8/31/20
Chicago’s latest mass shooting took place yesterday
afternoon in my old neighborhood, about two blocks from the house in which I
grew up and a block from St. Walter, where I went to grade school. Here is the link to the story on Channel 2,
the local CBS affiliate:
Five people were shot, one of those died.
Lume’s is what we used to call a coffee shop. For those of you not old enough to remember,
coffee shops were not always places where people went to fritter away money on
hideously overpriced coffee and other coffee-based drinks with unpronounceable
names. Once upon a time, coffee shops
were places, usually owned by Greeks but sometimes by Albanians
or people of other ethnic groups from the southeast corner of Europe, where one
went to get a reasonably priced meal. They generally have menus nearly as voluminous
as phone books, back when we had phone books, because one can get just about
anything except, in most cases, alcohol at such restaurants. I use the present tense in this description because
such places still exist, and are particular favorites of the Quinn household;
however, the title “coffee shop” has been purloined by the aforementioned hip
types of places where the sheepish among us can be shorn for $5.00 coffees with
no refills. Now, places like Lume’s are
called, informally, Greek joints and, formally, pancake houses, hence forth the
formal name of Lume’s, Lume’s Pancake House. Out east such places are called diners.
The busiest time of the day for such establishments is
Sunday for the after-church breakfast crowd.
That makes this particular shooting, which took place at 1:50 PM, just
before Lume’s closes but while it is still crowded, especially appalling.
Lume’s has not been at 116th and Western
forever, but yours truly was born in 1957 and can only barely remember when it
was being built. It was first called The Red Wheel.
In a later incarnation, it was called The Fifth Wheel. We went there occasionally for breakfast, but
neither my parents nor I went out to breakfast much; it was expensive and we
could eat better at home, especially when my dad would bring home the home-made
pork sausage one of his buddies in the meat business made, but I digress. I had a girlfriend in college who was from Mt.
Greenwood, the next neighborhood west.
She would now and then tell the story about how her family’s house was
damaged in a fire or some similar type of incident when she was little and the
kitchen was put out of commission; her family consequently ate dinner (Back
then, the restaurant was open for dinner.) at the Red Wheel just about every
night for what was, or at least seemed like, weeks. Somewhere along the line, one of my grade
school buddies, John Barajas, who still lives a few blocks east of the
place in the house in which he grew up, owned the joint, but he’s been out of
it for quite awhile. Lume’s has owned
the place for about 20 years. Lume’s is
a small chain. I think this is their
only Chicago location, with their others located in the southwest suburbs. The 116th location may have been
their first, but I’m writing this from memory, so don’t take these times to the
bank.
All three of our kids were confirmed at Sacred Heart,
a small Catholic Church about five blocks east of Lume’s, in the first and
second decades of the new millennium.
Sacred Heart has been my church since early adolescence; we stopped
going to Mass at St. Walter about the time I graduated from St. Walter
grade school for reasons that are not germane to this discussion but will come
up in my third book, on which I am working at the present time. After we went to 8:30 Mass and the kids
finished their religious education (“RE.” When I was young we called it “CCD,”
for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and it was for “the publics,”
which, come to think of it, our kids were.) class, we would go to Lume’s for
breakfast and, usually, sit at the counter.
We would often see people we knew from the neighborhood there, most
notably Mr. and Mrs. DuBois, who were like second parents to everybody
who went to St. Walter in my era. It was always a joyous occasion, and still is,
to see the DuBois, but I digress.
When we sat at the counter, our waitress was almost
invariably Terri, who is briefly
interviewed on the CBS report to which I included the link above. I was surprised to see that she is still
there, but I guess I shouldn’t have been; I have rarely seen a harder working
person. If you want to see an example
of hard work under pressure, take a look at the wait staff at a Greek joint on
Sunday morning. And Terri was, and I’m
still sure is, the best and hardest working of the staff at Lume’s, which
doesn’t hire slouches. Terri, besides
working at Lume’s full-time, had a second full-time job as an aide at a local
hospital. You could tell that, as hard
as the work was, she enjoyed working at Lume’s; it came through in all that she
did. She loved her customers, including
our girls. I remember our daughter Emily
going with me and her brother Mark to the restaurant a few years after Emily
had been confirmed and hence no longer regularly joined us on Sunday
mornings. Terri, of course, remembered
her name, which surprised me because Emily and Megan were both “Baby” to Terri,
gave her an enormous hug and told Emily how much she had missed her. I suspect Terri would know us if we were to
go back tomorrow, or when (I hope not “if.”) the restaurant re-opens, after
several years of absence. (We are,
except for when the kids were attending RE classes, “Saturday Mass” people and
Lume’s closes at 3:00; hence our absence since then.)
While I went to Lume’s with the girls more than with
their brother (Mark attended RE with three of his friends from out here and all
four kids, their dad, and I would go to White Castle after RE for late
morning sliders. It doesn’t get better
than that.), Mark and I would occasionally drop into Lume’s for breakfast. One such occasion was especially
memorable. At the next table sat Sam
Adams, Sr. and Jr., and Sam, Jr.’s wife and kids, who were little at the
time. Back then, Sam, Jr. lived in the
neighborhood, and I think he still does.
It was 2010, a month or so after Rod Blagojevich’s first trial,
the one in which he was exonerated on all but one count. Sam, Jr. had been his lead attorney, but Sam,
Sr. was co-counsel and had made a rousing and absolutely fantastic speech about
the power of the federal government to ruin people’s lives on little more than
a whim and a suspicion. As someone who
is especially wary about federal power, I was especially taken with the speech. So, after we ate and were getting ready to
leave, I apologized to the Adams family for interrupting their breakfast, but
told Sam, Sr. how great his post-Blagojevich speech was, how he had put into
such eloquent words many of the fears anybody with respect for the Constitution
has of the federal government. He
thanked me profusely, but then Sam, Jr. chimed in with (I won’t use quotes here
because I am paraphrasing from memory.):
Oh, great. Now
I’m going to have to hear from my dad all day, and probably all week and all
month, about what a great orator and lawyer he is because the guy at Lume’s
took the time to tell him what a great speech he made after the Blagojevich’s
trial. Thanks a lot!
Laughs were had all around and Mark got a great civics
lesson and the chance to meet a couple of celebrities who didn’t act like
celebrities at Lume’s. It’s that kind
of place.
As more information comes out on the shooting, we are
learning that the crime was not random but that the murder victim was targeted
and that the entire incident was gang, or at least crime, related. No
surprise there. It’s not easy to feel
bad for the direct and intended victims of such internecine gang
conflicts. However, it’s much easier to
yearn for how things might have turned out had many such criminals had a chance
at the fundamentals of a good life: involved
parents, intact families, a decent education, and, in general, people who care
about them not as political pawns or objects of pity but as fellow human
beings. And it’s far easier, indeed,
imperative, to care for the innocent victims of such violence, the bystanders
and people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case, as one woman whose cousin was
enjoying breakfast at Lume’s with her husband and grandchild when the shooting
started, put it,
“This is senseless.
Her grandbaby is sitting with her there, 2 months old. And y’all shoot
when you see a 2-month-old baby? That’s outrageous. You kind of get used to it, you see it every
day on the news. These babies, they don’t care.”
Violent crime happens everywhere in Chicago now, from the
crime-ridden neighborhoods on the South and West Sides to the Gold Coast. Sadly, we always took it for granted in the
former and now take it for granted in the latter. And it happens more frequently in
neighborhoods like Morgan Park, where Lume’s is located, than it did
when I grew up there. But something
like this? A mass shooting in broad
daylight at a restaurant that has never had problems despite the many changes
the neighborhood has seen over the years of the restaurant’s existence? As one of the neighbors on the CBS report
linked above put it, these things don’t happen there.
I can already hear some of the criticism from the types
who live in places like Winnetka, call themselves “social justice warriors,”
put anodyne signs in their front yards, and only care about Black lives when
they are lost at the hands of the police:
“Oh, so you don’t care when the police kill people on the
south and west sides! You only care
when violence affects your lily-white old neighborhood,” or some such nonsense,
followed by the inevitable charge of racism, as if these types know what real
racism is.
But, unlike the places from which a disproportionate
number of such self-described social justice warriors come from, my old
neighborhood is far from lily-white and hasn’t been for at least forty years, if it ever was. But it is a place where Blacks and Whites
live together and get along just fine despite people from all sides of the
“argument” telling them they shouldn’t.
And regardless of the neighborhood’s racial make-up, I plead “Hell,
yeah.” I am more concerned when such
things happen in my old neighborhood.
It’s a natural human inclination to be more concerned about things that
affect one more directly. No, I don’t
live there any more and haven’t since 1994.
But friends and family do. We
still go to church there. It’s still
my old neighborhood and most of you know what one’s old neighborhood means to
one, or certainly to yours truly.
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