Chi Trib’s Mary Schmich, who comes from a pretty big family in Savannah GA, tries out the idea for a city of three million:

Some days the big city feels like a big family and the powerful seem more like relatives than royalty.

On no days to this longtime metro area resident.  And who but a job-seeker gets the royalty part?

Chicago had one of those days last week, when we learned that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, would be seen around town in a wheelchair for a while because she’s getting radiation treatment on a bone tumor in her right leg.

Mary and a miniscule percentage of the rest of the population had one of those days, but Chicago didn’t.

If you live in Chicago, there’s a good chance that no matter what you think of the mayor, the news of this latest manifestation of his wife’s metastatic breast cancer touched you in a way that felt personal.

How good a chance?  None if you lived where people are shot and mugged every day or if you didn’t get a city job because you weren’t connected or for that matter if you realized you’d got the back of the mayor’s hand while running for re-election to county board presidency.

Reminds you of what Ezra Pound said about James Joyce’s handling of “beatiful” and “sordid” happenings in Portrait of the Artist:

[T]here is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation — without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality — and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exactitude.

It doesn’t remind you of that?  How about this, also from Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (New Directions, 1970)?

If Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth, in literature.

Mutatis mutandis, as skipping Armageddon and changing abominate to dislike and literature to newspaper column, it goes for this today about Mrs. Daley, whom I think should be sent a buck-up note and promise of prayers, and that’s all.