Shrimps With the Wimps
A Lenten reflection on the key question of the season
I've gone back and forth on Lenten fasting at different times in my life. There have been a lot of years where I've just ignored the fasting and abstinence requirements, thinking that it wasn't really that important - God was still going to love me and the Paschal Mystery was still going to happen, after all - and fasting or abstaining ran the very real risk of making me cranky, and I felt that being cranky would not help me develop in my faith. I am not an especially good Catholic in terms of pious devotions - I'm so sorry if you're just piecing that together now - and at various times in my life, I have been opposed to the idea of doing things even if they are slightly difficult or frustrating.
In recent years, I've come around a lot on fasting and abstinence. I am planning to take it more seriously this Lent. Lutheran pastor and My Substack Pal Benjamin Dueholm had a good piece on fasting a few years ago that got to some of what I was thinking:
“...if every day in America is a feast day, every day is also, often in ways that are not all obvious or even visible, a fast day, too. People have to prune their lives back in many ways in order to meet some obligation, bear some burden, or answer some vocation. These sacrifices will never show up as “works of supererogation,” but that’s fine because works of supererogation are made up. They probably won’t even be coded, to the people doing them or to anyone around them, as acts of divine love and devotion. But the sacrifices are real, and demanding…maybe what I’m describing is the theatrical run for which periods of fasting are the rehearsals. You don’t know when that inner stubbornness that fasting requires and cultivates will come in handy.”
Dueholm also discusses the “fasting” he did when he first became a father, and had to forgo large stretches of sleep and free time and hobbies, all of which I've been through as well (and every new parent has been through). In the past several years, as it turns out, I have done quite a few things that would normally make me cranky, because I had to. And the more used to those things I became, the less cranky those things made me. When you “fast” from something formally or informally, it may help to think of it as a rehearsal, as Dueholm outlined above. You are doing something a little hard now, so that if your faith calls on you to do something hard in the future, things will not seem quite so daunting. I have written in the past that being able to effectively be present to and serve the poor requires regularly practicing encounter; in fact, I used an extremely similar image as Dueholm (who wrote his piece first) when I compared it to getting ready for a piano recital:
“I have to practice encounter, repeatedly and deliberately. Because of where I am in my life now, I can’t do it the same way I used to, but I have to keep working on it any way I can. I have to force myself to do it, I have to keep sending myself out past the steel door and into the presence of God, and I will be bad at it, and it will feel bad, and I will have to keep doing it until I get better at being in the presence of God. I have to put myself in a position where I will be encountering and open to the poor, and the poor are not hard to find nowadays…I have to wire it into my muscle memory like I'm preparing for a piano recital, because someday - at a protest, at an accident, at some sort of altercation, when someone is camping out in front of my house, at some point when someone I don't know asks me to help them, at some point when my instinct will tell me to walk away but charity will tell me to stay - I will be called on to be selfless without getting to think about it beforehand, so I have to practice encounter as much as I can, I have to at least try and try and try over and over and over to be a good and charitable person at all times so that when I am called on to do it, I can eventually do it without second-guessing.”
Today, I'd add one more thing to this when it comes to fasting: part of what I have been thinking about a lot recently is that I’ve never been hungry in my life, and I see hungry people every day where I live. So, perhaps first and most obviously, any physical discomfort I feel from fasting or abstaining is extremely manageable, and I should remember that. But the other thing is that experiencing that small sliver of discomfort might just help me do the right thing when I encounter the poor. Because when I encounter someone in pain, in a much more intense form of discomfort than I've experienced, but still a discomfort that I am now able to somewhat identify and remember, it might be easier for me to recognize that person's humanity and my responsibility to them as a fellow child of God. Maybe it's an attempt at sympathy or solidarity or maybe it's just ignorant virtue signaling. But hopefully it is an approach to fasting that can then feed into how I do prayer and almsgiving this Lent. Hopefully this is me doing something a little bit hard so that when my faith calls me to do something harder, it's not so scary, and I have a reminder of what the stakes are.
Maybe you'll find that point of view helpful for your Lenten observances, maybe you think it's stupid, I don't know. As I've argued before, every essay ever written on Catholicism should end with the phrase “but what the hell do I know anyway.” What's most important for me to get across, though, was that all of the previous paragraphs are just an excuse to get to the actual topic I want to talk about: what the hell happened to Calumet Fisheries?
Look, fasting is a practice that I’m hoping to improve at for this and future Lents, but when I’m not fasting, I have one Lenten tradition that I look forward to year-round: buying and eating heavily fried fish. Not gourmet stuff, not exotic fish, just some bottom-feeders dumped into as much oil as possible with cheap french fries on the side. There is, of course, nothing stopping me from getting this fried fish on other non-Lenten occasions, but dude, it’s Lent, and this is something that helps me get through the long cold season. The McDonalds Filet O Fish was, as the story goes, created to plug a hole in Lent sales in the heavily Catholic Cincinnati market, and Catholics have used social media in the past to argue over the quality of the McDonald’s Filet O Fish sandwich (it’s fine but inferior to the Wendy’s fish sandwich), and every fast food chain is now launching Lent-only fish sandwich offerings, including Burger King's new “Fiery Big Fish”, but I prefer to stick with some local flavor for my fried fish. On Chicago’s south side, I have had two mainstay spots for fried fish that I hit every year. One of them is Lawrence’s Fish and Shrimp, recipient of South Side Weekly’s “Best of Bridgeport and Canaryville” citation in 2022, located right outside Chinatown on the other side of the Cermak Street bridge. They are open 24/7 and are best known for having a giant fiberglass prawn on top of their sign named, of course, LaPrawnda.
And the second, and my personal favorite, is, of course, Calumet Fisheries, at 95th street at the Calumet River, the fish smokery and friary so famous that it’s in Blues Brothers and has its own Wikipedia page. CNN named it one of the 10 greatest historical restaurants in the country. Anthony Bourdain featured it on No Reservations. Eater did a feature on it in 2016. It has a James Beard award.
While Calumet Fisheries are also known for their excellent smoked fish and their decades-old wood-smoking process, I love walking in a getting a “full fish, full fry”, just take whatever you caught in the ominously murky Calumet River, chop it up, throw it in as much oil as you can, and then throw in some french fries while you’re at it. Like all legitimate businesses, Calumet Fisheries is cash-only1. The entire area where customers can gather is smaller than my bathroom and I do not have a large bathroom, so during the lunch or dinner rush on a Friday at Lent - yeah, I’ve been there, I’m not the only one who had this idea - you’ll just have people lined up down the 95th Street Bridge. I love this place. If I had more disposable income and less concern about my blood pressure, I would be here every single Friday in Lent. But I will not be here this Lent, because of a weird confluence of events that hit Calumet Fisheries about three months ago.
So, the first thing that happened is that Calumet Fisheries was shut down by the Chicago Department of Public Health after two separate failed inspections that pointed to extensive rodent activity inside the restaurant, a situation that industry insiders often refer to as “less than ideal”. On October 31st, the Department found dead rodents and over 400 rodent droppings in the restaurant. Upon returning on November 6th, the Department did another inspection of the restaurant and found 150 rodent droppings, and despite this being a sixty-three percent reduction in the number of rodent droppings in the restaurant, and despite this being the only misstep that Calumet Fisheries had had during a health inspection in the past (checks notes) uh, three and a half years back to February 2020 when they also failed an inspection due to rodent activity, despite the owner’s assurances that “it’s never affected our food”, the Department took it upon themselves to close my favorite fried fish place. It sucked.
The good news is, by November 17th, the owners of Calumet Fisheries had pulled it together and passed a third inspection, giving them a perfect 0.333 batting average in a three-week period. The rodents were gone, or at least not shitting on the floor so much. And, perhaps anticipating my Easter joy this year, Calumet Fisheries was resurrected on November 19th, well in advance of Lent 2024.
Unfortunately, in what can only be seen as a dark inversion of the Paschal Mystery, Calumet Fisheries was only resurrected for three days before descending back into the fire. In this case, I mean that literally, because Calumet Fisheries caught fire on November 22nd and is still rebuilding to this day.
Despite the fact that a cleansing fire is perhaps the best way to permanently address a rodent infestation, I was heartbroken by this news. I cannot have the delicious, delicious fish that I have been looking forward to for months, and my Lent will be colored by this additional layer of mourning. Was this actually an electrical fire, as the owners have contended? Or could the fire have possibly been an act of arson meant to strike at the heart of Catholic devotion, or perhaps to attack me and my faith personally, right at the moment when I thought I had my Lenten devotions finally figured out? It seems like the only reasonable explanation for how a building that houses a cash-only business could burn down suddenly and unexpectedly after a major setback to their revenue stream and increased scrutiny from city officials. But what the hell do I know anyway.
So is Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park, which is the best beef in the Chicago area.