Newspapers In a City of Ghosts
I am a creature of habit. So when I visit my dad at his nursery home in Morton Grove, Illinois, I make a point of doing the same thing over and over again.
I always stay at the same ragingly adequate chain motel a couple of blocks from where my dad now lives unhappily. And I always make a point of indulging in all the things that I still love about Chicago.
I am a traditionalist, so no trip to Chicago or the outlying suburbs is complete without ordering Lou Malnati’s. You better believe that as a former proud Chicagoan I would never lower myself to eating thin crust pizza when I can have a thick brick of cheese and sausage and tomatoes and butter crust and everything else that separates Chicago deep dish pizza from the garbage they serve at Papa John’s.
A newspaperman
I would sooner slather a Vienna hot dog in ketchup than insult the spirit of Chicago by ordering thin crust instead of deep dish from Lou Malnati’s. I also make a point of going somewhere for an Italian Beef sandwich, preferably dipped, with sweet peppers and cheese.
Since marijuana was legalized in Illinois I also make a point of going to a dispensary upon arriving, although Chicago being Chicago, they’ve somehow managed to make a no-brainer like legal weed unnecessarily complicated and expensive.
Every time I visit my day I try to bring a different kind of deeply unhealthy food and we do what people in nursing homes do: watch a shit load of television. The last time I visited Amy Schneider was deep into her historic 39 episode run as a Jeopardy champion, which was tremendously exciting to watch the same way it’s exciting to watch Michael Jordan play basketball or Nicolas Cage act.
We also hate-watched the Jay Leno-hosted Let’s Make a Deal, which I recommend to anyone who wants to know what it looks like when a celebrity is completely checked out and literally could not care less about about what he’s doing.
Once upon a time my father was a denizen of the online world in the sense that he knew how to get online and enjoyed doing so. That changed about a decade ago and he regressed to the point where he now seems in genuine awe of people who can turn on computers and use iPhones.
Another beloved ritual of my trips to Chicago involves reading the Chicago Sun-Times and, to a lesser extent, The Chicago Tribune. Computers are few and far between at my dad’s nursing home but newspapers are everywhere.
Merely picking up a copy of Chicago Sun-Times engenders powerful nostalgia. Growing up, newspapers were life. As a tween and teen I would spend long, unhappy evenings at various greasy spoons in Chicago, reading The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times from cover to cover .
In high school they used to call me “Paperboy” because I was always reading the paper. I read Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times and dreamed about following in his footsteps.
For a long time I thought of myself as a newspaperman. That wasn’t just my profession: it was my existential destiny.
Now my identity is defined entirely by being a Juggalo.
That was a long, long time ago. Now reading a newspaper feels like a weird time warp trip to a past I only half-remember, when print was king and computers were something weird and fringe only nerds and scientists bothered with.
Newspapers feel like the past rather than the present or the future. It feels like they belong in a museum. They’re something I’ve loved rather than something I actively adore.
The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times may still be in operation but they now feel unmistakably like unusually literate ghosts in a city full of bittersweet reminders of what used to be my home but now feels very far away, not unlike my long-ago life as a Wind City newspaperman.
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