Roger Wright – Chicago

“Powerful women only cry in private.” flashed through her lightening sharp mind. “Especially about something as silly as Maria Shriver walking out on Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Outside her floor to ceiling window blankets of grey rain clouds settled over the roiling waves of Lake Michigan as if the clouds themselves were somehow trying to ease the water’s raw and bleeding pain.

A moment ago, Grace had thanked her assistant for the hot cup of tea, signed the ½ dozen documents, smiled and said, “Give me a minute.” And when she heard the steel tumblers click on her heavy oak door, she finally allowed herself the quiet tears.

“A Powerful woman.” She smiled through the tears. A friend had called her that recently. Her response? She rolled her eyes. Raised her middle finger. And said, “Shut up.”

But he went on. As all her friends tended to do. “Listen, I’m not talking Oprah power.”

“That’s good. Because I’m not buying you a car.”

“I already have a car. What I’m talking about is power in making a difference. That’s what this place does. People’s lives change here.”

“Not if the state keeps ducking out on paying its bills,” she answered.

“You need any help being cynical, just let me know,” he replied.

Remembering, she smiled and conceded that he did have a point. She was smart. She had the years, the ideals that she started with were in there somewhere, she had three brilliant, world changing sons, granddaughters, and friends. She did have a life. She ran one of Chicago’s preeminent social service non-profits. Maybe she wasn’t totally sold on the power part. But her life was good.

Yet here she was tearing up in the middle of a jam packed Tuesday afternoon because 30 years ago, when she didn’t have this big carpeted office overlooking the Lake and when she was just starting out, her husband had fathered a child with her best friend.

The kind of thing that only happened in TV movies. Not to real people. Maybe to famous people like Maria Shriver where that shame could be played out on the world stage like a circus side show.

But it also happened to her.

What did she do wrong? Where had she failed? She could see all the successes of her life looking no further than her granddaughter’s eyes. But then there was this. Like something had just died.

She took a sip of her hot tea, looking out at the grey horizon over the water and mused. What is it? The power some men have to persuade and deceive. And how otherwise strong, smart women get taken in by it. Or tolerate it. Or built elaborate gingerbread castles of self deception.

Maria Shriver has to leave her shame and her grief out there for the world to see. That’s worse, right?

Or is it worse to be silent. To never be able to shout to the world. Standing right here. At the top of a Chicago skyscraper, “My husband fathered a child by one of my best friends, a child born midway through my own first pregnancy!”

What would it be like to shout that story to the world?

Shout it and then say, in the calm measured tones of one who really did have her life together, “Oh. And here’s the rest of it. They kept the secret for 30 years. He took the secret to his grave.”

Only to be discovered by our sons as they went through his personal effects after he died.

Maria Shriver’s grief played out in public today.

Grace’s grief was unstuck in time. Floating through the years.

Grace’s grief was now. Now, when it was surfaced by Shriver’s story.

Grace’s grief was also back when her ex had died and her boys discovered their father’s secret.

Grace’s grief was even in the beginning. When life was all new.

Floating up into her mind as she watched the grey mist settle in over the rumbling city, a song she didn’t really remember all that well grabbed hold.

A young Emmy Lou Harris, singing out strong to the fiery canyon walls of grief for another kind of death. The death of her tender love, the groundbreaking musician Gram Parsons. A song called “Boulder To Birmingham.”

She remembered how the song, like a weary prayer to an unseen God, began with the line,

“I don’t want to hear another love song

I got on this airplane just to fly

And I know there’s life below me

But all that you can show me

Is the prairie and the sky.”

She remembered the eternal steel in the strong woman’s song. She remembered the line she liked the most. It came to her as she walked back from the window, sending out a prayer for Maria Shriver and all the other strong women who shared the larger story here.

Grace opened the door to her office to let the world in again just as she remembered Emmy Lou Harris’s best lyric ever. Reflecting on how Maria Shriver’s grief had once again brought back her own, Grace could hear Emmy Lou Harris singing,

“And the hardest part

Is knowing I’ll survive.”

http://youtu.be/lTry1yKvxZM

Mayor Daley. At the end of 22 years on the job.

It’s a story is about a person who was a perfect fit for the job. Not a perfect mayor. Not a perfect man. Not in this rusted steel bridge rising city.

Perfect fit means you were born to do the job.

Cheer him. Damn him. Decide you don’t care. The adoration or the damning isn’t even the point. It’s the fit between the between the person and the job that always took center stage.

That and his love for the place. Really loving where you live.

Look beyond Chicago. Stay with the idea of the perfect fit. What if “perfect fit’ became the lens through which we viewed any leader?

A touchstone for what really meant to be Mayor?

What if “perfect fit” was the real legacy of Richard M Daley?

This rough hewn fire plug of energy, who has lectured at Harvard and in Beijing, stood as the Dean of America’s Mayors.

What did I learn from watching him?

That “Fit” is what connects the soul to the work.

Start with Mayor Daley’s voice. High pitched. Staccato bursts of red faced, steaming raw energy. Loud.

You got to be loud here. In the teak paneled boardrooms where the big decisions are made, you can speak softly. But not when you are speaking to the city. Not on nightly jousts with the press, knowing full well that for a drama to come alive there must be conflict.

Not when the tired, beaten down Chicagoan is just getting home from work or trying to find work, and Mayor Daley is on TV being outraged. His rant with a signature phrase of “It’s like anything else.”

Like some wound up Uncle yelling in the kitchen. Your Dad might be watching the White Sox game in the living room, but Uncle Rich was yelling in the kitchen. And somehow Uncle Rich’s yelling made the day bearable.

Course it’s not just about talking. There was that time he decided to rip up an airport. In the dead of night. Bulldozers rumbling in military formation towards what once was called Meigs Field. Slashing the concrete runways where rich guys once landed their planes. And now that airport is a park. A beautiful lakeside park.

Because the Mayor wanted it that way.

There is horror at that kind of power. But there is also a park.

And in the quiet, just before going up to bed moments of a man and a woman standing at the front window of their red brick bungalow on the Northwest Side of the city, the woman says, “How about that Mayor Daley?” And the man softly chuckles and says, “You know, we haven’t been downtown lately. Maybe we should go Saturday?”

In those quiet moments was the work of a man who was a perfect fit for his job.

That same man and woman from the bungalow hop on an elevated train that Saturday.

And as they wind their way towards the city, gliding over the rooftops of the homes where people just do the best they can to live their lives, they are surrounded by the trees! Everywhere you look there are trees. Even on the roof of City Hall, a giant garden. And as the boulevards come into sight they see flowers. Running down the middle of the boulevards there are flowers. They get off their Brown Line train, walk downstairs to the street and then east to Millennium Park, and this island of collective, peace just rises up and grabs any weary heart who wanders in and its as if the park had a voice that says, “Here. Right here. There is beauty. And you can have some too.”

Once Millennium Park was a rail road yard. Now it’s an Urban Park to rival any in the world.

Once Chicago was a study in grey toned, smoky belching steam tunnel, cut you now and cut you bad. Now there are flowers and trees. Not enough. Or in all the needed places. But there are flowers where their once were none.

All that on Mayor Daley’s watch.

Of course the death spiral income disparity rampant across the country isn’t any different here than anywhere else.

And with struggle comes sorrow. There are still the ancient, unchangeable winds of deeply rooted sorrow.

But he communicates sorrow in the midst of the everyday business of doing his job.

Here’s what it looks like.

He walks through crowds every day of his working life. He roams the city in his car looking for pot holes, abandoned buildings, tell tale signs of drug dealing and violence, he writes down the problems and the addresses, barks out orders on the phone to get stuff fixed.

And when he encounters the deeper sorrows that come in the midst of 8 million people together, his wild Irish heart will remember out loud his two year old son Kevin, passed away so very many years ago. The man has known sorrow. So we share that with him.

In Mike Royko’s classic book on Mayor Daley’s father, “Boss” one finds a master writer of writers doing the work of peeling back easy labels of “corruption.” Not to romanticize, slam or cast any judgment—good or bad. But to tell the full story.

And telling the full story will be harder for whoever writes “Son of Boss.” Because the sweet temptation of the instantaneous judgment and label is now such succulent fruit.

Was there looking the other way? Taking care of friends?

Is there a club? And can that couple walking through Millennium Park be members?

With all those questions, there is also a whole way of life. A spaghetti bowl of highways carrying politics, business, money, power, heritage and a troubling strain of the powerful preying on the weak now moving on to the next generation. There is more to it that just this man out front. The one everybody looks at. The man in charge.

There is a way of life.

And finally there is Maggie.

There is grace personified in his wife Maggie. Already quadrupling the life expectancy of one with her kind of cancer. Grounding The Mayor like no king or prince ever could. Maggie in a billion tiny moments over the years sharing that grace with her neighbors here, on her block and around the world. Moments like:

I’m in the second floor lobby of The Goodman Theater. Deserted except for the bartenders. And the elegant blonde woman standing alone at the elevator. The second act has started. I go to wait for the elevator with her. She smiles. I’m amazed that there is no security around the First Lady of Chicago Maggie Daley. I almost feel as if I should volunteer to walk her back to her seat. But in her smiling eyes an iron fisted strength making clear that this is a woman who can take care of herself. I say, “Great show!”

She says, “Yes. The acting is exceptional.”

“My father in law is playing the lead,” I say, trying to contain my boasting.

Her smile shows me she sees my boast. And understands my pride.

“Oh my,” she says. “He is superb. When he’s on stage, no one looks anywhere else.”

“He’s always that good!” I say,

She laughs. Nods. Walks off to her seat and me to mine.

So as Mayor Daley closes this chapter of his story, I remember the time Maggie Daley said about my father in law “When he’s on stage, no one looks anywhere else.”

And I think, pretty good description of Mayor Daley too.

I was 15 years old the day I met Pete Seeger.

4,000 people singing the roof off the Auditorium Theater in Chicago. Mesmerized. This rail thin guy. Sleeves rolled up in his flannel shirt. Singing at the center of a bare stage. Just him and a guitar or banjo.

I have rolled up the sleeves of my flannel shirt ever since.

After the concert; clutching a meaningless piece of paper signed by the advisor to my high school radio club, someone actually let me follow a line of journalists up on to the stage of the emptying theater.

Standing with a crowd of about 20 up on stage. Surrounding Pete Seeger who was politely answering questions. Looking out on to the oceans of empty seats, all the house lights up.

It was finally my turn.

High School Radio Reporter ready for his moment. Sticking out my gangly arm to shake hands with the great man; and drawn in by the kindly eyes of time, he said; “And what can I do for you, young man?”

Open mouth, eyes wide and forgetting every imagined, written out and approved by my radio club teacher; I stammered: “Ah. . .um. . . thank you sir.”

He smiled and said “Why, you’re welcome.” And then here’s what happened. I have never forgotten this sight. And I never will.

Pete Seeger, who had just sang by himself to thousands, and sang about what really mattered, picked up his guitar case in one hand, his banjo case in another, hopped down the steps on the side of the stage, came back to he center aisle; and proceeded to walk up the center aisle towards the back of the theater.

Then, all of us real and would be reporters following him; watched him walk out the front door of the Auditorium Theater, out into the horns blaring, bright light Chicago night, hold up his guitar case to hail a cab; get in to the first one that stopped and drive away into the darkness.

Years later, I saw him again at The Peoples Church on Lawrence Avenue. The man could appear anywhere he wanted. In the world. Yet here he was. On another Chicago night across the street from the faded Aragon Theater singing in a struggling church.

And here’s the part that lifts him up into the realm of being one of the great souls to ever walk the earth. Here’s what astounds. That night at Peoples Church, the man could barely sing. His voice was almost gone. But it was OK. We sang for him. We sang for him. Living out what he taught us. It wasn’t about us. It wasn’t even about him.

It was about the song.

He will sing forever. And when you listen to him sing; you’ll sing too.

In this building. On 95th Street in Chicago. Here is where President Obama first learned how to answer the question, “In authorizing the death of Osama bin Laden, did I morally do the right thing?”

In this building. Yesterday. As the late afternoon sunlight streamed through the two stained glass windows bathing the sanctuary of Trinity United Church of Christ in orange tinged colors of swirling joy, the ocean sized choir swayed up front, and visitors from the other side of town were cordially welcomed; this church’s most famous former member, President Barack Obama was getting ready to tell the world that the mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden was now complete.

Leaked first, as reported in the New York Times, by a former aide to Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then exploding across the internet and into the grinning, mustache spectacle of Geraldo Rivera, on Fox, giggling with glee; the President, as we all know, made the announcement that the hunt for bin Laden was over.

But it was in the twenty years of attendance at Trinity, a place the President hasn’t been in awhile, that he first came to know the “Just War Debate.”

As the President’s team notified all the proper people, as the crucially important message was crafted, the President’s early schooling in a debate by two theologians, who happened to be brothers, back in 1932, spoke to a question much deeper than the glee in Geraldo’s grin. That question being, with the power of death I hold in my pen, am I doing the right thing here?

The surface answer to that question is of course a no-brainer. We were attacked. We must fight back. We must serve justice. End of story.

And of course there is always the obvious danger in over thinking anything. But what if what I’m doing is morally wrong? Should violence prompt violence? Will this help remove us from the endless cycle spinning since the beginning of time?

In answering those kinds of questions, the President turned to the “Just War” debate played out by the brothers H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr in the pages of Christian Century Magazine. In 1932. An historical moment in the history of Trinity’s denomination, The United Church of Christ.

The idea of “Just War”—when is it right to fight? —had been a staple of theological discussion since ancient times. There are 6 basic tenants of a “Just War.” Millions of books, but 6 key ideas. A “Just War” must be:

1. A last resort. Nothing else has worked.

2. Waged by a legitimate authority. Individuals don’t count.

3. Fought to address a previous wrong. (That was an easy one)

4. Fought with a reasonable chance of success. Hopeless causes don’t cut it.

5. Have peace as an ultimate goal.

6. Be proportional to the injury suffered

H. Richard was the more philosophical of the debating brothers. He, in essence, argued against the “Just War,” as a legitimate expression of Christian morality. An oversimplification of a complex moral position, but that’s the gist of it.

Reinhold saw it differently. “It is the business of true religion,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “to destroy man’s moral conceit.” Which perhaps can be paraphrased as:

Sometimes you can’t be ‘holier than thou.’ Sometimes you just gotta get the bad guys.

President Obama saw it like Brother Reinhold. Sometimes, war is the right answer.

So, late yesterday afternoon, on 95th Street, just outside Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, parking was, as always, tough. People streamed into the church, the radio and web streaming broadcasts revved up, and the impeccable precision of a well run organization went to work singing the songs of holy praise. The work of this church went on.

While 1,000 miles east in Washington D.C., the son of this church, Barack Obama, got ready to give whatever comfort he could to grieving families, to praise the heroes of the American military, to send the message to the world that this step in this war was over and to minimize the danger inherent in letting bin Laden go down in history as a holy martyr. To do it in a way that wasn’t boastful. Sending the message that wars and celebrations are strange bedfellows.

The President delivered the message with confidence, clarity and a call for unity.

The confidence and clarity of a leader schooled in the brothers Niebuhr.

A leader who did the heavy lifting thinking he first began in that building on 95th Street in Chicago. The president is no longer a member of the church. Officially. But it was here that he grew up.

And made a decision of world shaking gravity, accepting responsibility and personal self doubt, and coming to rest knowing . . . . .

That he’d done the right thing.

The faded blue numbers on her Grandmother’s forearm. That’s what she’d see. Then she’d smell the bread.

The weeks of endless grey rain that often came just before Easter always brought back the fresh baked bread smells as her Grandmother pulled the pans out of the oven. The faded blue numbers on her Grandmother’s forearm guiding the golden warm bread to the kitchen counter. Closing the oven door, as if she had conquered something unspeakable, her Grandmother would let out a breath and say, “Well, that work is done.”

Julia would be sitting at the worn maple kitchen table. As a girl, all bony knees and elbows. Drawing pictures on scraps of paper her Grandmother would deliver from nowhere. Then, years later, as a young woman writing poems in a spiral notebook her Grandmother had given her, ‘just because.’

“Why do you have the blue numbers, Grandma?” Julia tossed her long black hair back and asked first when she was eight years old. The question came on a Good Friday. On a day when the city was blanketed by a sad, lonely grey rain that made you think that there must be parties going on in other places. Parties that would never, ever, ever, include you.

“The numbers help us remember, liebchen,” the Grandmother said.
“Remember what?”

“Remember so many stories, that none of us on our own has the words for them.”

“Good stories?”

“Well darling child, why don’t you tell me a good story and we’ll find out?”

And Julia would launch into an account of something that happened at school that day. A complicated transaction of trading lunches that ended up with her getting 3 chocolate cupcakes.

As the years past, Julia would return to her question. “Why do you have the blue numbers Grandma?” Each time, the river of their ongoing conversation in the kitchen would shift more and more to her Grandmother’s stories. And Julia would listen.

Names like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Cousins lost. Those who made it out. Stories, her Grandmother explained, where the words still struggled even after all these years, even through the generations, the words still struggled to match the horror.

“That is why,” her Grandmother would tell her, gently, with the bread buttered, still warm from the oven, “That is why we don’t forget. That is why we keep trying. Why we keep looking for hope. And most of all child, why we do our best to tell the true stories.”

Julia didn’t get the part about true stories for a long time. Making up stories was much more fun. And one day, because she had been taught to be direct, she told her Grandmother, “I like making up stories! Can’t I do that?”

And her Grandmother did something she couldn’t ever remember her doing. She stopped moving. Stopped working. Came over to the table and sat down next to her Granddaughter.

“Julia. Of course you can make up stories. There can be just as much truth, more truth, in made up stories than there is if you were to look out the window right now and tell me about the rain.”

“Then how will I know I’m doing this right?”

“Here’s how you’ll know. You’ll make sure your words never loose their meaning. You’ll make sure that when you compare one thing to another, that the comparison is true! Child, let me say that again, cause it’s so very important, words must have meaning. Hold on to that meaning with your very life breath. And when comparisons are made that are not true, not real, then battle that back for all you are worth. Words must have meaning!”

The old woman with the kind eyes laced with an unfathomable sorrow got up from the table, looked out the window at the rain, and walked over to the sink to start scrubbing out the bread pans.

Julia’s Grandmother never got to meet Paul. So just before the wedding, Julia took him to the grave. A sweeping green hill in a light rain northwest of Chicago.

As they knelt down before the stone, Julia made the introductions. “Grandma, this is Paul. I wish he could have known what it was like to sit in your kitchen when you baked bread. I wish you two could have known each other. But this will have to do.”

After some silence the young couple walked back to the car and circled out through the drizzle to the entrance of the cemetery. Julia saw a newspaper machine and said, “Stop for a second, I want a newspaper.” Looking for stories to distract. Looking to bring her mind back to the world from the fields of distant sorrow, she knew the paper would help.

She ran out and put the money in the slot and then back to the warmth of the car. The young couple didn’t speak as he drove south to the rhythm of their windshield wipers. Julia paging through the paper.

It was Good Friday.

“Some days,” Paul said out of nowhere, “Some days I think are just supposed to be sad.”

“Mmm,” said his soon to be wife. And as she said that, her eyes fell on a story in that paper.

The group” Guns For Life” has compared the plight of gun owners who do not want their names to be made public, with victims of the holocaust. State Attorney General Lisa Madigan and the Illinois State Police are calling for the names of gun owners to be public. The headline, “Madigan’s List.” A play on the book and movie “Schindler’s List.”

Julia started reading the article to Paul as he drove. And he kept interrupting. “Wait. That doesn’t make sense. That can’t be true. So what they are saying is that keeping gun owners names private deserves to be compared to the holocaust?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“Jesus.” Paul said. “I know it’s 10 in the morning. But maybe we should find a bar.’

Julia smiled.

“Later,” she said. “I gotta write a story.”

You’re in “The Athenian Room.” In Chicago. It’s a few years back. Tina Fey is about to arrive and order the Greek chicken. And if you’re not careful, you’ll miss her. Should that happen, you might also miss a glimpse into improvisation for the theater, a force in American popular culture that winds it’s way off of midnight stages populated only with two chairs, past Second City alumni lists, Saturday Night Live reruns, memories of John Belushi and settles in the corners of everyday lives. Far from show business. Maybe even saving people. Changing people.

You think, this sure changed me.

Grab a small table next to the exposed brick wall, underneath the sunlight blue and white hand painted mural of a Greek fishing village.

Your eyes are drawn out the front window to the people strolling through the soft twilight of Webster Avenue on a warm summer night. Imagining the stories of each of them.

Alex looks out on the room. Gives you a nod and you nod back. You wave off the menu. Alex raises his eyebrows. You nod again and Alex leans over the front counter to tell the grill man you’ll have the gyros, fries and coke.

You’ve been here since the early years. When there was no grey in Alex’s beard. And as the sun would rise over the lake offering another summer day chance, you’d get off the shuttle bus on Halsted Street, grab a newspaper from a machine, find your coffee poured before you sat down and Alex would make the 2 eggs, toast and bacon breakfast for $1.99.

Lost in thoughts of those days of a brighter sunlight pouring through the third floor window of your tiny apartment in the yellow brick building, drinking in Saul Bellow and Algren as if they both rode in on the sunlight of the morning. So you don’t even notice the 3 people at the round table behind you, when they came in, what they looked like, you don’t notice anything until they stop talking.

That’s when you notice the intensity of the silence. You drop a napkin, shoot a look, and framed at the table, two young women and a man, are having a conversation, bubbling over with laughter, but then they all three do something remarkable. They all listen. Listen to each other as if listening was a contact sport. That silence you hear is the echo of someone listening. Listening like it was a thing you could put on the table right next to the Greek fries smothered in the juices of the gyros and flavored with a touch of vinegar.

Listening like no one else listens is the first key to improvisation.

You hear one of the women called Tina. But you can’t really get a sense of who these three are. So you shift your chair. And a second glance shows something else at the foundation of improvisation for the theater. There are no stars. Not here. Not now. Learning the craft demands that there be no stars. Because everything you do depends on someone else. The three fellow diners conversationally bounce off each other like three silver pinballs. But no one is a star.

You look again and you swear that one of the women has noticed you noticing. And given you ‘a look’ back! You put it down to wishful thinking on your part. But when she looked, you saw in her eyes a unique kind of intelligent awareness. Intelligence that comes from not being scared.

Their conversation deepens. You listen harder. And you start hearing names rarely, if ever tossed into the spotlights of Saturday Night Live.

You hear the name Neva Boyd. A woman born in 1876. Friend of the pioneers of social service Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams. Neva Boyd, who figured out that encouraging children to play games with each other made for deeper, richer lives.

You imagine what it would be like to live in a time when people didn’t know that. Oh maybe they knew it about their own kids. Neighbor’s kids.

But not about the children of the immigrant, the children of the vulnerable.

The laughter at the table next to you stops for a moment as the food comes and you hear the gasps of awe. Years from the night you sat at that table, you’d co-author a book with a name author on customer service. A book that was shelved and never published for one that became a New York Times best seller. Maybe a good business decision? Not so good for you. Good thing you knew how to improvise with what came next.

But as you listen to the three at the next table, no one is talking about “me.” You hear the name Viola Spolin. Author of “Improvisation for the Theater.” She took Neva’s work to the next level. Her son Paul Sills pushed the work forward.

The Compass Players, a University of Chicago troupe that evolved into The Second City, put the work on stage. The names are flowing, way too many to mention in anything less than book length form, and it becomes clear that the third key to improvisation for the theater is the deep history of this cultural force. First listening, then absence of stars, then history.

Tina Fey, bubbling up with unquestioned inborn talent, has a river of history behind her. Traced all the way back to a woman born in 1876.

The sun is starting to go down on Webster Avenue. The people at the next table are done. And Alex looks over at you with a glance that says, “Hey! I need the table.”

So you’re all back out on streets of a city summer night.

Just a few blocks north on Lincoln Avenue is The Players Workshop. A place for those not destined for the main stage of Second City on Wells Street. At Players Workshop, you can pay to learn the craft of improvisation for the theater.

That’s what you do. 2 years of classes. Single best training in anything you’ve ever had. Not a lot of days go by without using what you leaned.

Like for example. A couple days ago on the first 80-degree day of spring. A large square table full of well meaning people lecturing to three 13 year old boys on what it means to be part of a church, while the summer winds of distant lands came blowing in the window.

So as the boys bravely fought to keep their “I’m paying attention” faces in place, you stop the drill of one way communication and say, “OK boys, now when each of us big kids is done talking, and we will hurry our talking along, then you—as a team, because church, (like improvisation), is all about being a team, you together are going to repeat back one thing that each of us said.”

That’s improv. The kind that helps save. Even if it’s just for a moment.

Next night eating Chicago’s best chicken wings, burgers, a salad and killer mozzarella sticks in an almost empty restaurant, the welcome of the place being a lot like the way Alex does in at the Athenian Room. And your 17-year-old niece suddenly jumps up next to the table, and shouts out, “A rapper reading the labels on a can of corn, pushing a shopping cart in a supermarket!”

And out of nothing she creates that scene. “Sarah Palin reading labels!” Donald Trump being disgusted at how much stuff costs!”

Bam, Bam, Bam, she nails each scene. It lasts about 20 seconds.

The laughter fills the room.

While somewhere Neva Boyd, Viola Spolin, Del Close, Paul Sills, Tina Fey and all of those who arrived at being stars by learning a craft based on the fact that there are no stars, just sit back and smile.

Their work goes on.

That black plumed Old Coot paddling the North Branch of the Chicago River in the rain is her best friend at work.

He swims among and yet separate from the other waterfowl patrolling the river. He’s hard to see. Black feathers merging with the dark waters. Dodging the tour boats. Riding the waves. Looking for food. Keeping a distance from the other birds. Most often he’s unseen.

But everyday. Wednesday through Sunday. She walks to the water alone. Stands at the fence. The exact same spot. And from the unseen depths of the river comes the Old Coot. Pulling away from the other birds, he paddles to the edge of the water, right below where she stands, and he stops. As near to her as he can possibly be. As if he could see her smile. As if he’s always known her smile. Her hands on the fence. Both of them still. She whispers, “Hello Old Coot.” And neither of them needs to say anything more.

She is one of hundreds. In what used to be a cavernous empty warehouse full of electrical cable garbage and broken dreams of better days. Right between the River and one of the very last patches of housing projects that feel like a prison camp.

Now that old catalogue warehouse is reborn. Gleaming and shiny, managed brilliantly, bursting with the invisible pulsating rhythms of being Chicago’s Technology Hub. The streaming crowds of texting madly workers pouring in every morning, the lights burning brightly deep into the night. Way past the time when the river goes dark.

She is paid to talk on the phone and answer emails according to a script. Above all to do it quickly. Just go fast.

All day each day, she almost never speaks to any of the hundreds around her. All of them in headphones. Multi tasking. Looking at their computer screens. When there is some tiny almost invisible shred of an exchange, she always mentions it at home that night. “Ashley said hello to me! Rick asked me how my weekend was!”

So she goes to see that Old Coot. And they are silent. But it’s a different kind of silent.

A silence born of her real job, which the Old Coot and the poet Mary Oliver know is ‘loving the world.’

So when she approaches the shore, The Old Coot breaks from the pack and comes to swim by her. She doesn’t feed him. She just smiles.

Her talent. The way she was born. The stuff no one taught her. It’s a talent called Restorative. The talent is described like this:

“What is certain is that you enjoy bringing things back to life. It is a wonderful feeling to find underlying factors and restore something to its true glory. Intuitively you know that without your work, this thing—this machine, this person, this technique, this company, this living being, might have ceased to exist. You fixed it, resuscitated it, rekindled its vitality. You saved it.”

Back in the old warehouse, her RESTORITIVE talent is bottled up, never used. As if it’s inside another container of hand sanitizer. One with no pump on top.

So inside the warehouse she sits and simply tries to go faster. Something she is simply hard wired not to do. Something that will never happen.

Nothing wrong with going faster.

But, rekindling a life force isn’t measured with a stopwatch.

When the hours are over, she goes home. Opening the front door of her house to applause as she once again starts her real job of loving the world.

Tomorrow at lunch she’ll go visit that Old Coot.

Her best friend at work.

‘Do they still play the blues in Chicago?’

He sings that line. Just that one line. And the musical progression. The sound sums up the place.

Algren and James T. Farrell, and Bellow and Royko. They all wrote stories and books that dazzled in the billion different ways they summed up the place. Studs asked the right questions, listened harder than anyone and then edited what other people said and summed up the place.

Steve Goodman showed he could distill the place in that one musical phrase. Then with the song he told a story about how baseball goes way beyond a game or even a metaphor and gets woven into the very fabric of not just a person’s life, but the life of a place.

First pitch is in 10 minutes. My back window is open. There is a white sky and a springtime drizzle. The helicopters are circling above Wrigley Field. On the diamond, I see on TV with the sound turned down, they are honoring Ron Santo.

One more time they play Goodman’s song.

And the faint sounds of the crowd comes drifting in my back window in wistful waves of memories spiced in blue. The season starts while I’m listening to Steve Goodman sing one more time.

‘Do they still play the blues in Chicago?’

Play Ball!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xBxZGQ1dJk]

Feel that faint summer breeze? That’s baseball. And you don’t even have to like the game to feel that breeze. Baseball is back.

Chester the Peanut Guy singing “Cheaper on the outside. Get ‘um here now” is standing at the corner of Clark and Waveland in Chicago like the center of a compass that spans this whole wavering American land from the sandlot scratch game popping up on the tip of Maine to Willie McCovey Cove—baseball on the water even—in the sparkling San Francisco breeze.

Baseball is back. And it sweeps up every major, minor, playground city back alley smack of the ball that arcs screaming across the summer sky. Baseball is back and anyone can play.

It slows you down. Like a long ago remembered summer evening as the sun streaked sky held only promises of tomorrow. And someone started telling a story.

It reminds you where you came from. “Chester,” I say to the peanut guy. “What kind of year we gonna have?”

“We’ll find out come August,” he says with a shrug.

It gives you an order to your life. Everything is counted. Everything.

“Why, I might be mistaken,” says the radio color announcer, “but I believe that is sixteen times the pitcher has scratched his nose!” Last time we had that many scratches was a 1952 game in the Polo Grounds when. . .”

Baseball is back. And so is your history.

There were only about 5,000 fans in the stadium. Someday, there will be a million who claim they were here. But we saw it. We saw Kerry Wood mow down the mighty Houston Astros. A pitching performance of a lifetime. Baseball is back.

And the connections to the rest of the world somehow seem fresher. Renewed.

You’re sitting in the upper deck. Scanning the rooftops that circle Wrigley Field in Chicago. And you see something you’ve never seen before.

“Larry,” you say to your pal. “There are guys with guns on the rooftops!”

And you hear the crowd rumble, look over up behind home plate where the announcers and the press sit, and you see the silver grey hair. The wave. You can see the smile. “Hey that’s President Clinton!”

And just then. Just at that very second. Sammy Sosa smacks a home run. The white ball soaring up into the blue summer sky, tracing a shimmering arc of hope over the fence bouncing on to Waveland Avenue rolling towards the old red brick firehouse, while the scampering hordes of generations of children chase that little white ball,

Baseball is back.

Bringing all the baggage that has plagued the game since before the very first town father of Cooperstown New York said out loud, “Hey here’s an idea. Let’s pretend the game started here. We’ll build a museum. People will shell out cash by the bucketful. We will make a bundle!” The charlatan and the assorted devils of greed have always been there. Watching from the arid deserts of sin, ready to pounce. The masters of using other people’s money to make more for themselves. The cash fueled obstacles that keep more and more people every year of even having the dream that someday they’d walk inside a major league park. Those cash fueled Temples of exclusion screaming to the kid whose Dad works two jobs so they’ve never really had that game of catch, screaming to that kid, “Child, you don’t belong here.” All of that is clear and true as the summer sun.

Yet through all that, the little girl walks around back of her building tossing a ball up in the air and catching it. Tossing it higher and higher. And then one day her big brother says to her, “Hey our right fielder has a doctors appointment. Why don’t you come down to the park with us?”

And her little heart sings.

The real giants of the game, people like Bill Veeck, sitting around those endless heavenly summer fields of fun telling stories, they got their eyes on that little girl. Looking after her. And you hear the laughter and the singing of all the voices of the game and despite all baseball’s baggage, somewhere there is a minor league park that a kid of 8 or 88 has just walked into and the first sight of the green fields of summer make that kids eyes go wide in complete and total amazement.

Baseball is back. And the real giants of the game, now joined by Ron Santo. Your own hero. Gone now. You try and stretch your mind to imagine a season of the game without him. Because you’ve never known a season like that.

So you close your eyes. And you can see him. Still watching the game. His seats just a little bit further away then before. They start the interview. “Ronnie, what kind of year do you think we’re gonna have?”

He answers, “Well, Pat. I think our prospects look real good this year. If we could get one more pitcher. Maybe a left hander. Bring in a big stick. Get some speed. I think we got a shot.”

The man is in heaven. And he’s predicting a Cubs Championship. Just like he’s always done! Doesn’t he know what will happen???

Then you realize that perhaps he didn’t really leave. Oh perhaps he was quiet for the winter. Played some golf in Arizona. But the start of the season brought him back.

The start of the season brings everything back.

Chicago’s Bonnie Hunt once said that “Wrigley Field is the most romantic place on earth.”

When did she say that? Was around the time your wife started quoting baseball stats to you? When she started talking strategy? When, as your jaw hit the floor, she whipped off an explanation of the infield fly rule? Is that when?

Chester the Peanut guy stands in front of Bernie’s bar. The old men and women smile at all the memories, the young folks search, their eyes playing it cool, keeping all that wonder in check and the children catch that summer breeze first.

“Get your peanuts here!” Chester sings.

And the warm enveloping summer winds of baseball swoop in like the streaming crowds walking down Waveland Avenue, including all who even thought about running it out between home plate and first base, all who ever tossed a ball in the air, listened to a late night story from an Uncle or a Grandpa or a Grandma. Including all who ever yearned with all their heart for a hero, for time to slow down, for the green fields of summer to come alive again.

Baseball is back.

Like a trip to the promised land.

She’ll walk past this billboard everyday. Telling her she’s worthless. That she made the wrong decision

Call her LaShonda. She’s 21. Everyday she travels to her downtown retail job from her small apartment near the 5800 block of South State Street in Chicago where they will put this billboard. The bus and the el trains are always crowded. On some days it’s an hour trip each way. She makes $8.00 per hour.

There’s a junkyard on the block where they’ll put this billboard. Bare trees on a hardscrabble city street in a neighborhood where 40% of the people are under 25. Most of the people living in the area are children, age four to nine. Most of the 41,000 people who live in the area have an income of under $10,000 per year.

LaShonda had the abortion when she was 19. She went alone. And when she came home, walking past the lot where the billboard will be, she was alone. She turned on the TV, put the water on for some tea, her retail job is in a tea store, and sat down in her chair. No one heard her cry.

The billboard is scheduled to go up in the next few weeks. After being taken down in New York City, Chicago now gets to see these billboards. 30 of them. Just like the one LaShonda will walk by every day.

The political wars go on. The attack on Planned Parenthood. The lobbying for government control of life’s most intimate decisions. The twisted use of the President’s image.

While a shoulder slumping, vacant eyed young woman will soon walk past a billboard twice a day that reminds her that she’s worthless. That she made the wrong decision.

She doesn’t think too much about the baby. The one that might have been. At least that’s what she’d say if you asked.

And she doesn’t think much about the future.

Sometimes on the el train when she can get a seat, she’ll take out her pencil and start to draw. Forests and mountains and pencil grey sun filled skies of hope. She can see the color in her grey sketches. If there was anyone to tell her–here—take this paintbrush–perhaps she could change the world with her art.

She makes stories with her sketches. She has something in her mind that makes her reverse the letters when she reads. So she doesn’t read much. But she loves to hear the stories. And she loves to sketch. Most of them she just throws away when the train gets downtown. No place to keep them while she works.

So there will be no sketches in her hands when she walks past the billboard.

Maybe in awhile, she’ll forget the billboard is even there.

As if there was a way her eyes could become even more empty and cold.

On a bitter cold street with a billboard looking down on her.

A young woman with her head down. Trying to get home.