The weekend schoolers were shuffling in with notepads and folders, looking around and, one by one, heading toward the farthest spot from the woman who was about to step up to the mic to say “There are spaces up by the front” to the room full of professional educators, historians and me.

Even teachers don’t like to sit in the front row.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to judge the junior division of the Chicago Metro History Fair, a yearly event in which sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders across the greater Chicago area conspire to make me feel old and dumb. For the event, students prepare reports and displays on events, people and social movements that forged who we are as Illinoisans today.

The exhibits were astounding. They were beautiful or fun, exciting or interesting. One pair turned their project on the 1940s malaria experiments on prisoners at Stateville into a 3D, spinning model of the cylindrical prison. There were Lego replicas of the Eastland disaster, historical photos

The topics too were amazing. Yes, there were more than a few Al Capones and river reversals, but somewhere in this city, there was a junior high school student who heard “local history” and thought, “More grownups need to know how the FBI used COINTELPRO to attempt to destabilize the Black Panthers.” “I’ll talk about muckracking journalists who improved working conditions at the stockyards.” “Someone at my middle school should lionize the Jane Collective.”

These were children.

“Our goal today and in the future is that no one cries,” joked one of the organizers during our orientation. “Except for me. I’m allowed to cry.”

In our orientation, as an Abe Lincoln impersonator worked the room and a professional educator sitting across from me doodled a cat on her folder when she was supposed to be paying attention, we heard about “the raw stuff of history” and “the aboutness.” The raw stuff is the primary material — the old photos, the interviews, the documents that have been sitting in some government archive since John Quincy Adams calligraphed “Classified” on some Treaty of Ghent material that might look shady in retrospect. The aboutness is the secondary material — the books written on topics, the articles, the textbook entries and the other ways people have processed history so we can understand it.

The aboutness awaiting us in the gym was a room full of posterboard, glue, citations and glitter. The kids who created these worlds for us to explore, rank and judge, they’re the raw stuff that’s going to make history.

That’s real Mardi Gras for real New Orleanians, not the drunken beads and boobs fest of many a college road trip movie. She, the husband and the two little kidlings all in costume (they went as the four elements) wandering the streets, watching floats and generally being genuine, full-time natives of their community.

Meanwhile, I missed Paczki Day.

Paczki Day is Chicago’s answer to Mardi Gras. Like all things truly Chicagoan, it’s a lot more sedentary, a lot more Polish and involves a lot more lard than most places’ traditions. While New Orleans wanders massive street festivals to watch the ornate fruits of months of krewes’ labors, Chicagoans wait in long lines at local bakeries for these fat-ass Polish doughnuts called paczki (poonch-key).

There are three Paczki Days of note.

The first one is the traditional Polish Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek, because everyone in Poland is trying to use up the high-scoring Scrabble tiles). That’s on the last Thursday before Ash Wednesday.

Paczki Day #2 is on Fat Tuesday, sort of an American merge with Mardi Gras.

And the third Paczki Day is the one where you sort of remember one is called Fat Thursday so you think it’s the day after Ash Wednesday, which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense if you thought about it but now it’s Tuesday night and you’ve missed all the Paczki Days even though you work right by Bennison’s in Evanston and you asked Margaret last week if there was any money in the petty cash fund to buy the office paczki just to be told it would be a hard sell to expense “weird Chicago holidays.”

That Packzi Day’s a bit more obscure, mostly celebrated by doughnut-deprived bloggers.

I’m alternately drawn to and horrified by traditions. Like all non-religious people, I chafe at the notion of consensus determining when I do anything. If I want to get drunk midweek, Ash Wednesday is just as good as Fat Tuesday. If I want to be quiet and chaste and morally righteous, I can do that on Saturday night just as well as on Sunday morning.

But traditions do draw me in. I like the chance to be part of something bigger and to see how the festivals and dates we use to mark our calendar reflect the people and places that surround us.

I like explaining to my non-Illinoisian friends who Casimir Pulaski was and brag that, yep, we got the day off school for that.

I like hitting Humboldt Park on Puerto Rican Day. South Side Irish’s always a bit of a haul, but I’ve never not had a good time there. Christkindlmarket’s good fun and who can say no to Memorial Day grilling?

That’s the divide. I’m torn between the teenage “You can’t tell me what to do!” and the equally teenage “Where’s the party?”

I’m sad to see some traditions peter out or become so corporate all joy is bled from them. When did stores start selling Halloween cards?

And I’m equally sad I won’t be around to see future traditions develop, see what the big street fests are in 3014. Paczki Day and Mardi Gras won’t be around forever, any more than we still get down to Lupercalia.

But between those two sadnesses, we have this moment. We have our krewes and paczki. We dress our children as the elements at 7th and St. Charles in NOLA or we line ‘em up at 115th and Western in Chi and stick an Irish flag in their hands. We have our Christmases and New Years’, our Loi Krathongs and Bud Billikens. We have Juneteenths and Ramadans. We have days Labor, Arbor and Groundhog.

Around this planet, we pick random events to be the minute markings on the clock that ticks down our lives. We get 80 or 90 Christmases if we’re lucky. That’s 240 to 270 days of Timkat if we’re lucky and Ethiopian.

We pick days to make beautiful or silly or respectful and no matter the stated reason for each, they’re really all because we’re bored and mortal. It’s the way we mark our passage through time. It doesn’t matter if a fest’s the most beautiful collection of light and love you’ve ever seen.

Or just a chance to buy a jelly doughnut.

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Stories from a few Chicago traditions:

Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican Fest

Christkindlmarket

The green river on St. Patrick’s Day (illustrated by Dmitry Samarov)

Rosehill Cemetery’s Memorial Day tribute

In isn’t just inside. It’s the 21st-century condition. “In” is in a room in an apartment, motionless, staring at a screen and occasionally thinking I thought something.

In the last few hours, I read about actors I like, movies I’ve watched, video games I’ve at least heard of. I’ve read about historical serial killers, presidents who were sort of cool when younger, archeological hoaxes. I’ve looked at photos of people screaming at haunted houses and stuff that made George Takei chuckle.

And nothing, I repeat, nothing that challenged anything I thought before.

Old listicles I’ve already read. Gag-a-day webcomics I know by heart. Video game levels I know how to beat. Sites I know will laugh at my political foes in comforting memes I see, know and understand. Much sequestration. So mental protectionism. Wow.

I don’t have to go out of my comfort zone any more than I have to go out of this apartment. I’m down a rabbit hole of selected trivia where a Buzzfeed quiz makes me Henry Miller’s soul mate, a Cracked writer seems a genius for agreeing with my opinion on recycling and a Wikipedia article told me the story of the German general who told Hitler to fuck himself.

My last two searches were for astrolabes and for people who thought they were werewolves. And then to xkcd so stick figures could assure me this level of specific obsession is normal.

No beliefs challenged. No lessons learned. A comforting view of a selected world that only matches my perceptions. Outside is cold, bleary, challenging. Here I win quizzes for naming voice actors and everyone is neatly divided into Harry Potter characters based on their choice of sandwich and shoe.

In rules. In is fun. I’m always right in. I’m the center of a world I chose to surround me, envelop my senses, keep me, well, in.

In breaks my heart.

I’m not Hermione Granger and Henry Miller probably wouldn’t have much to do with me. General von Lettow-Vorbeck would think I’m a wuss and I would have to go to England for any astrolabe collection of note.

Liking a show doesn’t put me in a “fandom.” It just puts me in, probably on the couch.

When it warms, I’ll rampage through this town, collecting stories and life to put up here for you. But circumstances put me in for a night, with warmth, comfort and a screen that flashes images I curate to make me think the world outside matches the one in my head.

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Out

Only one student got an A. There were a couple A minuses, to be fair, but not many. It was a low A and that student worked her ass off all semester.

They must hate me.

I’m getting misty because in high school, my favorite teacher was the one everybody hated. Mrs. Boyer was demanding and never quite cottoned to the “princes of the world now tell us we’re clever and give us trophies” attitude so many of us in the gifted program had.

It didn’t get me up off my lazy ass to analyze the Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky like I was supposed to, but something about her really resonated with me. I had gotten so used to being told I was smart and there Mrs. Boyer was, demanding I actually put what brains I had to use before being told I was clever.

I had some amazing teachers through my life. I can still remember the quadratic formula because of Carol Anderson in middle school and Paul Stalter was exactly the sort of influence I and a lot of other vaguely troubled kids needed around us in high school. But I always admired the way Mrs. Boyer never accepted my cleverer-than-thou bullshit.

I didn’t start working at schoolwork until college and some might say I never dropped the attitude, but Mrs. Boyer was a good person to have in my life. I visited her in school once after I graduated. She and I traded a few letters, but that dropped off over the years. I would run into her at the gym when I was visiting my hometown.

I guess I didn’t really see her again until her funeral.

She had been sick for years, even when we were running into each other at the gym. Tough lady. Kept plugging along. I talked with her husband a bit in the receiving line. He laughed with such pride in his voice when he recalled what a tough grader she was. That was something he admired in her too. I didn’t see anyone I knew other than a couple teachers I didn’t care to talk to. I went home after the service. I didn’t feel like I said goodbye.

Those who know about my family know we had a bad run of death a while back. Nine family members in two years. It’s hard to process a teacher’s death when you’re dealing with losing grandparents, uncles, cousins. I was also working for a cackling sweatshop where they would tell you exactly how lucky you were to have a job. The demands were high and the lifestyle nil and I’m sorry to say I regressed.

The girl I was dating at the time told me later I sounded like a teenager when she asked about Mrs. Boyer’s funeral. I snapped “Fine” and then clammed up.

Now, years later, I’m away from the job and the run of death. I’m in a warm kitchen, watching snowy roofs and wind rustle snow-bowed evergreens. I’m sipping coffee, grading and, based on the fact that I just started crying, I guess I’m finally processing it.

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More thoughts on teaching

Stomach full of roast chicken and vegetables and brain full of YouTube videos, I sit and wait for inspiration.

Something’s got to happen. Something’s got to come.

Softly I wait as the rain drips outdoors.

Sirens go by the window through the soft rain. They shriek through the night, perhaps wailing toward a different splash of red. An airplane roars above.

Something’s got to happen.

Last night, many things did happen. A friend was encountered at a coffee shop; another at a birthday party. I laughed and joked and told too many old stories.

But now I sit with red wine and rain, staring out a darkened window.

Because I forgot my fucking notes for tomorrow’s story.

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I am good at this, I swear

I wasn’t trying to listen in. I was trying to work on Wednesday’s story about the veterans memorial. But when you’re at a crowded coffee shop and the men at the table next to you are saying God, God, God so much you think they’re re-enacting the “When Harry Met Sally” diner scene, it’s hard to ignore.

The two words the minister kept pronouncing more loudly than the others were “God,” of course, and “boundaries.” It was about setting boundaries, he kept repeating. It’s about setting emotional and, moreover, physical boundaries about how much someone can touch you.

At that point, I actually did start listening in because the subject matter and, to be honest, the congregant made me think I could be seated next to a gay conversion session.

Come on, the guy was wearing a fleece from a dance studio!

Luckily, Googling the name of the book on the men’s table showed it was a touchy-feely Christian self-help thing about being less of a doormat than a “You don’t like dudes” brainwashing.

“So, can I get out of that Christmas party?” the man in the dance studio fleece (come on!) asked at one point.

The minister’s response was immediate.

“Of course you can,” he said.

I’m not a religious person in any sense of the word, but I do feel sorry for the truly religious every Christmas season. Christ isn’t the reason for the season (that would be Earth’s tilted axis), but he sure as shit is the reason for the holiday we’ve co-opted into a festival of greed and catchy tunes.

I like presents and storing dead conifers in my house as much as the next guy, so why don’t we as a society just nut up and admit it has nothing to do with the day it’s supposedly around? Let the religious keep the birth of their savior as the personal and holy day it is to them.

We can form a new tradition, a secular fest of all the cookies and cupidity we turned a religious group’s most-sacred holiday into. I propose we call it “It’s Dark Out And I Need Something Peppy To Ward Off Seasonal-Affective Disorder… Mas.”

But each December we conflate God and Gucci, swirling the two together so much a Christian man Jesus fan felt he had to go to a Starbucks with his minister to ask permission to skip out on a holiday party he didn’t feel up to.

Maybe he was more worried about offending his significant other than his Significant Other, or maybe he was just wondering how to break a promise and stay right with G-O-D. Heck, maybe he’s a recovering alcoholic dealing with Yuletide temptation and I’m the ass here.

But sitting in that crowded Roscoe Square yuppitorium with a cleric representing the deity to whom both had pledged their lives and immortal souls, the man in the fleece seemed pretty relieved the creator of the universe gave him the OK to duck out on that party.

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Read another Christmas story

He smiled and was thanked. He returned to the corner of the bar to continue his paperwork while the cider-drinker and an old man with a beard, four-footed cane and stories about the steel die forge watched SportsCenter.

SportsCenter made a joke about electing a sports president that day along with the real one.

“Today’s the election?” the old man piped up. “I thought it was the 20th.”

The Gaelic surname on the outside of the bar promised a certain Irishness, which it delivered. The location at Roscoe and Damen and the mass of TVs promised a certain chaste sportiness, which it delivered as well.

It was a nice place, a good place, with inviting oak, comfortable seating, a charming, smiling barman and the top three feet of every wall lined with scribbled-on Jameson bottles.

What?

Running along the entire length of the bar, past the seats, over the TVs, around the dartboards, over the doors to the gents and basically snaking the circumference like a winning Go strategy were scores and scores of empty Jameson Irish Whiskey bottles.

They circled the top of the bar on little shelves made for nothing but the display of Jameson bottles. Each was scribbled upon illegibly, each in a different handwriting.

“If you finish a bottle of Jameson, you get to sign it,” the barman explained.

The barman, Chris by name, said the previous owner started the tradition. Whoever kills the last slurp of Jameson from a bottle, whether they downed the whole 750 ml themselves or just happened to get poured the last bit after some other drinker’s yeoman’s effort, gets to autograph the bottle for inclusion in the collection.

How charming! How quaint! What could possibly go wrong?

“There are thousands of them,” Chris said, shaking his head slightly.

Apparently, a popular Irish pub keeping every empty bottle of a popular Irish whiskey is not without its drawbacks. Over the years, the bottles have piled up.

Don’t get the cider-drinker wrong: The bar is still keeping the bottles. It’s just getting harder and harder to find places to store them. Chris would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a storage space full of scrawled-on Jamo, but did mention when bottles momentarily hauled to the alley got their 15 minutes of fame when a certain camera-laden car drove by.

“They’re on Google Earth,” Chris said. *

One plan to send the bottles off to a Southern recycling center to be melted into new glass-topped tables for the bar died a’borning.

“They wanted 30 grand,” Chris said.

Since Irish whiskey and the people who drink it aren’t going anywhere (we tend not to), bottles keep getting thrown in the collection. Week after week, month after month, more bottles no one has any idea what to do with.

At this point, as the SportsCenter blasted and the old man goggled that he missed the election, the cider-drinker requested a shot. Jameson, of course.

It was nowhere near signature time, but he figured he could help another fine-drinking soul get their moment of boozy immortality.

“It’s on me,” the barman said.

* The writer of this story could not find evidence of the bottles on Google Street View and sure wasn’t going to download Google Earth just to fact-check this. If you have Google Earth and can confirm this claim, please send a screenshot to 1001chicago@gmail.com.

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Read what happened the next morning

“Boris Yeltsin is one of my heroes,” the man said as an image of the former Russian president appeared on the screen.

Over the next few minutes, we saw video of Yeltsin drunkenly dancing, saw pictures and news articles of booze-related Yeltsin anecdotes, learned about the night he wouldn’t let the pope go to bed because he wanted to keep drinking and talk about Italian women. We learned about the Russian culture, heard about the man born with two livers who wouldn’t give his dying brother an extra one because then he couldn’t drink as much.

The brother said he wouldn’t take the liver anyway for that very reason.

And we hooted and hollered and damaged our own livers a little bit more.

Once the tales of Boris Yeltsin got us in the proper lather, the man in the urban-cool cabbie cap turned us over to a large gambler who told tales of betting on the University of Hawaii and other bad decisions booze and casinos have made him make. A comely Italian woman followed — Yeltsin would have loved her — to tell a story about getting drunk with her mom, going home with some guy and promptly vomiting over everything.

The event was the Blackout Diaries, a monthly showcase upstairs at a bar called the Beat Kitchen where professional comics like the Italian woman and hilarious amateurs like the large gambler tell their best drinking stories.

Let’s just say that in this case, “best” does not mean the time they were urbane, witty, charming and home at a reasonable hour.

Bolstered by PowerPoint presentations, Blackout Diary tales involve vomit, inappropriate dancing, bad decisions, photos from inside legendarily hellish night club Berlin. Two sisters, drinks in hand, talked about things they screamed at 4 a.m. A Southern man talked about getting drunk in his religious hometown. A somewhat frattish man had a presentation that involved Simpsons characters and hoots from his friends in the back.

After every presentation, the emcee in the cabbie cap would lead the audience in a brief Q&A with each presenter so we could ask follow-up questions and learn more about what happened. Or at least what they think happened.

Chicago’s bar culture is a thing of beauty in the right hands. From 4 a.m. dives to upscale establishments to that Spanish-language social club I was taken to at 6 a.m. one morning and have never been able to find again.

The Blackout Diaries celebrates those nights where it’s in the wrong hands, where just one becomes just 20, where you bet on Hawaii because it’s still game time in the Pacific, where you puke in a guy’s hallway, end up at Berlin. We don’t need those nights — as a culture we would probably be better off without them.

But it would be a less funny world without puke, Hawaii and Boris Yeltsin.

Read about a night out in Wrigleyville

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Part 1

It started with us in the morning, part of the sleepy-happy contingent of the brunchtime crowd. A certain segment of Chicago treats its Sundays very well. They start the day with food at bars, outdoor patios with breezes and skies and, in this case, an entire cycling team dressed in 312 beer gear.

We ate inside, chasing away the last night’s booze with biscuits, gravy and eggs.  Tired and light-sensitive, we giggled and talked about people we know who have weird jobs. A group of young women at the next table discussed cell phone payment plans. Roscoe Village spun by through the window, but it didn’t matter to our coffee, juice and shy laughs.

Somewhere, people were drinking bloody marys. And somewhere people had cold cereal. And somewhere people were sleeping in or riding bikes or doing something more sad and lonely that I don’t want to think about. Throughout this town, people were getting ready however they get ready for a day still fat with possibility.

Part 2

The evening of a pleasant summer Sunday turned the coffee into wine and the eggs into chicken. People still eat outside, of course. Now it’s the dinner diners’ turn. They take over the streets of gentrifying Chicago Avenue, one or two patios a block with thigh-high fencing marking off a chunk of the sidewalk for tables and food.

I walked alone now, taking a dusky stroll in place of the more far-reaching Chicago exploration my ailing car prevented. I’ve got to take it into the shop again.

The dinner diner crowd is a bit fancier than the brunch one. Sure, some brunchers are very fancy indeed, and some of the restaurants had table after table of evening-eating slobs. But whole swaths of diners had been cut off by the day. There were no sleepy, happy couples still wearing the previous day’s clothes. There were no trios of friends who looked like they just wandered by and plopped in for food.

The nighttime crowd looked like they planned to be there. There were older couples on casual nights out, groups of middle-aged buddies shooting shit over a leisurely dinner.

There was no sense of hurry with this crowd, no one checking their watch to make sure too much of the day hadn’t slipped by. This wasn’t a ritual preparation for a potential-laden morning. This was a victory celebration for a pleasant kill, a simple day quietly defeated.

Look, look, see, see. See how the diners dine.

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Read about a more adventurous way to spend some time

Many someones, it seems. They remember this young woman — killed at 20 in 2009 — through what’s known as a ghost bike. That’s a bicycle painted white and left as a memorial near the spot a cyclist was killed in a crash.

Liza’s bike is covered in flowers. It sits on the corner of Wellington and Damen, a spot I’ve gone by hundreds of times. It has angel wings on the back. It has a replica Eiffel Tower — Liza studied French at Loyola, a quick Google tells.

I never knew Liza, of course. I can’t speak to the loss of someone so young, so happy and vibrant from all the accounts I’ve found. She had family and friends — has family and friends. I can imagine their loss the same way I can imagine walking on Mars. I can’t.

I’ve lost people, of course. We all have. But implying any pain is the same or talking about the human condition always seemed a bit cruel to me, like the priest who just talks about the Resurrection in a eulogy because he barely knew the person in the casket.

Death isn’t universal. I’ve never lost a Liza.

So this is a story about Liza’s bike.

It’s beautiful. Some ghost bikes — they exist here and there — fall into disrepair. The tires go flat, the sign giving the name gets dingy. Not Liza’s. It seems eternally fresh.

I like the bike because it reminds me and the rest of the cyclists on the road to be safe. I don’t mean Liza wasn’t, but sometimes I zig when I should zag, look at a pretty tree when I should keep eyes glued. Liza’s bike reminds me horrible things can happen to the best biker. I’m not that person, so I should watch the road all the more.

I like it because it’s simple. All the best tributes are.

But mostly I like Liza Whitacre’s ghost bike because it made me wonder about this name on a sign on the side of a white-painted bike and the two dates that subtracted made 20. It made me do a quick Google and find out about this happy, vibrant person I would otherwise have never heard of. Bits of trivia, but bits that made me happy this person was alive.

I’ve gotten maudlin. Now I’m the stranger priest.

I wish the bike didn’t exist. I wish it didn’t have to. But I’m glad the people who did know and love this person created a place where they could share their memories.

And as a person who passes that memorial relatively often, I’m glad the form they chose is as beautiful as the night sky.

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Read about Liza Whitacre

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