Chicago Guy's Open Salon Blog

"Willing To Lay Down All My Joys"

Mon, 28 May 2012 11:05:49 -0400

A soldier’s last letter home.

Doc Watson's Front Porch Spirit

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:05:43 -0400

Just a moment after Doc Watson died, at 89, on a Tuesday in a Winston-Salem North Carolina hospital, his spirit pushed open a weathered wood frame screen door on to God’s front porch.

Way beyond the boundaries of any map. With glistening shafts of summer sunlight pouring through the rich green trees. About a mile from Wildcat Creek where Doc Watson was born, a small crowd materialized from the forest and started a slow, rhythmic stroll to that front porch. Because coming through that screen door, one of their own, one of the giants of music had arrived.

Arthel “Doc” Watson, blue eyes seeing it all, seeing in the same way he had spent his life on earth listening, looked around that porch, saw who was approaching, saw the one empty rocking chair. And he cocked his head, as if to ask some sort of permission. Jimmie Rodgers, first to reach the porch, motioned for Doc to sit. Doc sat down, hoisted up his guitar, and Jimmie Rodgers nodded towards Doc elbowed Chet Atkins in the ribs and said, “You know this boy Doc used to listen to me.”

Atkins nodded to Mother Maybelle Carter, standing quietly with her hands folded in prayer next to her beautiful daughter June Carter Cash. At their feet, Johnny Cash and his pal Waylon Jennings sitting on the worn, wooden step.

But as the crowd begins to grow bigger under that Carolina sun and whispering trees, the fact that this was not some small family gathering, became apparent.

That man without all his fingers, also holding a guitar. Django Reinhardt stood on that porch. In another corner, the impeccably dressed Gershwin brothers weren’t far from Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. Elvis stood quietly, paying attention. And off beneath a pine tree that touched the Carolina sky, a bright eyed German choirmaster, J.S. Bach was there to listen to Doc Watson play.

As the spirits came to listen from every corner of creation, the full picture of what was happening dawned on all. Music itself had turned out to pay its respects. That holy golden tone that connected all music was here in force. Across time. Across all space. Music was here to welcome one of its giants.

Doc Watson’s given name was “Arthel.” It’s a Gaelic name that translated means “ingenious valor.” The name was misspelled as “Orthel” on his birth certificate. His Mother was Annie. She hailed from Meat Camp North Carolina. And she sang to her nine children. His father’s given first name was “General.” He led the singing in church. Doc’s blindness came from an infection shortly after his birth. The 6^th of the 9 children, he was raised as if he wasn’t blind. In a 1979 interview in Frets Magazine, Watson said, “I would not have been worth the salt that went into my bread if my Dad hadn’t put me at the end of a crosscut saw to show me that there was not a reason in the world that I couldn’t pull my own weight and help to do my part in some of the hard work.”

On an early radio broadcast from a furniture store, the host decided that Arthel was not a good musician name so he asked the crowd for another name. Somebody in the crowd yelled out “Doc!” and it stuck.

Doc married Rosa Lee Carleton in 1947. They had two kids. Merle and Nancy. Merle began playing guitar with his father, helping him on the road, in 1964. Together they made 20 albums, on up till Merle’s death in 1985. Doc is survived by his wife, daughter, brother David, two grandchildren and several great grandchildren.

In the Watson biography, “Blind But Now I See,” Kent Gustavson quotes folk singer Greg Brown, “If the wind and the rain could play guitar, they would sound like Doc Watson.” The threads of what Watson did abound. They will be explored on down through the years. Like Reinhardt, Doc changed the way the guitar is played. Doc played the guitar like a fiddle, bringing the music the forests and the hills, grown and nurtured through the generations, out into the wider world. He influenced legions of musicians such that artists with the stature of Paul Simon were even in awe before they met Doc Watson. All of that will populate the stories on down through the years. There will undoubtedly be a movie. And there will be other books.

But back on God’s front porch, now that Music has arrived and taken up its rightful place; all of us past, gone and even now here on earth, begin to fill in that clearing in the woods not far from the cabin where the Watson children were raised, their cellar built into the side of the hill that held the preserves that got the family through the winter, the Carolina breeze that carried the sounds of Annie Watson singing her children to sleep. Back on that front porch, we who got to see or hear Doc Watson, if we closed our eyes while he was singing, we got to join the outskirts of that crowd.

I am at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I am, at 21, clueless as to just how young I am. I remember everything in the room as being some sort of shade of dance hall red. We are watching from around one of the tiny round tables. Doc led out on stage by Merle. And then, as he played, a wave of amazed learning washes over me. Because I didn’t know there was anybody who could play the guitar like that. Much as I didn’t know, as she and I drove west from Wisconsin over the Rockies that summer, that there were snow tipped mountains that high.

And finally, not that many years ago. Home. At the Old Town School of Folk Music on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. Doc and his grandson now. Doc’s friendly warm baritone voice. The way he talked to a crowd of 5,000, 50,000 or 5 in exactly the same way. This second time, as I sat there, not so young anymore, wrapped up in the holy golden glow of music that tells the stories of our common heartbeat. Flowing rivers of simple sounds put together by one of Music’s pillars. One of the greats. One who will never be forgotten.

Never forgotten. Because back there on God’s front porch, that friendly looking man with the warm smile and the workingman’s hands, that man sitting in that rocking chair, starts to play. Smiles as he sings. Sees the crowd.

And everyone listens while Doc Watson plays.

Back to the Garden

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:05:51 -0400

We’re still here, at Walker’s Restaurant.

Oh, the building is gone. As are most of our neighbors. Tucked back across Irving Park Road, you’ll find traces of the Selig Polyscope Corporation—a 200-acre movie studio and lot. Traces of the studio still remain…an archway. A building that once housed lights and stage props and costumes. A crumbling water tower that once loomed over the lots where Mister L. Frank Baum himself would tell the stories of his Wizard of Oz.

That’s when he wasn’t sharing the better parts of the Oz story at a hearty midday meal here with us. Or warming our dining room and tavern in the evenings, with further tales of Dorothy. Speaking while candlelight flickered on red-checked table cloths and winter winds swirled up snows, as darkness fell.

Quite a talker, that Mr. Baum.

Now, it’s a bit easier to find out about him than it is to find anything about Angela and I.

Someone made another movie about Mr. Baum’s Wizard, long after Mr. Selig and his Polyscope machine operation moved west to California. In the other Wizard movie, a young lady from Minnesota once known as Francis Gumm sang a song called Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and no one ever forgot the way she sang that song. So it’s a lot easier to find out about Frances Gumm, Judy Garland to most of us, than it is to find out about our restaurant.

But you can still find Walkers Restaurant. Even though we’re in no books, no movies or song. You can still find Walkers Restaurant.

You might begin to find us in much the same way Mr. Baum would have us all find Oz. At the end of a meal, chairs pushed back from the tables, the room turning dark, only the sound of the story and the wind. Listen hard. Close your eyes. Concentrate. . . .

And here we are. You’ve found Walkers.

Here’s how you know: it’s because you can still smell the fresh oregano from Angela’s garden. Just a trace, but it’s there. It’s that moment just after the warm summer rain. Just afterwards, for a moment, you think it’s your imagination. But it gets stronger, first the oregano, then basil. Then comes the sun-blessed warmth of the tomatoes. Like life’s abundance itself can take this bursting red juicy form and you can hold it all, right in the palm of your hand.

You begin to see it all as if you too were in the restaurant.

She would farm the tiny, green, smiling herbs like da Vinci would draw his preliminary sketches. She’d blend the tomatoes and the herbs into sauces that tasted as if warm rain and summer sun had wrapped a hand around the wooden stirring spoon. The pasta spread out rolled and cut every morning on her table in a white-floured haze. The sausage came from the Lincoln Avenue shops to the east of us. The leafy greens picked from gardens just outside our back door. And the bread? As if heaven was something fresh you could break a piece off of and made even better, as you reached for the creamery butter.

She started every day like da Vinci. She finished with a meal that was the Mona Lisa smile.

For years, before the restaurant, it was just the two of us.

We lived east of Mr. Selig’s Movie Studio. A tiny white house near the factories that lined the railroad chugging celery from our neighbors’ farms down to Chicago, six miles south.

Both Angela and I worked at the stately bank that anchored the corner of Lincoln and Grace. We were safe.

But with time the celery farms got smaller, the honkytonks along Clark Street got louder, and the money that began flowing into our corner of the world, the money started taking a narrower route. Working at the bank meant we could see it more clearly than most.

Chicago was bursting out in every direction. The land became more and more valuable. And those who owned the land, those few, began to get very wealthy. Oh, there were the factory owners. They made choir robes and trumpets and drum mallets here. And there was Dr. Abbott. His idea of making medicine into a tablet made him a tidy profit. There were some world-shakers.

But there was a 1% then, too – those who owned the houses past which the rivers of money flowed. We saw them at our church every Sunday. We were just the ones counting their money, the couple never blessed with children of our own; they were the ones seemingly blessed with it all, families and wealth, property and status.

As the years passed at the church, in the streets, in the bank, as the money and the people flowed in; that 1% with the money began to speak to us politely, but only when they had to.

The celery farms had shrunk and a city was rising. The newly rich banded together. Whether for protection, out of fear, or simply the natural course of things, there were those on the inside and those on the outside of a new circle of wealth.

We were on the outside. We weren’t poor. But we weren’t rich. What does one do with childless bankers?

Then came the anonymous hate letter from the member of the church. Left on our doorstep in darkness. Anonymous only till the next business day, as the author used her full real name. Not the name most knew her by. But the name on her bank account. Available to any banker.

The exact wording of the secret letter, not important. But the message was clear. You’re different. You don’t belong. Get out.

And it was that letter that led us to what would become our restaurant. Because the first thing that we did when we got the letter was go walking. We loved to walk Grace and Byron Streets, over by the movie studio. We saw the lot across Irving Park Road. We both knew it instantly. It was as if that land had a shaft of surprise sunlight all its own. Angela could cook like an angel. I could keep the front of the house. The workers from the movie studio and the quarry just down Western Road would come. It would be like a neighborhood for families of all shapes and sizes. No one would go hungry here.

We would call it Walkers. Everyone thought that was our name, but it wasn’t. We called in Walkers because that’s what we did whenever we had a few free moments.

Back then, there were no restaurants. There was the Buckthorn Tavern, west of us, on Elston Avenue. But the restaurant was different. It wasn’t just a stop along the way. It was a place to rest. To restore.

The beating heart of our place was the kitchen. Open to the dining room, our guests, our community, could see Angela dancing her way into making meals from her families ancient home on the rocky island of Sicily. Our guests, German and Irish, sharing food from a distant world as if the meal itself was a kind of grace. With ballet-like precision, she would present the food as if it were some kind of art, a framed restoration for a weary working soul.

And perhaps I made a few of our guests laugh. Told a story or two. Not like Mister Baum; but I sometimes held my own.

When the restaurant was full, when that smell of oregano would flower in the room and light the faces around each of our 24 tables, it felt holy.

When we filled the very souls of our friends on cold winter nights, those were times of true joy. When we could feed a hungry traveler, sometimes one who had no money that was fine by us, too.

We stayed on for years after the movie studio went west and the quarry closed, replaced by a television station. Long past the time when the Lutheran Seminary on Clark Street was torn down and they put up a baseball park they eventually called Wrigley Field.

The restaurant stayed open even past our time, mine and Angela’s.

Somehow the ownership fell into the hands of a family that was prominent at that old church we had left to find our new one, our Walker’s Restaurant. I never understood how the ownership change really came about.

I was never very good with numbers. Perhaps that’s why we were never of the moneyed class. All I know is that lawyers were involved, the restaurant stayed open, but no one came to dine there anymore. It became a gray room with just a few light bulbs. A bare electric cord and a light bulb hung from an open wound in the ceiling. A tired old man sitting by himself behind a cash register, reading a newspaper. He’d look up when a stray person would enter, scowl, and the person would go looking for sustenance elsewhere.

In time, the tired man and what had been our place was gone. There’s a Mobil Gas Station where our Walker’s once stood.

But Angela and I, we’re still here. Walking along between the cracks of time. Our story is told in the book of Isaiah. So I guess we found our church after all.

My people will live in a peaceful neighborhood

In safe houses, in quiet gardens.

The forest of your pride will be clear-cut,

The city showing off your power leveled.

You will enjoy a blessed life,

Planting well-watered fields and gardens

The restaurant was our garden.

If you’re hungry, if you’re in the neighborhood and wait for that singular moment just after the rain, you can still catch just a trace of oregano on the wind.

You can follow Angela dancing across our kitchen.and

And you can know we were here.

NATO Chicago Summit --- What if?

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:05:20 -0400

He thinks, “ She’s out of my league.” She thinks. Can’t somebody else take on the global war machine? And where they hell is a bathroom?”

They’re each in their own small band of protestors. Marching straight at each other down the middle of State Street in Chicago. Like some kind of show down dual at the social justice corral.

The two groups merge at the corner of Randolph and State. Funneled together by the rolling moveable fences of Chicago cops on bikes. Shouts and fist bumps as the two groups morph into one. Now no one is a stranger. Into the orange streaked sunset they all walk.

Up front of the group, Chicago Superintendent Garry McCarthy marches alongside. A newswoman asks him, “Where is this group going?” McCarthy answers, I don’t think they know where they’re going. But as long as they keep going, we’ll stay with them, making sure they get their right to free speech. And if they do anything criminal, we’ll stop them. It was a mantra he would repeat for the rest of the event. And he’d make good on his word.

As McCarthy spoke, the woman with the silky red blond hair fell in line behind the skinny, intense looking guy from the other group. Sees him first from the back. As if somehow she knew him. Not now, or before. Maybe later? That makes no sense.

Jammed in the back pocket of his jeans, a loud, shiny chartreuse paperback book. Who brings a book to a protest?

She wonders if she’ll stop doing things like what she’s about to do when she turns 23 next September. Then she does it. She slips the book out of his pocket. He turns, smiles. “Hey!” Not believing. That same woman. “I would have given you the book!” he smiles.

She looks at him. Eyes like surprises. But also like home. “John D. McDonald. Who’s he?”

“Guy who lives on a boat. Fights evil. Kinda like what we’re doing here. His tone missing the cool guy sarcasm he hoped for.

“Mmm” She nods. “Hey. Any clue on finding a bathroom?”

“Sure!"He takes her hand as if they’d known each other forever, and they slip into the doors of what looks like a Bavarian Ski Lodge. Argo Tea Shop.

The security guy nods at the man, “ Sup Bill?”

“Hey Simon!”

“OK I am almost impressed.” She snickers. “What are you, like Rahm Emanuel’s son or something?”

“No, he’s 12. I just like to act like I’m 12 sometimes.”

“Why did I know that?” she nods.

As he waited for her to come upstairs from the bathroom, he bought two giant red pomegranate ice teas. “Here,” he said, “We’ll need these. By the way, what’s your name?”

“I’m Clarrisa.” She puts her hand on her chest. A voice like warm honey. “I’m from Charlottesville.”

“Bill. From here.”

Then back out into the marching night. As the orange streaked sky gave way to the city street light glow, night, they just kept walking.

Holding hands as if it had always been that way.

The protest went on deep into the night. Way past 8 hours after the last official rally ended. The rhythm of the rolling Chicago Police escorts bending and turning as groups from all over the country would walk, meet up with each other and merge, split off, wander around and meet again As if some golden thread of purpose was being woven together. This was the night to make connections. Going way past any permit times, way into the night, the police allowing some long buried collective cry come out of the constantly changing groups, handing over these streets, for assembly, for free speech.

The setting for this weaving thread was the Chicago Loop, a 1.58 square mile of real estate at the center of the business district, called “Loop” because of the elevated trains that circle above, is also one of the largest college campuses in the country. 65,000 students go to school here. Many students live here. Since 2000, the population has increased by 78%.

East of the Loop, bordering the towering Chicago skyline is the giant Lake Michigan, a natural wonder that sometimes seems to always keep fresh the soul of the city. As the protest finally wound down, Clarissa and Bill wandered over to the shoreline as splinter groups of protestors headed off for Greek Town revelry to the west or an empty space of floor somewhere north.

Clarissa wide eyed at the water, “Pfft! You call this impressive? Ever heard of a little place they call ‘The Atlantic?’ Still holding hands, they wandered north up to a condo on Goethe Street that Bill’s uncle, in New York on a book tour, had let him use.

Sleep came deep. Eventually.

And they were up, showered and fed in time for Sunday’s demonstration.

That demonstration, what they saw happen, took them both into a silence that neither of them, at 23, had ever known.

The event had ended. They were walking west on Cermak Road. The police order to disperse has clear, loud and scared neither of them. Both of them still stunned by what they had just seen. Being told by the cops “Walk west” was almost a comfort.

But that police order was also a signal. Clarissa saw the three girls pulling on the black sweatshirts and masks in the now 90-degree heat. She saw a group of about 20, close enough to see the crazy in their eyes, she saw them start urging the dispersing crowd to walk east toward McCormick Place. Into police lines.

Bill didn’t see it. But he sensed it. Trouble. He took Clarissa’s hand and started walking fast towards a restaurant just a little bit west. Jimmy’s Place. An old friend of his Uncle’s. Jimmy saw Bill and the woman, opened his front door, motioned them in. “Up on the roof. I got WGN TV cameras up there."

Pounding up the stairs to the sun splashed gravel roof, Bill and Clarissa were able to look down on what would be called the one really tense confrontation of the entire summit.

This was a chance almost never seen in any media anywhere. They saw the full context of the confrontation from beginning to end. Not clips cut to prove a point. But full streaming video, standing next to the WGN camera filming the whole event. Watching first the 4 or 5 black clad demonstrators form a point to push into police lines. From the back of the crowd, sticks and water bottles and light bulbs and bottles of urine being tossed into police lines.

They saw Superintendent McCarthy, easy to recognize because he had no protective gear, at the back of his lines, barking out orders, picking up fallen cops, gradually pushing the line of demonstrators west where most all of them had gone anyway. McCarthy making history by erasing the city’s shame at the 1968 police riots and replacing it with pride. Pure pride. The hard core tiny group of demonstrators beating back at police shields and billy clubs.

The 3 times they saw a cop, being spit on, taunted and abused, go over the edge and start to throw a punch or a billy club, the cop who literally had his back, would tap him on the shoulder, and would shout “Remember your training!” Hearing that phrase, the two cops would trade places. So the front line of cops was always changing. But the number of demonstrators kept getting smaller. The small number, who came only to fight, in full view of the TV cameras recording from that roof, peeled off by cops and sent back through the lines to be arrested. The others, the real protestors, the Occupy leaders, long since gone and dispersed.

Ringing the scene were mounted cops, acres of state police in full riot gear.

With the massive show of law enforcement force, most of it just standing at ready, and the rotating front lines, and the brutal hard and violent work of fighting in the 90 degree sun; it took about an hour for the crowd to disperse. And it wasn’t till the crowd had gone, that Bill and Clarrisa, eating pizza with Jimmy at a dark, cool corner table, could talk about what was really the true beating heart meaning of this day.

It wasn’t the absurdity of those who came here to do violence as protest against the NATO violence machine. It wasn’t the tea party or evangelical like certainty bleated out by the faint cries of protest leaders claiming that cops caused the violence. Every time Jimmy heard that he’d say, “Watch the fucking game tape moron! The whole story is on video!”

It wasn’t whatever happened around the NATO meeting table. “Anybody know if they figured out how to fight the wars cheaper?” Ernie the cook yelled from the kitchen.

For Bill and Clarissa, as much as they were tied together at the heart, it wasn’t even about them. Likely they’d both be off to other stories when her plane headed south. At least for now.

The real meaning of this thing? The lesson?

It was those veterans. Those heroes. That earlier demonstration that had taken their breath away.

Those vets, who tasted Iraqi sand in their teeth and searched for IED’s under achingly blue Afghani skies. Those who really fought. Really did the work. No matter what the abstraction of politics or reason or any of the talk, talk talk.

These vets stood there. Right in front of Bill and Clarissa. And then these brave and noble souls tossed away their medals. The hurled them off into the Chicago sky. They threw away their medals!

Why?

There were easy answers. Cheap answers.

But what if there was more than judgments of heroes or cheap answers or blaming the bosses?

What if heroes throwing away medals was a sign that there was something terribly wrong in the ways we all do our best to protect our planet?

And what could make it right?

Could it be that golden thread born of that collective wail of a crowd coming together?

What if the cry of that golden thread that fell across Chicago like a cleansing spring rain was some sort of sign? Something that was saying, “People get ready. There is a train a coming. Something new is coming”

What if it was a time for a deep, lasting change in the way we protect the planet?

What if we figure it out together, this time?

“What if?” said Bill

And Clarissa, who always liked to have the last word, reached over to take his hand, smiled and asked,

“What if?”

NATO, Nurses & Sundaes

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:05:42 -0400

At the giant United Nurses Rally on a sparkling warm spring afternoon, next to the Picasso sculpture in the middle of downtown Chicago, "Patti" made sure to thank some cops.

Patti, at sixty something, could never be called shy. By anyone.

An underlying thread of a narrative begins to weave its way beneath so many of the larger questions at the Chicago NATO Summit. Larger questions like:

W Why do we need NATO?

· Is NATO good? Evil? Both?

· Why would Chicago even want this giant, potentially planet shaping event here at home? Doesn’t the world understand that this will disrupt traffic for 3 days? And that a guy who owns a steak house won’t make his projected sales this weekend?

· Don’t we have enough, larger problems without spending all this money and energy on questions like “How do we fight wars more cheaply?”

And of course, "what if I don't like the Mayor?"

Underlying all these larger questions is the quiet story of “Cops get taunted. Cops don’t respond.” You see it played out everywhere.

So Patti decided to thank them for that. A proudly liberal activist, her son in law theorizes Patti has at least 2 “Congress People” and countless state senators on speed dial. And if you ever say the name “Scott Walker” in her presence, don’t expect to leave the room for at least an hour.

“We think it’s great that you guys aren’t wearing riot gear!” Patti said to a line of cops standing to the side of the speeches and the music of Tom Morello, who had made his way downtown from suburban Libertyville and announced that the only Boss he had, was Bruce Springsteen.

A cop almost cracked a smile. Looked down at Patti and said, “We think it’s great too. That stuff is hot.”

Patti’s husband Nick stood next to her. As he always does. Growing up in Indiana, they missed a lot of the protest action of the 1960’s. Although, Patti is quick to remind the rest of the family that they did see Peter, Paul and Mary.

That was back when Patti was pregnant with my wife.

Morello is singing one of the “secret” verses to “This Land is Your Land.” Same verse Pete Seeger had been singing since the 1940’s.

One bright Sunday morning

In the shadow of the steeple

By the relief office

I seen my people

As they stood their hungry

I stood there whistling

This land is made for you and me.

Patti says to the group of silent cops, “So even when they call you guys pigs, you don’t do anything?”

One cop tries to stifle a laugh. Another grins. “Yes ma’am even then."

Patti and Nick report the music and the speeches as being great.

That rally was yesterday. Today, across the city, a march to the Mayor's house, one tactic that makes withholding judgment and sticking with descriptions hard. That house is where the Mayor's children live.

And of course it will also make it inconvenient for me to go to the dentist.

Across town, the mystery of exactly what was being made in that house in Bridgeport, Molotov Cocktails or beer, remains a mystery.

A photo of the beer brewing apparatus has been released. And 3 men, all from out of town, have been charged with terrorism. So there was either a foiled terrorist threat or one bad call by one group of cops. Among the millions of us here. All trying to do the best we can.

Today is the day before the main event. The summit starts tomorrow. And the temperture is getting hotter.

I see Mick the cop in a car in my neighborhood. He’s off to help at the Mayor’s house.

“What’s up with the Molotov, cocktail beer thing, Mick?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Under investigation.”

Which means he ain’t gonna tell me.

“So what are you worried about Mick? Tell me what’s ahead.”

Mick growls. “I ain’t worried bout nothing. ‘Cept maybe how much credit the bosses are gonna be taking when we pull this off.”

An underlying thread of a story here. It’s that “turning the other cheek” does not have to be a passive act. The absolute force of pure power. Bigger than all the riot gear, sound trucks and stale memories of 1968. The power of turning the other cheek. On display everywhere.

If you look.

Meanwhile, yesterday at the Nurses rally, Patti and Nick had a sundae at McDonald’s and trooped home.

One good protest in the book.

“Yay Nurses!!!!”

Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune. Guy on the right is Gerry McCarthy. Chicago Superintendent of Police,