So It Goes, Part 43: "I don't want to do a story about this."

The moment I stepped through the doors, the cool air washed over me like a cleansing bath. The birds in the trees were singing. I was free of the dread of having to undo my transgression. Now that it was over, my nervousness seemed totally displaced.

I walked around to the side of Bardolet’s office, looking in the bushes. But I saw nothing. “Farkus?” I called. I even walked around the inner edge of the bushes, next to the wall. I saw nothing. “Thanks,” I said, in case anyone was listening.

A heavy, dark presence appeared around the corner of the building, but it was not the three-foot-tall figure I had hoped to see. Instead, a six-foot-tall security guard asked if he could help me. No, I told him, I dropped something on the ground and was looking for it; I would be OK. He turned, then looked back and gave me a skeptical scowl. I got on my bike and raced toward home.

On the way, I stopped at the newspaper. I had to tell someone what had happened, so I told Burns. “I’m not worried about a lawsuit,” he said. “We checked it out really well. I think he was just trying to yank your chain.”

I had to think for a moment. This was the first time I had ever heard this phrase. “Now, I don’t want to do a story about this,” I said. “I can’t get my mother in trouble any more.”

He put his hand on his chin and seemed to finger an invisible beard. Perhaps he had had one in the ‘60s or early ‘70s. I tried to imagine him, with his clean-cut face, his short hair, and his chipmunk teeth, as a young hippie. It seemed impossible.

“Let’s wait and see what happens,” he said finally.

Is this heaven? No, it's Big Sur.

So It Goes, Part 42: "What are you, a bunch of Nazis?"

“I’m going to get Mom’s job back."

My sister frowned. “You’re going to mess things up even worse.”

“How can they be worse?”

She clicked her tongue. “At least she has a job, even if it’s a crummy one.”

Before I could dispute this a phone rang. She somehow recognized this ring as hers and hers alone in the sea of office noises, and went away. I sat in the waiting room, glancing at the magazines, without any plan of what to say.

Before I could come up with a plan, a man in a brown suit came up to the door, knocked, and went in. Then the receptionist came out. “You may go in.”

The office was paneled in flimsy fake wood the color of dark chocolate. In the corner was a case with glass doors behind which were lined up a small army of liquor bottles—Metaxa, Cuervo, Jack Daniels. On the desk was an ashtray with the figure of a naked woman in a running pose. Three or four cigarette butts were crushed into it. The air was thick with smoke. The carpet made a soft sucking sound as my gym shoes trod gingerly over it. Clearly, I had entered the Realm of Men.

Two men stood before me. Mr. Bardolet was behind his desk, the other man next to it. “This is our legal counsel, Ken McCutcheon,” he said. “Have a seat."

My legs were shivering. I felt if I sat down I would never get up. “No, thanks,” I said. This modest bit of defiance made my legs feel stronger.

“Your newspaper has published slanderous articles, and we are considering libel proceedings against you,” said McCutcheon. Later, I realized he had mixed two terms and probably was lying outright just to intimidate me. But at the time, I was intimidated. I gulped and said nothing. “Anything you say here will be added to the lawsuit and come out in court.”

“What is it you want?” said Bardolet.

I stood before him, stammering. “Um…my, my mother. Had nothing to do with this.”

Then a shape moved by the window. Two bright eyes stared at me out of a coal black face. A light palm waved. I blinked, and just as quickly, the shape was gone. But the thought of Farkus loosened my throat.

“Is that all?” Bardolet asked. This inflamed me.

“You have no right to take my mother’s job away after all she has done to this—I mean for this—place,” I said. “I put that story in the paper. She didn’t. If anything, you should penalize me. Sue me. Sue the paper. You won’t because you know the story is true. Isn’t it?”

“It’s a lie!” he yelled. I couldn’t help jumping up a bit at the force of his words.

“Take it easy,” the lawyer muttered. Then to me: “Your mother signed a confidentiality oath when she joined this company. All employees are duty bound to keep all proceedings within the walls—“

“What are you, a bunch of Nazis?” I yelled. All the anger I had felt before at my mother, at the world, was now directed at these two men, as sharply focused as a laser beam. “That’ll sound good in print. You make her sign a piece of paper just so she can get a job and then you can do what you want with her. That’s got to be against the law. You want me to write about that? Give her her job back and I won’t.”

“There is no law barring employee confidentiality agreements,” said the lawyer.

But Bardolet stood and stared, apparently thinking. It seemed like a good time to turn on my heel and make a dramatic exit. My legs were shaking, so my turn wasn’t as sharp and warrior-like as I would have wished. But I have always been good at making such exits.

So It Goes, Part 41: Confronting the Bully

This was not the first time I had confronted someone in a dramatic way. Once, I had gone up to a bully on the playground and said, Look, you don’t want to hurt us. Why don’t you just leave us alone? I remember a knot of boys staring at me, not knowing what to do. But they did leave us in peace. I also remember breaking someone’s window when delivering a newspaper. Later, I came back to the house and “’fessed up” to her. It was not so unusual to ride across town to the black monolith of an insurance company that stood on the edge of Northwest Highway, brooding over the city.

When I got there, my legs were shaking from nervousness. I leaned my bike up against a tree. It fell down when I bumped it. I left it lying there on the ground. I went up the steps, feeling that this was all a dream, opened the door, and strode right up to the receptionist. She looked up from her newspaper, began to say “May I help you?” mechanically, then recognized me and simply said, “Oh.”

“I’m here to see Mr. Bardolet,” I said.

“Mr. Bardolet is in a meeting,” she said. “I don’t know when he’ll be available.”

“It’s important,” I said. “I think he will want to see me.”

She picked up the phone and announced my presence, describing me as “that reporter.” She hung up and said, “He’ll be with you shortly.” I took a seat in the waiting area off to the side. In the large room off to the side, I heard the clacking of IBM selectric typewriters, and the ring of telephones—all sounds that have disappeared now from offices all over the world. I smelled coffee; I smelled the mingled perfume of various women. Off to the right of the building, all the men worked. Off to the left were all the women. This place had not heard anything about the women’s liberation movement.

The receptionist left for a moment. I was glancing at the magazines when, a minute or two later, my sister came hurrying up. “What are you doing here?” Her brows were knitted together in vexation.

Jane Austen with Sea Monsters

I know I am sounding like Seinfeld right now but: What's the deal with books where classic texts are mingled with zombies and sea monsters? Is this legal? Zosia and I were shocked to see the books "Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters" and "Pride and Prejudice with Zombies" in Borders the other day. The author was given as "Jane Austen and ____ ____". (I don't remember the other writer's name, don't care to. How can he or she live with this?) This just seems so wrong, I don't even know what to say about it.

So It Goes, Part 40: Footsteps

It’s a strange thing to be reminded of the fact that you exist and that you leave footprints in the world. I had thought writing for the newspaper was a game, something that happened only in my head. Only rarely did I get feedback that let me know someone was reading my words. Now I had gotten my own mother in trouble with my words, and I was in a panic.

First, I did what anyone would do, I ate. I opened all the bags of potato chips (purchased by my mother) and devoured a handful of each, leaving crumbs all over the floor. This did not relieve the churning in my stomach. In fact, the churning got worse. Briefly, I thought of calling my father. But I was sure I would get deeper in trouble, not less.

I went outside and, with no plan in mind, got on my bicycle. I asked the bike what to do: Ride, it said. Okay, I thought. So I rode. I asked the school where I had gone to kindergarten: Too late, I heard it say. I asked the school where I had gone to grade school: Too bad, the nuns all chanted. I found myself riding north and west, past my high school (which had no response at all). I was close to the building where my mother worked. It came to me in a flash: I would go there and save her job. I would be the hero. I would fix things, like a true Do-It-Yourselfer, in the tradition of my family.

E-Commerce Tip: Use YouTube as a Search Engine

Everyone knows that Google is the most popular search engine on the Web. What's the second? It's probably not what you think. It's YouTube. Read this article at SearchEngineWatch. After spending time optimizing your site for Google and Microsoft's search engine Bing, try to post a short video on YouTube. "YouTube has been a phenomenal success for us, and has been our most successful new marketing technique in the last two or three years," says Lars Hundley of Clean Air Gardening. he shoots videos of products for sale and embeds them on his site's Web page. You can, too. This page includes a YouTube video of a compost bin.

So It Goes, Part 39: That's Who I Am

The Times came out on Wednesdays, and the rhythm of the week was arranged around that day. On Tuesday night we worked late, pasting up the pages and sending them off to be photographed and turned into plates. Wednesday was a low-pressure day. You cleaned up your desk, planned out the next issue, and in the early afternoon, the papers were delivered at the back gate. You could grab samples on your way home.

This week was different. I had a story on the front page. It wasn’t all my story, of course. The by-line was “Bob Burns and Greg Holden.” But that was good enough for me. I had broken through the mold of simply being a columnist and was now a true newspaperman.

When I got home, exhausted, I followed my usual Wednesday routine. I poured some Pepsi, went up to my room, and flopped down in my bed. I turned on the radio and stared at the newspaper spread out on the floor, reading my own stories over and over. It was like massaging my brain or my ego. Seeing my words and my name in print was better than any drug. That’s me, I kept thinking. That’s really who I am.

It wasn’t until the next day that I began to get the reaction. First, the phone rang at home. Thursday was my day off.

“What did you do that for?” Mom’s voice was tight, compressed, as though she was a tightly inflated tire and words, like air, were pouring out through clenched teeth.

“Do what for?” I asked stupidly.

“That story you wrote,” she said. “It’s really getting me in trouble. I’m going to lose my job.”

A hot caustic fluid shot out from my midsection and flooded my arms and legs. My Worry Engine, a machine I inherited from my mother, began churning in high gear. I knew immediately what she meant in a flash. But I asked about it anyway, hoping I was wrong.

“How am I making you lose your job?”

“Mr. Bardolet is really mad about that story you wrote,” she said. I was about to point out that I was only the co-author, but thankfully, I didn’t say this. “That report was supposed to be confidential. How could you do this to me?”

I tried to explain, as calmly as I could, that I wasn’t doing anything to her, that any report paid for by the city was a public matter, the kind of reasoning reporters use all the time. I was trying to be rational, unemotional. This only seemed to make her more anxious. Finally she had to hang up; Mr. Bardolet was calling her into her office. I sat at my desk, stunned, wondering what to do.

The phone rang a few minutes later. This time it was my sister. She raked me over the coals and said I was ruining Mom’s career. I had never thought of my mother having a career or any life outside the home.

“They think Mom told you all that stuff,” she said. “She’s really in trouble over it. What are you going to do about it?”

Tip for E-commerce Marketers: Practice Ethical SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't just loading down a site with keywords that are repeated over and over. Sites like Google also take into account whether or not your descriptions are accurate, and even whether your business is "worthwhile" or "worthy of attention." That's what Sarah-Lou Morris, founder of Alfresco, told me:

"We have spent enormous time researching our competition and their key points, as well as the keywords people search for, and making sure we are sincere in our ethics. It's important to write intelligently about your products and services in a truthful and interesting way. The search engine robots these days wander about sites sifting the "worthwhile" from the not so. Not to spend time working on getting across clearly and precisely what is being sold would be like sending in a shoddy half hearted CV to the best job in the world. The Google Robots will put you at the bottom of the pile."

Morris has done business online since 1997 and has customers like Sir Paul McCartney, so she knows what she is talking about.

Facial Hair, a column from 1978-79

It's interesting that I wrote about this as it was in my pre-beard days...

Part 2 is here.

So It Goes, Part 38: Maneuvering Around the Lumps

When you are young, everything seems like a game—at first. How bad can the consequences be, when your parents are always there to bail you out, either literally or figuratively?

I sat with Burns in his office. He looked over the annual report. “His credentials are quite good,” he said. “He’s been an insurance investigator since 1967.”

“He has some awards on his wall,” I added.

He nodded. “Let’s try to find out what they are. The question is, what happened to his report?”

The city had not released the report. It only released a brief one-paragraph summary stating an investigation was ongoing and the loss of life was “regrettable.”

“Does your mother have a copy of the report?” he asked me over the clacking of typewriters and the rumbling of the big presses with the word GOSS on them.

I didn’t bat an eye. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can ask.”

“At least if she can tell us how long it was, how many pages. Even that would be of interest.”

On the way home, all I could think of was the fact that he had used the word “Let’s.” It felt like I was a co-conspirator in a great adult adventure.

Mom was more upset than usual when she came home from work. I knew I would not have to ask her what was going on. It would come out of her soon enough. “Mr. Bardolet was so cranky today,” she said as she spooned the mashed potatoes into a big bowl. I scowled; I could see the big lumps in them. “He just seemed mean.”

“Something’s bothering him. It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” said my sister. She had begun to work part-time at the same insurance company. “It’ll be all right.” She was always trying to smooth things over, no matter what the problem.

“You want me to waste him?” said my brother. Everything that came out of his mouth had a sense of menace and threatened violence. “Waste” was being used in some movie of the time and was the current catchphrase. We all looked at him for a second and went on eating.

“Maybe it has something to do with that report about the fire,” I ventured, maneuvering my spoon around the lumps in the potatoes. “The city never did anything with it. Maybe that’s what’s bugging him.”

“I should have never said anything about it,” said Mom.

“That was a pretty long report, though,” I said. “Do you remember how long it was?”

“Eighteen pages, it was a long one,” she said.

“Maybe you should stop asking about it,” said my brother, glaring at me.

“Yeah, Greg, Mom doesn’t want to talk about it, and besides, all the reports are confidential.”

“It’s not confidential if the report is for the city. Everything having to do with the city is a public matter.” I had heard Burns say this once. I knew I wasn’t going to get any farther with this. But I got the bit of information I needed. And that was what caused the trouble.

So It Goes, Part 38: "Oh, he's a clever lad!"

It was the menacing time of autumn, the time just before Halloween when the leaves all tumbled from the trees with an audible clatter on the dry pavement and frost coated the windows in the mornings when you awoke in the dark and roused yourself unwillingly from between warm sheets. After school I drove out to Northwest Highway where my mother worked in a black metal box of a building. I slammed the door and walked over in the trenchcoat I had found at the resale shop near campus.

The bare branches of the trees seemed to be waggling at me like bony fingers, saying “Don’t…don’t…” But I paid no attention to them.

Once inside, Mom showed me off like a new baby, introducing me to one suburban matron after another. It reminded me of the skit I had just seen on the British comedy show I had discovered, Monty Python. I couldn’t wait to see it every Sunday night at 9:30. The mother introduces the grown son to her doting friend, talking to him in baby talk, asking if he likes his rattle, and he says, “Mother, I’m minister for overseas development.” “Oh, he’s a clever lad!” exclaims the mother.

“Oh, is this your son who writes the column in the paper?” said Mrs. Hareball. “We read that all the time.”

“Yes,” said mom, who never missed a chance to boast about my accomplishments to her friends, “and he’s writing an article right now on…”.

I cut her off, putting a finger to my lips.

She didn’t have an office so much as a corner of someone else’s reception area. There was her IBM Selectric II typewriter, with the little ball in the middle that spun rapidly, transferring letters to sheets of paper and carbon paper. On a side table were some brochures about the insurance company. I rifled through them eagerly.

“Does this company have an annual report?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ll see…”

Just then a man in a blue pinstripe suit came through the door. “Do you have that letter ready?” he asked my mother roughly. If that had happened now, I would have told him not to talk to her like that, but at the time, I was intimidated by things like job titles and people who were older than me, so I moved out of the way.

“No, Mr. Bardolet, I’ll have it in five minutes. This is my son…”

The hard wrinkles around his eyes and the deep furrows that creased his brow faded. “Oh, hello,” he shook my hand. I thought: this is the man we are investigating. He’s a normal human being with two hands.

I took a deep breath and spoke: “I’m interested in your company,” I said. “Do you have anything like an annual report I could look at?”

“Why, sure,” he said, ducking back into his office. Once he had been distracted, mom sat down at the typewriter and hurriedly loaded paper into it. There was a moment of collusion between us.

“Here’s this year’s, and the year before,” he said when he reappeared. By this time mom had started typing. He excused himself and went to the bathroom. I sat in a chair and scanned the reports.

So It Goes, Part 37: It's Very Stable Work

I was surprised to hear Burns's deep and authoritative voice on the other end of the phone, not the hung-over slur or nasal prankster tones of my joking friends. The only phone was in the kitchen. Mom never left when you were on the phone. She shuffled between the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, eating, cleaning, moving things around. I am surprised, now that she is gone, not to see a triangular path worn into the green linoleum tile.

“Can you turn that radio down?” I asked. She clicked her tongue and turned down Newsradio 78.

“I did a little asking around about that fire in the warehouse,” he said. “There might be something to it. That building had had a fire inspection just a month before. I was wondering if you could help me with it.”

“Sure,” I said, glancing over at my mother, wishing she would leave but not saying anything.

“Find out something about her boss, the guy who made that arson report. Maybe you can get a biography of him or something? It would be in their annual report.” In those days there was no such thing as a Web site. Everything was in printed books.

“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. This was exactly what I had wanted—to work on a real news story, to participate in an investigation, to “dig up dirt,” as reporters sometimes say casually without thinking about where to put the dirt or who will get dirty.

“Find out how long he has been there and how many reports he has done. Maybe that will be in their literature somewhere.”

“OK.”

When I hung up, Mom left the kitchen and went into the living room. “Who was that?” she asked.

“My editor,” I said.

“Oh, is he giving you more work? It would be so good if he would give you a real full-time job instead of writing these columns once in a while.”

I let the sting of what seemed like her continual dissatisfaction with what I was doing wash over me. Far, far back in the reptilian part of my brain, a voice said: I’ll show you. I said, “Actually, he does have a job for me, to help with a story,” I said.

“That’s great!” she sat down in her recliner, a plate of pastries on her lap. “Is that something you might do all the time, so you have a regular paycheck coming in?”

“Maybe,” I said. “It’s sort of a trial.”

“Well, if that doesn’t work you should think about the insurance industry,” she said. “It’s very stable, very steady.”

I thought quickly and was pleased at the nimbleness of my mind. “Maybe I should find out about your company just in case a reporter job doesn’t open up. Maybe I should stop over there some time—this afternoon even.”

She said that would be just fine. I made a note to stop over after my classes got out, and felt like a young Woodward or Bernstein. I’ll have to buy a trenchcoat, I thought as I made a sandwich for lunch with the food my mother had purchased with the money she worked hard to make at the insurance company I was about to investigate.

An E-Commerce Sale on Facebook

I wrote about a Facebook seller Kharisma Ryantori in an earlier column about her Facebook Kiosk. Shortly after, she made her first sale on Facebook. No, Facebook is not a store, nor should it be. But it does give enterprising people another outlet for reaching potential customers. Her store is called Popnicute; what she sold is here.

So It Goes, Part 36: The Beginning of a Fire

“Mr. Bardolet seemed really worried about this fire,” my mother told me. “He didn’t sound like himself.”

She didn't seem like herself either. Instead of telling me about food that was available or asking me to get her shoes or perform some other task for her, she was confiding in me. Because I was in the newspaper, I was someone "in the know," apparently. Suddenly, I was being treated like an adult.

It was a fire in a city-owned warehouse, where they kept old vehicles and industrial equipment. Many vehicles were lost in the blaze. In addition, one homeless man who had been sleeping in one of the buses in the warehouse had been killed. She had typed the report from one of her insurance company's agents, who had dictated it into his dictaphone.

“He said when he went to the scene he smelled gasoline,” mom said. “He used the words ‘suspicious origin.’”

I had not heard this about the fire before. When Burns, the editor, had written about the event, it was said to have been an electrical fire. Some bit of curiosity rose inside me like a flame, the beginning of a fire. It is the curiosity that drives all reporters.

“Did he use the word ‘arson’?” I said.

“No, no…I probably shouldn’t be telling you about this,” she said. “Why don’t you eat something? You’re too thin.”

I had written one story for the main part of the newspaper, a report about a local elementary school closing. Perhaps, I thought, I could write an investigative piece about this fire, and it would help me get a job as a reporter, either at this paper or another.

When I told Burns over the phone he didn’t seem all that interested. I learned later not to take this feigned indifference too seriously. Sometimes when people seem like they aren’t really interested, they’re really intrigued. “What was this insurance guy’s name?” he asked casually. I told him. So things were set in motion, without any deep thought on my part, other than my own ambition.

Deadheads, a column from 1978-79

[Click on the image to read the full column.]

So It Goes, Part 35: The Ogre

When I thought about my mother at all, I thought of her as an ogre. She was a figure sitting in the living room, rubbing her arthritic knees, and harping at me. One time this changed was when I took the young woman I was dating—the one I had met on the el train—to Evanston, the town on the swank North Shore where I was felt I was supposed to grow up all along.

We walked down the sidewalk where I had played as a little tyke and looked in the windows at 913-1/2 Sherman Avenue. We couldn’t see anything. A guy walking past asked if we were looking for someone. “No…no,” I said. I felt the urge to tell him I used to live there, like a famous writer come back to the humble home of his origins, but I did not, because I was not famous, and I was barely a writer at all.

“You used to zip past that basement window on your tricycle as fast as you could,” my father told us when we returned. “Your mother and I used to wonder where you were pedaling so furiously.”

“I used to push you in your carriage down Main Street, visiting the bakery and the other shops,” my mother told me.

I felt a fleeting rush of maternal love for her, a feeling her as my mother, and not some figure endlessly complaining and nagging and watching dumb situation comedies on TV. But such feelings were rare; I seldom had the time to feel or think in her presence as she was constantly asking me to get her something, telling me to put something away, complaining about something I had said or did earlier.

She worked at the insurance company on Northwest Highway, where she was a stenographer, recording interminable reports transmitted to her by agents talking into a mysterious device called a Dictaphone. She would sit with headphones on her head typing 100 words a minute, for hours at a time. Usually she typed out the details of some disaster or other that had nothing to do with her but that fed into the dark cloud of anxiety that hung over her all the time. “Damage to the front end of the car was extensive…occupants were thrown forward, hitting their heads on the windshield…” or “The origin of the fire was determined to be a pile of rags in the garage…”

Usually the reports she typed were of no consequence to the public, but once, she did tell me about a report she had typed that she thought would be of interest.

So It Goes, Part 34: Putting the Roots Back Together

“Why is everyone so angry with me?” I asked. “All I did was cut a few roots.”

Farkus sighed. As he shook his head, a few grains of dirt fell into the cracks in the ancient leather seat covering. “No, you do not understand.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Let me see. I didn’t cut just a few roots. I hurt the whole network, all over the place, everywhere.”

Now he looked up at me, happily, and touched my arm for the first time. “Now you see. You see.”

We made some more travels through the network. We went to the cemetery where my grandmother was buried. We could practically feel her presence and that of the people all around her. We went to her home in the city, and then to the historic home in Des Plaines that had burned down. After a while I yawned, and Farkus took me back to where we had started. But this time he showed me another way to descend into the Rootweavers’ world, through another manhole cover.

“Go down this passage twenty steps, then open this door,” he said. “You have to squeeze through. Keep yourself thin.” He patted me on the stomach. I wish now that I had followed this advice.

When I came up through the street and put the cover back with a loud clatter the dawn light was just coming up. It was a quiet Saturday morning. Yet as I turned the corner there was activity on Orchard Street. It was my mother. On weekends she and her sister, my aunt Willamae, went to flea markets to sell the things they had found at garage sales during the week.

“Greg-o-ry,” said my aunt in her nasal, singsong voice. “Whatcha doin’? Just comin’ in after a night on the town?”

“Actually, I took a little trip,” I said, yawning.

I knew my mother would ask me for help. Whenever I was in her presence, I was at her disposal. I was like a second pair of arms. “Oh, could you bring those boxes out to the car?” she asked, pointing to some boxes on the front steps.

“Come on, I’m tired,” I said.

“What were you doing out all night?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand.” As quickly as I could, I carried all three boxes at once and plopped them on the ground by the car, then hurried away to escape further demands on my precious time and energy.

“Don’t drop them, they contain valuable antiques!” she said.

“Stupid junk,” I muttered.

“Do you see how he talks to me, how he treats me?” she said to her sister.

“These kids, they just don’t care about their mothers,” said Aunt Willamae.

Now I look back and think: I wish I could put those roots back together. I did not know how difficult it would be. But I would find out soon enough.