Doesn’t look like much from the outside.

The Thanksgiving break was welcome, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us to get out of town. But I did find an escape a few miles from home in the steam of a Turkish sauna, the desert heat of the dry Russian Sauna, and all-in-all a different world at the Chicago Sweat Lodge.

This place is old school. It’s completely unassuming from the outside, where it sits on Cicero Avenue in a working class neighborhood. It’s clean and pleasant, and it’s full of half-naked males (and only males) who range from boys with their dads learning to do the Russian bath house (bania) thing, to millennials of multiple ethnicities and languages, to short-legged older guys with enormous torsos speaking Russian or some Eastern European language. Many of these guys look like fellows you’d like on your side in a fight.

It’s an old-world, men-only anachronism. Lots of testosterone, but everyone is on good behavior. The entry door has a sign with four very clear admonitions (see photograph below).

Code of conduct at the Chicago Sweat Lodge.

You pay $30, get a towel, a locker key and number, a little skirt-like terry cover up, and shower shoes. The main corridor is lined with photos of one kind of sauna or sweat lodge or another from different cultures around the world—it’s a pretty universal tradition.

From there it’s to the locker, to the shower and to one of the saunas. They both have massive stone ovens—overall the sauna rooms look like they’d survive an air raid.

I was partial to the Turkish sauna, where water and steam are constantly flowing. Men sat in their little cover ups wearing goofy looking sauna caps (that actually really work well at keeping your head cool)–some silently, others with friends carrying on conversations, mostly in other languages.

From time to time one guy would lie down on the sauna bench and a friend would give him a vigorous detoxifying (and from the looks of it, exfoliating) rub down using a tightly wrapped bundle of oak leaves. Sometimes, instead of oak leaves, it’s a giant loofah-like thing soaked in soapy water. There are buckets and faucets all around and frequently someone would stand up, grab a full bucket of cool water and pour it over his head. (The bucket challenge was nothing new here.)

On my first cycle in the sauna, when I reached my heat limit I took a quick shower and then jumped into the icy-cold plunge pool, the equivalent, it says on a little placard, to the Nordic tradition of rolling in the snow after a sauna. It said it’s cleansing—the heat brings all your blood to your skin, then the cold makes it rush back to your organs, and then you heat up again in the sauna.

Well, I went in one or the other of the saunas five or six times, but I could only stand one plunge.

After a couple of cycles I got hungry and went to the café where I ordered pork pelmeni (think along the lines of pot stickers) served with a vinegar sauce—and while they serve alcohol, I stuck with a celery, cucumber, carrot juice blend. Both the pelmeni and the juice drink were delicious.

I was there a total of maybe 2-1/2 hours, but I left with nary an ache in my body, clear sinuses, and I felt like I’d left the country for a while. Just what the doctor ordered.

If you want to learn more about the Chicago Sweat Lodge, watch Mike Rowe get a massage from a former Russian weightlifter who works at the Lodge in this clip from CNN’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It. You can also check out this Chicago Magazine article.

Meantime, until next week,

До свидания

(goodbye in Russian, pronounced Da sveedanya)

This is the time each year when Flo (my mom) would get out her ceramic Christmas bowl and fill it with ruby-red anise candy for the holidays. Smart woman, that Flo. The spicy taste of the hard candy was not terribly appealing to us kids,which meant we didn’t sneak it when she wasn’t looking, and it lasted throughout the season.

This is our second holiday season with out Flo. We miss her, but her spirit certainly is still with us. Here’s a poem my nine-year-old great-niece Floey wrote in her great-grandmother’s honor.

A photo from a few years back — Flo is looking over Floey’s order sheet for Girl Scout cookies. Love ’em both.

Anises

As the sweet taste of licorice
Melts in my mouth,
Memories come back to me.
Ones of my great grandmother
Who always smelled of flowers and bleach
With her silvery white hair
Neatly curling on top of her head.
Oh, the joyful memories anises can bring back,
Even if some are never
going to come back for real.
So I’ll just have another anise.

By AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski
4th grade

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the movie Back to the Future, I asked the writers in my memoir classes last week to think about their own family histories. “Write about where you’d like to travel back — or forward — to,” I told them. “And then, explain why.”

Many, many writers wanted to go back and observe their parents before marriage, and many shared old photographs of the relatives in their essays. Two brought props — a writer who wanted to be on a train with her Uncle Harry (he worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency) brought his cane along to class — complete with a stiletto hidden in the handle.

Another writer arrived in class with a mimeographed copy of a handwritten letter she’s inherited from the 1800s. “I’d like to go back in time and see how my great-great- grandfather Patrick here in America reacted to this letter from his mother in Ireland.” FromHer essay:

His mother’s handwriting is beautiful, and it looks like she wrote with a pen dipped in ink. Ink smudges on the pages make it difficult to read, but I think one line in the letter asks him for a lock of the children’s hair. Did he send her a lock of their hair?

Another line of the letter read, “I would have written before Christmas but waiting thinking that you would be up to your promise and as I did not hear from ye I promise you I had a lonesome Christmas.” Patrick’s great-great granddaughter wondered out loud in class Whether this letter made Patrick sad. “Did he feel guilty?” she asked in her essay. “Did Patrick ever see his dear mother again?”

Writer Marion Jackson wrote about the past, too, but it wasn’t easy for her.

Marion attends a writing class at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in addition to our “Me, Myself and I” class at the Chicago Cultural Center, and she loves her creative life here in the city. “I’m glad you asked about my ancestors,” she wrote in an email to me after I gave the assignment. ”But it would be so painful going back for my history information, my families past of pain.”

Marion Jackson mustered the courage to take on her ancestors’ past.

Marion is African-American. Her ancestors were slaves here in America. The essay she brought to class acknowledges how heartwrenching it is for her to look back at what her ancestors went through to have her end up in America, how they were treated when they arrived here, how they “endured unmentionable, evil unbelievable forms of punishment and torture and were systematically separated from their families.”

Our ancestors helped in the building and the feeding of America. Working, building, slaving in the field cooking and cleaning, making the slave owner wealthy, they had all the profit, pleasure and comfort, all the slaves had was the pain of labor.

Marion points out that after the Civil War, most former slaves had no financial resources, property, residence, or education. “Not having an education for 300 years, they could not read and understand the reconstruction policies,” she writes.  “To this day… there has been no compensation, no retribution, not even an apology. The unfairness and injustice angers me.”

Conversation after Marion’s reading focused more on history and reparations than on writing memoirs. Ninety-four-year-old Wanda was eight years old when her great-grandmother died. “She told us stories of what slavery was like,” Wanda said, almost in a whisper. “I just can’t go there, I can’t write about it.” Before we went on to hear from the next writer in class, I asked Marion how it felt to write her essay. “It didn’t help with anything,” she said with a sigh. “I want people to know this, but it makes me angry to write it down.”

After class was over, I asked Marion if I could share excerpts from her essay with my blog readers this week. “I’d be honored,” she said. Marion doesn’t realize that we are the honored ones, having the opportunity to hear stories from her life every week in class — and now here, on this blog. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and I am so grateful that my complicated life journey landed me where I am now, leading these memoir-writing classes. Every week is a history lesson.

The class Marion and Wanda attends meets in downtown Chicago this morning, where ddemonstrators have taken to the streets to protest the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, an African-American teenager who was shot by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke 16 times in October of 2014. I’d been expecting a low turnout in class due to the holiday, but now I wonder if writers might make a special effort to be there to talk together about the release of a video of the shooting — and the Cook County State Attorney’s decision to pursue a first degree murder charge against Van Dyke.

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and I am so grateful that my compllicated life journey landed me where I am now, leading these memoir-writing classes. Happy Thanksgiving to all you memoir writers who share your life stories in my classes. Every week is a history lesson.

Allen Toussaint and the President after Toussaint received the Medal of Honor for the Arts, 2013.

It’s been a blur of a week so today’s post, forgive me, will be short and may be a little splintered.

• I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., starting with a gargantuan conference and trade show called Greenbuild. The organization I work for —PHIUS—exhibited there, and my colleagues and I staffed the booth. My feet still hurt and my voice is recovering. But it was a good show for us, and I’m especially proud that PHIUS Executive Director Katrin Klingenberg won a Women in Sustainability Leadership award from Green Building & Design magazine. She had some pretty good company, and she belonged.
• Managed to squeeze in a visit to our friends Pick and Hank in Northern Virginia at the end of the week. Beth was supposed to join us, but the snow in Chicago grounded her flight and she didn’t make it for the night. But I still had a swell time.
• Of course, the ISIS story is ongoing and I continue, like pretty much everyone, to follow it. And to look for context and a better understanding. Found lots of good stuff, including this one in the Independent. The article isn’t exactly calming, but is informative in terms of the history of the region, and the history of the borders. Those borders were drawn not by the residents of the region, but by Western powers after World War I. Worth the time.

Finally, something that sort of got lost in the aftermath of the Paris attacks was the death of Allen Toussaint, a one-of-a-kind songwriter and musician. His catalog includes everything from Working in a Coal Mine to What do You Want the Girl (or Boy, when Bonnie Raitt sings it) to Do to Fortune Teller to Southern Nights (yeah, that pop song Glen Campbell sang). Beth and I were fortunate to see Toussaint perform a slew of his songs at the Old Town School of Folk Music a few years back—just a wonderful performance, and he told some lovely stories between numbers.

One of them was about the aforementioned Southern Nights. About why he wrote it, what it reminded him of. And then he performed it—no offense to Glen Campbell, but it’s a completely different song when Toussaint performs it.

He told that same story during an interview with Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot on their Sound Opinions radio show last year. If you want a treat, download the interview here. You’ll be forced to listen to a public radio supported by message when the program first downloads—but it’s brief. Once it ends, if you want to skip straight to the story about Southern Nights, go to the 47:30 mark and keep listening. It’s a compelling tale of how his childhood memories inspired the song. Followed by a beautiful performance.

If you can find the time, though, listen to the full interview. A whole lot of joy and beauty and essence of New Orleans float in Allen Toussaint’s voice and his music.

Having been able to see him perform live is one of the myriad wonderful things I’ll be thanking my lucky stars for this Thursday.

Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all.

That’s Ray mugging for the camera.

Realizing I wouldn’t be able to see when his schoolfriends raised their hands to ask questions, my six-year-old great nephew Ray volunteered to help me call on kids in all three of the first-grade classes we visited at his school yesterday. All of the first-graders at Westmore Elementary had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before Whitney and I arrived, and that meant they had time to come up with some pretty thoughtful questions. Examples:

• What kind of dog food does your dog eat?
• How can your write a book if you can’t see?
• How do you drive when you’re blind?
• Can you get that thing on her back off of her by yourself?
• What if you’re with your dog and you bump into something?
• When your dog isn’t there with you, how can you see?
• What does the safety pin do? (This after I’d said I put a safety pin on the tag inside anything I wear that is black)
• What happens if your dog gets distracted?

Whitney was as spirited as the students we were visiting, so we answered that last question with actions rather than words. After she flipped to her back (with her harness on) to beg the kids for a belly rub, she popped up to lick a first-grader in the front row. Time for her seven-step obedience ritual:

1. “Whitney, sit!” She sat.
2. “Whitney, down!” I pointed to the ground, and even though she uttered a huge groan while she did it, she managed to lie down.
3. “Whitney, sit!” She popped back up.
4. “Whitney, heel!” I held her leash, walked four steps forward while she walked along at my side.
5. “Whitney, sit!” She sat.
6. “Whitney, rest.” I stood in front of her, put my palm up in front of her nose for a second, walked backwards away from her, and she didn’t make a move.
7. “Good girl, Whitney!” That’s what I said when I returned to her side.

When the obedience routine was over, one first-grader exclaimed, “It’s like a time out!” We had a ball at Westmore School, and as I write this post, Whitney is enjoying a real time out: she’s fast asleep under my desk.