabbie. Please get me to this five-Yelp-star-rated hotel and this exact café that a review tells me is the absolute most charming and authentic thing ever.”

Or I could wander, explore. Stumble across a little café that serves a tea I’ll never taste again or get ripped off by a cabbie on the way to a restaurant that will serve a food that I hate but will never forget the flavor of.

It might be confusing that the first option offers me the best of the world and the second is my preference. Why wouldn’t I prefer that bus map and those Yelp reviews? Why wouldn’t I want to tailor my experience to be exactly what I want?

Because these technologies and this specificity they allows in restaurants, original source documents and TED Talks on a particular particle can only give us the best of what we already know exists. Only randomness, chaos and that ineffable world that gives us things we did not search for can show us something new.

I don’t know how to find this vital chaos online. I don’t know a site that, instead of “search,” has a button that says “surprise me.”

No, the chaos and randomness of an in-person life aren’t perfect. Sometimes we’re astounded, sometimes we’re left wanting. But to me, occasional lousy tea, bad hotels and boring movies are forgivable side products of the only option left that lets us play.

Are you a scientist? If so, we need your story.

I thought about how it feels on the forehead, a bit too much and it dribbles down a bit. A perfect amount and it sort of stays there, giving the illusion of coolness as it evaporates into dry, marble-laden air.

Up, down, left shoulder, right shoulder. Sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, shake hands and say “And also with you.”

The music curled out of the church as I walked by.

It was a Sunday morning. The doors were open. A lone woman with curly hair nowhere near in color to the gray it should be trudged up stone steps. I glanced over as she disappeared into the door, swallowed by the glorious tinny choir warbling songs of joy and love.

I wondered if I should go in.

By the word of God, I’m nowhere near a good man. I don’t pray, attend or believe. My faith is fact-finding, my cosmology one of black holes and big bangs rather than purgatories and “Let there be light.”

It’s a bad system of science and of ethics. Reward and punishment is a good system for training a dog, but it does not make a person good. It just makes one fearful of hell, greedy for heaven.

I also hate the idea of forgiveness through rosaries, that you can chant away a wrong you did another without fixing the problem.

I can’t hate gays the way Jesus’ testament commands in Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10.

But still, I thought about the cool dab of holy water on my forehead and wondered if I should go in.

My lack of faith isn’t a source of joy nor is it a fount of existential despair. There’s no more emotion here than there is in saying trees photosynthesize. It’s just an is. More technically, an isn’t. I begrudge no one their solace and comfort, until they use it as excuse to take away mine.

The sign of the cross on my forehead and chest. The paper-dry taste of wafer on my tongue. A sip of wine that always makes me wonder when the germs of the faithful will transubstantiate into flu.

And that feeling I once had that the world is simple and God is good. A pious person making the noble choice of love. Or a lab rat happily pressing the button of kindness and charity in knowledge of an eternal treat.

I don’t know if I want my dad to read this story.

I walked away from the church, not going inside or daubing my head with blessings. I know I would have written about it. I would have been a spy in their world of faith. They would have welcomed me. That’s the part that made me turn away. They would have been kind to a dirty spy.

As I walked away, a passel of smiling children sprinted around the barbershop on the corner, near bowling me over in their race to those holy, music-laden doors. A mother-type yelled in Polish after them. She yelled at them to slow down, context said.

I smiled at their smiles, knowing the world is, at least for a moment, at least in one spot, at least on one street corner by a barbershop and Catholic church in Chicago, Illinois, happy. And just a little touch of good.

Come to this fundraiser for everything Donald Trump hates on Wednesday

You’ll have to put on a best of the ‘60s and ‘70s rotation. Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary” and that Pink Floyd song that’s just the woman wailing.

It has to be punctuated with the hisses and pops of patties sizzling on the grill, of the whir of an industrial coffee pot, of the gabbings and chatters of a room full of diners and of the mild moans of a waitress who had been on shift for 32 hours, she said.

The smell hitting your nose right now should be hot Lipton’s tea with a metal container of extra hot water on the side, “Because that’s just a sip” the other waitress said.

The taste in your mouth should be saliva in anticipation of impending chicken noodle soup.

To read this story, it should be late at night on a Sunday after a thunderstorm. The now-cooled air has allowed a few braver, damper souls out of the air-conditioned prisons the weekend’s heatwave locked them in.

They now can wander darkened streets along Welles Park, heads ducked toward glowing screens, occasionally flicking a finger to read the next status or nab an elusive Pokémon.

To read this story you should dip into an all-night diner across from the park, one where the 32-hour waitress is let just refill the water while the one who brought you extra hot water runs the grill, takes the orders and checks the clock for the third scheduled waitress.

She’s too busy for weird blogger questions about the message on the bottom of the menu, “In loving memory of our founder Mr. A.D.”

“The owner’s father, I guess,” she said, turning her head to check to see if her 32-hour friend leaning on the counter is OK.

The third waitress later comes, apologizing about missed calls. They’re glad to see her.

They’re all plump older white women. They all smile and are kind, even the 32-hour worker.

The story’s better when surrounded by the chatters of diners, two young male fashionistos, the type of 20-somes with perfect hair and the ultimate of trend. They laugh and joke and the plump woman with the soup asks if they’re the ones who usually sit in the corner.

“We’re here all the time,” one said, pleased to be spotted as a regular.

Over in the corner, an old man with skin turned brown-red from a life working in the sun shuffles back and forth outside for smokes and in for sitting and coffee. He wears shorts and a dingy hoodie. His legs are caked with something white and chalky, a medicinal poultice or just a day working with cement.

You can read this story without the poultice man or fashionistos. You can read this story without the 32-hour waitress and the gabs from the tables I didn’t even mention.

You can, are able to, are allowed to read this story without the steam of steeping tea in your nose, the anticipation of soup on your tongue or the tones of Jimi Hendrix whispering and pulsing from some unseen speaker.

But why would you want to?

Listen to Jimi Hendrix

Read about a soft dance at a Polish buffet

More ’60s music in the dark

Chocolate and the Class War

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My girlfriend called her “The Dancing Kid.”

It was the student showcase at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Classes come together for mass performances for each other. Mostly guitar classes, such as the one where my girlfriend had just crushed her solo, but with a few oddball classes like the go-go dance club snuck in.

It was the last band of the night, the one known for being the size of 5.25 Beatleses, plus the daughter of one of the band members dancing around like a tiny little Bosstone.

They started a new song, the last of the night. It started with an odd acoustic beat.

The guitarists and singers started in, a little warbly, a little unsure. It was decently played, but in addition to the size and the dancing kid, this class is also known for its military marching band precision.

This was fine, just unpracticed, an unheard-of thing for this group.

I guess I should of known
By the way you parked your car sideways
That it wouldn’t last.

“Is this…” I said, venturing a guess that turned out to be dead wrong.

We kept listening.

See you’re the kinda person
That believes in makin’ out once
Love ‘em and leave ‘em fast

“Oh,” I said.

“Should I know this song?” my girlfriend whispered.

“In about a second, you will.”

I guess I must be dumb
‘Cause you had a pocket full of horses
Trojan and some of them used

But it was Saturday night
I guess that makes it all right
And you say what have I got to lose?

And honey I say
Little red Corvette
Baby you’re much too fast
Little red Corvette

You need a love that’s gonna last.

We lost Prince yesterday. The Prince of Purple Rain, Raspberry Beret and the song in question, the hit single off 1983’s “1999,” Little Red Corvette.

It was the single that launched Prince’s career, and the song that got the pitch-perfect giganta-class to play a half-prepped song in tribute.

The duets class clapped and sang along. The visiting guitar combos from the school’s Armitage location bopped heads to the beat. The go-go dance class jumped from their seats and did an impromptu shimmy, which the dancing kid in the dino shirt copied.

We were laughing, singing, clapping, half-dancing in our chairs. At that moment, we weren’t sad that we lost Prince. We were happy that we had him.

The song ended, which of course it does. And the night ended, which of course it did. And Prince Rogers Nelson of Chanhassen, Minnesota, died at his home on April 21, 2016. He was 57.

Read about an Old Town memorial to one of their own

A B-Girl talks about the music that moves her

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He patted the block of ice, gave statistics on its weight. 300 pounds. He and a young woman grabbed it with large metal pincers, set it on the short table.

He called for suggestions from the small crowd huddled around the surrounding fence. They called fish, penguin, bear. He rejected them all, pulling what looked like an awl out of his back pocket to start scratching out a shape for the crowd to guess at.

The chainsaw came next, huge blocks coming out between the frog’s fingers, around its eyes and taut, hopping legs. The man in the leather or rubber apron carved sprayed in a snowstorm of his own devising.

In the time it takes to carve a frog from a giant block of ice, you can walk a lap around the Lincoln Park Zoo at night. You can take in the last weekend of Zoo Lights, watching chilluns run and scream and laugh at the shimmering displays synched to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

You can stroll with a cup of hot chocolate, your first of the season you note as you stroll by glowing fake zebras the color of Fruit Stripe gum, by twinkle-clad trees, by a brief lighted animation of a chameleon tongue-snapping a passing fly.

The chimpanzees were asleep in the primate house, seeming not to mind, not to notice or at least to have become inured to the throng of humans pointing and gaping at them through the glass.

Toward the back of the park, where the food stands are fewer and the species less exciting, the lights wrapped around trees and between cages spill out into the lights of the city beyond. It’s pretty.

By the time you got back, he had carved a frog. Webbed toes to bulging eyes to the texture and warp of its backside, it was intricate and beautiful.

In the time it takes to carve a frog, the holidays are over.

No more Zoo Lights among sleeping chimps, no more calls for Santa, stars leading to mangers, cocoa and snowflakes telling you to spend a little more. No more charity bell ringers, no more fake-wrapped presents at stores. No more menorahs, kinaras, dropping Times Square balls.

Our bells have been jingled, our auld acquaintances forgot. By the moment you get back and see the frog, you know somehow the holidays are over. It feels good, like going to bed at the end of a long day.

The next morning you wake up and the world doesn’t feel like jingly lights in darkness. That yuletide feel of light in the night ended with the frog. You take a walk, not sure yet what the world does feel like.

You wander down a cold, fresh street in early January and look up at the milk-white sky of sun behind clouds, realizing at once you’re going to have to end this story on a mixed metaphor.

You’re struck for a moment how the sky is the color of a sheet of typing paper.

In the time it takes to carve a frog, the season of twinkles shining in darkness ended. Now, on lightening skies the color of paper, it’s time to write the year to come.

A street musician takes “Rudolph” out of the rotation

A homeless man and college kid realize the party’s over

A tale of dark magick, mall Santas and the only possible explanation

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They got corndogs and eyed craft jewelry. They traded cash for tickets and tickets for beer. Outside, kids ran and laughed and got their faces painted like tigers as the bright sun burned sandaled feet and unlotioned necks.

Inside, a packed auditorium remembered a friend with guitars and drums, bass and banjo. 

His name was Mike Mann. He was a teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where on Sunday scores of friends, students and music fans gathered to play a few of Mike’s favorite songs.

He died Dec. 5, 2014, following a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

“Each of us, in our heart of hearts, knew he liked us best,” one of his fellow Old Town teachers told the assembled crowd.

Set for the last day of the Square Roots craft beer and music festival (it’s in Lincoln Square and benefits Old Town’s roots music), Jam for Mike Mann packed Szold Hall in the new Old Town building on the east side of Lincoln Avenue.

Guitar-bearing friends and pupils overwhelmed the rows of chairs set up for the jam, filling the audience seating areas and, eventually, the aisles.

The rules of a jam are simple: Show up and join in.

Attendees got a packet of music Mike loved, with the chords, notes and lyrics written out. The Old Town teachers leading the show would occasionally give instruction on the trickier chords, but the joy was in the act of playing, not its technical perfection.

The audience belted out “Worried Man Blues,” “Everyday People.” They strummed and sang Buffalo Springfield and Taj Mahal. The Beatles and blues. They sang for their friend.

Mike Mann came to Old Town in 1998, joining up with a Beatles Ensemble after stopping by a First Friday, the music school’s monthly community night. He moved from student to teacher over the years, and traded 12-string guitar for bass.

The teachers shared stories of his humor, his kindness, his dedication to sharing music with the world.

He was loved. He was loved and the one-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is 20 percent.

Mike Mann lived three years after diagnosis.

The last song they sang was “The Weight.” The Band’s 1968 hit was a favorite song of Mann’s. It was the one he always used to close out the jams he ran.

It was his closing number.

So forgive the corn, forgive the cheese, forgive me letting The Band finish this story I started, but I can’t in good faith memorialize a man who breathed music with anything but music.

Please take four minutes and 33 seconds out of your day to give Mike Mann’s last song a listen.

…

Old Town School remembers Mike Mann

A YouTube tribute to Mann, posted the day after he died

Read about a man memorialized by canoe

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The game erupted around our blanket, crept up on me as I napped in the park. A repeated and increasingly near rustle of a tennis ball through grass kept waking me, followed each time by calls of “BALL!” or “STRIKE!” and a stern-looking young boy running back to retrieve the pitch he whiffed.

“There’s a ghost runner!” a second kid yelled as he ran to play catcher, pointing back at the flip-flop that marked first base.

The stern-looking boy was the dead spit of the ripped teen pitcher with the cut-off sleeves, just four or five years younger. The two and a teen girl playing right field all had jet-black hair and olive skin.

The pitcher joked and laughed, bent his body into clownish contortions for a lark, but grimaced with disappointment at every pitch that wasn’t perfect.

The little boy was quiet and grim, determined to knock out of the park whatever his big brother offered.

When he connected and the tennis ball went sailing toward a necking couple, the pitcher cheered louder than anyone.

“It almost hit that couple making out,” said the left fielder.

She was left fielder in title only. She and the olive-skinned right fielder kept laughing and joking, about five feet from each other at any point.

Earlier, the skinny, sandy-haired kid who called ghost runner got a pop up that bopped the left fielder on the head as she wandered somewhere between shortstop and pitcher. She made a comical stage fall as the tennis ball rolled in the grass and the ghost runners rounded the flip-flops.

This is baseball. Ghost runners, arguments over whether the shoe or the Frisbee will make a better home plate, the pitcher cheering when his little brother nails one and the right fielder demonstrating the perfect swing for her friend’s edification.

The good game has its place, of course. Dedication, matching uniforms and that youthful esprit de corps where you make fun of the fat kid all teach lessons of teamwork, grit, conformity and only deserving to feel joy if you win. Valuable stuff in the end.

But the baseball I feel, the baseball I love is the one of stage falls, laughter, fun and arguments over whether that was a ball or a strike. No score, no teams, no victory or loss. Just an endless stream of runs and the plink of tennis balls on an endless summer day.

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Another tale of terrible baseball (the Cubs)

Pride of lions, that’s one everyone knows.

A herd of sheep.

Now let’s get more complicated, ratchet it up.

A murder of crows.

A parliament of owls.

A smack of jellyfish.

They’re called nouns of assemblage, linguistic oddities half historic and half made up to describe what a group of things would be. A knot of toads. A leap of leopards. A shoal of bass.

One of the best sources collecting these collectives is James Lipton’s “An Exultation of Larks.” In it, the man who would be mocked as the “Inside the Actors Studio” toady (and past pimp) dove into research to find some terms and made up the others, inviting his readers to do the same.

It’s a fun game, but raises some questions. We see more owls on this continent than lions, but why is a “pride” a well-known term and “parliament” confusing trivia?

Are a group of lawyers playing badminton “an eloquence” for the law or “a battle” for the badminton?

What’s a group of old Polish women riding the bus to church on a gray and misty Sunday morning?

The Milwaukee bus came to a stop in Avondale, by the house of a friend who let me crash the night before. I Ventraed aboard to turn and see the cluster of old Polish women… the slew? The smack?

I came on board the bus and prim and proper unsmiling Polish women turned their white heads to glance at me.

We rode the bus southeast.

They talked softly, practicing their church voices. They weren’t a congregation yet, wouldn’t be until they crossed the church doors. They were too quiet and coiffed to be the “gaggle of women” Lipton found from 13 separate sources in his research.

They spoke in hushed tones, preparing for the piety to come.

A cloud of witnesses.

A gang of elk.

A rash of dermatologists.

And what to call the middle-aged Hispanic man hawking cotton candy through Logan Square?

The gray morning had become a hot and windy afternoon. The man hoisted a pole dappled with bags of pink and blue floss over his shoulder, wiping his head as he walked. He was alone, tramping his path by Western and Fullerton, one of hundreds across the city hoisting a tree’s worth of cotton candy bags on a stick.

A charm of finches.

A hover of trout.

A skulk of thieves.

The Croatians gather to play bocce in Lincoln Square.

The hot afternoon had become a mild and beautiful evening. In Welles Park, they’ve been coming for decades on nights like this to bowl on the lawn in spots not claimed by Little League players and children spinning around until they fall.

The men huddle and yell in Croatian, arguing and bartering with each roll about who hit what and what the strategy should be. Younger generations have crept into the game over the years, the gray heads punctuated by black ones. All laugh and yell and gripe and holler at the game, surrounded by a dray of bounding black squirrels.

A haggle of bocce players arguing in Croatian.

A bindle of cotton candy sellers hoisting their wares on shoulder.

A whisper of old Polish women riding the bus to church on a gray and misty Sunday morning.

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“Do you have another card?” she asked, holding my debit card out to me as if it were something very wet and cold that she no longer wanted to be touching.

“No,” I responded. “Could you run it again?”

“I tried to run it twice,” she said.

Then that feeling came into my gut.

You know the feeling if you’ve ever been told your card has been declined, that your significant other needs to talk or, for men, that a doctor wants you to turn your head. It’s a deep seizing of your gut coupled with the violent realization you are in fact a small child playing adult for fun and profit.

“I don’t have another card,” I said, as I either imagined or noticed the man at the next table cock his head to listen in a little better.

Responding to my sickly look with one of her own, the server glided back to the register to give my card another swipe we both knew would be futile.

“No,” she said when she came back.

Out into the rain and then to an ATM down the street where this trifling foofaraw would soon be cleared up with…

PLEASE CONTACT YOUR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

Frick.

There are moments in life I’m proud of. Standing in a bank foyer in the rain, explaining via cell phone to a sympathetic fraud prevention employee that I really can pay for my curry while a wet man trying to get cash pretended not to listen is not one of those moments.

Then the phone beeped to let me know it was going to die.

In short, no. I have not mismanaged my funds to the point where a $7.95 kang massaman and a pot of jasmine tea made my bank go, “Enough of that now.”

Instead, some jerk wanted to buy $170 of online gaming from a place in Albany, N.Y., and thought my credit card information, culled from a store that got hacked a few months back, would be a better fit for the job than his.

The bank canceled my card as a security precaution, will send a new one within seven to 10 business days and of course can briefly remove the block to let me pay for my meal because standing on hold charging my phone in a Thai restaurant’s unisex bathroom because it had the only unguarded outlet in Lincoln Square sounds really embarrassing.

“Thank you,” I said.

I don’t know why I was embarrassed. If anyone should be embarrassed, it should be the criminal dweeblets who decided cribbing someone else’s debit info was a better solution to not-playing-Warcraft than, I don’t know, working a job like an effing adult.

(Although a man who runs a website and who has already had his identity stolen should probably not antagonize hackers. I, for one, welcome our Cheetos-stained overlords. May you never have sunlight or a carrot forced upon you.)

“They got me for $600 one time,” the server lady told me as she swiped my card.

I silently vowed to carry more cash.

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