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DSK–Citizenship Edition

(Postings will only be on Monday and Thursday this week and the next. Traveling.)

Many of the staff at the DSK biergarten, my local for the last few years, have volunteered that they make good money working at the bar. Even so, many have left. This is hardly surprising. Most of them have interests outside waiting on tables or bartending, and they move on to those other things.

My favorite of the servers who has left I will call Aylin. When I learned her background, I said that she was a New Yorker’s nightmare: a German Muslim. She was born in Germany to Turkish parents who had emigrated to Germany. She has spent a lot of time in Turkey, and we talked about that country frequently. She taught me where the accent should go for the last name of the Nobel-Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. She, somewhat shyly, said that she had not read any of his books, and I dusted off a Pamuk book or two I owned and gave them to her.

She was an undergraduate studying psychology, and while a DSK server, fell in love with an American citizen. She was in the US on a student visa but wanted to stay here after she finished her undergraduate degree. She knew that she could get permanent resident status if she married an American. Aylin and her boyfriend, in an ideal world, would have waited a year or two more before marriage, but with her student visa expiring soon, they planned to wed as quickly as they could.

Several of the DSK servers are not citizens, and from them I have learned that their immigration status affects many of their decisions, big and small, something that this native-born citizen seldom thinks about. And, of course, the anti-immigrant sentiments sweeping the country have, on some level or another, rattled nearly every one of them, even though all are here legally.

Aylin’s situation made me think back to a family who had Thanksgiving dinner with us for many years. The parents, both medical doctors who had been born in mainland China and were citizens there, had worked in the United States for a long time and had permanent resident status here. Their only daughter had been born in China, but she came to this country, not speaking a word of English, in the first grade. She attended public schools in the New Jersey town where her parents had bought a house. By the sixth grade, she won the English, and other school academic, prizes. She had her choice of colleges, and after attending a prestigious one worked in a management consultant firm before heading off to one of the country’s top medical schools. She may have been born in China, but she was an American woman who soon married and started a family.

The daughter said that she was planning to become an American citizen and asked her parents to get American citizenship, too. The mother talked to me about whether she should become an American citizen. She said that it would be hard to give up her Chinese citizenship; she had grown up as a Chinese citizen and it had always been a part of her identity. I don’t really understand dual citizenship, but America apparently allows a naturalized citizen to keep their original citizenship, at least if they come from certain countries. Many countries, but not all, are fine with dual citizenship, but some require that people lose their original citizenship when they become naturalized in the US. China apparently does not allow dual citizenship, or at least it does not allow it with the United States. My Chinese friend, if she became an American citizen, would no longer be a Chinese citizen; she would be a foreigner in her birth place, her original home.

I listened and understood. Whenever I have thought of starting a new life in another country, I knew that it would be hard to stop thinking of myself as American and even harder to relinquish my citizenship. But I asked the mother, “Do you plan to stay in the United States?” She said yes. I said that in that case I thought she should get American citizenship. We were talking years ago when anti-immigrant feelings were strong, but not as strong as now. I told her that I did not trust this country and its feelings towards those who were not citizens. I was not predicting this, but there was always the possibility that the country would strip today’s permanent residents of that status. There is no guarantee that the present system will continue, I told her. If you know you want to stay in the US, be safe and become a citizen. Both she and her daughter did.

Her husband, however, did not. This is not because he has stronger psychological ties to China. He was a victim of the cultural revolution, something he has great difficulty talking about and was very upset about the government’s actions during the protests at Tiananmen Square. His Chinese citizenship, however, has family advantages. He can simply get on a plane and go to China. Now that the mother and daughter are American citizens, they no longer can. They must get visas, which means traveling to a consulate and generally encountering long lines, other delays, and officious bureaucracy. Trips back “home” for them must be planned well in advance, but not for the father as long he retains his Chinese citizenship. The mother and father were concerned that if any of their parents in China or other relatives got sick or had some other emergency, no one could get there in time if they all became American citizens.

This American family had considerations most of the rest of us Americans never had to weigh.

(continued November 8)

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=DSK

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Running to Work (concluded)

When I left my job in White Plains and began to work in lower Manhattan, my running-commute continued, but now I regularly ran both to and from work. The route over the Brooklyn Bridge was a bit over three miles, which at this point was a bagatelle. When pressed for time, however, I used the Brooklyn Bridge. If I was not in a rush, I went over the Williamsburg Bridge, which is north of my home and north of where I worked. This U-shaped route was five or six miles long, and if I took the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning and the Williamsburg going home, I had put in a respectable daily mileage.

I had run the Brooklyn Bridge route so many times that most of it was boring, but the longer way brought me to neighborhoods I enjoyed going through. The route from my office to the Williamsburg Bridge had me wend through Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Sometimes I would stop in shops that looked interesting. One favorite was an old bagel shop. They mostly made bagels for delivery to other outlets, but they did have a retail counter where I would make a few purchases. My choices were limited. The shop was old school, or maybe it was alt shul.  No fifteen kinds of bagels. No pumpernickel or pesto or even cinnamon raisin. They made only a plain bagel, which was smaller and denser than what was even then becoming accepted as a bagel (the Wonder-Bread-inspired “bagels” are often correctly referred to as a BSO, a bagel-shaped object.) The bake shop rounded out their offerings only with bialys, a treat that has inexplicably almost disappeared, and a torpedo-shaped onion loaf. The products selection was limited, but all were delicious.

I also stopped in a Lower East Side store whose stock was hard to characterize. The dominant items were small appliances, but it also had a little of this and little of that. I learned not to assume that they did not have something simply because I did not see it. Ask, was the motto for this place. “Do you have a squeeze bottle with a star-shaped tip?” Or, “Do you have lefthanded pinking shears?” Often the answer was, “Let me see.” The owner would disappear somewhere for a few moments—maybe in the back or upstairs or the basement—and often came back with the requested item. I primarily stopped there to buy carbon dioxide cartridges, which were then hard to find, that I used in a seltzer bottle.

The owner and I sometimes chatted a bit. I learned that he lived on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge and often walked to work and that his father had started the business. I learned a little about his kids, but almost never heard about his wife. He asked about my work, and when he learned where I grew up, he asked about Wisconsin. He was fascinated by it, perhaps because it seemed so foreign to him, a person who seemed to have spent his life in a couple of square miles on either side of the East River. I, however, showed my unsophistication with him. It was the season of the Jewish High Holy Days, and I knew Yom Kippur was approaching. I thought that that was the start of a new year on the Jewish calendar, and I wished him a happy new year. By the look on his face, I discerned that this was not an appropriate comment. Only then did I remember that Yom Kippur was a day of reflection, fasting, and atonement, not a time of celebration. The store owner said nothing about my faux pas.

In those days, Manhattan’s Lower East Side had a strong Jewish presence. When I got over the bridge I was in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was the home of many Hasidic Jews. Their distinctive dress makes them stand out in most places, but they were so common in Williamsburg after a while I did not notice the adults much. From having seen them elsewhere in New York I, without consciously thinking about it, assumed that none was good-looking, and all were frumpily dressed. (Does this make me prejudiced?)  I had to reassess my views. The young orthodox boys fit my preconceptions, but many of the young girls were attractive and stylishly dressed. I found that there were discounted dress shops for girls in Williamsburg, and I bought the last dress that the daughter regularly wore at one of them. But the good looks and the stylishness of those young girls seemed to decline each year as they got older. Or maybe I just got older.

I did not stop in as many stores in Williamsburg as I did in the Lower East Side. While the Lower East Side shops were Jewish owned, they seemed to cater to all those who ventured in. The Hasid shops of Williamsburg primarily seemed to exist for other Hasids. I would stop occasionally in a bakery on my way home to get some poppy seed bread, but without the beard and sideburn ringlets and in my running clothes with uncovered arms and legs, I felt unwelcome and stopped going.

My running attire, however, did not prevent me from being stopped one Friday evening by an Orthodox Jew as a ran through his neighborhood.  He politely inquired whether I was a Jewish.  I said that I was not. He pressed on and asked if my purported lack of Jewishness was because I was a lapsed Jew. Again, I said that I was not. (I don’t know if it would have made a difference to him if I then knew what one of those DNA-testing companies much later told me—I am four percent Ashkenazi Jew) After determining this pedigree, he asked if I would do him the favor of coming into the house and turning off his over. He was forbidden to do so on the sabbath. This was the only time, and it was only because of running, that I got the experience of being a shabbat goy.

 

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bridges

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Running to Work

The New York City Marathon this year is on November 4. The runners pass on the street at the foot of our block. Most years, the spouse and I go and cheer and chat with our neighbors who are out doing the same thing. Not this year, however. I will be out of the country when the marathon makes its way through my neighborhood, but the approach of that event always makes me think back to the times when I ran that marathon and about my running days in general.

Running just seems boring to many people, but I never found it so. For some, running is a form of meditation where an activity takes a person out of themselves into a different realm. On occasion I felt that. But mostly I think about the new experiences I got and the discoveries I made because I ran.

After I had run for a while, I decided to try a marathon, and I ran two marathons a year—one in the fall and another in the spring. Several months before the scheduled date, I would start increasing my weekly mileage with the goal of running seventy miles a week in the month before the race. I looked for ways to integrate running into my life so that the time it took to put in the miles would be less burdensome. An obvious way was to incorporate running into my commutes to work.

When I prepared for my first marathon, I worked several days a week in White Plains, a community north of New York City. My normal commute in the morning was to take the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central Terminal. Then I caught a train to White Plains. The subway ride to Grand Central took about a half hour. I found that I could run that distance in about fifty minutes, so, I figured, that the run only took twenty minutes out of my day. I ran with a backpack in which I carried a towel and some dry clothes. At Grand Central, I would duck into the men’s room, towel off, and put on the fresh clothes. I kept stashes of clothes in my office, and when I got there, I would shower and change into work attire.

I varied my route to Grand Central. This not only gave me different mileages on different days, but it allowed me to see parts of New York City that I did not ordinarily see, and seeing new things was one of ways to keep running interesting.

Some days I substituted running for a different part of the commute. I would take the subway to Grand Central but get off the commuter train before White Plains and run to my office from these intermediate stops. I was not very familiar with the suburbs I was running through and this added to a sense of discovery that running gave me.

I furthered to my geographical knowledge when I had extra time. I would take the subway to a stop in the Bronx, the borough north of Manhattan and south of Westchester County’s White Plains. I discovered long runs through parks in the Bronx and Westchester County, parks that I otherwise would never have known about.

These running patterns changed after a few years of working in the suburbs when I bought a car to get to my office. I often worked until 10 PM. I did not run that late, and the commute by public transportation at that hour was longer than in the morning or afternoon and, frankly, often scary. The car got me home much quicker at night, and I felt safer.

But I used that car for running, too. I would find some place in between home and White Plains to park the car, get out, and run in an area I would not otherwise have gone to.  I ran the circumference of Roosevelt Island in the East River; I ran on the paths of Bronx and Westchester Parks; I ran the narrow streets of City Island, that seaside village that, surprisingly, is part of New York City. Except for that car and the running, I am not sure that I ever would have seen it and such places as Orchard Beach and Pelham Parkway and the dam up in Westchester, all spectacular places in their own ways.

 

(concluded November 2)

 

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bridges

 

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Snippets

Ads on a local radio station promoting civic engagement say that New York has among the lowest voter turnouts in the country. (It is not clear whether New York City or the state or both are being referred to.) At least part of the reason for that is the lack of truly contested elections. New York is electing its top state official, the governor. While this is nominally contested, the victor is already clear. Similarly, the state is electing a United States Senator, and that result also seems certain. In my House of Representatives district, the Republicans don’t even have someone on the ballot. Democrats in my district for the state senate and assembly are also unopposed. Only one candidate is listed for the Surrogate’s Court. I can vote for seven other judicial slots. In six of those “races,” the Republicans and Democrats have nominated the same candidate. There are, however, three proposals on the ballot. I don’t know how they will come out. On the other hand, I was not even aware of them until a week ago, and I am not sure that I understand them. Why vote?

 

I am going to vote, but it will be by absentee ballot. I have been supplied an envelope for my ballot. Where the stamps go, the envelope states that sufficient postage must be affixed and continues, “Inquire at the post office as to amount of postage necessary.” Couldn’t one person at the Board of Elections have figured out the necessary postage and stated it on the envelope instead of ordering the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of us voting absentee to go individually to the post office?

 

I want legislation passed that all networks and local stations showing the same sport must use the same in-game graphics. ESPN has one set of graphics and FOX another and so on. I am tired of trying to decipher each one. I should, for example, only have to learn once how the count on a batter is displayed or how many yards for a first down. While they’re at it, please require that everything is big enough so that I can easily see it.

 

What does it mean that some people want secure borders but don’t care about secure elections?

 

An expression I heard for the first time. The man walking behind me answered his phone and told his caller where he was, which was a New York neighborhood with stately homes. After a pause, he said, “I was looking at a studio apartment.” Pause. “It was nice, but it was a boat cavity, but that’s New York.” Pause. “A boat cavity.” Pause. “It was all wood.”

 

News stories tell me about “early voting.” I am confused. I understand that I can be early for a movie, a dinner party, or a doctor’s appointment. That means I have arrived before the scheduled time, and I will have to wait for the movie, the dinner, or the doctor. But if I show up at the polls and am allowed to vote, how can I be early? I have arrived during the scheduled time for voting.

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The Play’s the (Limited) Thing (concluded)

The dramatist Elmer Rice thought that plays don’t have lasting power because they have to be produced, but he also thought they did not last because plays are written for a group audience, and this limits their quality. The author of a book seeks wide readership, but in an important sense that writer really composes for an audience of one, the solitary reader who can choose where and when to read.  That author has a freedom in determining at what level to pitch his writing. He can seek an audience of an academic, a trained professional, a serious reader, or pitch to a mass market. He can aim for literary or intellectual merit and have a chance of finding the right readership.

The dramatist’s audience, in contrast, requires a group of individuals assembled together at a particular time and place to experience the work together.  The socially indelicate or controversial book can be read in private, but a dramatic performance is public, which makes it subject to many forms of public scrutiny and influence that have little or nothing to do with drama as art. Furthermore, theater-going is generally not inexpensive and the audience is largely limited to the upper economic class. Rice thought that such audiences generally sought mere entertainment and were not particularly sophisticated, having on average, less understanding of the art they are perceiving than concert-goers, visitors to art exhibitions, or readers of serious books. “Rocketing costs have increased the professional theater’s dependence upon an audience that is likely to be better equipped with money than with taste.”

Furthermore, a play’s audience does not have an advantage of the book audience.  The reader can always thumb back if something has been missed, but the playgoer cannot requiring the playwright to repeat important information sometimes undercutting the artistic integrity of the work. “The audience must move forward with the performers, and what is not instantly grasped is forever lost.”

Equally important, Rice felt that the collective behavior of any group, including an audience, was different from the private reactions of individuals.  Writing in mid-career in an introduction to a British collection of his plays, Rice concluded that for whatever reason, those in a group “assume a uniformity of conduct, a sort of common denominator, . .  . which is far below the habitual level of the more intelligent . . . members of the group. . . . [The dramatist] is handicapped by the low level of his audience, which imposes upon him the necessity of over-simplifying and over-emphasizing his points in order to make them at all.” Even so, Rice pronounced “that almost any play is considerably above the level of the audience which it attracts. Anyone who has listened to the comments of an audience, during or after the performance, can say without hesitation that at least one-half of those present have no definite notion of what the author has been driving at, or even what the play is about.”  Rice concluded, “Why, then, is the lot of the dramatist more unhappy than that of his fellow-artists?  For the simple reason that he cannot address himself to the individual judgments of the scattered few to whom he may have something to say. The very nature of his art demands an organisation of his audience, in space and in time. If he writes plays for the theatre, he cannot fail to take the theatre heavily into account; if he writes plays for the library, he is no longer wholly a dramatist.”

Rice was not alone in seeing the limitations brought by a group audience. Maugham wrote that when assembled as a group, its members only want limited ideas. An audience “likes novelty, but a novelty that will fit in with old notions, so that it excites but does not alarm. It likes ideas, so long as they are put in dramatic form, only they must be ideas that it has itself had, but for want of courage has never expressed.” Arthur Miller agreed after seeing a Greek theater in Sicily that could hold 14,000 that it is “hard to grasp how the tragedies could have been written for such massive crowds when in our time the mass audience all but demanded vulgarization.”

Even with these pessimistic thoughts about the limitations of plays, however, Rice did not abandon the theater. He continued to write play after play, sometimes merely to entertain, sometimes to experiment with form, and sometimes to present ideas. He apparently saw drama’s inherent limitations as a challenge to surmount, and at least some of the time, he succeeded well enough to produce worthy plays.

And even though I appreciate the limited reach of plays, I continue to go because some of the time a production succeeds in producing a memorable event.

Related Posts:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=theatre

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=broadchurch

 

 

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The Play’s the (Limited) Thing

I go to plays even though I am convinced, largely from the writings of Elmer Rice, that plays are a limited art form. Rice, who lived from 1892 to 1967, did many things. He wrote several novels and many short stories, essays, book reviews, and movie, television, and radio scripts. He directed and produced stage performances, helped run theater organizations, and was a noted civil libertarian. But first and foremost, Rice was a prolific and successful playwright. About thirty of his plays were produced on Broadway, and some of his two dozen unproduced plays were published. In 1914, when he was only twenty-one, his1914 On Trial stormed Broadway with its new technique of flashbacks. His expressionist The Adding Machine in 1923 helped usher in a new dramatic era. His 1929 naturalistic Street Scene ran for 601 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize. Dream Girl, a delightful comedy, was a hit in 1945. He wrote plays of political comment, including We the People (1933), Judgment Day (1934) and Flight to the West (1940), which provoked controversies. More than four decades after his debut, Cue for Passion (1958) opened on Broadway.  As a result of this career, in 1958 a writer in the New York Times labeled him, not extravagantly, “Dean of Playwrights.” A student of the theater, Robert Allan Davison later said, “Throughout a fifty-three-year career, Rice showed genius, talent, and wisdom in his exploration of universal and timeless issues through the finely wrought specifics of his drama. Among the forty of his plays produced or published during his lifetime are some of the finest and most innovative plays in the history of the American Theatre.”

Today, however, even though a play of his is occasionally revived, Elmer Rice is largely forgotten even by the play-going public. He would probably not be surprised by his present obscurity because he maintained that although dramatic masterpieces may always endure, the work of a first-rate playwright was less likely to last than the work of other good writers. Rice thought that plays have a limited lasting potential because they are written to be performed, not merely published and read. He noted that “a play that is unperformed quickly falls into oblivion from which it is seldom rescued,” but a play’s production is an expensive, complicated affair. Large amounts of money and the assembled talents of many are required in addition to an author’s words, and each day a play runs continues to bring significant expenses. A new play almost always has to be instantly successful to last more than a brief time, and if its initial production does not succeed, it is unlikely ever to be produced again.  For a play to generate that audience, it must almost always get favorable comments from the handful of critics attending opening night. A result is that few plays are initially produced, few will continue in production or be re-produced, and consequently few will have the chance to endure. Since the producer knows he needs an immediate, sizeable audience to recoup his investment, Rice wrote, “His choice of plays to be produced is determined by his judgment of their potential popularity. This state of things does not make for the choice of plays of great depth or literary value.”

Books are different. Many more books are printed each year than plays are produced. Less money is required to publish a book than to mount a play. Novels, unlike plays, often survive when not immediately successful and even without favorable reviews. While some book reviewers are more influential than others, a book may receive many reviews around the country with none being decisive. And since a distribution system is in place when a book is published, it continues to remain available after its publication date.  Rice noted in his 1959 book about the social structure of the theater, The Living Theatre, “Even if time is required to overcome adverse reviews, it costs nothing to keep the books on the shelves while the public demand develops.”  Consequently, for books, unlike plays, positive word-of-mouth can build over months and years, bringing new audiences to a book long after it is published.

W. Somerset Maugham is a case in point. He may not be considered a major writer today, but you can still find books containing his stories and novels. As long as you can, Maugham’s works still live as does the work of any novelist or short story writer if there is someone somewhere still reading it. Maugham, however, was also a successful playwright–he had ten plays produced in seven years with several of them running simultaneously in London. Few now have the opportunity to see those stage pieces. Without productions, those works, even if first-rate, cannot live. If he only wrote plays, Maugham’s name would be recognized by almost no one today. Even though successful, Maugham stopped writing plays. He concluded in The Summing Up, a book of reflections, “that a prose play was scarcely less ephemeral than a news sheet” and abandoned the theater.

(concluded on October 26)

Related Posts:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=theatre

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=broadchurch

 

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First Car. First Day in Court (concluded)

 

I was quick to find injustice in those days, and a ticket for an unsafe vehicle because my car did not have a bumper struck me as a major injustice. No one else of Chicago’s Finest apparently saw a dangerous car when I drove past them. What was it with this one cop who viewed my beloved transportation differently? I was not wimpishly going to pay the fine. No! I was going to fight. I sent the ticket in with an angry slash across the not-guilty box, knowing it would mean a trip to traffic court.

I was a law student after all, and I knew how to do legal research. In these pre-computer-research-days, this required hitting the books and took some time. I could not find any case that said a car without a front bumper was unsafe. On the other hand, I did not find a case that said such a car was kosher. I started to look for legal definitions of “unsafe vehicle” in cases and statutes. I read all legal decisions that had any mention of a bumper. Using what legal writing skill I had obtained, I wrote a memorandum explaining why I had not violated the law. A car was unsafe, I said, if some condition made it unreasonably dangerous for the driver or passengers of the car or for other drivers, passengers, cars, or pedestrians and cited cases to that effect. The absence of the front bumper did not increase the risk to anyone or any other vehicle. Mine did not meet the definition of an unsafe vehicle. The point to a bumper, an insurance case suggested, was to protect the car from excessive damage, not to protect others. Q.E.D.

Taking public transportation, I went off to traffic court on the appointed day. I found a huge, packed room with a judge upfront, a court officer hovering near him, and a prosecuting attorney off to the side. Cases were called. People moved forward. Things were said at the front of the room that I could not hear. Stuff was happening, but I had no idea what it was.

I heard something like a reasonable facsimile of my name announced. I went forward and stood in front of the bench. The judge asked me how I was pleading. I said that I was not guilty. I continued that I was charged with driving an unsafe vehicle because my car did not have a front bumper and that, after research, it was clear that a car sans fender was not legally unsafe. I started to hand up to him my legal argument that I had worked on for a couple days. He looked not so much bemused as condescending and told me to hand my only copy of the papers to the prosecutor and that we would discuss my argument after the prosecutor had a chance to read what I had written.

After a recess, my case was called again. The prosecutor said he had read my pages, which he held, and continued, “I think this young man has a good point.” I tried not to smile, but I am sure that I beamed. Being a lawyer was going to be great! Visions of future, momentous victories flashed before me. Then the judge, without lifting his eyes from whatever was occupying him on the bench and without asking either the prosecutor or me anything, said, “I don’t. Guilty. That will be a $75 fine and court costs.” And my first episode of legal advocacy ended.

Shortly after this day of ignominy, I drove three hours to the ancestral home. The father, although clearly not pleased with my car purchase, came up with a solution. He got a 2 x 6 piece of lumber, cut it to the width of the car, and bolted it to the front of my beloved VW. Before doing so, he even lovingly put on a coat of varnish that gave the wood an orange tint that almost made it blend in with the many rust spots on the car.

I never again got stopped for driving an unsafe vehicle, but when I looked at that bolted-on hunk of solid wood, I would think that if I ever nudged a pedestrian with it, he or she would more likely need an ACL repair than if it were not there. Without it, the pedestrian would have come in contact with the sloping “trunk”—the engine was in the rear and storage went up front (although it could not have held more than a half-filled duffle bag). The trunk’s lid was made of such thin sheet metal that it looked as if it would crumple if sneezed on and that hypothetical pedestrian would have had the impact cushioned. The car was more unsafe with that board.

I had that car for another six months. On a trip to visit a friend in Madison, thick black smoke started billowing out of the engine in some godforsaken part of Wisconsin—the first of a succession of cars that went kaput in highly inconvenient places. I limped into a garage/service station and sold it on the spot for $25 and called my friend to pick me up.

But that first day in court did teach me a lesson that I was to carry forward to the time when I was an actual attorney: Never trust a judge.

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

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First Car. First Day in Court (continued).

 

My first car, bought to get me from my inexpensive neighborhood to my Chicago law school, had some problems. The inside handle on the driver’s side did not work. I would have to lower the window and open the door from the outside to get out. It did not have a radio. I bought a small transistor radio and propped it on the dashboard so I could listen to the great Larry Lujack. That soon got stolen, and I learned to hide the radio when I parked the car. The heat could not be turned off, which was a considerable defect in a sweltering Chicago summer. It did not have a gas gauge. It had a reserve tank. A lever needed to be turned when the car was filled up and then flipped back. When the main gas tank emptied, the lever would be flipped back for more gas. The first time I drove the car, I ran out of gas, but nothing happened when I engaged the reserve tank. It had not been filled. I coasted to a stop in some not entirely safe place and trudged to a filling station for a can of gas. I learned to note the mileage when I filled up so that I could determine when I needed gas. The car was underpowered. On the highway, it was pedal to the metal, but even so, that VW could not make seventy. To pass a truck on the interstate that was going a few miles an hour slower, I would have to channel my NASCAR and get as close to the semi as possible to draft it, and then pull sharply to the left to slingshot myself around it. Scary, but, hey, I was young. The girlfriend—soon to be the spouse—did not appreciate the skill and derring-do of the maneuver. I learned that the road surfaces in Wisconsin and Illinois must have had slightly different compositions, because the car went a tad faster in Wisconsin. When the temperatures hovered near zero, as they often did in those Chicago winters, the car might not start, but if I could get the car rolling down even the slightest of hills or from pushing, I could pop the clutch, and the car would spring (an exaggeration) to life.

The car, however, had positive qualities. The steering and brakes worked, and it took me to many parts of Chicago I would not have otherwise experienced. I loved that car.

But it had one other flaw: It did not have a front bumper. This seemed unimportant. It had no effect on my driving. The steering was not affected. The brakes were not affected. But one day driving in perhaps a part of Chicago that was the farthest away from the university campus and my apartment, I was pulled over by a police officer. I had not been speeding. I didn’t think that I had run a light or a stop sign. I lowered my window, and the officer did that slow walk over to my car. (Are they taught not to walk quickly to a car they pulled over? Is this done to increase the pulled-over driver’s tension? Does that tension serve a purpose or do the cops just like increasing the driver’s concern? Is it merely a little power play?) “Your car does not have a front bumper,” the uniformed man said. He imparted this wisdom as if the fender must have just fallen off and I had not notice or that I had not otherwise been aware that in the bumper department the car was deficient to the tune of one. I said, “Yes.” He said, “You are driving an unsafe vehicle,” pronouncing that last word in three distinct syllables with the last one sounding like ‘kill’. I had run my course of snappy comebacks and was quiet for a bit but finally responded, “I wasn’t aware that made it unsafe.” This was the truth; I had never before contemplated this particular issue. I waited; he pondered. He broke the silence. “I am just giving you a warning. Get it fixed.” I thanked him. He walked more quickly back to his vehicle and drove off.

I didn’t know where to get a bumper for an old VW or who would attach it. I did figure that it would probably cost more than the car was worth–money I did not have. By then I had driven the car for more than half a year all over Chicago. The car, no doubt, had been seen by many police officers who apparently had not considered it a death-dealing or maiming missile. I had only been in the Chicago neighborhood where I had been stopped by happenstance. I determined that it would be easy to avoid it in the future where that one cop was stationed. So, I did; I stayed out of it.

I continued to drive it to school and many other parts of Chicago, Illinois, and Wisconsin without a problem. Then months later I saw the bubble light of a cop car behind me in the university neighborhood, and I pull over. Wondering what I had done wrong, I looked at the rear view mirror to see a cop slowly, slowly approaching me. It was the same friggin’ one who stopped me before! He immediately said, “I see you didn’t get it fixed. You’re getting a ticket for an unsafe vehicle.” And he immediately wrote it out.

(Concluded on October 22)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

 

 

Posted on by rjonakait

First Car. First Day in Court.

My first car led to my first day in court. I loved that car. I had different emotions about that court appearance.

I was in law school in Chicago. Part of the reason I was in law school there was because I had wanted to live in a big city. I had grown up in a small Wisconsin town and gone to a New Jersey college that seemed, and in many ways was, isolated from the world. Even so, that college had been good for me. My high school education had been adequate at best, and the college presented, through its professors, courses, and classmates, new intellectual frontiers. I learned much there, including that I could more than hold myself with the “best.” In our self-congratulatory way, all of us at the college–students, faculty and administrators–placed ourselves in that “best” category. We were the elite.

The school also exposed me to new social settings. My town had only public high schools, but now I encountered a prep school culture. My father was a janitor, and almost all my classmates came from higher, often much higher, economic circumstances. I learned not to be intimidated by money and social standing.

After a while, however, the conformity and the political and societal apathy the place generated began to weigh on me. There was a bigger world. I spent quite a few college weekends taking the bus into New York and walking its streets, which, to me in those days, meant the streets of Manhattan. I felt drawn to the bustle and energy and was convinced that I needed to experience big city life. Law school presented that opportunity.

My classmates who had their choice of law schools overwhelmingly opted for the one in what I thought was in another isolated spot. I did not want to be in New Haven, but I thought Boston would be ok. Even though I had become fascinated with New York, almost no one, if they had other choices, opted for what was then the law school there, and I, too, fell into that category. The feeling about Chicago was even stronger, not because the law school did not have prestige, but because it was in Chicago. While I admit that I had absorbed some East Coast snobbery, I did not fear the Midwest. After all, I had grown up there.

After the admission letters arrived, twenty-one of us could choose between New Haven and Boston. Nineteen picked Connecticut; one chose Massachusetts. I was the only one who picked Illinois.

Money was the deciding factor. Chicago was certainly a city, and in those days, I also put Boston in that category. But I wasn’t going to law school just to get out of small-town life. I actually did want to become a lawyer. However, I knew that I was not going to be the kind of lawyer who would make much money (some predictions turn out to be true). I was going to be the kind of lawyer who fought for civil liberties and civil rights, for the downtrodden, against “the man,” be that corporations or the government.

I did not have the resources to pay for law school. I needed financial aid. The new Haven and Chicago schools offered respectable aid packages, and I thought that along with part-time work, I could manage. The Boston school, however, dangled a package that was half scholarship and half loan. If I matriculated there, by graduation I would have what a sizeable debt. I did not want loan payments to be a determinant of what kind of legal position I would have to take upon graduation. So off I went to Chicago with its scholarship offer. I wrote to the other schools explaining the reasons for my Chicago choice, hoping they would up their antes. New Haven responded with a gracious congratulatory note. Boston wrote, in effect, that it did not have to buy students and that it was not unhappy to see me go elsewhere.

I started to experience Chicago. It was scary and exhilarating and had many places to explore and experience. All of that excited me; I belonged in a big city. At first, I lived in the university neighborhood, but while it was in the city, it did not truly feel part of the city. It was its own enclave, and I wanted more of the real Chicago. Besides the apartment was terrible. I found a cheap apartment (no central heat) several miles west of the campus in one of Chicago’s many ethnic neighborhoods—this one was primarily Polish-American. But now I needed a car to get to my classes. I went to used car lots and found a VW beetle. The odometer said something like 50,000 miles, but that I am sure was misleading. Either it meant 150,000 or it had been turned back. The dealership did not seem high on the integrity scale. The spare tire, which was in the car when I first saw it, had disappeared when I bought it, which I only discovered some time later. It cost $300, which I did not have, but the brother lent me money.

(continued on Oct.19)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Supposedly when Margot Asquith met Jean Harlow, Harlow kept pronouncing all the letters in Margot.  In exasperation, Asquith finally said, “The ‘t’ in Margot is silent just like the ‘t’ in Harlow.”

“That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of desire.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The ad for a New York City restaurant said: “Farm to table Greek food.” I had some questions.

Because of recent movies and documentaries, clips are being played of the most famous passage from President John F. Kennedy’s Let’s-Go-Mooning Speech: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Memorable. Inspirational. But piffle. No country, no one, should choose to do something because it is hard. Building a perpetual motion machine is hard. Turning lead into gold is hard. Hopping on one foot for twenty-four straight hours is hard. Their difficulty is not a reason to commit to attempting them. The easiness of doing something is also not a reason to do or not to do it. The starting point should not be the difficulty or ease of a project. The starting point should be whether the goal is worth the effort.

I sporadically post First Sentences. For whatever the reason, these are sentences that attract me. My standard is that it be the first sentence, and not more, of the introduction or the initial chapter of a book I am reading or one that I have read that is on my shelves. I don’t do research and find books that I have read but no longer have. If any such opening passages have intrigued you, please feel free to send them to me through the contact link so that I can post them.

A hurricane pummels a state rife with conservative politicians. These are the officeholders who, when running for office, label opponents as devoted to tax-and-spend, who decry Washington, who almost weep over Big Government. But in the aftermath of the storm they beseech Washington for tax dollars to be spent on them by big government agencies. Hypocrisy never seems to occur to them. Irony is beyond them.

The academic paper’s “basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them.” Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain.