What I saw at the fair

The Russian emigre who works at the dry cleaner has an accent like Natasha, as in Boris and Natasha. "You are going to the fair?" she asked on Saturday. "Yes, indeed," I said, "I've gone every year since I moved here in 1992.

"I live here eight years and I have never been. What is there to see?"

"Fat people," I said, "lots and lots of fat people."

True of course, but true like mild cheese, nourishing yet boring. Here's what I saw that wasn't boring:

1. Goats, one of which was eating a steel-link dog chain.

2. Dogs running an obstacle course. My corgi Luther would rip my throat out if I asked him to do even one of those jumps, tunnels, see-saws, or ramps.

3. Young men with muscles.

4. An old man who sat next to me on a bench and, between bites of pepperoni pizza, told me that it isn't the heat that bothers him, it's the humidity.

5. The entire cast of extras from Winter's Bone.

6. A display on how and why bees swarm, useful knowledge because my neighbor Mel has become an amateur apiarist, and just last week his bees swarmed.

7. Some cupolas, after which I won an argument over how to pronounce cupola.

I didn't get a scotch egg or a turkey leg, so maybe I'll go back. Or maybe not.

Day two at Lollapalooza

On day two of Lollapalooza I set out to find the tattoo that stands out, the one that says, "yeah, you old fart, you think everyone regrets this decision eventually but here is artwork for a lifetime." Lollapalooza is certainly the place for that quest; I saw at least a billion. But not one went beyond the expected and ordinary. Maybe it's hidden so that only lovers will ever enjoy it. I hope so.

I did see a Chicago flag belt buckle; I'd never seen one before. Here it is without the human. The first star is for Fort Dearborn, founded in 1803, the second for the Chicago Fire of 1871, the third for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the fourth for the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933.

I saw one good t-shirt, a category more depressingly obvious and ordinary than tattoos: "Because, without beer, things do not seem to go as well." I like its polished sense of dramatic understatement.

And I was stretched out in the sun on the wall of a stairway, listening to Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, when a young hipster with muscles and a grin looked at my socks and said, "best socks in the place." Then he was gone up the stairs. It was one of those odd fillips that makes one feel at home in a strange place, and I'm grateful to him.

As for Gogol Bordello, it was the best live musical performance I've ever sat through, so that even if I don't find that tattoo, the adventure will have been worthwhile.

Day one at Lollapalooza

About a year ago I made the radical decision to follow along with my son William's alternative rock avocation. This meant simply that instead of saying, "turn that down," I said, "what is that?" I'm not reporting this to prove what a good parent I am, but instead to explain why I'm spending three days at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

Here's what's worth noting after one day.

1. The city I lived in for 27 years is unrecognizable. This is probably true of anyplace when you don't come back for 18 years, but it's not just the way it looks. The zeitgeist has changed; it doesn't feel, smell, taste, or sound like Chicago. It's a nice hipster rich city, but it's not Chicago.

2. Pork belly is in. At Lollapalooza at least four stands of four different ethnicities are selling something made of pork belly. This means it will be in Minneapolis in two years.

3. When accosted by Rock the Vote about the November election, a teenager behind me in line said, "What election?" This is not remarkable, but when told the election is for the House of Representatives and the Senate, the look on his face said he had no idea what those are.

4. Emailing clients while standing in a crowd being blasted by sound improves both business and the concert experience.

5. It was Hiroshima Day and no one mentioned it.

6. You can sometimes believe The Wall Street Journal. They recommended seven bands and the first one I saw, Wavves, was terrific.

7. Short shorts with low boots is in. This means it will be in Minneapolis in two years.

And now I'm going to get ready for day two.

Things you may not know about prothonotaries

Every year we visit my wife's parents in Naples (Florida, not Campania), and every year we spend half a day going to Corkscrew Swamp, an Audubon preserve 45 minutes inland. Corkscrew after days of beach and sun is like salad after the main course or cheese with apple pie, a contrast that refreshes the senses, revives desire, and satisfies the craving for complexity in the universe.

This year we saw Painted Buntings, a baby raccoon, a Ghost Orchid so high up in a faraway tree that it had to be viewed through a high-powered monocular on a tripod, bear shit, a baby alligator, and a giant alligator that surfaced silently from the algae on the pond in front of us. But the best thing we saw was a Prothonotary Warbler.

Prothonotary Warblers aren’t rare, but they are difficult to see because they forage in dense foliage low to the ground. Even bird-watchers and ornithologists get excited when they see one, and Alger Hiss’s boast of having sighted a Prothonotary Warbler became, for HUAC, one of the facts that linked him to Whittaker Chambers.

Now, unless you’re tragically incurious, drugged, or dead, you of course want to know what a prothonotary is. I’m glad you asked.

Prothonotaries were high-ranking civil administrators in the Byzantine Empire, 7th through 12th centuries. Prothonotaries still are high officials of the Roman Catholic Church, but they no longer wear the golden robes that give the warbler its name. In the Canadian federal courts, a prothonotary is a judicial officer with many of the powers of a judge. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the prothonotary is the chief court clerk, as he is in the Supreme Courts of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria.

Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all of this by tomorrow. It is, after all, a random collection of facts held together by a 12.5-gram bird. And cravings for complexity are quickly sated. My 12- and 14-year old boys forgot the Prothonotary Warbler even faster than tomorrow, first decrying the depressing ugliness of inland Florida strip malls as we drove back from Corkscrew Swamp, then demanding that we stop at one for Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had a Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut and a Chocolate Kreme Filled Donut, and, many days later, I'm still wondering where the salad course is.

Pantywaist goes to hockey game

Once a year my brother-in-law gives the family tickets to a Wild game. We all look forward to it. Hockey is beautiful and exciting. Xcel is a great place to see a game. And the whole experience is other-worldly, not just being surrounded by space aliens, but actually visiting their planet.

This year, as usual, the four of us were the only people in the arena not wearing Wild paraphernalia. And this year, as usual, the greatest pleasure for the 12- and 14-year olds was eating the kind of food they don't get at home. Both boys were done with their Philly cheese steaks before the Star Spangled Banner began, and no, they didn't care that their sandwiches bore no relation to what's served in Philadelphia, or that the cheese glopped over it was mostly vegetable oil with artificial coloring.

A few minutes into the first period, there was a fight. Not a little fight, but the kind where the referees stand aside and let the two guys go at it. The St. Louis Blues player lost his helmet, so his head served as a punching bag for the Wild player. It was probably 60 seconds; it seemed like ten minutes. It was unpleasant.

Not so much because I expected the punchee to start bleeding from his ears and be carted off to die in some green-tiled, fluorescent-lit St. Paul emergency room. But because the crowd cheered every punch, standing and screaming with pleasure, so excited that they might even have spilled some of their beer.

"Watch out," you're thinking, "he's going to make a last-days-of-Rome reference." No I'm not. The cheering needed no tired similes; it was horrible enough on its own. The 12-year old, who spends every waking minute splattering the brains of opposing Call of Duty soldiers against the concrete block walls of nameless Eastern European cities, all the while chortling "head shot" into his headset, was visibly upset. He'd never seen real grownups really fighting, he didn't like it, and he particularly didn't like that thousands of people loved it. The 14-year old asked why they allowed it. "Because everyone loves it," I said, "look around you."

Oh well. The rest of the game was filled with dazzling skating and shot-making. The boys recovered sufficiently to each eat a pizza at the beginning of the second period. The Wild won. We all went home feeling we'd had a cultural adventure. We were exhausted in a good way and, at the same time, excited, so excited that we had huge fight in the car over how to pronounce Guayaquil.

Now there's something worth fighting over. I think if we'd been on skates, there might have been a death or two.

The rabbit in the back yard

I don't care how cute and furry they are, I hate rabbits.

They eat the garden. They're stupid, prone to dying needlessly under the wheels of cars because they freeze in terror, spreading guts and brains and blood and fur all over the road for the crows to clean up. They shit everywhere at will, leaving perfect and delicious Rabbit Trix for my Corgi (a big, manly Cardigan Corgi, by the way, not a small, overweight, sissy Pembroke Corgi) to hoover up endlessly, which is even more disgusting than rabbit bodies in the road. And rabbits breed like rabbits, producing adorable bunny treats for Alice the cat. Alice eats the whole baby, leaving only the skull for me to clean up and the scream of the dying innocent echoing in my ears.

So it was with dismay that I discovered we've acquired a resident rabbit who lives under our front porch. He was in our back yard every night this winter, eating like a king from our compost heap, where he can choose from the leavings of pears, apples, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, cabbages both green and red, brussels sprouts, lettuces of all nations, cucumbers, tulips, lilies, and whatever else, all of it flash-frozen to preserve the flavor and nutrition, and decorated with a tasteful dusting of ridiculously expensive coffee grounds from Dunn Bros. With the exception of the root vegetables, it's a small lesson in the evils of the carbon-based economy: burn fossil fuels to transport food, instead of eating locally, and your rabbits will come home to roost.

Even worse, I've come to like him. I'm proud that he's bigger than any other rabbits I see in the alley. The whole family cuts those weird little black berries from the chokeberry bush for him to eat, then applauds when they're gone in the morning. And now that he spends a lot of time in our neighbors' yard, I worry that he's ok.

It can't end well. Spring is here, and he'll start to eat the garden, starting with the alpine strawberry plants that just yesterday appeared from under the ice. Or he'll cross the road looking for a mate and die and I'll have to watch his body decay while the crows carry away the juiciest pieces. Or he will turn out to have been she all along, and she'll have babies, and Alice will eat them, and I'll have to worry that she's sad.

Yeah, I know rabbits don't get sad. But this is my rabbit.

Christmas trees and pigs

I once knew a woman who, when I mentioned my Christmas tree, said, "oh, it's like having a dead body in your house." I understood right away, pondered why I'd never seen it her way before, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it her way ever since.

It hasn't, of course, stopped me from having Christmas trees. But every year at Thanksgiving I wonder what it would be like to have a house with an atrium where our live Christmas tree grew, decorated in late November and undecorated in early January, a member of the family, growing tall with our kids.

This year, for the second or third year in a row, our discarded Christmas tree is propped perfectly vertical in a backyard snow bank. It adds architecture to the yard, relieves the monotony of white, and, as whatever broadside that gave us the idea promised, it gives shelter to the birds. It looks perfectly alive, green and healthy, and it will until the snow melts. Then it will fall over, and all the needles will come off at once, and it will be a skeleton instead of a body, lying on its side in the middle of the spring rebirth.

In perfect non sequitur it will remind me of another friend, a man I knew when I was a vegetarian. "You know," I told him one day, "pigs are really smart animals, you shouldn't eat them." To which he replied, "that's exactly the animals I want to be eating, the really smart ones."