By John Kass

January 4, 2023

We were coming down in the elevator at Northwestern Hospital, bickering ever so slightly in the way of married couples who know how to bicker politely in public. I was a bit nervous about having shoulder surgery this week. And Betty was nervous that I was nervous.

So, we bickered, ever so slightly, about that gold Greek Orthodox cross that wasn’t around my neck. Its absence vexed me. If there’s one thing married couples know how to do well, is to bicker in hospital elevators with their masks on. We were so good at the bickering that we forgot there was someone else in the elevator with us.

She was a nice woman, a loyal reader and subscriber to johnkassnews.com

Betty bought that cross for me years ago from our friend Odyss Tsarouhis of Reichman Jeweler’s in Oak Lawn. He and his partner are closing their doors after 40 years in business. The reason? You guessed it. Violent crime. This time the robbers shot Odyss in the chest and left him on the floor to die. He’s tough. He didn’t die. Now he shows reporters his scars.

But he is closing his door. “It’s just too dangerous,” he said. And he’s right.

Years ago, When Oak Lawn was an Outfit town there was never any violence against shopkeepers. No stickup crew from Chicago would ever dare hit a place in Oak Lawn. Even during the Outfit chop shop wars in the ‘70s, Oak Lawn was safe. The wiseguys used shotguns on each other, but they didn’t go around shooting innocent business owners in Oak Lawn.

Oak Lawn?

What I’m going through is nothing like what Odyss went through. Rotator cuff surgery doesn’t take courage. I’ll just sit quietly on my behind like I usually do. The only things I won’t be able to do for a few days is type, or fish, or throw curveballs. But I kept reaching for the cross that wasn’t there.

I’d taken the cross off for the MRI. I thought Betty had it. She didn’t. I must have put it in my jeans, but it wasn’t there. So, she didn’t have it. And I didn’t have it. Where was it?

“Excuse me,” said the third person in the elevator. We’d forgotten about her. “Good luck with the shoulder surgery,” she said.

What? We stopped bickering. How did she know?

“I just wanted to tell you that I’ve renewed my subscription to johnkassnews,” she said. “I knew you from your voice.”

I guess I don’t have the voice of a nightingale.

“No,” she agreed. “You don’t.”

We all had masks on like criminals in the hospital, but you could see by her eyes she was smiling. Her voice was smiling. Betty and I thanked her and I apologized for bickering.

“Get that shoulder fixed,” she said.

I’ll be throwing a curveball before you know it, I told her. But just not for a bit. Even typing might take a few days. The left shoulder took a few days out of me. The right one should take a few too.

I will get to the Golden Moutza of the month column, and I have the perfect winner. If there’s anyone more deserving of the award, I don’t know who is. But I won’t spoil it. You’ll just have to wait until Sunday. This Golden Moutza will sting this guy for years.

I might need a couple days with good friends lending a hand with guest columns, me sleeping in the recliner, enjoying an ice sleeve and the pain pills, streaming “1923” on video and itching to get my arm strong again.

Why? To get back to life, to fish for steelhead and salmon in that river up north. To work in the garden. To work with a serious working line German Shepherd Dog in the sport of Shutzhund.

 And to hold a hunting hawk. What’s that you say? Thinking of a hawk for hunting is a fantasy? You don’t have to tell me it’s a fantasy. I already know that. But it would be something, wouldn’t it?

I’m not crazy enough to think I could handle an eagle, like the Mongolian man in the photo. You ever stand next to an eagle, two or three feet away, close enough that it could reach you? I have. It was a Golden Eagle.

 The first thing you realize is that it’s a killer. You realize the power of it, that it could kill you if it wanted, and there would be nothing you could do about it. The beak could break your skull, as if Mike Tyson was determined to punch you in the mouth. What would you do? Nothing.

Most Americans remember a line or two from the movie “Conan the Barbarian” the screen play written by John Milius and Oliver Stone. What they remember is the Genghis Kahn character asking his son and Conan the eternal question: What is best in life.

Unlike Conan, who became one of those establishment Republicans favoring endless wars, I really don’t want to crush my enemies, drive them before me while I listen to the lamentation of their women.

I suppose I’ll never make a good barbarian. Or a neo-con policy hawk.

The Khan’s son would fall to Conan. But he wanted what I wanted. The hunting bird and a good horse. And maybe out in Montana or Wyoming?

And Zeus the Wonder Dog quartering the field in front of me? Just the thought of it is enough to get me through the next few days. Then back to the race for mayor as soon as I can, before these candidates start panicking and tearing up the city.

What is it about the hunting hawk thing? As a little boy who was sickly, with a mom who tried keeping me out of sports until finally she couldn’t stop me, I did a lot of reading. It was either that or go mad. And I read everything from Robert Louis Stevenson to stories about the saints, and treacherous kings, and others involving the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus. I’d sit out on the back steps of the two flat on Peoria Street, and later in a lawn chair on the patio in Oak Lawn and read.

I also learned from the Arthurian stories that hunting with hawks was big sport in olden times.

In the 5^th grade I ordered a special book from the Scholastic Book Club, “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean Craighead George. It was book about a boy named Sam Gribley, who runs away from home to his grandfather’s land up in the Catskill Mountains of New York. And there Sam survives alone in the wilderness with his friend, the brave falcon named Frightful.

We took a late summer vacation that year, the only one of our childhood. My parents took us to Montreal, to the world exposition or Expo ’67. We avoided Detroit—even as an 11-year-old I knew Detroit was cracking under the weight of violence and crime, just as Chicago is now. We headed up to Guelph for Uncle Bill’s wedding, and then on to Quebec.

For eternities I stared out the window, mile after mile in that big ’62 blue Caddy going 100 miles an hour, my father smoking in the front seat, no one wearing seat belts, past endless fields of corn and beans, looking for only one thing: The sight of a hawk.

We stopped at a highway picnic ground, we had bread and cheese and Pepsi for lunch. The wasps ran us off. And back in the car, out the window to my left, there were brown stubbly fields.

I saw motion before anything else, a shadow, and then the flash of the bright underside of wings, yellow talons extended reaching to grab a brown rabbit on the edge of dirt.

I told myself that I would never, ever forget that day.

There have been many things I’ve forgotten, from the names of long haired girls I thought I loved, and triumphs I once thought were important.

But I did not forget that day. And I know why. It involved a hawk.

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(Copyright 2023 John Kass)